Wow, it went from about 80 degrees to 46 degrees in 1 day!! Eric and I went into Jerusalem today and we froze our tushies off. We went to breakfast and then to pick up a gift we had ordered and then we left! I kind of thought we would make it to the shuk like Eric wanted or at least to the Kotel but neither of us really wanted to stick around.
I fell asleep in the car, I am zonked, and we came home and brought the cleaning man to the bus and then ran to Home Center to pick up some things we needed and then went to pick up Ben from school.
This afternoon I had to run to the doctor. The way the kids’ shots work here is that they get their shots at school! So they had sent something home to me telling me that they were going to give Talia her shots and that I had to sign off on it. I remembered the doctor telling me that she wouldn’t need any shots here when we first got here and I first took her to the doctor so I wanted to make sure that I was correct. So he looked at the info that I gave him and agreed that she wasn’t going to need any.
The next stop was to Talia’s school to sign Ben up for kindergarten next year!! What a big boy!! I signed him up and what a difference 6 months makes! This time I knew what she was talking about and we could have an actual conversation and I wasn’t all nervous that I would miss something in translation. I didn’t need Eric to come with me. It was great. The woman that I sign him up with kind of takes care of all the office stuff in Talia’s school. She is wonderful and she was very helpful when we first moved here and Talia was having a hard time and hated school. So now that Talia is doing great in school she felt she could tell me a story about how one day she felt so bad for Talia that she wanted to go home and cry!!!!! I felt the same way in those days but I can’t believe she felt that way too. I am SOOO glad that that part is over and done with and the kids are happy and Talia has figured things out.
After I finished there I dropped Talia off at home and Ben and I went to the makolet to pick up some things for dinner.
Then we came home and had dinner and we played a little and the kids are now all tucked in and Eric is at his rent-a-cop class or Mishmar Ezrachi class, as he likes to call it and then he is leaving to America tonight
I am in bed already at 8:30 and I am really hoping to get a good night of sleep in. Last night Keren decided to sleep through the night for the first time since I can remember but UNFORTUNATELY, Ben peed in his bed and woke me up and I had to change him, his linens and calm him down since he was so upset about it. Then his foot was hurting him and he asked me to get him the hot water bottle. By the time I got back into bed I was wide awake and couldn’t fall asleep for a while. So I am going to read a little and then hope that I fall asleep quickly and don’t get woken up too many times tonight.
Today was election day!! The kids had no school and we took them to an indoor play place with my cousin. It was nice but it was a long day.
They followed us in their car on the way there, which is funny since they are the ones that have lived here all their lives, and Talia was very concerned that we were going to lose them, or rather that they were going to lose us. I explained that if they did lose us that they could just call us and we could stop. Then I told her that when we were growing up there was no such thing as a cell phone. So she asked me if there was such a thing as a phone when we were growing up!! So I tossed her out of the car and made her walk the rest of the way.
Let me just explain how one votes in this country before I end this rather short blog. Wait until you read this: You go into a room and they give you an envelope. Then you go behind a cardboard box cutout with a desk behind it. On the desk are little pieces of paper, each representing a party. You take one of the pieces of paper (not two, if you take two your vote is disqualified) and you put it into your envelope and seal it. Then you come out from behind the box and walk up to a panel of 3 people sitting at a desk and you drop it into a big box that has a big lock on it! You would think that with today’s technology Israel would come up with something a little more advanced than that!!!!! Anyway, I thought it was hysterical! Talia came with me and put the envelope in the box for me.
Well, that’s it, ulpan is officially over! I am finished. I have learned all the Hebrew that I am going to be learning from a classroom and the rest is up to me to do on my own. Good luck to me. We learned for the first half and then we had a party. It was nice. I have no idea what I am going to be doing with my mornings now. I am more than a little worried about it too!! We’ll see if anything develops in that area.
The weather here today was crazy. It must have been in the 80s but it was cloudy the whole day with this warm breeze. After we picked Ben up from school we went to the playground on the way home for half an hour and then we went home, ate lunch and played in the backyard for a long time.
Ben brought home a flower to plant in honor of Tu B’Shvat and we planted it and it was so nice that we decided to stay outside. Of course Keren wasn’t content to play inside when she saw us out there so Eric brought her out and Ben and I played catch and basketball until Talia came home. Then we all kind of hung out outside playing. Keren was eating every rock in sight, she apparently loves their texture. There was one unfortunate incident where instead of a rock she ate bird doody. I am hoping she doesn’t get sick. I was able to scoop it out but I am not sure how much she swallowed, if any. I know, GROSS!!
A little before 4 Talia and I took Ben to his karate class, the two of them on their bikes and me by foot. Ben is really getting a hang of it now. He can ride up a hill really well, which is important here in the Chash where there are tons of hills. Talia wound up hanging out at school instead of coming home with me. I ran home and made dinner and then ran back to get them. I came for the last couple minutes of karate and I am definitely going to go back and video tape it a little so I can put it up on the blog. He was so adorable. Apparently I had just missed him landing head first into the bulls-eye that they were supposed to be kicking. I was told it was so funny and he did it twice. Next time…
So tomorrow is election day!! We are going to be voting!! So exciting. First time voting in Israel. Actually, it is my first time voting at all. The kids have off tomorrow and we are getting together with Avivt and Avi and if the weather holds out we’ll go to the monkey park that is close by. I am sure it will rain and we’ll get stuck inside. It hasn’t rained in weeks and weeks, perhaps a month, but I am sure that tomorrow it will since I really want it to be nice tomorrow.
This is the cutest video of Talia singing an oldie but a goodie: “Od Lo Ahavti Dai”
I think that I blogged on Friday, for a change, so I only have Shabbat to catch up on.
Friday night it was just the 5 of us. It was nice and quiet. We ate pretty quickly and we had the kids in bed by 7:30 and we were asleep by 9:15!!
Eric had read before Shabbat on one of the Modiin lists that the first Saturday in February was national eat ice cream for breakfast day. So he gave the kids ice cream for breakfast. They were very excited! He gave them ice cream with sprinkles and whipped cream, the works!
After I got everyone out to shul I attempted to put Keren in to take a nap but she only woke up at 8, after going back to sleep in the morning and she refused to go back to sleep again. So we got dressed and went to shul and surprised everyone. They gave each kid a package of dried fruit for Tu B’Shvat, which is this Monday. After shul we went straight to our hosts’ house. We had a great time. They are people I can see being friendly with. It was one of those meals where the kids were all different ages but they all played really well together in a group.
After the meal we benched and we hung out there for a while. The other couple that was there had a girl in 2nd grade that Talia has played with before and after lunch they went back to the girl’s house together. We didn’t ‘leave until close to 5. We walked home with the other couple and then he left to go to his chavruta and she came over with her little girl. Ben and Odelia are in school together. Let me paint the picture for you, she is half his size, about 8 months younger than him and she has white hair, blue eyes and little round glasses. She is the cutest thing. They used to play together a lot at the beginning of gan. In fact, I think her house is the first play date that he ever went to. Anyway, they came here and I gave them dinner.
Talia came home crying a little while later. She fell off the little blue car while zooming down the hills of Chash and she ripped her tights, scraped up her shoes and cut her knee up. Of course from the way that she carried on the rest of the night it was as though someone were cutting off her leg! She was ridiculous. Cleaning it with peroxide was loads of fun!!
Anyway, the kids were in bed by 6:40!! We had another early night last night as well. I caught up on American Idols that I’ve been missing lately and then was asleep by 10.
I forgot to write that one night last week when I woke Ben up to pee he started talking to me in his sleep. He started speaking to me in HEBREW! It was so funny. I asked him what he was talking about and then he didn’t answer me. Yesterday at the Shabbat table one of the people there said that she was in their gan and she heard him speaking Hebrew really really well. I can’t get over it!!
Keren has started clapping her hands. She started on Shabbat. It’s so cute.
Talia came home on Friday with 2 or 3 sentences that she had to memorize for her Siddur play that she is going to be having at the kotel this month. She had them memorized by last night. I thought it was going to take a lot longer since it’s all in Hebrew.
This morning we got an early start and after I took the kids to school Eric, Keren and I went out for breakfast. The place we went to was really cute. They bake everything on the premises and the kitchen was bigger than the seating area! I thought of Eric’s mom, she would probably love a place like that and I plan to take her there when she comes next week.
After we came home Eric and I did some cleaning up, folded some laundry and Eric decided it would be a good time to clean the windows!! He is so funny. It’s his thing. Kerenwas assisting by crawling around outside and eating the rocks. She LOVES to be outside (she IS my mother-in-law!). Here are some pictures of the two of them:
Oh, the title of this blog is “Eric, the jogger!” the reason for this is that Eric told me today that he wants to jog. Let me give some history on Eric jogging. In the 10 years that we’ve been married Eric has gone jogging maybe twice. One of those times was with his friend Jeremy when we lived in Riverdale. Let’s jut say I think they jogged a block and then walked the rest of the way. It wasn’t very successful (to say the least). I don’t remember what happened the second time. So I told him that he should go jogging this morning. He told me he couldn’t b/c the coffee he just drank during our breakfast would “slosh around too much.” I suggested that maybe we start walking together once the kids are off to school in the mornings since I won’t have ulpan after tomorrow. So we are going to try that instead. I think it’s more likely to happen than this jogging idea of his. (he is going to kill me for this post)
We kind of ran out of things to do at home and we decided that it was a nice day outside so we went for that walk! We walked around the yishuv around one and a half times. When Keren started getting cranky we took her to the playground and she sat on the swing with me for a while. Unfortunately we didn’t bring a camera. She LOVES to sit on my lap on the swings and cracks up for the first couple of minutes usually.
We picked the kids up from school and picked my friend Jere up and we all went to the mall for lunch. The kids ate Chinese food, I got a schwarma in laffa bread and Eric got chicken in lafa and I think Jere got falafel. The funny thing is that we all ordered our food from different places. Then we got the kids slushies for dessert. It is 7:30 and I am still full right now from that laffa!
Talia had English at 3:15 so we dropped her off at English and hung out at home until 4. I put Keren to sleep and played with Ben and then I took the kids to Talia’s school to ride their bikes and play in the playground. Here is video of Ben on his bike without training wheels:
We came home and the kids were exhausted!! We still wanted to go look at a house. We have officially started house hunting. We think the guy whose house we are renting now is going to ask a lot for it and we can’t afford to buy it and we don’t think our house is worth the price that we think he’s going to be asking. There are other houses out there for the same price with basements and our house doesn’t have one. Anyway, I told the kids that we could bike there and then they could hang out at the bball courts near the house while we looked at it quickly. In the end, Talia wound up taking a bad spill on her bike and hurting her thumb and Ben was in a horrible mood after a long day and we wound up walking home and taking the car.
So the house was very nice. It is probably around the same size as our house but it also has a basement. The kitchen was really pretty and HUGE. It is also decorated very nicely and they have a lot of buit-in closets that she said will be staying in the house. The master bedroom has an actual closet, almost unheard of in this country! She is also leaving her double American ovens and range. WOW! For now the price is a little above what we can pay…
Anyway, we came home and fed the kids and put them to sleep. Eric just found out that he has his rent-a-cop class tonight – he is going to kill me for calling it that but it is essentially what it is!!! So he is leaving in half an hour and then I’ll put in the bath and then to sleep.
As if it’s not enough that Keren is the spitting image of Eric’s mother and is the first of the kids to really not look at all like me, now she has started acting like her too!! Eric took her for a walk yesterday and when he looked down she had her head turned up to the sun and her eyes closed and she fell asleep like that! Most kids turn away from the sun when it’s in their eyes, this kid turns to the sun and basks in it!!
So today the kids walked to school themselves. Eric got up with them and was the one to send them off. I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed this morning.
This morning was spent doing a couple of loads of laundry. Talia was on my case that she didn’t have any clothes left so I had to take care of that! Keren and I did the laundry and hung out while Eric went and took care of some errands, including the bakery (it’s been a while), buying flowers for the people we are eating at tomorrow and taking care of installing a new car alarm. All I had left in terms of Shabbat cooking was the rice and defrosting the chicken that I had made a couple of weeks ago. So I did that too. It is going to be a really simple meal here tonight but I don’t think anyone will mind since Keren woke the whole house up at 6 this morning.
He came home and then Talia came home shortly thereafter. She hung out for a bit, washed the kitchen floor for me and had some bourekas for lunch. Then Ben came home and Keren went in for a nap, Eric went to buy strawberries for Ben’s Tu B’Shvat mesiba on Sunday and I took the kids to the park next door so they could ride their bikes on the little path that’s there. When Keren woke up we all just hung out in the park on the grass and enoyed the weather. I think it’s supposed to get cooler tomorrow and then who knows. So we hung out for a bit and enjoyed.
Meanwhile, as I write this, the kids are downstairs playing and Eric is resting and Keren just made her way into his office and started to fax someone and a million blank pages started shooting out of the machine. Eric came in and yelled at me and threw her out of his office. She is such a trouble maker. She is hysterical.
So today was an exciting day, Ben learned how to ride a two-wheeler bike!! I saw that he was riding his bike with his training wheels and that he really wasn’t using them much. I told him a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to take him riding on Talia’s bike (rather than taking his training wheels off and then having to perhaps put them back on again) but he was too chicken to come with me. Finally today he agreed. So while Talia was at a birthday party and Eric was working, I took him with Talia’s bike to the basketball court that we have on the yishuv and basically gave him a little push and he was off!! He can’t start or stop by himself but he can ride really really well. He is confident on the bike (with his knee and elbow pads) and he turns really nicely – something that was a bit hard to teach Talia.
Keren is also almost at a milestone. She was standing for a few seconds today. Eric gave her something to hold and she let go of him for at least 3 seconds today. Go Keren!!
For some reason all the bug zappers in our house have been breaking. We had one that we borrowed and then we had one that we bought. The bought one stopped working suddenly so we took out the borrowed one and now that one isn’t working (yikes, we need to give it back!!) Before I put the kids in tonight we ran to the local hardware store and bought a new one. I didn’t want to get stuck without one tonight since Eric said that he killed a huge mosquito today up in my room. It felt like summer out today, I even let Ben wear short sleeves, and I guess the mosquitoes are living it up that there is no winter here this year so far.
We got a late invite out to lunch today from people here that I think we would be friends with in the future. So I am looking forward to Shabbat lunch. It also means another week of little cooking. Yay.
I think that yesterday was uneventful so I decided to skip the blog and write today instead. One thing that did happen was the shomer in Ben’s school came up to me after school and said how cute Ben is. He said that he hangs out with him all the time during playtime in the yard. I think Ben has a lot of questions that he likes to ask him. He has a huge rifle so I am sure that has something to do with Ben’s obsession with him. He talks about him all the time.
Today Eric and I went to Yerushalayim for the morning. It was really nice. We took Keren, of course, who behaved like a little angel. She slept in the car on the way there and then sat so nicely in her stroller the whole time we were walking around. She even fell asleep on the way back to the car and then transferred to her car seat. The only time she got upset was when we were 5 minutes from home. What a pleasure. It was really nice walking around with Eric and Keren and not having Talia and Ben. No one was kvetching that they were bored or they didn’t want to walk anymore. I think we are going to go every Wednesday from now on. We parked in the lot of a new outdoor mall that they have there. It was a beautiful mall with a lot of fancy and overpriced stores. We walked to the Old City and went to Hodaya, the jewelry store that Eric bought me a necklace from that has the kids’ names engraved in it and a pasuk with my name on it. We had him add Keren’s name to it. Then we walked to Ben Yehudah Street and got some coffee and a pastry. Then we went to this place that does paper cut outs and ordered a sign for my cousin Avi and Miriam’s door to their home. They just moved into a new apartment so I thought it would be a nice gift. We did a little more walking around and then we came home.
Robin’s daughter had an interview at some school in Yerushalayim so she asked me to take Eitan home with Ben. Eric went to get them and when they came home Eitan said his ear hurt him. He was really sad and just wanted to go home. I called Robin and she said she would make an appointment with the doctor and that I should just give him some medicine in the mean time. Until the medicine kicked in he was pretty miserable. I felt so bad for him. They wound up just watching Finding Nemo for a while and then we made some popcorn when Eitan got sad again and hung out. Talia came home with a friend whose mom had to go to the doctor with one of her kids and since the doctor is across the street, she figured it would be easier to pick her up from here afterwards, rather than her daughter walk home and have to wait there in case she was a few minutes late. So there were a bunch of kids in my house and it was a pretty crazy afternoon!
Talia had a ton of homework last night and we didn’t finish it and then her teacher just gave her more homework tonight. She basically did homework from the time her friend left, through dinner and then after her shower and we didn’t finish until close to 8. It was practically 2.5 hours of homework! It was crazy. Her reading is really coming along and I get the feeling that she is understanding most of what she reads. So it is paying off. Tomorrow she has a crazy day with swim right after school and then instead of Rinat coming to help with Hebrew, she has a birthday party. So she’ll have very little time to do homework tomorrow but she usually only has about 5 minutes of math on Thursdays and it’s easy for her.
So that’s what’s going on here. The weather has been stunning. I think Eric said that tomorrow is going to be as warm or warmer than today and then on Friday the temp. is finallygoing to fall a bit again. So it might be a chilly Shabbat. We’ll see. In the meantime, it’s been like spring here. Have yet to put on a winter coat which is good since I am not sure where mine is!
Typical day here today. School, playdates, chugim, etc.
Keren keeps trying to climb up the steps here. It is a big problem. We are looking into a baby gate, but it won’t completely solve the problem b/c we only have a wall on one side and on the other side the wall starts on the second step. So even if we do put up a baby gate, she can still fall down one step and with the concrete floors here, it is pretty dangerous. Tonight I made sure that she was with me in the kitchen and before I knew it she had climbed up the step stool! So she is a little monkey and I have to watch her at all times.
So Talia has been making fun of me and tonight she was full out laughing at me when I was trying to speak Hebrew! She was hysterical! She mostly makes fun of my R’s but I am sure there is soon going to be more where that came from.
Ben, on the other hand, for weeks has been saying that the Hebrew word for gun was רובה and I have been thinking that he was saying רופא . I kept trying to tell him that what he was saying meant doctor, not gun!! He kept insisting he was right and that’s what his friend said and what his morot said it was. Then, today in ulpan, I learned that the Hebrew word for rifle is רובה and he was right all along!!
So our friend in White Plains are gathering for their annual superbowl party tonight and they even included us on their invite but we can’t go (obviously) and I am sad that I will be missing the festivities. Oh well!! A small price to pay for living here, I guess.
Anyway, Shabbat was uneventful. We went out for lunch to neighbors across the street. It was very nice.
The major event of the weekend is that the boiler in the house in America wasn’t working and by the time our tenant called us and we got it worked out, it cause the air handler to freeze and now we have to take care of paying for either a new air handler or just fixing this one and it’s not going to be cheap. Poor Eric was so worried about it last night that he couldn’t sleep and wound up falling asleep on the couch this afternoon for a while!!
The kids are great. Talia had a birthday party today after her English chug and she had a blast. Ben and I went to the toy store to replace his broken night light and he saw all the costumes that they have there for Purim and he is now determined to be a chayal because he wants to buy a really big gun! He tried to talk me into buying him the gun today but I said no! he was between that being a witch b/c he saw a walking stick and he LOVES walking sticks (or canes as the rest of us call them). Keren is waving goodbye all over the place. We taught her how to and now she won’t stop. She is hysterical.
Tonight we went out to Petach Tikvah to see my cousin Avi’s new apartment that they just finished building. It is beautiful. Nice and big. I am happy for them. It was nice to get out but now it is late and I have ulpan tomorrow! At least my test is over and done with.
It has finally gotten cold here. That didn’t stop the mosquitoes, unfortunately, last night from chasing us out of our room again! I have the bug zapper right above my head and I can’t figure out why they won’t fly into it! Of course it didn’t help that on Shabbat Talia was running away from Ben and ran into our room and knocked over Eric’s home-made mosquito trap and it spilled all over his bed. So the result is all that smelly stuff in the trap that was supposed to attract the mosquitoes and then they would get stuck in there, it’s now all over is bed. So they are going to LOVE Eric!! I tried my best today to get the smell out with a combination of Resolve and baking soda and the vacuum. I think it worked.
This morning was verrrry relaxing. Keren and I went to the supermarket and, although it was a zoo there, we only needed 5 things and we were in and out in under 15 minutes. Then we went to Ace Hardware and bought a pretty dish to put the cookies in that I’ll be bringing to my neighbors’ house for Shabbat.
When we came home I fed Keren her breakfast and dumped her into bed where she slept for 2 hours!! I had to wake her up so we could go to the airport to pick Eric up.
Everyone is home now and I would really like to take Ben bike riding b/c he is ready to ride on a two-wheeler, but he is afraid and won’t try. I can see from the way that he is riding that he is practically riding on two wheels anyway. I will have to talk him into it. For now the kids are playing nicely. I am pretty much ready for Shabbat. Just a few small things to do.
Eric brought me whipped cream, 3 of them from Costco!!! He also brought me more hot chocolate. He came home with a HUGE roll of aluminum foil, the big one from Costco. I don’t know what he was thinking. I have nowhere in my kitchen to put it. As it is I have no room for my things in there. So I am making him bring it back and get me some normal sized aluminum foil. He also brought me a beautiful jacket/poncho thing that my parents sent for me. It is beautiful and solves my problem of what to wear on Shabbat if it is a chilly here. Yay.
Oh, here comes Keren, ready to type on my keyboard. I better end it here if I don’t want her deleting this entire post.
