Monday, February 18, 2008

Batsheva, the famous writer!

http://tinyurl.com/2o6o7s

I'm so proud of her!

A few weeks ago, when I was emailing lots of Jewish newspapers about Purim soaps, the Jewish Woman website at Chabad came up as their "newspaper". The editor was excited to get a Purim soap sample and asked about us writing a piece for the site. Then she suggested that it would be very interesting if *Batsheva* wrote it from her perspective. Amazing! She didn't even know that we have a budding journalist at home!

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Kids Say the Durndest Things

Ilana (20 months old) was in bed w. me yesterday. She put her hand on my face and lovingly asked, "I pick you' nose, mama?". I cracked up as I told her, "thanks, but no thanks".

Tonight, PB and I were reading "Grover Sleeps Over" and I told her about how that book had inspired Batsheva to throw a big fit when she was about 3 y/o. In the book, Grover has "spaghetti and meatballs and salad and milk" for dinner. So she, of course, wanted me to put milk on top of her salad. (With succeeding kids, we read that line as "salad with salad dressing and milk in a glass" :)

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Back from FL

The first thing one notices after a week in Florida: how grossly dirty all the cars are here in Boston!

Anyway, the weather was nice and I thoroughly enjoyed taking long walks at night. --Batsheva introduced me to playing Dungeons & Dragons (I'm such a nerd, I don't know how I missed that in High School [actually, I do: back then, at least in "my crowd", only the guys played D&D]).
--Chana, my father and I spent over an hour doing a 100 piece puzzle on Shabbat (ages 5 and up. Isn't that embarrassing?!])
--PB loved playing shuffle board and Ilana grooved out in her new bright orange carriage (navy was $20 more, so bright orange it is!)

Getting home was difficult. We left my parents' house at 9:30 a.m. for an 11:20 flight, did pre-boarding, then sat on the plane for a looong time while a "small switch" tried to get fixed ("well, folks, we're just expecting this to take about 15 minutes"). So we "15 minutes'ed" our way until they pulled back to the gate and told us to deplane but hang around, as they were sure it would be fixed soon.

Much later, they canceled the flight and offered us the next one out: at 9 PM! NOOOOOO! I explained that the whole reason I had earned my kids' wrath by choosing an 11 a.m. flight in the first place and having them miss a whole day of vacation was b/c I was still traumatized by taking a 7 pm flight a few years ago. The flight had been very delayed, and we got in after midnight. I had three sleeping kids I had to get off the plane myself and take into the freezing Boston weather. Very unpleasant. And did I mention the huge tantrum PB threw as we were about to board? Like lying on the floor, kicking and screaming. Baaaad time for me.

So they offered the flight after that (i.e. the 11:20 the next day) and my poor father was so stressed from having us visit that, when I called him to say what was going on, he said, "tell them you need a hotel room"! I was laughing so hard (he called back about five minutes later and said he'd come pick us up).

We're back. It was lovely to be away. It's lovely to be home.

Yay, Uberima, Yay!

It's another boy for Uberima and Uberaba! That makes three. I heartily approve of many children of the same gender :)

You should have much nachas from him....