Lauren and I are a team. We take a daily nap with her holding tight to my hair while I hold her foot.
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she is going to be a big sister
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It is July. It is hot. I have no clothes that will fit over my enormous belly. It turns out that when you let your almost 3 year old girl pick out your new maternity clothes, you spend the several weeks switching between several florid pink flowery dresses until delivery.
The days before she is born, the names have been chosen, but the baby’s gender is still unknown to us. Alana if it is a girl, Adam if a boy. My mother in law is doing the Sunday crossword puzzle and calls me over in amazement with the following two answers in the puzzle:
103 Across: It’s a girl. 34 Down: Alana
(actual puzzle appears below)
Alana is born weighing 9 pounds/8 ounces. She is so big that she looks like she can eat all of the other little babies in the nursery. My father in law had always been a bit cautious handling a small infant. Finally here was one that was solid enough that he wasn’t afraid to hold her. From the start he would repeat to us, “There is something special about this one”
Lauren is thrilled with the baby.She is not quite willing to share her Nanya, but other than that she makes room for her sister in her heart and in our family She is the older sibling that every parent wishes for - gentle and loving. Almost immediately Alana is her best audience. No one gets the giggles and smiles that Lauren can elicit. Later on, she is the only person who can understand what Alana is trying to say and acts as a translator.
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I am sitting in the dark in the middle of the night nursing my baby Alana, I nuzzle her head and take a big sniff. Does anything smell as wonderful as a baby’s head?
Sleep deprived, but these moments are magic.
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We are at a park and Alana is crawling at record speed across the grass. We can barely catch her. What is her target? A dog of course. Five times her size. The bigger the better. She makes a bee-line towards anything with fur. The adoration is mutual. I have not yet met an animal who doesn’t immediately fall in love with her.
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Alana is growing and doing things at her own pace.The lesson that you can’t compare sibling milestones turns out to be a gift that I am able to share with other concerned parents over the course of my career.
Walking? Talking? Toilet training? Lauren broke the curve on the early side. Alana, on the other hand, was in no hurry to do anything. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Aunt Marjie forecast this tendency while checking out Alana’s astrological chart before she was even born. “She will take her time and then instantly master things when she is ready”. When she finally walked, her first steps involved her picking up a small chair and carrying it. Perhaps she was practicing when no one was around?
Her poking along on her own relaxed timeline ended up giving me subject matter for many blog posts. The lesson? They get there when they get there. Kids are all different. Relax!
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Alana is three and we are cuddling in bed reading a library book. It is a silly story about a bunch of different animals. One of the characters was a naughty hyena who played malicious tricks on the other animals. These animals were getting fed up. One day they overhead the hyena plotting his next caper. He was planning to pretend to be in trouble, call for help and lure the other animals into a car-wash where he would trap them and get them all wet. They decided to turn the tables and the book ended as they got their revenge by making the trick backfire. The hyena ends up wet and sad. Most people reading this book would be left with a “well, he got what he deserved.” Not Alana. I look down and her and she is stricken. “The good animals turned bad, they shouldn’t have done that”
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We are in a teacher conference with her first grade teacher. Dear Ms. Eisenhower is telling us about a group activity. There were multiple choice questions that needed to be answered following reading a story. Everyone else in the group thought the answer was A. They pushed and cajoled, but Alana stuck with the answer B and would not be swayed. She was the only one who was correct. The teacher watched with pride as this one little girl was impervious to peer pressure.
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Alana is in high school at Lowell. She has kept all of her friends from preschool and grade school and is now gathering new ones who she will continue to hold dear. She is a peer helper. One day she is in the principal's office just chatting with Mr I. They lost track of time and she is now late for class. He gives her a note to give to the teacher.
“Please excuse Alana from being late, she was counseling me.”
She is going back and forth between several bonfires at the beach. She arrives at one right as the police come. They are not acting at their finest and are forcing the kids in attendance to do push ups down on the sand. She sees people terrified and in tears. Alana insists that the officers show her their badge numbers and she reports them.
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Alana has learned to make things work in her favor. We all watch it happen over and over. The family refers to it as Alana-Land. She wins raffles. Restaurants offer her free food. She gets upgraded on flights. The burrito man at Gordos knows her order and has it ready for her as soon as she enters. No need to stand in line.
She presented an expired membership card to the museum.
“I am afraid your card is expired”
“It isn’t a problem. And I have 3 friends with me that I will be bringing in with me”
“Uh, okay...here are your tickets”
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UC Santa Cruz, she ends up being one of the rare undergrad teaching assistants for the chair of the department. Another professor refuses to allow her into a section that would work with her schedule. He gets a scathing call from the department chair warning him to rethink his position. “Oh, it must have been a misunderstanding, Of course Alana can be in any section that works for her” and then asks Alana if she would be willing to be a TA for him as well.
After finishing her undergrad, she works at the SF suicide hotline. One night when walking to muni after a late night shift, I am keeping her company on the phone as she walks. What is that sound? A dixieland band accompanies her down Market Street and then tips their hats and she heads underground. When not volunteering at the hotline, during the day she does an internship at UCSF where she ends up co-authoring published research papers.
Now it is time for grad school. She gets in to all the schools she applies to. She and her dad do an epic road trip cross country where she earns her MSW from the University of Michigan. As Sandy likes to say, she graduated at the top of her class at the #1 graduate school of social work, making her the #1 graduate student in her field in the country. She then does a few years working at a community mental health clinic until she is fully licensed.
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The family is on a trip in Wadi Rum in Jordan. Lauren and Sandy are clambering up cliffs and sliding down sand dunes. Where is Alana? Oh, there she is, in a tent. She is drinking tea. There is a cat on her lap. A young Bedouin fellow is giving her a henna tattoo
A cancelled flight from Detroit to Pittsburgh where she is flying to meet me. No worries. A group of new friends that she met at an airport bar rent a car and drive her door to door. AlanaLand!
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She continues to collect lifelong friends. Now she is living back in San Francisco where she belongs.
Wise, kind, funny, compassionate, creative, passionate about right and wrong with a quiet backbone made of steel. Making the world a better place, one starfish at a time. I couldn’t be more proud of the adult she has become.
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For anyone interested, here is the speech that Sandy made about Alana on the occasion of her Bat Mitzvah when she was 13. She was already well on the road to becoming the awesome woman she is today!
My Darling Alana,
As an infant, you were, well, slow. You weren’t particularly quick to turn over, or quick to crawl, or quick to walk, or quick to talk. As mommy just said, one day my father, your papa, held you, looked into your eyes, and said, “This one – she’s going to be very special.” Rarely have such prophetic words been spoken.
To everyone sitting here today who knows you, you are indeed special. Whether it's as a granddaughter, niece, cousin, friend, student, sister, or daughter, you have established that specialness to all of us. But the fascinating thing is that no 2 of us understand that to mean the same thing. You of all people I have ever known have a rare ability to find that unique essence of each of us as individuals, and focus in on it, nurture it, respect it, and use it to form a relationship that is truly distinct from any you would have with anyone else. And intuitively, we all recognize that; you make us feel special as a result of it, and we are better off because of it.
You have amazing talents in many areas – writing, the arts, mathematics, and you’ve heard over and over that you can do anything you want to in life, because you have the talent, and the will. But for as long as you can remember, you’ve always heard me tell you that you would be the world’s greatest diplomat. Many years ago, your dear friend Yael went to a new school, and came home one day very upset. She told her mom that everyone was being mean to her, teasing her, ... hurting her feelings. Jodi told her that occasionally friends could turn on you and do that. And Yael’s response: “Not Alana. She doesn’t know how to be mean.” In 4th grade, your friend Zachary would never eat his lunch at school. Melanie, his mom had exhausted all her motherly tactics to get him to eat. So what did she do? She turned to you and asked you to make sure Zach ate his lunch. And so you sat with him every day, and we don’t know what you did or how you did it, but sure enough, he ate his lunch. A few years ago in school, you had a new teacher, and after a few weeks, she approached your teacher from the previous year and asked if everything was all right with Alana. "She seems kind of quiet, reserved, shy, keeps to herself, and doesn’t participate much in class." And she just wanted to know if there were any special considerations she needed to be aware of. Your previous teacher told us that she smiled, laughed, and replied by saying “In a few weeks, Alana will let you get to know her, and then you’ll wish you had a classful of Alana’s.”
But there isn’t a classful of Alana’s. There is only one. And while others are lucky enough to have a little bit of you in their lives, your mom and I are the luckiest of all, because Papa (You listening dad? Because you won’t hear me say this too often) was right – this is a special one. And we’re not the only ones who think so. I’ll close with one sentence from a letter you received just yesterday from your 4th grade teacher, who wrote “You’re so very special Alana, the world needs your kindness and your brilliance.” I am so very proud of you and I love you dearly.
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