Feelin' the Love

Today I am feeling the love.

I was both shocked and humbled to wake up this morning and find that my blog has passed the 5,000 mark in hits.

Thanks to my loyal (and not so loyal who really are just waiting for my demise:) readers. Love you guys. Will try and keep it interesting!

K

Clean all the things? :(

It's Sunday. Again. 


Somehow it's either always Sunday (I guess for you Americans that would be Monday) or Friday. Those days in the middle of the week just seem to flit away before they've even arrived.


Every Sunday before I even get out of bed, I think of this post that has to be one of the funniest blog posts I've ever seen. (Special thanks to DK for turning me onto this blog)


http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html


So my Sunday mantra has now become "Clean all the things? :(" I can still get a chuckle out of TPH if I tilt my head and wilt to the side just the right amount. 


This morning was a bit easier though: Uncle S was here and took N to the park so that I could Clean All the Things. Then, I remembered it was Rosh Chodesh, and I just Cleaned Some of the Things. 


This post was really supposed to be about BAW. When I got engaged to TPH, I promised myself that no matter how many long and wonderful years we were married, I would always appreciate him. I've been good so far, but wanted to share a story with you that shows how much of a better man he is than I.


First grader S came home from school on Thursday with a note that he needs to bring "Chips" to the class party on Sunday. I assumed (even though deep down I knew) that the teacher couldn't possibly mean "french fries", which is what the Israeli's call "Chips". After all, I'd already done all my shabbos shopping. How could they expect me to get to the store, fry up some french fries for 35 kids on Sunday morning, and then send them to school with a five year old who walks there?!


After we clarified that it was indeed french fries, my first reaction was, OK, forget it. The teacher said 4 other kids are supposed to bring FF also, so we'll just skip out on it. But BAW said, "No. We're team players, and we are going to get the FF." We were supposed to walk up to the store last night, but TPH wasn't feeling well so we ditched that idea too. 


Cut to: the next morning at 6:30am. I groggily come downstairs and find TPH peeling, cutting and frying potatoes so that S will have some to bring. 


Now sorry, but THAT is just awesome.

No...Pics...Yet...

Ha! So, after my much aggrandized post that I will now be posting pics on my blog, I haven't had even a second to upload :( 


I was telling you that we are starting a new family tradition: the once a month family trip. Some of you might laugh, and say, "only once a month?" But with our ever changing lifestyle, and a bunch of kids to get to a bunch of places all the time, there just seems to be no time for family time! This reminds me of the first time I read Rabbi Brezak's book calld "Chinuch in Turbulent Times" (BEST chinuch book, ever btw). He writes that every parent must strive to spend a half an hour alone with each child every couple of weeks. He might have even said every month, I have to go look it up and check.


Well, imagine my haughty and naive response: "Hey BAW! Check this out!! Ha! Once a month! That's crazy! Should be once a day!" BAW had a similar response, and now that we are older and our brood three times the size, and somehow 10x more demanding, we often chuckle over this earlier exchange. The sad thing is that it really does take an effort to find 1/2 hour alone with each of the kids. Ever. 


We have a funny "family-ism" that's become second nature in our house. You know what I mean: words that you use in your home that have become invented over the years. Words that if you use them outside of the house, you get funny looks. 


So, we have a saying that goes, "Imma-Abba Time, Hey!" Or "Imma-S Time, Hey!" or "Abba-J Time, Hey!" This connotes any two people in the W family getting alone time together. I don't know where or when the "hey" part was added, but the funniest part is that it doesn't even have it's own exclamation mark anymore. Just monotone with the rest of the sentence. As in, my 5 year old might say on our walk to school, "Is this Imma-S Time, Hey?" Or on our way out the door for our Friday night walk, J says, "Have fun Imma-Abba Time, Hey".


SO, about that trip...hopefully I'll get the camera out tomorrow to tell you all about our family trip to the Biblical Zoo in J-lem this past week, if I can find two minutes to myself. 


Ironic how there's there's no "ism" for plain old "Imma-Time, Hey."

Crazy American

Ha! I love it! I just got my first "Crazy American" eye roll!

Was at the park doing the morning "let's run down this baby so he sleeps well" trick, when a native Israeli mother went out of her way to come over to me to give me a piece of her mind. "Isn't he cold in shorts? He must be freezing!!" I was a little embarrassed, and sheepishly said, "No, I think he's ok." Collective eyeball roll of the other mothers around me. I looked around and it dawned on me that most kids were in corduroy pants, long sleeves, and a couple even in sweaters.

On my way home I was feeling a little insecure, so I checked my phone for the weather. 79 degrees.

Um, yeah. We're good. Thanks.

My Secret

I have a secret, and where better to share it than privately on the internet (of course only after I link to it on FaceBook).


My secret is...(nope, not pregnant) I am going to start putting pics on my blog. Yup, that's the big news.


See, me and TPH have had this argument from my very first post. He is of the "old school" mind that there still is a chance to chronicle your life on the internet and remain anonymous. He thinks that if someone sees who we are...I'm not sure what. 


I still won't use our *real* names, cuz' I like to pretend that it's cool to be sketchy, but I can't live without photos anymore! I am the person who spent the first 5 years of my marriage carefully cataloging our photos, and putting them into adorable scrapbooks. My older kids can pull any one of these off the shelf and spend hours reminiscing to perky titles like, "A's first Havdalah!" Or "J's third molar came in!" or "Turtleback Zoo for the 17th time!"


My younger kids however, are hard pressed to find even a pic titled, "S's first steps!" or "R's first foods!" I am not going to take all the blame for this though. When my older kids were younger, things were different. We still had our film cameras, and if you didn't get to the store to develop them and put them in an album somewhere, that was it. No memories. 


But now, when my first grader is looking for VIP pics for school, I can yell: "Go look on FB, in my albums!" So, really it's the same thing, but instead of pulling out the albums, they can pull up the albums. I figure if I can post pics and blog at the same time, viola! Virtual scrapbook!


This all sounds good in theory, but let's see if I can actually follow through...

J's Poems

My 10 year old daughter is a literary genius. Well, maybe not yet, but she will be. Trust me. I am not bragging (well, maybe a teeny bit) and I am not over dramatizing. Words and language are already her passion. She uses words unknown to most college professors, she's been reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy since she was 8 and has completed it several times. She was finished with the Harry Potters 2 days after the final one was on shelves. So, imagine my excitement when she started to write! 


Here is a poem she wrote this week. Reprinted of course, with her permission. (The original is in pink pen, written into the shape of a heart. Hey, she's still a 10 year old girl!)


If You Were Here


If you were here I wouldn't be moping or sighing. 
If you were here I could talk to you instead of sending letters.
If you were here I could laugh with you and actually see you laugh, instead of hearing you on the phone. 
If you were here, you could feel my hand slipping the candy into yours, instead of watching it slip out of the package.
If you were here, I could inhale deeply and smell the baking cookies, instead of getting 35 emails from you saying you baked cookies. 
If you were here, I wouldn't miss you.


And one more...


The Rainbow


One single morning, 
I was pleased to see,
The colors of the rainbow, 
glimmering there for me. 


There stood Red, proud and strong, 
the colors of bravery and love.
I could've looked at him for hours, 
but there was more to see of.


Then danced Orange, 
carefree and true,
Seemingly she's always 
waiting there for you.


After came Yellow,
Happy, sunny and bright,
Just him, his smiley face, 
Makes the world go right.


Swishing lightly, follows in Green,
The lover and mother of Nature,
With the likes of which,
You have never seen.


Serenely drifting,
The tide brings Blue,
A Father of Water;
Old, young, the same and New.


Purple and Lavender are here,
Serious and Cute,
They are in the same color family,
But alike right down to the boots.


And there I was marveling,
How precise the colors were,
And how rainbows were rare,
And then of how the colors are
always 
there 
for sure.

On a Mission

Have I mentioned how much I LOVE living in Israel?! Especially now that the weather is finally cooperating, I feel like we can at last start living here, and loving it!

This morning, I popped out of bed (please read: “groggily slogged to the bathroom”) and loudly started announcing that “we” were leaving in ½ an hour for school, which drew some funny looks from the brood. See, “we” never go anywhere in the morning.  “We” generally stay in our pajamas until about 9am when N starts yelling for the park so persistently that it might just be child abuse if I ignore him any longer. “They”, on the other hand trek up the hill no matter what the weather, and when they need a parental unit for whatever reason, it’s “he” that goes up, and never, ever “We”. So, when I said, “we”, I got quite a confused and suspicious reaction.

Don’t get me wrong. In my defense, I am not just an overweight, lazy mother. For the record: I am an overweight lazy mother, who really, really doesn’t like the heat. And now that it seems to have officially dipped into the 70s more than one day in a row, I really have no more excuses. I’ve also spent a lot of the last week walking and it IS getting easier.

So, S, J and I trekked up this morning (B and A got a ride to ulpan in BS), and it was really a beautiful walk. The mornings here are crisp and clear and smell of something fresh and new. It’s a nice ½ hour to spend with the kids one on one, or one on two. I also love the hustle bustle of the mornings of all the kids getting to school, men coming home from shul, shopkeepers opening and the town coming to life.

My real agenda this morning was to help first grader S unpack his backpack and leave his books at school. Over the past few weeks, his books have slowly made their way from his cubby to his backpack, and everyday he has been schlepping a 20 lb bag up the hill, like a little pack mule. Yesterday, when S took his shirt off, BAW pointed out that he has not an ounce of fat on him. Regardless of his new GQ physique, I couldn’t take him carrying all that around with him. For some reason, I can’t get him to leave the stuff in his cubby on his own, so I figured this was a job for SuperMom. “We” to the rescue!

 Another fine point: I needed to speak to them at the school to remind them that once again, the kids are complaining that there is no toilet paper in the bathrooms. Even when I send them with tissues, they are embarrassed to take them out of their backpacks and bring them into the bathroom.  The dirty job of a mother….

So, off “we” went, and it was clear that J wasn’t going to believe that I was actually going to walk up with them until she saw me head out the door. About half way up, she says to me, “Hey, Ima, you do pretty well for someone who doesn’t do this every day!” Thanks for the perky encouragement, J.

We dropped J off and made our way up to the boys’ school. I still can’t get over the fact that a 5 (ok, almost 6!) year old makes this walk every day without complaint. Not to mention the 7, 10 and 11 year olds. I am really so proud of them!

Now, this particular boys’ school is known for total and complete chaos. And still, I love it. The boys are so happy, smiling, playing, schmoozing, and for the most part, doing it all like mentchen. We walked into S’s first grade classroom, and the boys run over, “Y! (They call him by his full name) Boker Tov!” They put their arms around his shoulders, they hug him, and dance a little impromptu jig as only first grade boys can. They notice me and immediately start to authoritatively help me, mostly in English with Israeli accents, some in Hebrew, a few in good ole’ American English.

“This book goes in the cubby, this one stays in the backpack.”

“Here, let me do it.”

“Come, Y, I will show you.”

They take over completely, throwing old papers away, organizing the cubby, and eventually hand me back a near empty backpack. They reminded me on some level of a coffee clutch of old Sefardi men. You know, the retired taxi drivers that sit around and drink “Caffe Turki”; brusque in their manner, yet efficient, and caring. And thankfully none of them had a cigarette. It was endearing and sweet.

After saying goodbye to S, I headed to the office to file my TP complaint, and the only thing to report from that visit was that a teacher gently put her hand on my arm and looked me square in the eye, and corrected a wrong word I had used in Hebrew. (I used “ya’giya” for a woman, she earnestly repeated “ta’giya” about four times.) So, that set back my using Hebrew ever again for about 6 months. Thanks.

Otherwise, besides that and the fact that for no reason known to man or the inhuman Bezeq phone company, we have had no internet for the past two days, all is good. I am writing this the old fashion way; in Word, and I guess I’ll have to repost it on the internet if we ever get it back.

Maybe the 1^st grade boys can show me how.