transfaabulous

This time it's a Mediterranean restaurant called Oasis Fresh, where I got a vegetarian platter. Basmati rice with dolmas on top, side salad, hummus, and pita. Simple and very good. The rice was much better than that place I got the boiled unflavored rice from (Assyrian...something) with no hummus. I added it to the "good" restaurant list and I'll remember it for the future, though I'm just bringing my lunch tomorrow.

Visited Laila in the hospital yesterday. sashagee told me before I got there that Laila was energetic and chatty earlier in the day, but by the time I got there she was listless and half-asleep. I waited around for an hour but she never got any more energy, but this morning right when I was finishing my breakfast, I got a FaceTime and Laila excitedly showed me Ariel and told me about the wires coming out of her head, so she had more energy at least earlier today. We'll see if she has more energy when I go see her after work today--I saw some pictures that Poppa and Nana took when they visited and she was more subdued then. We'll see.

I've been slowly reading a book that's much more interesting than my slow pace would indicate, called The Son and Heir. The book starts with the author finding an SS uniform hat in their attic and then expands to the story of his family--Dutch in Latvia and owners of a business empire, the clashes between his father and his grandfather over heritage (his grandfather was very proud of being Dutch and his father wanted nothing to do with the Netherlands), the way his father ran away to enlist in the German army to fight the Russians... I'm halfway through the book and the author is three years old, but his father has already divorced his mother, been put on trial for being an SS members and gotten off after only ten months in jail, avoided being sent to South America, and married another (already-married) woman. The book is only half-over. Now that the setup is all over I wonder when we're going to get the author's reaction to all of this?

Computer is still working. It's been over a month now without a single crash and the only thing I changed is plugging some things into the USB ports. Maybe it really was a faulty USB connector. Well, it saved me $2000, so I won't complain. Of course, now sashagee is asking for a gaming laptop so she can play Stardew Valley with mods, and Clair Obscur with the "disgustingly easy" parry mod. I've been looking around but I have no idea what a "mid-range" gaming laptop should look like so it's slow going. I'll gladly take any suggestions if anyone has any.

Almost five! I can still remember when she was so small I would carry her in the crook of my arm while I was walking around the condo. Every parent says that, because it's true.

Laila is expressing more preferences and wants while also being more independent. On mornings when I get up and let sashagee sleep in, I go out with Laila and give her medicine, and I no longer just make her food and give her what she gets. I now ask her what she wants to eat for breakfast. And sure, the answer is always the same thing: "pickle AND cheese!", by which she means some pickles, a bit of cheese, some fruit (usually blueberries or strawberries), and toast with butter or jam. It's what she always wants, even when she wants something else--a couple times she's said e.g. waffles or eggs, and when I asked her, "You want eggs?" she'll respond with "Just pickles and cheese." Well, I can't blame her, since I have basically the same thing for breakfast every day too.

She's also getting more self-conscious. There's been a few times when she's tripped and fallen while running around the condo and she got so embarrassed that she immediately ran to her room and shut the door afterwards. It's not like we laugh at her or anything! We just ask her if she's okay, but she's grown-up enough to be embarrassed about it. And a few days ago, she had a coughing fit, looked up at me when she recovered, and said, "It's very frustrating!"

You're right, Laila, it is.

She's settled on her new interests and moved on from her old interests. A year ago, she was very into the Cars franchise and loved Lightning McQueen, but she hasn't wanted to watch Cars in months. A few months ago it was all Bluey all the time. Nowadays it's Hello Kitty and Friends whenever we give her the choice of what she wants to watch. She'll spend almost every free moment drawing and painting with the water markers and books we've gotten her, and painting with watercolors if we let her. The other thing she loves to do lately is have us read books to her, which has always been something she likes but it's more of an interest lately. She'll grab books herself and bring them over--her favorites lately are Sammy Spider's First Yom Kippur, Little Owl's Night, Challah for Shabbat Tonight, and You Are My Happy. I got her Sammy Spider's First Shabbat but she hasn't taken to it yet.

Unfortunately, tragedy has struck. When Laila was younger she had a habit of pulling her hair, but we had mostly managed to deter the behavior...until she spent a week in the hospital, which caused her enough anxiety that it started up again. sashagee saw how thin her hair was getting on one side and was worried she'd do permanent damage to her hair by pulling out too much of it, and so to deter further hair pulling, we gave her a haircut. A significant one:


Laila...doesn't like it. It has, however, helped stop her from pulling her hair--she'll reach for where she usually pulls and it's not there--as have my comments that if she keep pulling it we'll have to cut it even shorter. They're probably going to have to cut some of it for her upcoming surgery anyway, so it's not purely a deterrent measure. And we know that if she did give herself bald spots she'd be really upset about them when she got older, but seeing her look in the mirror and silent tears roll down her cheeks is really upsetting.

In happier news, she's fully become a fashionista. She no longer waits for us to pick out her clothes in the morning--if we wait too long, she'll go rummage through her drawers until she finds something she likes and change into it, all by herself! The only hurdles are that if she's wearing shorts as part of her pajama set she'll sometimes leave them on under her pants and, the bigger one, if we let her she would wear a half-dozen outfits throughout the day. She'll forget to roll up her sleeves when washing her hands, get the sleeves wet, and then go back to her room to change into a new shirt because she can't stand having wet sleeves. If we didn't stop her, she'd change her clothes a half-dozen times a day and sashagee would have to go laundry basically every single day.

I also make her carry her own food plate to the table. She may have issues focusing on things sometimes, but when it's her food, she can keep her mind on it. Though she does carry it at a very dangerous angle sometimes.

What other ways will she grow and change?