Jiggity-jig

We're back, and Barak is at playgroup and Iyyar sounds like he is just waking up from his nap. The house is beyond catastrophic--it was more or less tidy when we left, really it was, so how is that possible?!--and I have SO MUCH TO DO between now and Monday I have no idea even where to begin. Shabbos is coming, in its regularly scheduled way, and there are speeches to be written and mountains of laundry to fold and the taxes to file (they are done, don't worry) and a very major other project about which I am not at liberty to blog that absolutely, positively must get done tonight.

But, you know, first a little blogging...

Pesach was B"H fabulous. Barak really wants to be the youngest of a huge family. The friends we stayed with have, KA"H, seven, and Barak immediately became buddies with their youngest, who just turned four. Everyone else was always wanting to hold the baby--at one time I counted eight hands stretched toward me, or rather, him. The oldest daughter in the household (aged 12) took it upon herself to teach Iyyar to stand on his own, which he is now doing, with great glee. He spent the week, when not being held by others or woken up by all the noise, eating. Eating everything. As I said more than once, "You're not a baby. You're a bottomless pit!" He ate knaidlach. He ate chicken soup. He ate Pesach cholent and vegetable soup and potato kugel and yogurt and shmura matzo and even a couple of jars of baby food, because he was just that hungry. He nursed and ate and ate and nursed and ate some more. But not in the high chair. No, no, because we don't do high chairs, because why would anyone sit in a high chair when there are so many willing laps? Strangely, he doesn't look any bigger, although maybe he's taller and I'm just not seeing it.

And when you have a mother of seven and aunt of twenty-two (three sisters, 29 kids!) confirm for your that your children, when it comes to sleep, are Not Normal, you can feel better that it really isn't you. Erev Pesach, I told Barak that if he took a nap in the afternoon with everyone else, he wouldn't have to go to bed. At all. I knew that the seder tended to go till 3 am, so I figured he would have to crash by then, right?

Wrong. So, so wrong. He did nap, and woke up joyously crowing, "I not gonna go night night! All done night night!" while dancing the happy no night-night dance. And as the seder went on (after Ma Nishtana, during which he spilled the entire contents of a full glass of grape juice on my brand new skirt), all the other children started to flag, and resettled themselves on the couch, their mother's lap, etc. Not Barak. Barak--I kid you not--started dancing jigs and singing (loudly) in the middle of the living room floor. At 1 am. At 1:30, I thought, this is insane, and sent him for a potty trip, thinking a little quiet time with a book might be a good lead-in to winding down. Wrong again. Instead, at 1:50 am, as the afikoman was being sought, Barak came barrelling back into the dining room, totally naked except for the red feetie pajamas around his ankles, shrieking, "I pished!" while pumping fists of victory. "I pished! I pished and I POOPED!"

More as I remember and have time, but that was a highlight. We now return to our regularly scheduled speechwriting.