Bicycle holiday

Six-year-old Peach has had her heart set on a bicycle for weeks now.  Beans (8 years old) has had one for a couple of years, and learned to ride a tw0-wheel bike last summer.  Even 4-year-old Banana recently acquired a bike.  But so far no one has had Peach’s size in stock.  So the Cap’n [...]

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Split pea soup

My favorite soup has always been split pea.  As a kid I could eat a large can of Campbell’s chunky, with the bits of ham, potato, and carrot.  It’s remained my favorite even in adulthood, though in recent years buying the stuff in cans has been, well, no longer an option. But keeping kosher changed [...]

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Fasting tip

With Yom Kippur around the corner, it’s time to think about the best way to fast so that we can make it through the day without collapsing during Neilah. The Cap’n and I have read tips for the long fasts (Yom Kippur, Tisha B’Av) from a number of people over the years.  Most of them [...]

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More eye candy

My friend Heather is one of the great corrupting influences in my life.  She introduced me to Cake Wrecks, and now every few days I click over and catch up on the madness of professionally decorated cakes gone horribly, hilariously wrong.  No matter how wiped out, down, or stressed I am, Jen can usually get [...]

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Don’t get this holiday

Why is Rosh Hashana, on which we pig out on sweet foods, the most solemn day (two days, actually) of the year, while Yom Kippur, on which we fast, is supposed to be the most joyous? I get Pesach, and I get Shavuot.  I’m working on Purim.  But I don’t get Rosh Hashana at all.

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Diplomatic lipstick

The Cap’n and I happened across some old friends (from our Beit Shemesh days) the other evening.  We spent a few minutes chatting, catching up, filling each other in on our families and their doings. Then the husband asked, with a gloating sort of edge to his voice, “So, what do the people in your [...]

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Luck in the midst of sadness

These last few weeks have been packed and difficult.  Returning from the U.S., unpacking, finding things missing, the start of cold season, school starting, parent meetings, signing the kids up for activities, helping friends settle in Efrat, the high holidays coming and, in the last week or two, several upsetting illnesses and deaths. The latest [...]

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Coping with sadness

Back in July, RivkA of Coffee and Chemo had one of the most insightful posts I’ve ever read.  She said she used to think that there were people with complicated, difficult lives, and people with easy, smooth-going lives.  Nowadays, she still believes that there are two types of people, but the two types are “1. [...]

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Cleaning lessons

Hashem has blessed the Cap’n and me with four adorable, delightful children.  But as most parents know, kids don’t come with a “cleaning chip” installed in their brains. So one of the great challenges of my life in recent years has been to find the right combination of teaching, reminding, reprimanding, and doling out of [...]

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A new, cool, creative blog!

At lunch today, my neighbor Andy told me about a blog he came across recently, called Creative Jewish Mom. I just checked it out. It’s gorgeous! Beans is always interesting in making crafts, and this woman, with talent in design, photography, gardening, and pretty much everything else that truly matters, is a great source of [...]

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Ordeal By Hunger

One of the books I read last summer was Ordeal By Hunger, an historical account of the journey of 87 pioneer men, women, and children who set out from the plains of Kansas for California in 1846. This book is required reading in some high school social studies departments.  It is a thoroughly researched account [...]

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To vaccinate or not to vaccinate

Years ago, when I was pregnant with Beans, my first, the Cap’n and I were up late watching television.  There was an episode of “E.R.” on where one of the plot lines involved a kid brought to the hospital after collapsing on a school trip.  It turns out the kid had measles, and ended up [...]

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All-girls education

I promised in a comment exchange on yesterday’s post to write about single-sex education, and here it is. Until 11th grade, I attended mostly public, co-ed schools.  I liked school, was a good student, and both because of my success in school and because I was one of the older students in the class, I [...]

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Tzniut adventure, Grade 1

I found myself in an interesting situation today with Peach’s school.  At about 8:00 this morning, I got a call from the principal of the school telling me that Peach had turned up at school in pants.  I knew she had put on pants because I had helped her get them out personally, since the [...]

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Adoring Obama

One of my goals when I was in America was to talk to people about their impressions of President Barack Obama after 7 months of office. I must admit, I’m more than a little concerned. Our dyed-in-the-wool Republican friends say that Obama is deceptive—promising to do one thing, then doing something else entirely—and that anyone [...]

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English rant #17: Near misses and general screwups

I’ve been keeping a log in recent months of English language errors that get up my nose.  If I see a glaring mistake once, I write it off as a mistake.  But if I see it more than once, I begin to worry that it’s a trend.  Here are some examples of things that I [...]

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We’re back

The Crunch family is finally back from our August 2009 American odyssey, and in the throes of jetlag.  After many adventures and WAAAAYYYY too much together time as a family, the Crunch girls are delighted to be back at school.  (There are no words to describe how delighted their mother is; it’s times like these [...]

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