Well, on June 18th we had to hospitalize your grandfather (my dad) in markham stouffville hospital.

He was diagnosed with dementia (FTD: frontal temporal dementia) exactly four years ago. On June 18th, he started charging on my mom and your dad, he kept on hitting and beating them. No one could calm him down or control him. I was on the second floor in the bedroom with you, calling 911 to come and get him.

They came, injected sedatives, took him to the hospital, restrained him, and…well, I hope you never get an idea how hard this might be.

I will write down all details of that night for you, later. But the purpose of this one is just a quick note, honey:

This same thing, or many other bad things might happen to the dearest and nearest people around us. But no matter what, life goes on.

Be strong to confront anything if (god forbids) it ever happens to you, yourself. Make sure the people close to you are ready and know your wish.

Be strong if such difficult and disastrous things happens to people you love, try to help them, but make sure you will live your life.

If it ever happens to me, ask trained personnel to take care of me, love me, but do not sacrifice your life for me. I love you. But if I am in the stage where my father is now, I am not sure if I will have meaningful emotions. It means, I might not even be able to love people.

I never want to be under life support. Death is supposed to happen to every living thing (at least up to this date no one has survived death). So, be brave and ask for no life support. In addition, if I get to a stage, that I do not know you, your father, my brother and my mother, or if I get to a stage where I cannot keep my dignity, I would prefer to die. Please be strong and ask for euthanasia for me.

As I am writing these words, you are sleeping, and I am watching you on baby monitor.

As I am writing these words, I have no idea what my dad is doing, and what is going on in his (badly damaged) brain.

God bless you, honey.

God helps my father. Between you and I, I do wish he was dead.

The last conversation we had with him about you, several days after he was hospitalized:

– Do you remember my baby?

-Yes.

-What was her name?

-Deeba.

-Yes, Deeba. The baby.

-Yes. The beautiful baby.

Oh, honey. You are adorable, precious and lovely.

Words cannot express how I feel when I touch you, kiss you, or see your smile.

I am sure I will miss them all, but, hey, now I am enjoying them all.

If there is one thing I wish you to do, is falling in love with a responsible and caring person (man or woman, no difference), and having a child with him/her.

Oh god, you are an adorable little sweet thing. God bless you.

Your father worships you. I have never seen him so much in love with anything in his life.

Your tommy pain days are behind us. You didn’t have the problem in the past several weeks.

But, it was funny, you were shouting and folding your legs into and under your tummy, we gave you a teaspoon of gripe water, and you got relieved and calm in a minute.

Your doctor said, you might like the taste. Gripe water cannot effect so quickly. But well, I do think gripe water did some magic with you.

It is alcohol-free, btw.

It is said that gripe water doesn’t work for all babies, but just for some. but hey, it did work for you.

I believe I said before, but your doctor prescribed BioGaia. BioGaia had an accumulative impact. But for gripe water, it was immediate.

If we put our finger in your mouth, and you start sucking it, you are definitely hungry.

If we want to put you into sleep, and you cry outloud, you are either very sleepy, or not sleepy. So, if we put you in your activity saucer (or take you out of the house, at the door) and you start laughing and goggling, you are not sleepy. If you keep on shouting and yelling or nagging, you are sleepy.

If you fold your legs in your tommy and cry outloud, it is your tommy! Thanks god now all tommy pain is behind us.

and, you might be cold or warm, you might be bored, or, you might react to a new place or a stranger new person. You rarely cry if you poo or pee!

If you have burp, and we try to feed you, you shout outloud!

If you want to turn (from your back to your tommy) and we do not let you, you shout.

Your father says, babies do not understand what is wrong when they are tired, exhausted and sleepy. They start shouting and screaming, and get uneasy when they are sleepy. They need help to go to sleep.

Interestingly, you can crawl when you are on a bed, and about to sleep!

This keeps you from going to sleep! It seems that whenever babies learn a skill, they are so excited, they can’t sleep.

Your crawling skill is not mature yet.

You have always slept really well through the night. We feed you every four hours after you sleep, without waking you.

For the first 15 weeks or so, we changed your diaper, and wiped you in your sleep too. But starting a couple of weeks ago, we stoped changing you during the night. We use 12-hours diapers. Change you at around 11 p.m. (in your sleep), then again at around 8 or 9 in the morning.

Yet, if you poo, we always wash you with water and change you immediately, regardless of the time of the day.

Putting you to sleep is recently a bit of a challenge, but after you sleep, you sleep really well.

It is almost a month or longer since your poop started smelling awful. For a month or longer you used to poop once a day, always in the morning.

For a couple of weeks now, you poop every 28 to 48 hours.

We all get excited and ecstatic when you poop. Your dad loves to wash you after you pee or poo! We all adore you.

An italian young guy, exactly one year older than you kissed you a couple of days ago!

Apparently, you didn’t like it. Your granny who was holding you at the time, says you cried outloud. But then Luka, caressed your legs and you liked it. You smiled. This was all according to your grandma who took you unto the street for a change and to entertain you.

Your dad is really bad in learning lyrics. He knows one now and that is “my beautiful doll” a very famous babies (mostly girls) iranian nursery rhythms. He sings it to you again and again until you fall asleep.

I keep on reading many different iranian songs (including by Farhad Mehrad, Mansoor Tehrani, Haydeh, Sattar, Marzyeh, Vigen and many more) to you. I have learnt some English nursery rhymes as well, and I read them to you.

I even read some revolutionary songs for you. I just want you to learn our history and get the feeling.

Our family never liked the Islamic revolution. Your father’s family had a totally different idea. Anyways, I like you to be familiar with all those revolutionary songs.

For the “my beautiful doll”, I have created a lyrics of my own. The original lyrics says “my beautiful doll, open your eyes, when night falls, go back to sleep again, now come play with me, play balls or skip ropes with me”.

I replaced it with:

“my beautiful doll (or Deeba kouchoulou) close your eyes, when it is morning again, smile at the world, now let’s go sleep calmly together, you will wake up again, you almond blossom”.