So our seder was short and to the point. DH went to shul early Friday evening and we got the seder underway at the earliest permitted time (7:23 in Rehovot). We were done by 10 pm.
Friday morning I started the cooking around 7:30 and was done by 1:30 and since we only had one guest (my Mom) huge quantities of each dish weren't necessary so I was more able to enjoy what I was doing - even though cooking isn't my "thing" - rather than kill myself cooking right up to candle lighting. It really was in the realm of enjoyable and manageable.
My Mom hadn't been well and wasn't sure until the last minute whether she'd feel up to coming but she did. She was our only guest which also helped us keep it short and sweet. The more people, the more chaotic it tends to be. Y and E were good but I spent a lot of time in the living room just listening to DH read from the Haggadah while playing with E. You know 3 year olds and attention spans......Both kids were awake until the end. In fact, E had napped so he was bouncing around LONG after we'd finished and washed up the dishes. He didn't go down until 11:30 pm!
After we'd finished, we all were recalling many a seder we'd attended before moving to Israel and wondering HOW on EARTH families managed to schlepp out the story telling until 2, 3 and even 4 a.m. HOW is it possible? That is just pure torture, IMO. A read of the Haggadah really doesn't take THAT long. <head shaking> Not only that, those who don't live here have to conduct TWO seders one night after the next. Reason #3, 756, 872 to move to Israel, if you ask me.
The next day after going to shul in the morning and a quick, light lunch, I took the kids to a nice park a 5 minute walk from us for a couple of hours so DH could nap. My Mom came with. She and I sat on a bench on the side and read while the kids amused themselves on the equipment and in the sand. Y ended up getting her foot bitten by some microscopic creature of some sort in the sand. We never saw what it was and there was no bite or sting mark but it was painful and her foot swelled up and was red and hot for the next three days and very very itchy. Just like when she gets a mosquito bite. That kinda ended the stint in the park so we packed up and went home.
DH then took over with the kids and had them back out in the park next to our building for the rest of the afternoon while I napped. This way we keep E going all day and don't allow him to nap so by evening he's exhausted and we don't have any battles over bedtime.
Sunday I worked a full day.
Monday I took the kids and popped into the bead store in Rishon to get some beads for a bracelet I want to make. Then I took them to see the movie The Lorax. Excellent movie! I like the ecological message of it. We have and love the book as well. The kids were good through the movie. We came home after the movie to pick up DH and went off to the Passover festival on Rabbi Carlebach's moshav. Some friends of mine had gone in previous years and somehow I'd always missed the boat so I wanted to go check it out this year. I am so in love with this moshav. I have been there on quite a few other occasions and every time I go I never want to leave. I love the setting (it's very rural), I love how laid back the people are - lots of tofu and brown rice eating, organic eating, tree hugging ex-hippies - I love that everyone there speaks English, I love that their shul is a gigantic army tent, I love the earthy smell of the place. (I grew up a 30 minute drive from Santa Cruz, CA in the 1970s. Nuff said. That should tell you why this place feels so much like I've come home.)
They had activities for the kids (helium balloons, face painting, hair braiding, etc.), they had a whole line-up of different bands, they had food for sale, they had various artists selling their wares (clothing, ceramics, jewelry, aromatherapy oils, etc.). Something for everyone. There were a lot of people there of all ages and it was nice to see such a variety of religious types. My friend, Pesha, was there with her family and we bumped into a mutual friend with her husband and we saw a few other Rehovot families that we know less well but we connected with them too.
Yesterday we got a late start but around 11:30 I took the kids to a place called Chava's Farm. It's about a 30 minute drive south of us. I'd heard a few people recommend it and it wasn't hugely expensive. The kids and I had a blast. So nice to be somewhere so low-tech. It's like a kiddie zoo - gazelles and ostriches and a bull and donkey rides for the kids and a petting corner with baby chicks and ducks and mice and hamsters and guinea pigs and turtles and inflatable trampolines and a goat milking demonstration and monkeys and giant tortoises and a tractor ride to visit the nearby kibbutz's cow shed, etc. It was truly a place to spend the day. People in the know bring blankets and a picnic lunch and make a day of it. They had huge grassy expanses with covered picnic areas with chairs and tables. Really nice. We were there until 5 pm. As soon as we got in the car to go home, E yawned and told me he was tired and CRASHED. If he'd have been standing, you'd have heard him fall flat on his face. As soon as we got home I dumped him in bed and he slept through the night!!
Today I'm at work for the whole day and - as you can see - getting SO much work done. LOL. There are only about 4 other employees here today. Not sure if I'm going to have the car tonight or what to do with the kids after work if I do. I had wanted to get to the beach but ran out of time.
And tomorrow's erev chag and since we're having only a gazillion guests (mil and DH's two married kids and 2 grandkids), the madness will begin once again tomorrow morning with THE COOKING. O joy!
I have lots of pics to post from the past 2 days but put my camera's battery in to charge last night and of course forgot it at home this morning so....pics to follow.
Showing posts with label Rehovot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rehovot. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Thursday, December 1, 2011
English
Y mentioned recently that she is bored in her English class. Not surprising. Her spoken English is fluent even though her reading and writing skills aren't - although those are quickly improving too. I hope to make a trip to Ra'anana (about 45 minutes north of us) to a store there that I was told sells English teaching supplies - workbooks and such. I want to get her a book or two that will supplement what she's getting in school but that will be more of a challenge for her.
Y started a gynmastics class this week and is LOVING it!
Y started a gynmastics class this week and is LOVING it!
My weekend starts tonight. I wonder what the weekend holds?
We have been potty training E for several weeks now. He got "#1" down pat in about 2 days. "#2"......that's been a bug-a-boo. Sigh. I keep comforting myself by saying, "He won't come to his wedding in a diaper." Everyone catches on at some point. Just when?
Chanuka is around the corner and I want to take a day or two off to spend with the kids. But do I want to just stick close to home or pull out all the stops and do something BIG with them??? That is the question. A month before E was born - on Christmas day which was COLD and pouring rain (weren't no shepherds out tending flocks in THAT weather, let me tell you!) - I and the girls jumped on a bus and went to Jerusalem for the day. There is a small, quaint, cosy coffee shop there called Kad V'Chomer where they sell plaster molds of all kinds of things including Judaica items like menorahs, kiddush cups, Shabbat candlesticks, mezzuzah covers, etc. You pay for the one you want and then you sit and paint it. They provide all the brushes and paints and sponges for people who like sponge painting, etc. When you're done painting your piece, you have to leave it there for them to fire it in the kiln and then return to collect it which, coming all the way from Rehovot, was a bit problematic for us. But we have friends who live near Jerusalem who agreed to pick up the three items for us and hold them until we saw them again. So it worked out in the end. The girls each painted a jewelry box and I painted a mezzuah cover which we have up on the doorway of our kitchen at home. This activity is NOT cheap but it was the perfect thing for three artistic girls on a cold, rainy day in Jerusalem. I don't think doing this again would fly, especially now that we have a very active almost-3-year-old but maybe spending the day in Jerusalem would be fun as we hardly ever get there.
T and I did a big food shop last night. I love baklava but rarely buy it. But it just sounded good so last night I did buy a box of it. Which brought to mind the one and only time my Mom ever made it when I was a kid. Dad took one bite of it and started laughing so hard he was crying and couldn't talk for ages. We asked him why he was laughing and when he could finally talk he said, "It's like eating the morning newspaper!" That's what I think of whenever I eat it. LOL.
Have a good weekend!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Best Thing I Ever Did with My Kids
I suffer from "nature deficit". I have known this for a long time but could never acurately describe it or put a name on it until I read the book called Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. I am working my way sloooowwly through it and savoring it as I go. After I finish reading it, I plan to re-read it and highlight the portions that speak to me.
In the book, he makes a connection between "nature deficit" in children and the rise of all kinds of ADHD-type disorders. I think he might be on to something there. In my case, I grew up in a private house with a yard and my brother and I spent more time outdoors as kids than we did indoors. We also went a few times a week to one or the other of the many wonderful public park in the CA Bay Area and were also very "in to" camping as a family and did that for long stretches a couple of times a year. So we didn't have to "find" nature. It was all around us, even if a lot of the time it was cultivated nature (yards, parks, etc.) and we didn't have to go far to find it.
I remember going camping once when I was about 9 with my family. The day came when it was time to pack up and go home. I will never forget the strong desire I felt then to just burst out sobbing and of choking back the tears. Not that the vacation and fun time was over but because I had to leave all that quiet, beauty, solitude. And I remember being a little bit shocked that my reaction to the quiet, beauty and solitude was SO strong and wondering if that was normal. Also, as a kid, my secret desire was to be a forest ranger.
The nature deficit started when I moved to Israel as an adult. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not at least borderline ADD (that's 'attention deficit' without the hyperactive part). My oldest daughter most definitely is ADD.
I am so in love with this book that I feel like typing it all out here but a) that's illegal and b) I don't have time. Suffice to say that on Monday, after two days of hellish heat, the weather was absolute perfection. What I call "perfect California weather". Pleasantly cool, brisk breeze, warm sun and not a hint of humidity. It was too perfect not to take advantage of and the message of the aforementioned book gave me the push I needed to try something with my kids that I'm usually too reluctant to give up my precious naptime to try - to take my kids to "find" nature. It was an experiment of sorts on my part - to see how much this contact with nature would affect my kids (and myself) - or not. Would they respond/connect? After only one excursion? To what extent would they respond?
We live about a 10 minute walk from the eastern edge of Rehovot and once you reach the edge you find open fields of wild wheat and oats and orange groves and cacti (how come the plural of "cactus" isn't "cactuses"???) criss-crossed by sandy one-lane tracks. Yesterday I packed up the kids, got out the baby backpack for E to ride in (he refused, of course) and schlepped them over there on foot. Y had gotten a mosquito bite on her arm the night before. She is terribly allergic - swells up like a sausage - and she was crying and wailing the whole way, "I wanna go hoooooooommme!" So I was trying to cajole her into continuing, all the while carrying E. Fun, right? So we got to the ring road that goes around the eastern edge of Rehovot, crossed the road, and the MINUTE we set foot on the dirt road that took us down a short incline and past the orange groves on both sides of the track, Y forgot all about her bite for the next TWO hours of the two mile circuitous route we took through the fields. The instant she stepped off the sidewalk and onto the dirt track, she was crouched down calling me over excitedly to inspect some interesting insect she'd found and that's the way the entire 2 hours that followed went. She was as good as gold, didn't complain once, she was happy and talkative and kept saying, "Ima, it's SO BEAUTIFUL here. What a beautiful view! I love this place!"
We had fun trying to identify the animal tracks. I showed her how to identify bird tracks (three toes forward, one back) and horse tracks. We saw other smaller tracks which we guessed were made by some sort of beetle and then later on we actually saw a big black beetle making the tracks. We saw an old pile of horse manure and I asked her if she knew what it was. She told me what it was and why it had lots of grass in it and then launched into this whole explanation about how dung beetles lay their eggs in it and then roll it up into balls and put them somewhere safe and when the baby beetles hatch they eat it. Don't ask me where she got THAT from but it wasn't from me.
We saw plenty of ant holes. One was quite big - about the size of a dime - with large ants rushing in and out the front door, each carrying a large clump of bright red earth which they would dump in a pile on the "doormat" and then rush back in to get another one. E was fascinated by that and nearly stood on his head to get his eyeball right up near the hole and see just where those funny ants were rushing back and forth to/from! We also found a sturdy stick for E that he used like a walking stick and he was thoroughly enjoyed mosey-ing down the sandy track hitting the sand with it and going, "Bash, bash, bash!" I told him to get all the bashing out of his system then and there. LOL.
The kids found a few ladybugs and Y had fun letting them crawl on her hand so of course E wanted to also. I told Y to put the ladybug on his hand and it tickled him so he shook it off immediately. He went to pick it up out of the sand and accidentally smushed it :-( It's interesting that as terrified as Y is of insects because of her mosquito bite allergy, she has NO qualms about handling a ladybug. She knows they won't hurt her. We LOVE ladybugs. Ladybugs have sort of been my kids' mascot since T was a baby.
We found a line of ants marching across the track busily carrying grains of wheat. On either side of the track at this point there had been fields of it growing but it had recently been mown and was still lying there - I assume drying. So we went and examined a stalk of wheat and I showed Y how the grains of wheat grow inside. We also found a stalk of wild oats and compared that to the wheat.
The large purple thistle blossoms have now all dried up and exploded with seed parachutes, so we had fun pulling tufts of those out of the flower head and letting them fly away.
Y asked me a million questions about things - not all of which I could answer. It was nice to see her "exercising" her curiosity!
We passed a very few other people out for a nature walk like we were but not many.
At one point, Y stopped dead still, closed her eyes and told me to shush. Then she told me every sound she could hear - the cars in the distance, a distant tractor plowing, the wind, the birds and a cricket. Then she told me to close my eyes and tell her what I heard. By the end of the walk, she really really was awake, alive, tuned in, hyperaware. She was noticing interesting things here and there that even I wouldn't have noticed. That is what is missing for me and I think for my kids also although they probably don't realize it because they don't know any other way of living. They have never lived in a house with a yard. This part of the book Last Child in the Woods really leaped out at me:
"Ideally, a child learns to negotiate both city and country. Mastering each environment builds the senses and common sense. Is there something special about the experience in nature, at least a quality that sharpens a young person's senses? Wonderful possibilities await researchers wanting to explore that unknown frontier. Surely the width and depth of nature, the added mystery - the catalogue of sounds and smells and sights - is larger than the relatively short and known list of urban stimulations. In the city or suburb, much of our energy is spent blocking sounds and stimulants. Do we actually hear the honking of cabs - do we want to? In a forest, our ears are open - the honking of geese overhead enlivens us, and when enlivened, human senses grow and develop."
This paragraph hit me between the eyes when I read it. THAT'S IT! I feel like I spend SO much time blocking the unpleasant/unaesthetic/jarring sounds, sights, smells where we live that everything gets blocked out. When we were out in the fields, I had to strain to hear the tractor and strain to hear the distant traffic so I had to "switch on" whereas normally, those would be things I would work hard to block because there's just too much of it going on around me where we live and it just grates on me.
I have to say that this nature walk with the kids was one of the most enjoyable and memorable things I have ever done with the kids and I hope to do it again soon.
In the book, he makes a connection between "nature deficit" in children and the rise of all kinds of ADHD-type disorders. I think he might be on to something there. In my case, I grew up in a private house with a yard and my brother and I spent more time outdoors as kids than we did indoors. We also went a few times a week to one or the other of the many wonderful public park in the CA Bay Area and were also very "in to" camping as a family and did that for long stretches a couple of times a year. So we didn't have to "find" nature. It was all around us, even if a lot of the time it was cultivated nature (yards, parks, etc.) and we didn't have to go far to find it.
I remember going camping once when I was about 9 with my family. The day came when it was time to pack up and go home. I will never forget the strong desire I felt then to just burst out sobbing and of choking back the tears. Not that the vacation and fun time was over but because I had to leave all that quiet, beauty, solitude. And I remember being a little bit shocked that my reaction to the quiet, beauty and solitude was SO strong and wondering if that was normal. Also, as a kid, my secret desire was to be a forest ranger.
The nature deficit started when I moved to Israel as an adult. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not at least borderline ADD (that's 'attention deficit' without the hyperactive part). My oldest daughter most definitely is ADD.
I am so in love with this book that I feel like typing it all out here but a) that's illegal and b) I don't have time. Suffice to say that on Monday, after two days of hellish heat, the weather was absolute perfection. What I call "perfect California weather". Pleasantly cool, brisk breeze, warm sun and not a hint of humidity. It was too perfect not to take advantage of and the message of the aforementioned book gave me the push I needed to try something with my kids that I'm usually too reluctant to give up my precious naptime to try - to take my kids to "find" nature. It was an experiment of sorts on my part - to see how much this contact with nature would affect my kids (and myself) - or not. Would they respond/connect? After only one excursion? To what extent would they respond?
We live about a 10 minute walk from the eastern edge of Rehovot and once you reach the edge you find open fields of wild wheat and oats and orange groves and cacti (how come the plural of "cactus" isn't "cactuses"???) criss-crossed by sandy one-lane tracks. Yesterday I packed up the kids, got out the baby backpack for E to ride in (he refused, of course) and schlepped them over there on foot. Y had gotten a mosquito bite on her arm the night before. She is terribly allergic - swells up like a sausage - and she was crying and wailing the whole way, "I wanna go hoooooooommme!" So I was trying to cajole her into continuing, all the while carrying E. Fun, right? So we got to the ring road that goes around the eastern edge of Rehovot, crossed the road, and the MINUTE we set foot on the dirt road that took us down a short incline and past the orange groves on both sides of the track, Y forgot all about her bite for the next TWO hours of the two mile circuitous route we took through the fields. The instant she stepped off the sidewalk and onto the dirt track, she was crouched down calling me over excitedly to inspect some interesting insect she'd found and that's the way the entire 2 hours that followed went. She was as good as gold, didn't complain once, she was happy and talkative and kept saying, "Ima, it's SO BEAUTIFUL here. What a beautiful view! I love this place!"
We had fun trying to identify the animal tracks. I showed her how to identify bird tracks (three toes forward, one back) and horse tracks. We saw other smaller tracks which we guessed were made by some sort of beetle and then later on we actually saw a big black beetle making the tracks. We saw an old pile of horse manure and I asked her if she knew what it was. She told me what it was and why it had lots of grass in it and then launched into this whole explanation about how dung beetles lay their eggs in it and then roll it up into balls and put them somewhere safe and when the baby beetles hatch they eat it. Don't ask me where she got THAT from but it wasn't from me.
We saw plenty of ant holes. One was quite big - about the size of a dime - with large ants rushing in and out the front door, each carrying a large clump of bright red earth which they would dump in a pile on the "doormat" and then rush back in to get another one. E was fascinated by that and nearly stood on his head to get his eyeball right up near the hole and see just where those funny ants were rushing back and forth to/from! We also found a sturdy stick for E that he used like a walking stick and he was thoroughly enjoyed mosey-ing down the sandy track hitting the sand with it and going, "Bash, bash, bash!" I told him to get all the bashing out of his system then and there. LOL.
The kids found a few ladybugs and Y had fun letting them crawl on her hand so of course E wanted to also. I told Y to put the ladybug on his hand and it tickled him so he shook it off immediately. He went to pick it up out of the sand and accidentally smushed it :-( It's interesting that as terrified as Y is of insects because of her mosquito bite allergy, she has NO qualms about handling a ladybug. She knows they won't hurt her. We LOVE ladybugs. Ladybugs have sort of been my kids' mascot since T was a baby.
We found a line of ants marching across the track busily carrying grains of wheat. On either side of the track at this point there had been fields of it growing but it had recently been mown and was still lying there - I assume drying. So we went and examined a stalk of wheat and I showed Y how the grains of wheat grow inside. We also found a stalk of wild oats and compared that to the wheat.
The large purple thistle blossoms have now all dried up and exploded with seed parachutes, so we had fun pulling tufts of those out of the flower head and letting them fly away.
Y asked me a million questions about things - not all of which I could answer. It was nice to see her "exercising" her curiosity!
We passed a very few other people out for a nature walk like we were but not many.
At one point, Y stopped dead still, closed her eyes and told me to shush. Then she told me every sound she could hear - the cars in the distance, a distant tractor plowing, the wind, the birds and a cricket. Then she told me to close my eyes and tell her what I heard. By the end of the walk, she really really was awake, alive, tuned in, hyperaware. She was noticing interesting things here and there that even I wouldn't have noticed. That is what is missing for me and I think for my kids also although they probably don't realize it because they don't know any other way of living. They have never lived in a house with a yard. This part of the book Last Child in the Woods really leaped out at me:
"Ideally, a child learns to negotiate both city and country. Mastering each environment builds the senses and common sense. Is there something special about the experience in nature, at least a quality that sharpens a young person's senses? Wonderful possibilities await researchers wanting to explore that unknown frontier. Surely the width and depth of nature, the added mystery - the catalogue of sounds and smells and sights - is larger than the relatively short and known list of urban stimulations. In the city or suburb, much of our energy is spent blocking sounds and stimulants. Do we actually hear the honking of cabs - do we want to? In a forest, our ears are open - the honking of geese overhead enlivens us, and when enlivened, human senses grow and develop."
This paragraph hit me between the eyes when I read it. THAT'S IT! I feel like I spend SO much time blocking the unpleasant/unaesthetic/jarring sounds, sights, smells where we live that everything gets blocked out. When we were out in the fields, I had to strain to hear the tractor and strain to hear the distant traffic so I had to "switch on" whereas normally, those would be things I would work hard to block because there's just too much of it going on around me where we live and it just grates on me.
I have to say that this nature walk with the kids was one of the most enjoyable and memorable things I have ever done with the kids and I hope to do it again soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)