Listen to the Rain

Yesterday, sashagee took Laila to a speech evaluation. I've mentioned that she's been behind for a while, but only in expressive speech--she'll understand multi-stage instructions and I just talk to her using grown-up sentence structures at this point. Still, she has a hard time putting sentences together and it's especially obvious when she's in a group of her peers, hence the evaluation. I heard from sashagee that she came away very reassured, but it wasn't until later that I got the details.

To wit: they seemed to think it was more of an occupational therapy issue rather than a speech therapy issue. sashagee has mentioned she feels like Laila is just thinking much too quickly and the words don't have any time to get out, so she needs some help slowing down and reconnecting her mind and body (coupled with a bit of speech therapy to smooth the process out). Now if you've been following the story of Laila for a while, you may remember that Laila was in both speech and occupational therapy years ago, but graduated out of them. The person doing the assessment this time was pretty dismissive of Laila's previous therapists--sashagee told me that she said this was definitely something they should have noticed and they must "not have been very good" (direct quote)--but had some recommendations for therapists in the city for us to look in to, so that's the next step. At least from what sashagee said, this should hopefully be something that doesn't take that much time and then Laila will unlock her language. Hopefully that's the case.

Just got back from the work popup of Tandoor Char House, previously written about here. Last time they gave me free dessert. This time I paid for dessert...but they gave me a free samosa. I'm not sure how they plan to make money if they constantly give away free stuff but I'm certainly not going to complain.

We got sick from the wedding we went to the weekend before last. At least, I assume that's why--we felt a little bad the day after, but while I recovered on Monday morning, I started feeling worse and took Tuesday off and worked from home on Wednesday. sashagee never felt better and it cumulated in us going to the doctor a couple days ago. Laila and I waited out in the waiting room, alternating between Laila being nearly comatose and laying on my lap, and her wanting to run around the waiting room only to give up and want to go back and sit down when I took her outside to give her more room to run (and also not disturb all the other patients). After an hour of waiting for both us and sashagee--she was updating me on her time just sitting in the exam room in back--a doctor came in, did some checks, diagnosed her with bronchitis acquired after a week of coughing, and sent us off with prescriptions for an inhaler and a couple medications. We went across the street to a place that had both burgers and shawarma, able to satisfy all parties concerned, and when our food came it is ludicrously large portions. None of us finished our food, but we ate what we could, took some takeout boxes, and went on our way.

We're also 2/2 on Middle Eastern places hearing that our daughter's name is Laila and giving us free baklava.

After her first couple swimming classes where she was very wild, Laila got very timid all of a sudden. Her next class she barely wanted to swim at all, just wanted to cling on to the instructor, and the next couple classes after that she tried to get out of the water. The instructor told me that they were going to work on Laila's confidence, though, and yesterday during the lesson she was a little wild but she managed to swim a bit all by herself and I was told she was talking more and did a much better job at swimming. She's slowly getting to the point of being independent--which is good, because we want to put her into preschool this fall and she needs to be conditioned to deal with other kids and with adults she doesn't know telling her what to do. She doesn't have a lot of experience with either of those right now.

Alright, post took me a few hours and now that work day's done. Time to head home. I got a transceiver ping from Laila at 9:30 a.m. saying she misses me so I'm sure she'll be glad to see me when I come home. Have to treasure Laila running to the door to say hi to me for as long as it lasts.

No New Year's Eve parties for us this year. sashagee had her wisdom teeth out last Friday, and while they said she might be mostly recovered after a few days, it's taking her quite a while, and I don't want to leave her alone. But the more proximate reason is that the weekend before last, I came down with what I thought was food poisoning that completely knocked me out on Sunday. A couple days later I was feeling better and thought everything had passed...and then Laila had a fever and some stomach troubles. And now sashagee has the same thing plus most of what she can eat is dairy (because it's soft), so she's having a very rough time. Today is the first day she really left better since Friday, but it's obvious that we had the norovirus that's going around. We don't want to spread that to anyone else at any party we go to, so a quiet celebration at home it is.

I appreciate how that article calls it "wretched." Stick it to the norovirus!

I did beat Citizen Sleeper, though, the final game in my twelve games in twelve months goal. Review tomorrow or the day after. Now next year, to relax and play some longer games I've been holding off on.

Because of that, I’m behind on my 年賀状 (nengajō, "new year's cards"). I normally at least have a bunch of them addressed by now but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. I can spend a chunk of the day doing that and then take them out and put them in the mailbox to be picked up the next day. It's later than I like, but not too late--in Japan, 年賀状 are all held by the mail and then delivered on New Year's Day. We have no such custom here, so I'll send them out and they'll be delivered when they make it, with another load to take to work and pass out there. It's fortunate that I’m always the last to leave. And the last to come in, don't get the wrong idea.

Have a Happy New Year everyone!

Yesterday, sashagee told me that she and Laila were going to be downtown today for some blood tests related to her brain troubles, and since the tests only took a few minutes--they draw the blood, say thanks, and send you on your way--why not have lunch together? And I thought that was a great idea...and then I went and made my lunch anyway and put it in the fridge, and this morning when I woke up and I got my lunch and got all ready to go and then realized that we were supposed to meet for lunch. Oops. Well, at least my lunch for tomorrow is made.

sashagee originally suggested Ed Debevic's, but when I told her that it was famous for the servers making fun of you, she switched to Wildberry Cafe, right near the hospital. When she texted I left work, hopped on the 26 going north on Michigan Avenue, and arrived just as Laila was drinking water with an open seat next to her. sashagee said she specifically asked me to sit next to her, and as soon as I walked up, she immediately patted the seat next to her and said "Sit!", so I sat. I was a little worried because American breakfast places are often stuffed full of pork or meat and cheese--we've been to breakfast places with multi-page menus where the number of things I can and want to eat are 1 ± 1--but I saw the veggie skillet and thought it looked good, and it was:



Sourdough toast with berry compote on the side, hash browns and asparagus and broccoli and onions and tomatoes and cheese under two eggs over easy. It was huge and now I'm pretty sure I don't actually need to eat dinner, which is good because sashagee took out a rotisserie chicken to thaw for dinner tonight, but that chicken is still a block of ice-chicken so we're getting dinner at the farmer's market tonight. And by dinner, I mean "snacks."

We ate, I chatted mostly with Laila, who was fascinated by the bee flying by and the stop signs visible in the store window, and then I dropped off sashagee and Laila at the bus stop and went back to work. A lovely interlude.

On Thursday my parents came out and picked up Laila and thus began our weekend of adventure.

It started on a bad note, with workers unable to deliver most of our appliances, but after that Laila went off with Papa and Nana to have an exciting time and we spent most of the rest of the day doing not much of anything. sashagee fished up a bunch of fish in Final Fantasy XIV and I read and played Fallout. It was the tail end of Shavuot, the holiday where G-d gave us in the Torah on Mount Sinai, so I took it off and spent it at home with my family, eating cheesecake and ice cream. I was tempted to go to the Tikken Leil Shavuot at Anshe Emet, but maybe next year.

( And for the rest of the weekend )

This post is slightly backdated because somehow the original date passed me by!

Laila continues to expand her vocabulary. While she was originally placed in speech therapy after her early intervention assessment, apparently the speech therapist always had some doubts about its necessity--the day I worked from home to meet her, she told me that the very first day she heard Laila say, "Her bag has flowers!" when she was coming up the stairs and she was like "Oh, why am I even here?" She doesn't have any worries about Laila's development. I wrote back in the two years and eight months update post that she was reluctant to use sentences, but that reluctance seems to be fading. She'll very often string words together now, most frequently "No want" (of course), but also things like "sit here" or "I fell down" or "What happened?" My parents heard her say, unprompted, "I want some bread please." Of course her longer sentences are about food!

She's also getting a better understanding of emotions, though of course being a toddler, she thinks about it out loud. One of the cutest things she still does is when she thinks something is hilarious, which always leads to laughter that sounds like this: "Ahahahahahaah funny!" We were at the park and Laila was playing with another kid about her age, and when the other kid had to go home she threw a crying tantrum. And Laila looked at this other little girl, yelling and crying and falling on the ground, and did this:

Laila: "Sad."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Cry."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."

She'll sometimes do the same thing herself after she's done crying, along with analyzing what it was that made her cry ("Fall down" or "bonk head" are common). She has a much better understanding of when she's done something wrong--it doesn't mean she doesn't do it, because of course she's a toddler, but she'll sometimes run away immediately after it, or try to give us a hug and kiss in the obvious hope that we'll think she's too cute to notice her throwing her toys or trying to stand on the table. Just normal, ordinary toddler things.

She's been in a gymnastics class lately, and while the first class apparently ran sashagee ragged with how wild Laila was, it turned out to be because she had just come back from a weekend out at the grandparents and was low on sleep. She's been much better in subsequent weeks and has slowly started to learn that sometimes you can't just do what you want, especially if there are other people there your age who want to do it too. It's also good because it helps her burn off her energy, of which she has a prodigious amount. Even the other toddler parents at the gymnastics class talk about how much energy Laila has. They're right, and they don't even have to keep up with her!

It's not all good news. Our book-loving baby, who always wanted to be read to, has discovered video. She still likes books, but she's much more annoyed that we limit her screen time to an hour a day and always stuff that we watch together with her. She used to watch a lot of Sesame Street but lately, she's been on a Ghibli movies kick. She watches My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, The Secret World of Arrietty , and Howl's Moving Castle over and over again, half an hour at a time in the morning after breakfast, and then no screen time until after dinner, when lately she's been wanting to watch the Cars shorts. In the way of young children, she's perfectly happy to watch the same thing day after day.

Here's a recent of picture of her taken by her Papa and Nana after they dressed her up for St. Patrick's Day:


Not pictured here, but they painted her nails green too, and she was so pleased by that. For days after until it washed off she would keep looking at it.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Laila last week went into the hospital for an overnight EEG, just as a way to check up on her seizures. We got the results back yesterday, and they indicate no change and even a bit of improvement from her last EEG, and as it still says, we don't know what caused her infantile spasms (the best results--it means there's no obvious underlying condition that will continue to cause problems).

And so, here's a video of Laila being cute:

Thank you for your good wishes on my last couple of posts. I'm happy to say that the plague has mostly left our house--Laila is feeling much better, I have a small headache, and it's only sashagee that is still feeling terrible. She has a headache from all her coughing and a small fever, and is currently lying down on the couch trying to rest while watching spooky ghost hunter YouTube.

I took off work today because it was originally going to be the day I helped sashagee make Shabbat dinner for our guests tonight, but that's obviously been cancelled.

My mother had surgery on her leg and my father sent a video of her walking (with a walker) today! There's obviously been a lot of medical progress since I broke my leg 34 years ago, where I ended up laid up in the hospital for a month, in a cast for a month, and then unable to walk for a month while my muscles rebuilt themselves. As a seven-year-old, I had the energy to do all that rebuilding. Hopefully my mother will get to go home soon and she'll be able to see Laila next weekend.

Last Wednesday was the final farmer's market of the season, so even though I wasn't feeling particularly well, I put on a mask and dragged myself down there. Unfortunately the place I usually get my eggs from had run out and due to all the sickness in the house I had forgotten to preorder any, but I dig snag one last bag of apples and a pie from the local pie shop. Zeitlin's Deli was also there, and since they're primarily an online shop and it's unpredictable where I'll find them, I bought ḥallah for Shabbat tonight, a giardiniera focaccia which is spicy and absolutely delicious, and a half-dozen bagels. This morning, sashagee woke up and made a French toast bake out of most of the ḥallah but there's just a little bit left for the motzi tonight.

Alright, I need to get to the post office. More after Shabbat.

sashagee: "Laila, what happened to your friends?"
Laila: "Uh oh!"
-On coming in this morning and seeing all her stuffed animals on the ground outside her crib

The actual day was yesterday but it was a pretty hectic day.

Last update was about language, and this update is a bit about language too. Laila puts words into short sentences, usually around food: "bite this" or "food please" and will sometimes say "me" or "you" when referring to people (though she has a bit of the child's confusion around pronouns since they don't refer to a single consistent person), but she still most often uses single words, which worries me. All the milestone lists for two-year-olds indicate a lot more sentence use than she does. I'm comforted by her understanding concepts, though. She'll start dancing to music and say "dance? dance?" indicating she knows that dance doesn't refer to a single song, for example, and just yesterday she woke up from her nap and was laughing in her room and then we heard "Help! Help!" She eventually fell back asleep, but when we checked on her at the end of nap time she had thrown all her stuffed animals out of her crib. Just recently when she knows she's done something wrong like trying to grab food off the counter, sometimes when we tell her no she'll self-exile to the corner and say "No. No no no" to herself softly. 🥺 It's important to teach her how to behave but it's still sad seeing her telling herself no.

All her thoughts are in her head, she just needs help getting them out.

She's really been getting into physical activities lately. She eats perfectly with a spoon, though she'll often keep swapping spoons around with one of us to see if we have the perfect spoon. And she loves dancing, either to music or not. She'll sometimes just start dancing spontaneously and saying "dance!" and her latest obsession is the Wiggles version of the Hokey Pokey. She'll often raise her hands over head and spin around, saying "Ooooooooooh the Pokeeeeeey." She keeps trying to climb on things and wants to go out for a walk every day, and lately she's gotten very competent at running. She still kind of looks like she's off balance while she's running and like she'll fall any moment, but she doesn't--she'll run up and down our hallway over and over, laughing the whole time.

She has opinions about clothes. Lately, she's really been into fall hats:

She looks like she's taking an Outfit of the Day selfie here.

On the other hand, toddlerhood is now in full swing. She'll keep doing things she knows she's not supposed to do because as a toddler she has very little self-control. As I write this she's trying to pull some plates off the end table and sashagee is telling her no. She knows she's not supposed to do it, but she doesn't really know why yet and she has a hard time resisting her impulses. It's normal but that doesn't always make it easier to deal with.

She knows her name at last, though. She'll even say it sometimes!

What other ways will she grow and change?

Edit: sashagee and Laila were just making homemade goldfish crackers and as Laila was looking through the oven at the baking fish, she said "Put the fish in my mouth." The words are in there!

Laila had an assessment today by the Early Intervention specialists, who we were recommended to by the hospital because of her history of infantile spasms. The long story short is that she has speech delays--not in terms of her vocabulary, which is average or above-average for her age, but in her usage of words. When talking to us, she sometimes won't use words to indicate her wants at all, just whining and hoping that we'll understand her. The specialist talking to sashagee (I was out of the room) said that Laila should not just be trying to communicating her wants, she should be eager to do so because she can finally talk in a way that other people understand. But she often doesn't.

The grandparents tell us that Laila is more talkative when sashagee is not there, so I do wonder how much if it is lack of necessity--Laila knows that she doesn't need to ask us "Up please?" when she wants to be picked up, and she doesn't need to ask for food specifically by name. At lunch today, after the meeting, I stopped counting "Please?" from Laila as good enough for a food request and made her ask for exactly what kind of food she wanted, and she did eventually say "Bread. Please?"...though not until after sashagee said "She saw the bread," which gets back to the concern. Laila understands the meaning of words, and will imitate our usage of them, but she's not synthesizing her own requests as often as they like.

The good news is that everything else is basically on track--her motor skills, her ability to focus on play that interests her (she spent a while drawing circles), her movement up and down obstacles, her ability to feed herself, her response to requests we make of her are all good. They're going to put her in weekly therapy to improve her language skills and recommended that we get her a play group--sashagee want to put her in gymnastics.

My parents are a little dismissive of the idea that Laila is so far behind (the evaluator said she had the asking skills of a fourteen-month-old). I do think that part of the problem is that we've been too indulgent with her, though. We were so happy that she got through her infantile spasms without suffering severe brain damage, and sashagee has been sick basically from eight months before Laila was born until this past May. She's worried that her being sick has sabotaged Laila and it's all her fault, but getting Laila more help this early is good, as is that this is really the only thing the specialist was concerned with. Laila knows the words, and she can use them abstractly. We just need to teach her that she needs to use them.

"There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man, with human flesh."
-From "Collected sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

ב״ה‎ it was only a minor one but still.

On Monday, the day both sets of grandparents were supposed to have a dinner together with Laila and sashagee's parents would hand Laila off to my parents, my mother texted me to say that my father had woken up with numbness in his right arm and they were going to the hospital. Obviously, numbness in a 70-year-old can be a sign of all kinds of terrible things, so they did an initial evaluation where he scored only 1 out of 45 on stroke likelihood (higher being worse), but they admitted him to do more tests.

Long story short, the MRI did show a stroke, though the above-mentioned 1 out of 45 means that it only did extremely minor damage. The far two fingers on his right hand are still tingly, and he had to readjust the way he uses his right hand for delicate operations like shaving and playing the euphonium. According to him--he was just here with my mother and sister to pick up Laila and take her to the zoo--he's already adjusted to a new shaving pattern and played the euphonium just fine after a short bit of work. When he was here in the brief interactions we had, he seemed like exactly the same person I've known all my life.

It could have been so much worse, and if it had to happen I'm glad that it happened the way it did since now the doctors can keep an eye on him and do tests to prevent it from happening again. They were going to give him medicine to dissolve any clots while he was in the hospital, but they ended up deciding against it since literally every time the nurses checked on him he was up and walking around his hospital room (being sedentary is one of the biggest risk factors). He's on a blood thinner now and, as he put it, while they had him in their clutches they wanted to talk to him about his cholesterol, so when they came over they brought approximately two pounds of butter over for us. Dietary cholesterol isn't as important for blood cholesterol as people used to believe but I can understand why he's being extra cautious--he has a granddaughter he wants to see grow up.

Am I worried? Yes, obviously--but not a lot. I'd be much more worried if he seemed like a different person in any of our interactions but as far as I can tell he's exactly the same. But this is really the first direct indication we've gotten of his mortality, and he'll only be 71 this year. Both sets of my grandparents lived into their mid-80s so he should ("should") still have quite a ways to go. I hope he and the doctors are on top of this so he can see Laila graduate high school, the way my grandparents did for me.

If he's already feeling well enough to take Laila to the zoo today and work on our new table a couple days ago (though as he said, he's staying away from the bandsaw for another couple weeks) that's a good sign.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
-Frank Herbert, Dune

Strange coincidence that I simultaneously saw this article entitled We must declare jihad against AI and also went to a work seminar today about the use of AI in healthcare. The latter mentioned the recent JAMA article about physician vs AI empathy.

I've been an AI skeptic for most of the last decade and for most of the last decade I've been right--I remember arguing eight years ago with someone who laughed at my insistence that we would absolutely not have direct brain interfaces within five years--but I think that's less likely in the future. Nothing is going to constrain AI because there's too much money to be made from out-of-control AI and the social consequences be damned. Look at how much damage has already been done through social media algorithms designed simply to keep people's eyes on the platform--the promotion of outrage engagement, Instagram Face, depression and anxiety in Gen Z, people at risk of having a single bad interaction go viral, etc--and imagine it with programs more sophisticated than the stuff on Amazon that says "Ah, I see you bought a toaster, would you like to buy a dozen more?" That was the point of the Dune quote I posted above, since AI isn't going anywhere so we'll need to manage its social effects.

People talk about AI destroying whole swaths of jobs and that may happen in the future but it's not going to happen currently due to AI's tendency to confidently make up nonsense. It's like Laila--she has a lot of words she says, but she also makes sounds that I'm sure mean something to her but which aren't English (or Japanese, or Hebrew, or French, or any other language she's been exposed to). Like, she's lately switched to pronouncing banana as "bahlahlah." She says it consistently, she knows exactly what it means, but who knows where she got it from. AI is like that. I remember reading a rebbe.io answer where the AI confidently stated that eating poultry and milk together was allowed, which isn't true under any interpretation of halakhah. I just asked it about eating kiniyot during Pesaḥ and it told me this was a matter of individual custom and to consult your rabbi, which I'm a little unsure is the answer an actual Chabad rabbi would give. But it gives those answers confidently and seems to provide reasoning to support them, and it reminds me of that scene in the sealed chamber in 2001 where Dave and Frank decide that if HAL was wrong about the antenna, what else is it wrong about, and if it's wrong about anything, then they need to shut it down to prevent misinformation from jeopardizing the mission. Which is exactly the same reasoning HAL uses to shut them down, which is part of the point of the movie (who is more robotic, the literal computer, or the humans?) and part of the point of the presentation I went to. AI needs to be guided in right thought by humans to really be useful.

To pick an example, if you look at the example interactions that were rated in that JAMA article, you'll notice the most obvious unifying point is that each of the AI responses is twice as long as the human responses. No wonder they were voted more empathetic! There's an immediate perception that the AI is spending more time on the response because it's longer, and since Americans have an extremely common complaint that they barely get to see their doctors and when they do, it's more only a few minutes, that the AI seems to be more attentive. But what if the AI was used as an aid, listening to the doctor-patient conversation and taking notes, filling in the EMR in the background, and the doctor checked the results at the end but otherwise spent the time talking to the patient instead of looking at a computer? Wouldn't that make the doctor seem much more empathetic? And this could be an aid to doctors elsewhere too, since the average of twenty minutes per visit in America is actually on the extreme high end globally. In Bangladesh people see their doctors for an average of less than a minute!

Sure, AI will still sometimes produce nonsense. I remember reading a teacher saying they took psychic damage from reading an AI-written essay that the student had gone at with a blind-idiot thesaurus afterwards, leading to phrases like

Unused York City

but also human medical error kills at a higher rate than anything other than disease or cancer. If AI can assist humans in reducing that even a little...

I don't think we're in danger of getting paperclip-maximized any time soon. It's lazy thinking, or not thinking at all, that'll do us in.

I slept through my alarm an hour late today, but managed to make it to work on time through a quick shower and not shaving. And just like every other time I've slept in too late, I feel incredibly relaxed and refreshed. My sleep tracker shows that I didn't even wake up when my alarm went off, so I guess it's a good thing that I woke up an late (after a nice period of deep sleep) and then immediately got out of bed, ate my breakfast, and left. Laila's not going to like how scratchy my face is, though.

The weather is lovely now! Over the course of about two days, the temperature went from 12°C to 23°C and the weather went from cloudy to sunny. Laila didn't have to wear a coat when we went to the park on Monday and yesterday I didn't even bother bringing a coat to work. I went out on the riverwalk at lunch and while none of the businesses are open yet--the restaurants just say they'll open in "spring", which in Chicago starts in May when the cherryblossoms finally bloom--it was packed full of people eating lunch, going on walks, and otherwise enjoying the weather. It'll be back down to 8°C by next week so we have to enjoy the burst of warmth while we can. Portland already had their cherryblossoms, DC already had their cherryblossoms, but it'll still be a month or longer before we get ours. The reason Chicago summers are so jam-packed is that we pack a whole year's worth of activities into those three months.

In further news, Laila made friends with a polar bear:


My parents came out on Tuesdays as they usually do while I was at the office and picked up Laila so sashagee would have some time for herself. They took Laila to the zoo and she had a nice time, since this time the animals were out and wandering, but what she really loved were the polar bears. My parents took a video of her laughing and giggling as this giant head that's almost as big as her whole body gets to within a few inches of her. She has no fear, which is certainly one of our problems to solve as parents. I want Laila to be brave, but not foolhardy!

Looking forward to taking her to the park today and making some stir-fry. Pesaḥ ends tomorrow night, though late enough that dinner will still be unleavened. On Friday, though, it'll probably be burgers.