Zora and her friend.

Zora spent last night with one of her oldest friends. When she got home this morning, the other girl's Mom told me they'd passed protesters on the square and had a conversation about gay marriage, which the protesters were in favor of. So now both girls want to write letters to President Obama in favour of gay marriage. Because when they grow up, they want to marry each other. I'm looking forward to helping her write this one. :D

apparently that's not all i left at home...

i did the stoopidest thing this morning. as planned with Alex's mother, i dropped razi off at school and then went to pick up Alex for a play date with zora. i was in such a rush i put lilah's coat on over her dirty diaper and pyjamas, and carried her through the snow so i wouldn't have to bother with shoes.

so i get to Alex's place and no one answers the door. i ring, i knock, i wait, i try again, ... complete silence. so i go to call and, remember that big hurry? apparently i left my bag and my cell at home. we drove all the way back to the house (it's only a mile and a half) and i leave the girls in the car (at zora's express request) while i run in to get my bag and the synagogue directory in case i don't have the right number in my phone. i call their house from my driveway and no one answers, it gets forwarded to voice mail. so i leave a message. now i'm really freaked out. is the sitter in a coma on the floor? what is going on?

i call Alex's mother at work (so glad i grabbed the phone directory!) and she thinks maybe the sitter was putting Alex's little sister down for a nap and Alex didn't want to come to the door for some reason. she says she will call the sitter's cell phone and let her know i am coming back. as for the phone, she now realizes she must not have turned the ringer back on last night after she accidentally shut it off. oh, whew!

so i drive back on snow and ice and park in the driveway again and go to the door again and... wait a minute... this isn't the porch i was on ten minutes ago. i look around and recognize a decoration hanging on an outside wall. next door. the last time i was here, i rang the neighbor's doorbell. oops. so once i figured that all out i rang Alex's doorbell and their dog goes nuts inside. oh. right. i didn't hear a dog last time. now i feel REALLY stoopid.

anyway, this time the sitter opens the door right away and says that the ringer was indeed off on the phone, which is why she didn't answer when i called. so i get Alex in my car and all is well.

and they're closing school early because the snow is coming down like gangbusters. i've decided i'll take Alex home at about 1:30 and then go get razi, whose school is going to let out at 2 instead of 3:10. and i don't have to worry about lilah's bus reorganization getting messed up, because this means no afternoon preschool.

so it all worked out fine in the end.

nachas

happiness is...

hearing my three children spontaneously break into the prayers, in perfect hebrew, for both bread and wine.

so what if they are singing them over chocolate ice cream.

mars

my insane children are "cleaning" their bathroom. you see, razi dared to tell me, on the way home from school no less, that my ideas about what to do when we got home were "boring." i angrily told him that if he was bored he could clean the bathroom and zora turned that into the funnest idea of what to do, ever.

that child is from mars.

i can only hope they don't do anything purely revolting with the toilet scrubber or the toothbrushes or something like that, but i can't supervise, i just can't. i suppose this means i'm a wuss.

i can, however, go up and check on them occasionally. so, what does this "cleaning" mean? water all over the floor. every single washcloth soaked and dubious. zora covered with soap. razi running around in his underwear. me wanting to send them all back to school.

sigh.

preparing for school

this morning the kids saw a pile of backpacks that their father had set aside to check out. i have decided that two are going to charity but one will now be zora's new school pack. they got all excited about how they will start back to school soon, so this has become backpack morning.

lilah was wearing the old "Dora the Explorer" backpack i bought for her brother when he turned three (over four years ago. it's holding up well.) razi had me fill his brand new pack full of the school supplies i bought for him and zora has been stuffing her new pack with so many books and toys that she probably won't be able to carry it.

razi is still wearing his new pack on his back. he doesn't start school for two days. i wonder when he will decide to take it off. ;)

ahh, i was wrong. she CAN carry it. on the other hand, she's unbalanced!

what does godzilla have to do with bedtime, again?

part of the standard bedtime routine around here is a "special extra story" that used to actually be special and extra. ;)

the two older kids start every day with an assumption of three storybooks at bedtime, plus the special extra story (which razi used to earn by reading a book to ME, but that sort of evaporated when his little sister who couldn't read at all got into the act).

one book is for staying clean and dry all day, which should be a given since zora is almost five now, but sometimes she gets lazy. argh.

the other two books are for cleaning up the two downstairs rooms in a timely manner at clean-up time. if they finish in under half an hour, they get both. if not, fifteen minute intervals come to take away the other two books and then the special extra story.

last night zora lost everything. then she had to lose something else even beyond the special extra story, so she lost the priviledge of drinking soda next shabbat. she was devastated. good. maybe she'll learn that screaming fits are not the best way to deal with disappointments.

razi, though, still got the special extra story. now, my spouse is a genius for making these things up on the fly, with prompts the children give him right before. our cats, hello kitty and godzilla are regular stars. but last night it was apparently my turn, so i told a story of godzilla rising from a laboratory at the local university and destroying the town we live in. of course, my spouse - genius that he is - saved the day with the judicious placement of a sleeping-pill-laced lean cuisine on top of a freight car.

everyone knows that godzilla's favorite snack is a train. ;)

yes, it was a goofy story, but razi seemed to like it.

the colts, miami, and zora

Zora and I went to Miami, Florida last weekend. My oldest cousin’s two oldest children had a joint bar/bat mitzvah ceremony, and Zora and I went and represented the whole Indiana branch of the clan. Zora had a really marvelous time, and I could not be more proud of her. She stayed up really late both Friday and Saturday nights and she was a perfect little delight the whole weekend anyway.

We flew in and out of Indianapolis the very weekend of the playoff game, and wow, the fever over the football thing was everywhere. Not my thing, but it seemed to put everyone in a good mood, and that was a very nice side effect.

The weather in Miami was fantastic. I actually took a nap outside on Saturday afternoon. Considering that when I checked the weather for Indianapolis on the internet the next morning I learned that at home it was 27 degrees and snowing, that was a nice break.

But I’m glad to be home, even if it is cold and snowy here.

my girl

My four year old daughter needs to learn that talking about something, like heading to the bathroom or cleaning up her toys, is not, oddly enough, the same as doing that thing.

can we get back to you?

So Zora and Razi were putting together a "show" which I, of course, was waiting eagerly to watch.

Finally they called me to come sit on the couch and watch it. Zora held a stuffed toy in front of her face and mumbled something incomprehensible while Razi danced around with a box on his head.

When I said to Zora that I could not hear her, she told me "Ima, we forgot to practice how the show goes."

ROFL!!

random stuff

after searching unsuccessfully for lapsang souchong at, what, three different kroger stores? i finally made the time to check the fancy-pants supermarket. yay! my favorite tea. mmmmmmmmmm. i've had some every day since i bought it. i have to be careful though, because it still makes me feel a bit... off, if i drink a great deal of it. it might be the caffeine. apparently it's a highly caffienated tea, for tea anyway.

lilah is doing GREAT with preschool. nowadays i bring her, i put her down, she walks in and doesn't look back or need a hug or even to wave goodbye. to quote my mother's favorite story about my childhood: "i don't need you any more, mommy."

on the other hand, i think she's begun to transition out of her nap. she's a touch under the weather today, and went to sleep easily, but this is the first time she's fallen asleep without difficulty in something like a week.

i hate nap transitions.

but by this age her sister zora was completely done with napping, so at least she postponed it, in comparison.

i still don't know where zora is going to go to kindergarten. or how i am going to pay for it. oh, she can go for free, but only half-day. full-day public school kindergarten will cost me $1800/year. full-day private school, which i would loveLoveLOVE to send her to, would be $4000/yr, before scholarships. but that is only if the private school gets enough children to HAVE kindergarten next year.

last i checked, the private jewish school was as likely to have enough kids for a class as i was to have $4000 sitting around doing nothing. now, paying for public school makes me angry enough to spit nails. but i still feel half-day would be a waste of her time. yuck-o. i want a fairy godmother to come fix this for me.

yesterday was razi's seventh birthday. wow. i've been a mother for seven years and a day. and he got a 100% on his spelling test today, just like last week. he's such a great kid. also, a massive goofball, but he's seven. it's part of the territory.

in addition to all that, he needs braces. my, how times have changed. apparently putting braces on six and seven year olds is all the rage in orthodonture these days. but i can't deny that his teeth are messed up. even if i hadn't seen the panoramic x-rays (and i have. yikes!), he's already got a tooth coming in very, very crooked. looks like he inherited his grandpa john's mouth, and if you've looked into john's mouth, you'll know why that thought makes me willing to get braces for my seven year old. for those of you who've never seen my father-in-law smile, i will allow you to imagine.

Evolution

Zora was watching Fantasia, which has a dinosaur extinction scene. She asked me where the people were. I told her there were no people then. So she asked me where the people came from.

So I gave her a brief description of evolution. The shortest I could come up with.

She can be a real challenge, but I'm very proud of her.

far too true

"Abba, if I were a clock, I would be a talking clock!"
Zora, June 24, 2006

Wow!

other local parents have been telling me about this great new playground in town. i kept thinking yeah, i should go there with the kids. we finally made it a few days ago.

i wasn't sure where it was, so i drove slowly through the park it is in, looking for it. it's a large park, with a golf course and then a long winding road with more than one playground. it must be an old park as well, because the trees are thick and huge.

anyway, i'd heard it was "completely redone". so when i saw a totally fancy new parking lot i thought okay, that must be it. the playground, however, looked quite ordinary and there were no children on it. but there was a large stone shelter with indoor bathrooms, and the stream was nice and the trees were nice and i figured well, i guess the playground that was here before was awful. we stayed a while and then i saw something through the trees. what was that? it was bright red... wait a minute... was that the REAL new playground, across the street and behind some trees?

we walked across the street to find what has got to be the best playground i've ever seen in my whole life. i took some pictures just to show it off. i love my town.
the playground has this thing children can climb up and two of the slides that come down are about three stories tall. look for the adults in the photos for perspective.it has a little play house, a section just for kids under five, a rope climbing structure i've never seen the likes of in the US (though i saw two in scotland years ago). it has lots of swings. one is almost like a huge plastic throne. two are these large saucers that can fit four kids at once. it has a huge long bridge/walkway that the kids love to run up and down. it has places to eat with tent-like covers to create shade.it's fabulous. we've been there three times in three days.

clever kid!

"You can only be shrunk if you're in a book. You can only be shrunk if you're pretending. And if you are real, and you are shrunk, then you're pretending."
Zora, June 8, 2006

puns

This morning I was getting the "big kids" ready for school and walked into my bedroom to check on my middle kid. She was sitting on the toilet and I heard her pee.
I said "That's great, I heard you pee, honey!"
Well, she starts laughing and laughing and I have no idea what about. Finally I get an answer out of her. "I don't pee honey!"

whatever would we say?

Yesterday I was driving my two "big kids" (6 and a half and nearly 4) to synagogue. the nearly 4 year old was babbling about Gd. she's a talker. she told me:
"if we met Him...
we wouldn't know what to say."
i wasn't expecting something quite so profound. sometimes she is fascinated with the idea of Gd. yesterday morning was definitely one of those times. i've been trying to teach her for ages that Gd isn't a person and therefore has no gender but she usually calls Gd "Him" anyway. but she does seem to understand that Gd doesn't have a body, that Gd is bigger than anything else and that Gd is "alone".

she recites the shema to me every night in Hebrew. i love hearing her say it.
shema, yisrael: adonoy elohaynu, adonoy ECHAD.
listen, israel: the Lord our Gd, the Lord is ONE.
but echad is also translated as "alone". i gave her that interpretation once and have regretted it ever since. she latched onto the word. she latches onto words frequently. so i've been trying to teach her that it means not that Gd is lonely, away from us, but alone among divine beings. we'll see how well that goes.

the other two kids aren't interested in religion. we'll see how that goes, too.

That's my girl!

My daughter Zora is in the kitchen playing with a Hanuka present: a Disney Princess "activity set" - which means colored pencils, markers, a little coloring book, some stickers and a cardboard "ballroom" to put the stickers on. I was helping her put the stickers on the ballroom. Big stickers like those are easy to rip while removing from the backing. Anyway, she said "I want to dance at the ball."
"That sounds like fun!" I replied. "Who would you want to dance with?" I expected her to choose her Abba, a schoolfriend, someone she knows in real life. But she didn't.
"Umm....," she looked carefully at the four couples she'd placed on the cardboard, and pointed at "Belle" from the Beauty and the Beast movie. "Her." She sounded quite decisive.
Well. That's my girl!
I told her I thought that would be a lot of fun, by the way.

the nightmare of a three and a half year old

this morning, a bit after 5am, my older daughter woke up very suddenly and screaming. she sleeps right next to me, so i immediately started trying to comfort her, but she was having none of it. she was so hysterical that it took me a while to figure out what she was yelling about, but she seemed to have had a nightmare about her bedtime routine, as she was trying to tell her Abba (who wasn't in the room) that she did not want to brush her teeth. at least that was what it sounded like.

i tried explaining that it was a dream, but that just made her more angry. she really can't tell the difference, and with dreams like that, who can blame her? it isn't like she was dreaming about something that doesn't happen every day. so i tried explaining that she had already brushed them and she needed to go back to sleep. i tried comforting her with cuddling, but she was too pissed off and freaked out to care. then i realized she'd switched gears, and was screaming that she did want to brush her teeth. well hey, that's easy. we got up and brushed our teeth. yeah, me too. why not? the dentist would be proud of me.

so that is how i found myself brushing my teeth at about 5:20am. she fell asleep easily after that.

parenthood is often not what i expected.

well, that settles it

"Ima, we don't need any more babies in our family".
Zora 11-10-2005

delightful things my children have said

"The opposite of Aladdin is Jafar". - Zora, 2 years old
"Cheetahs bite their own food!" - Razi 7/15/05
"I gave Boo bread. That was kindful." - Zora 8/11/05
"Monsters are scared of trains! They are GOOD!" - Razi 8/23/05
"Bodies are for dancing." - Zora 9/8/05