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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?

It seems to be a cold.
( Mild sick talk )

Astute readers with excellent memory (or better than mine anyway XD) may remember when I lost my shit over Wind Breaker's volume 22 back in June. I basically immediately started writing this fic afterwards, which is just That Scene written from different point of views and every character individually losing it, just like I did... Lol. I'm a bit sick of trying to find an ending that is The Best Possible Ever so now that I have one that's probably good enough, let's go with it. Especially since that polyship doesn't have a ton of fic for it either, so it's nice to add one more either way.

On the plus side of going back to this story then dropping it again, the first chapters are decently edited already 😆

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Acting on instinct | Wind Breaker | Sakura/Nirei/Suou/Kiryuu/Tsugeura | 800~ words (WIP, 1/5) | rated T

Summary: Something shifted for them all in that moment at Kiryuu's house. They all felt it. But Kiryuu was missing for it, so they can't do anything about it.

Not yet.


Read it on Dreamwidth or on AO3.

I acquired a new bookshelf over the weekend! It's just a cheap Ikea shelf basically made entirely of particleboard but the most important part is that it was free lol. I spent a while cleaning off the smaller shelf I wanted to replace and everything was soooo dusty because I literally never touch anything on it. Like solid layers of dust lmao it was bad!! But I cleared everything off it and put the new shelf in its place so now I have two large shelves instead of one large shelf and one small shelf. 🥳 I'll probably try to make space for the small shelf somewhere but that's a project for later.

The problem now is that I don't know how I want to organize anything lmao. I have a shit ton of manga from middle school/high school taking up space that I should probably get rid of, but I don't want to. 😩 But also 20 volumes of Fruits Basket takes up a lot of space!! (Also pissed at my younger self for not buying the last few volumes of several series like Fruits Basket back when they were released.) I guess I can start with the stuff I was never super attached to but I know that will leave me with more books than I should be holding on to haha.

I did also buy some book easels and a cheap plastic tiered display shelf so I'll finally be able to display some of the figures and special editions of books I just have stacked in a huge pile because I had no shelf space. It's hard being a maximalist with no room to put anything!!

Oh I almost forgot, for people who have a lot of trinkets and figures and stuff displayed, how do you keep it all clean? I haaate dusting but I cannot let things get as bad as it was on that small shelf after not touching it for years. Do I just get an actual feather duster and bat at all the figures every so often or what lmao.

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My throat feels off in a sickly way; usually if I simply kept the fan on too much, it'll mostly be quite high in my throat and "dry" without affecting speaking or swallowing, but today it feels mucuous-y and is affecting my swallowing/speaking. Hoping that it's nothing, but GanGan is sick so can't be sure I didn't get it from her.

I slept most of today's daylight, so I haven't done much yet. Just had a bit of a talk about crushes (and age gaps) with my main online groupchat. Ended up giving some advice for keeping a romantic relationship healthy when there's an age gap, but I'm not sure how well I did. I don't have any personal experience with that (even my friendships have majority been the same age until recently), but I've seen stuff around so here's to success!

I haven't mentioned her at all before because she's one of Laila's classmates, and on Friday night we got invited to her birthday party.

We've been to birthday parties before but this was second time we've been to a birthday party for someone in Laila's class and the first time it was at their house (the first one we went to was at a zoo). Because of that they had all the standard party games for young kids--they painted pictures, they played pin the tail on the donkey, hit a piñata, danced to songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters!, the works. They ate pizza and cake while the adults ate fajitas and drank margaritas. It's the story about kids' birthday parties that we didn't realize was happening while we were young but heard about after we grew up.

Laila...was a bit of a handful. She didn't really play with the other kids very much, and she kept running around and grabbing balloons, so we couldn't just trust her to hang out with the other kids. One of us always had to follower her around and keep track of her to make sure everything was going okay. It was a smaller house with a bunch of kids, though, so some chaos was expected. Near the end she started getting even more wild, but she had been up since almost 6 a.m. and it was past her bedtime, so it was definitely time for her to go home.

sashagee talked to Amelia's mom at the party a bit and maybe we'll get a playdate set up! The parents were mentioning how they were a bit disappointed that it seemed like no one had set up any playdates. I talked to a couple of the other dads in the kitchen--one of the parents is French, so we chatted about being in a country where you don't speak the language at all (him when he came here, me in Japan) until I had to run away because Laila was on a rampage again.

Also, sashagee did get some vindication, though! One of the other parents mentioned that they also were offered the option of half-day preschool for their four-year-old, so it's not just us. The school officials acted like this was a mistake that we had made and everything was all our fault, but nope! They screwed up their intake forms. Well, at least now we know.

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Weird Question Department- did anyone send me something in the mail around the end of last month? There's a tracking number in the system that scanned once at a sorting center and then has never been seen again. Unfortunately, the system also only has the tracking number, no origin point, and no actual image of the label so we're not even sure whose it is. I can't think of anything unaccounted for! (Not the KS I thought it might be.)

Also mildly convinced there's something going on/I'm supposed to have done by tomorrow but also nothing comes to mind. I have a busy week next week, but this week is pretty open. But it's also Fat Tuesday and the Lunar New Year so perhaps my brain is trying to juggle those in.

Other than that, work last night wasn't ridiculous but I hadn't slept well, so I pretty much deflated early but slept decent. I did get runners checked for both Star Abyss kits so I'm just going to count the entire day as a win anyway, lol. I'll keep working on the Destiny Astray when I have the brain power, and I grabbed a battered KO GM to poke at otherwise.