More reasons why my husband is a saint and there will never be an Artscroll biography written about me

The scene: the back bedroom, half an hour ago. I was sitting on the floor organizing my sock yarn stash, Barak was sitting in the big chair listening to the Uncle Moishy playing on iTunes, MHH was learning and Iyyar was asleep. It was bedtime for Barak.

Me: Barak, it's time to go to bed. Or do you want to go potty first?

Barak: Gonna go poop potty.

Me: Are you going to go by yourself?

Barak: No. Needa help you please.

Silence.

Me, to MHH: Are you reading something you can take into the bathroom?

MHH, who obviously has a sefer in his lap: No.

Barak: Abba can't takea sefer inna brafroom?

Me: No, sweetie, you can't take Torah books in the bathroom.

Barak: Why?

Me: Hashem doesn't like it. He says no no, you can't do that.

Barak. Oh. Can takea Torah in Barak Iyyar's room! Can do that! That's okay!

Me: Right, that's okay. As long as there's no poop in the garbage can, that's fine.

Pause.

Me (to MHH): How terrible is it that I want you to stop learning and take Barak to the bathroom so I can finish organizing my sock yarn?

(MHH, without comment, closes his sefer, gets up, and trudges out the door.)

MHH: Come on Barak, let's go poop potty and get some ice cream!

Roundup

So, the trip.

The trip was okay. All in all, it could have been a whole lot worse: none of the things I was really worried would happen did happen, and the thing I was worried wouldn't happen, did. Like I said, I'm glad we went, and it was good to see my granny, but traveling with an extremely perky and mobile 13-mo has its drawbacks.

Truthfully, Iyyar did great, all things considered. He did. But the 10-hour flight there with him in my lap trying to scale me like a mountain so he could smile at and flirt with every single passenger in the rows behind us... well. And the daily 50-minute bus rides to and from my grandmothers with him raging and shrieking in frustation weren't really a high point either. While we were at myy granny's, he did fine in the sense that he didn't cry much and actually even napped a couple of times, and had the charm turned on full-blast (and let me tell you, 200-proof Iyyar charm is a thing with which to be reckoned) but as you might imagine a 100-year-old rural Hungarian nursing home is one of the less baby-friendly environments you could come up with. So I felt bad, because at the end of it I felt as though I'd barely talked to my grandmother at all. I mean, I talked to her, but every two sentences I had to interrupt myself or her to pull Iyyar off a drawer, cabinet, tablecloth, cane, walker, or other verboten item. And every time the door was left open, there was the immediate splat-splat-splat sound of little hands and knees making a beeline for the corridor where all those little old ladies were waiting to pinch his cheek and smile at him and tell him how cute he was. The last day we were there, I said I was sorry that we'd barely gotten to talk, but she was glad I'd brought the baby, wasn't she? And she said yes, of course, and we agreed we could always chat on the phone. So.

Among the things for which I must be grateful is that Iyyar did phenomenally well with the time change. The flight over was rough, but he did sleep a few hours, and then stayed awake most of the next day (I think he did pass out in the stroller a couple of times). I put him to bed at around 7 the first night we were there, and other than an hour of screaming at 9 or so he slept straight through till 10 am. I suspected this earlier but I really think that Iyyar wakes up when it gets light much more than he wakes up in response to any internal clock. The hotel room had those typical thick Hungarian blackout shades, and he slept way later than he ever sleeps here. At home he is usually bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5 am, though if I am lucky he will go back in his crib for a little bit after he nurses. Anyone else think I need to get thicker curtains for the boys' room?

I did end up taking the car seat, which I was glad for, because the friend who was supposed to meet me at the airport in Vienna got sunstroke from biking to Slovakia the previous day (this is the kind of thing that happens to her. All the time.) So her sister ran in from work to get me with her van, and it would have been awkward indeed if I hadn't had a carseat. It also came in handy on the way back, which was pretty much the ideal flight with baby. Iyyar got a seat to himself, we were in the bulkhead row, and I don't really remember what he did the whole 10 hours but there was very little crying involved. And we both had food for the flight, which also helped a lot. The whole week in Hungary was spent on a diet of plain yogurt, bread and butter, Twix bars (which, bizarrely, come with an Israeli hechsher in Hungary), and bananas. I got into Vienna at about 3 on Friday afternoon, and assumed that Kosherland (the bigger of the two kosher groceries in the second district) was closed. But I assumed incorrectly. As we were walking down the street (oh, I think that was right after Iyyar choked on a bread crust and vomited yogurt and breastmilk all over every part of himself, his clothes, and the stroller, and I realized I didn't have so much as a tissue in my so-called diaper bag) I spotted a guy with a kippa who, when I went up to him and asked, thought it was still open. And indeed, as we walked up to the corner the store is on the lights were still on. But as I walked up to the door they went off. I pounded on the door and pleaded and the door was opened by the proprieter, who told me sternly, "Funf minuten!" So I raced around in my allotted five minutes and bought pita, hummous, chatzilim salad, smoked turkey, cheese for Iyyar, rice cakes, and, um, gummy wheels. It was the seuda of kings.

Sorry if this is all a little incoherent. The trip was just, well, so incredibly exhausting. You don't really appreciate a baby-proof environment until you are without one and on your own with your kid for a week; every second he wasn't asleep I had to be either holding him or looking right at him, ready to pounce on whatever contraband was on its way into his mouth. Added to the heat and the jet lag and the hunger pangs it got to be a bit wearing. But he was a trouper and really it was all worthwhile seeing my granny read him books about Piglet in Hungarian, and seeing MHH and Barak waiting for us at the gate, and seeing Barak and Iyyar's reaction on seeing each other. To wit, giggles. Lots and lots of giggles. You're back! And I'm back! Woohoo!

Kibud em

Home

Unscathed, but exhausted. I was glad to see my granny, and I'm glad we went, but I don't think I'll be doing that again any time soon. It is an awful lot easier to travel with babies before they are mobile.

More details when I have the time, and the energy--it could be a little while.

Three days

till we leave.

I'm packed, mostly, and the house is cleaner than it was. The laundry is caught up with, thanks to MHH. My bag is sitting in the hall ready to go, and so is my husband's; Barak's bag is packed with his snacks and new Matchbox trucks. The monkey, of course, stays out till the last minute. I'm about to start cooking for Shabbos because of course I couldn't say no yesterday when MHH asked me if we could have a couple of the bocherim. Oh, and I made dinner tonight for a family with a new baby--dinner for seven people in addition to the four who live here. And I delivered it, in a milk crate tied to the top of my Snap n Go. With handspun, because that was the closest thing at hand. I think I should get bonus points for that one.

Okay. Need to cook now. Really really. Right now.

Honesty

This morning, nursing a just-woken-up Iyyar, I got a runny nose. "Barak, could you get me a tissue please?" Barak is a fabulous helper who, 90% of the time, really likes running errands. This time, however, he couldn't find the tissues--they were there, but not in the usual spot--and he came back with one square of toilet paper. I had a really runny nose to which said square of toilet paper turned out to something less than adequate. Barak watched my difficulties, impressed. "There's a lot of boogers in there," he commented. "Yep," I said. "Here," he said, offering me a longer piece of toilet paper. "Wanna have some more?"

News

Nothing all that exciting, but here's what's new around here:

1. I am telecommuting now. Okay, fine, I lied, that is exciting. I have a fancy laptop with full network access, a separate phone line (which I am paying for, but it is half the price of my monthly bus pass so who cares), and explicit permission to take the laptop anywhere I need to work with it. So, theoretically, I could go work at the bagel shop or wherever. The laptop also, shockingly, has an enabled wireless card. I thought they would limit me to the secure internet connection I have at home, but no.

2. It really is true that the majority of what you teach your kids, you aren't aware you're teaching them. This week especially I've seen Barak do so many things that are just, um, me. Like after I put Iyyar in the double stroller, but before he got in, he went over to Iyyar and inspected his seatbelt, with an expression on his face that was, uh, pure me. "Are you all buckled in? Yeah? Kay." Or when he bumped into me this afternoon, and said, "Oops! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that." He is very into feeding the baby, and "sharing" baby yogurts (otherwise known as Yobabies.) One small taste on the spoon for the baby, one huge ladleful for him. At least he's not picking that one up from me--I don't like sweet yogurt.

3. This morning, while Iyyar napped, Barak and I made chocolate chip cookies for a friend who rescued me from a babysitting crisis last Thursday. He was standing on the chair assisting. He is usually quite reliable, so I sometimes get a little cavalier about watching him every second. Today I opened the new bag of brown sugar and told him to empty it into the brown-sugar canister. I went to get the eggs out of the fridge, and turned around just in time to see him stuffing a whole golf-ball-sized hunk of brown sugar in his mouth with a look of frenzied ecstasy.

4. Further to the cookie-baking, I think Barak must have dumped in some other extraneous ingredients when I wasn't watching, because the cookies, although tasty, were distinctly not my usual cookies. They looked very pasty, did not brown well, and burned on the bottom in an unaccountable pattern. White patches and black patches on the same cookie-bottom. At first I thought there was something stuck to the cookie sheets under the parchment paper, but no. Very bizarre. I have baked thousands if not tens of thousands of these very cookies, and have never had this happen before. I tried calling the King Arthur Baking hotline, but it's Sunday and they were closed. Then I had a truly radical idea.

When we went to California a few weeks ago, we happened to meet the sister-in-law of my most favorite cookbook author, Gil Marks. He wrote the most-used cookbook in my kitchen, which is one of those mysteriously charmed cookbooks in which all the recipes, um, work. I make recipes from his book for the first time for company, without testing them out on my husband first. (High praise indeed.) Said sister-in-law gave me some of his old Kosher Gourmet issues, and said offhandedly, "You know, you can call him if you have questions. He doesn't mind." I thought this was kind of odd. Great fabulous cookbook writer--just ring him up? No no. I would never do that.

But I did. I called this morning, and asked for Rabbi Marks. There was a pause. "What is this regarding?" I said, well, I know your sister-in-law, and she said you didn't mind occasional phone calls from perplexed cooks, and I had a baking conundrum, and could he answer a question? "I can try," he said. We spent twenty minutes on the phone hashing out the chemical details of chocolate chip cookies, and all the variables that might have made them turn out that way. It was glorious. He rocks. Go buy his cookbooks now, especially this new one.

5. Lately, I have occasionally been letting Barak watch little clips of Disney movies in Hebrew on YouTube. (The Hebrew is my hetter.) His favorite one is this, but today we watched this one instead. There's a scene where the animals are eating bugs. Barak said, "Eww! Bugs! They're eating the bugs!" Then, "Bugs are crawling. Bugs are crawling like Iyyar." Um, yeah, I guess so.

6. Lately, as the wearing of clean and dry underwear has become the rule rather than the exception, we have been discussing what will happen when Barak keeps his underwear clean and dry all day, every day: namely, he will get to wear not only underwear (now greatly preferred over diapers or a pull-up), but also tzitzit. And, um, he will get to wear a tie. It was his idea. We were discussing the merits of dry underwear, and what would be the ultimate reward of same. "Barak, what are you going to get to wear like Abba?" "Glasses like Abba!" "Really? And what else?" "Also a tie like Abba!" After he mentioned it a few times I went ahead and bought him glasses (sunglasses from Target) and, yes, a tie, on clearance at Lands' End. It's a kid's version, of course, but it is an actual silk tie, in blue and green plaid. It's on top of my wardrobe, waiting to be earned.

7. Yesterday (further to the above) Barak and I were walking down the street, on the way to a neighbor's. (Iyyar was home with Abba, napping.) Walking toward us was a very big, very bearded, very Litvak kind of a guy. Barak greeted him with an important-sounding, "Good Shabbos," which was returned. We passed him. Then Barak commented. "He's wearing a hat." "Yes, he's wearing a big black hat." Pause. "I sink he's also wearing underwear."

I'm pretty sure he didn't hear us. But I didn't look back to check.

8. Abba is finishing up his grading this weekend, so I did my best to keep everybody out of the house. One of our stops was at the supermarket, where I didn't really need anything, but I thought I would let the boys go in one of those shopping carts with the cars in front. I stowed the stroller in the stockroom, found a car cart, and off we went. Iyyar, Iyyar thought this was just beyond awesome. He drove, he helped Barak drive (which Barak did not appreciate), he hung out the side of his door (which made me a little nervous) and giggled. A lot. And then he started climbing out his window, even though he had his seatbelt on. Have I mentioned that this one is a monkey? So I took him out of the driver's seat (there were two steering wheels, so we were covered, and he doesn't have a license anyway) and put him in the seat on top. It didn't have a seatbelt, but that was never a problem with Barak--he always just held on. Not so Iyyar, whose instant reaction was, "Oho! I can climb out of this even more easily!" and in three seconds flat would have been over the side of the cart if I hadn't been grabbing his shirt. He doesn't even stand on his own much yet, but oh boy, he can climb.

Two weeks till Hungary. Think he'll be walking?

Lame

I feel like my blog has been kind of on the lame side lately. Not many posts, and the ones that I have put up have been hastily written and not really that well put together. What can I say--it's been busy, it's getting hot, Barak is in full-on kvetchy toddler mode and Iyyar is becoming quite the handful himself. Oh, and work is getting really really busy too.

So, sorry for the lack of quality blogging. Things at work should quiet down in about two years, so maybe it will get better then.

Lest you think

that Iyyar does not figure prominently in the cast of characters around here, let me reassure you that that is not the case. It's just that he doesn't really talk much, so there's not as much to blog. He sort of says Barak's name, and sort of says his own, but that's it. No real developmental milestones lately--he pulls up but doesn't stand on his own, crawls and cruises on furniture but doesn't walk yet, even holding hands. He claps, he nurses, he understands more and more, and he spends a lot of time huffing and puffing his way around the house in search of things to bang, suck, and chew. He is more tolerant of the stroller than he once was, but I don't think he'll ever really be a fan. He'd just rather be on the floor. He gets very excited by drawers (Elmo underwear! Blankets! I can fling them on the floor!) and can now reach and empty the third shelf of the bookshelf in their room. He had his 12-month checkup last week, and is at 20 lb 6 oz--15th percentile for weight, and 76th percentile for height.

One thing he does do, however, is eat. A lot. Of everything, but preferably whatever I'm eating. Tonight, Barak was having couscous while MHH and I were having crockpot ratatouille and meatballs. I gave Iyyar couscous. Biiig mistake. Iyyar was completely outraged, because clearly whatever I had was better (he was right) and it is always preferable to be fed with a spoon over eating things with one's fingers, is it not? Clearly. So, I took off his (milchig) high chair tray and started feeding him eggplant and red peppers. First he started wailing hysterically, because usually the removal of the high chair tray means that mealtime is over. Then he got a mouthful of vegetables, chewed thoughtfully, and opened wide for the next one. And whenever I was a little too slow with the spoon, instead of his usual frantic "uh! uh! uh!" he reached over and tapped me politely on the knee. "Um, hi, I'm ready for more, please..."

His willingness to eat just about anything will be helpful in three weeks when I take him to Hungary, but his objection to being confined by arms, stroller, or carseat for any length of time will be, ah, inconvenient. It's not even the 10-hour flight I'm worried about; it's the week of hanging out in a Hungarian nursing home with my grandmother and her three roommates and their distinctly un-baby-proof setup of low drawers full of medicines and choking hazards. It's going to be... a challenge.

We're leaving b'ezrat Hashem in 19 days. I still have no idea how I will do this--I think I will attach his carseat (La-Z-Boy toddler sized) to the stroller with the Latch straps, put my big backpack on my back and my carryon under the stroller, bring lots of Cheerios (or Cheerioka as my grandmother calls them) and hope for the best. And try very hard to remember to say tefillas ha'derech.

Talking more

Sometimes, when I think about things that Barak says, it occurs to me that if it weren't for the way he pronounces things, a lot of what Barak says these days sounds like normal adult speech. Fortunately for me, he does still sound like a toddler. A concrete mixer is still a "croncrete mixer"; the bathroom is still the "brafroom." If he needs something, he still asks me to "help you please," "can I" is still "C'I" and "th" still comes out "f." So I am still asked to "help you please wiffa socks," or "play wif Lego"; Friday night we "make kiddush motzi"; new and complex thoughts come out slowly, with pauses between words and great thought. "First go to the barbershop getta haircut, then getta lollipop. I'm gonna get a red lollipop, 'kay Imma?"

But there are now more and more sentences that make it clear that Barak is barrelling toward kidhood. "Abba, no no can't be late shul!" has turned into, "Abba, don't be late for shul!" (I admit it, I put him up to that one.) "Mamaksa" is now "popsicle," "ikeem" is "ice cream," "No no can't touch it baby!" is "Iyyar, you can't touch that, it's not for you! That's my backhoe loader!" "No can't touch my leg," is "Imma, he's touching my leg! Stop!"

We hear that one a lot, actually. And yesterday, the two of them had their first genuine brotherly fight--as in, not Barak grabbing a toy away and Iyyar crying, but Iyyar grabbing Barak's sunglasses, Barak objecting, and the two of them then whaling at each other in the double stroller. I solved it by taking Barak out and letting him walk. Shades of things to come.

Oh, and on the subject of the barbershop--we went this afternoon. (The barber, before I could stop him, offered Barak not one but two lollipops--a red one and an orange one. One lollipop was had at the time, another saved for a potty incentive. Because Barak can drag lollipop-licking out for hours, I set the oven timer; when it beeped, the lollipop went into a container. It's now sitting on the windowsill by Barak's bed, waiting for the morning.) Anyway--I asked the barber to do what he did last time. "Short, please. Keep his payes." The barber mamash SHAVED HIS HEAD. He has a shaved head and payes. He looks like he belongs in B'nai Brak, except for the, um, L. L. Bean plaid pants, croncrete mixer shirt and excavator kippa. I don't think they have a lot of excavator kippas in B'nai Brak. Although, who knows, I could be wrong.

?

Lately, Barak has taken to wanting to sleep in Abba's bed. He's never been a big one for sneaking into our bed, although he has had phases where he does it occasionally. For the last couple of weeks though, he's wanted to go to bed in our room. I've been letting him, because if it's taking Iyyar a while to fall asleep it's sometimes just easier to have Barak in another room. He gets transferred back to his own bed when it's time for us to go to bed, and is fine with that (although he does sometimes reappear in our room at around 6 am and clamber back in). Last night, he went to bed in our room, and at around 10 or so I went in there to get something.

And he was not in the bed. Just as I was trying to absorb this without panicking, I noticed a strange hand-shaped smudge on the footstool of the glider rocker. And that was when I realized that Barak was, in fact, asleep in the most awkward-looking position imaginable--half sprawled on the floor, half draped on the glider footstool, completely out.

All I can think is that he woke up enough to get up out of bed, started walking, got to the footstool, and fell back asleep rather than navigate around it. Not something I'd be able to do, myself, but I guess he's got those toddler powers.

Beeg animals

First a word of background: bugs, they are not kosher. At all. Worse than pigs, in fact. Got that? Good. So, one checks bug-prone produce for bugs, and either they are buggy or they are not. It is very rare to find a single bug, in my experience anyway.

On Purim, as you may recall, we ate by the home of some friends of ours from Israel. The father of the family, who is from Bnai Brak, got up and gave, while not entirely sober, a Purim drasha, on whether or not it is muttar to eat in the homes of people who you know do not sift flour. In Israel, everyone sifts flour, because there are bugs and we do not eat bugs. But here, here in chutz la'aretz? People do not sift flour. Why? Is it because there are no bugs in the flour? No! There are bugs! Here, my wife sifts the flour, and we have seen them! Animals in the flour! Beeg animals! Beeg animals in the flour! And here, the people ARE EATING THEM!

I sat there listening and thought, hmm, I don't sift my flour. I used to, because I used to live in a place where grain moths are endemic. But where I live now I have never found a bug, except for once when the entire bag was clearly infested. There's never been a case where I had a bag of flour that looked fine but, when sifted, turned out buggy. Sifting a five-pound bag of flour by hand every week when you are not finding anything gets old fast. So a couple of years ago, I stopped sifting.

This made me feel guilty, though, and on my next trip to Target I bought a sifter. Then, we invited the family over for Shabbos. I made challah. I thought, okay, I'd better sift the flour.

And what did I find?

You guessed it.

A beeg animal in my flour!

I was so excited I called my friend. "You'll never guess what I found! I found an animal in the flour!"

"Ma?"

"I found a big animal in the flour, like your husband was talking about!"

"Ani lo m'vina."

I explained, and I still think she thought I was nuts. Especially when I put the bug in a ziploc bag to show my husband. "Look! A beeg animal!" My accent got distinctly Israeli. "A beeg animal in da flowa!"

"Yes, and so, there are always bugs in flour."

"But I would never have sifted it if it hadn't been for your husband's drasha! He saved us all from eating treif challah!"

"Pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

I still haven't tossed the ziploc. Because it is not every day that one finds beeg animals in one's flowa.

By popular demand

The esskavator kippa, in all its glory.

Saturday night

Okay, first the important stuff: Harry Potter. Jasmin, I agree that JKR has been dropping hints, but I think it is more about his fallibility than anything more nefarious. Has everyone looked at mugglenet? There was an interview with JKR right after #6 was published that was very enlightening. I think Dumbledore is as we saw him--good, human, and imperfect. Snape, he is trouble. Oh, and I think Malfoy is going to do tshuva in the end.

That out of the way...

Has anyone been to the post office since the rate increase? Okay, has anyone tried to mail anything internationally since the rate increase? If you have not and plan to do so soon, you may be in for the same nasty surprise I got yesterday. International rates have more than doubled, and so far as I can tell, surface shipping for most things has been abolished. I used to make good use of those little Global Priority mailers, that were $5 for a little one and $9 for a big one. I had bought and packed a big one to send to my knitting buddy in Sydney, and discovered that those little mailers are now $13 and $21!!! And if you have something big and heavy to send, there is no longer any option of sending it by slow boat to save money. A couple of months ago, said knitting buddy was in at the beginning of job-search season, which is always one of your more stressful life experiences. So I put together a Lovely Box, and sent it by ship for--well, I don't remember how much it was, but considering how much it weighed and how far it was going, it wasn't bad. Now there's no way to send a box that size for less than sixty dollars. Yikes! I am going to have to insist that anyone who plans on requiring a care package in future relocate to the lower 48. Thank you for your cooperation.

Time to clean up the kitchen. Shabbos was good, we had guests, they'd already eaten too much at kiddush and the kids had stashed candy in the stroller, so we are leftover city around here. Anyone up for some cold chatzilim, chicken and cholent? Stop on by.

*snort*

In America, people think I am something of a linguist because I have some ability to speak in more languages than I have fingers on one hand. In other parts of the world, I am just an American who can't speak the local language very well, and is not really fluent in anything but English, and how lame is that? Having spent a lot of time living and working and traveling in other countries, I am exquisitely familiar with the humiliation of not being able to say what you want to say, or, worse, saying something that is exactly not what you wanted to say.

An example:

When I lived in Hungary in the mid-90s, I arrived with pretty good pronunciation, a fairly good intuitive sense of the language, atrocious grammar and a vocabulary that was all but useless anywhere but my grandmother's kitchen. This was, in a way, even worse than speaking with a bad American accent, because a) what I could say sounded Hungarian, b) the phrases I did know were correct and idiomatic, and therefore c) whenever I did mess up, people would not leap to the conclusion that I was in fact a foreigner (especially since those were fairly thin on the ground in those days, but) assume that I was deranged. And Hungarian, as a language, offers unparalleled opportunities of making a fool of yourself. In what other language could a simple toast turn into a celebration of your drinking partner's entire anus with a fatally shortened vowel? I ask you.

Anyway, one day I was at the library with my roommate, studying. On the way out you had to present all of your books to the checkout lady, whether or not you were checking anything out; no high-tech theft prevention here, you just left your bag at the door and showed her all your books as you left to demonstrate that they were your own. As I waited, I chatted with my roommate, in normal Hungarian, probably not making any immediately noticeable mistakes. And, as one does, I mentally plotted what I would tell the checkout lady. This is my own book [not the library's.] Ez a konyv--this book-- a sajat konyvem. This book is my own book. Well, I could shorten it and say, "This is my own." Ez a sajatam. Oh, no, wait. Postpositions like those, elide the vowel, it shortens to "Ez a sajtam." Doesn't it? No, no, it doesn't. See "fatally shortened vowel, above." That's why the checkout lady, who had already heard my seemingly normal Hungarian, was a bit taken aback when I proudly showed her my book and announced, "This is my cheese."

Ah, the memories.

What made me think of this, you ask? This. Read it and weep (in a good way.)

The only way to learn a language is to make a fool of yourself, early and often. Take it from me. I've been there.

You heard it here first

So, as I hope you are all aware, we are in the serious counting-down phase here. Two more months till... oh, come on, you know what I'm talking about... Harry Potter, Book The Seventh And Final.

For posterity's sake, this is what I think:

1. Snape is evil. Anyone who thinks otherwise is (not to be overly harsh here) delusional.

2. Dudley was born a wizard and Aunt Petunia had him Squibified. This is the terrible memory he relived in Book Six, at the beginning when you you-know-whats came to Little Whinging. (Being vague here in case you haven't read Book Six.)

3. MHH thinks that in the last chapter, in which we are told we will find out what eventually happens to the surviving character, we'll find out that Hermione will become headmistress.

That's it.

From the mouths of babes

Dinner tonight was chicken soup and knaidlach, or, in Barak's case, knaidlach with an absolute minimum of chicken soup. Definitely no carrots, thanks. In the middle of soup-eating, I got this gem:

"Hashem say hafta eat chicken soup and knaidlach on Shabbos."

And hundreds of thousands of yiden probably agree with him.

* * *

This afternoon, Barak was on the toilet and I was in my bedroom (adjacent to bathroom), nursing Iyyar, who has a little fever, threw up this afternoon, and is on permanurser status. The conversation with Barak, room-to-room, went something like this:

"Wassa mem say?"

"A mem says mmmm. What starts with a mem?"

"Moishy starts wiffa mem!"

"Right! And also?"

"I don't know."

"Also Menucha starts with a mem?"

"Yeah!"

"And also Menachem starts with a mem?"

"Yeah!"

"What does Imma start with?"

"Imma start wiffa aleph!"

"Right! How about Abba?"

"Also Abba start wiffa aleph!"

"Right!"

"What does broom start wif?"

"Umm. Broom starts with a B."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. See, there are two kinds of letters. There are aleph-beis letters, and ABC letters. Aleph and mem are aleph-beis letters. Broom starts with a B. That's an ABC letter."

Pause, during which I wonder if he is actually processing this. Then,

"What are you talking about?"

* * *

Yesterday, I made ravioli for dinner. I put herbs and cheese on the ravioli, and did not take out Barak's before the application of the dread "green." (No, I didn't forget. I just didn't.) I put some in Barak's bowl, and some in mine. Barak inspected the contents, and was not pleased.

"I no want it. I just want a clean one please."

* * *

This isn't really a talking post, but it's definitely a communicating post. As you may know, if you want to take a nursing baby off the Source of All Good Things, you can't just pull him off if he's actively sucking. That will hurt. What you have to do first is slide a finger in his mouth to break his latch.

Today, after Iyyar nursed and nursed and nursed, I'd had enough and went to take him off. But he saw the dreaded latch-breaking finger coming, grabbed it, held on, and wrenched it as far away from his mouth as he possibly could. Can't you see I'm busy here?

Psychic

It was nice and sunny today and I decided to take the boys out in the double stroller so I could get some exercise and we could all get some air. I needed to stop at the bank (got my tax return, woohoo!) and on the way realized I was hungry. Hmm. The thought of French fries crossed my mind--I have not been to the pizza (and French fry) shop since my maternity leave, nor have any other members of the family. On mature reflection, I decided it was probably better that way. Then I heard Barak say something.

"K'I havea French fries please?"

????????????!!!!!!!!!!!

Did I mention that we have not gone for French fries since AUGUST?!

What could I do? We went for French fries. Iyyar got his first taste of the dread delicious "food" item. We sat there munching. Barak said, pensively,

"I likea French fries. Iss very yummy."

"Yeah. I like them too. Do you know who else really likes French fries?"

"Yeah?"

"Grandma. Grandma really likes French fries. Whenever she comes to visit, we go get French fries."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Grandma likes a French Fries?"

"Yup."

Pause for consideration.

"Grandma's very nice."

"Yup, she is."

Speaking of grandmas (the other one this time), our plane tickets came in the mail today, and I got our hotel confirmation e-mailed. Five weeks and six days to go.

Yet another list.

1. This conversation was related to me by Ada, our babysitter, when I got home from work on Friday.

She had Iyyar on her lap, and he was playing with her necklace. She told him no and got it away from him, he went for it again, and she told him no, don't do that. Barak was watching this.

"Ada say no no, don't do that."

"Right, I told Iyyar no."

"Also Imma say no no."

"Right, Imma says no sometimes too."

Pause.

"Abba don't say no."

Ooh. He noticed.

2. Barak wore underwear all day yesterday, with pretty good success, and today, as of 3:15 pm, was still all clean and dry. Abba took him to the bathroom when we got back from our walk and a good three hours without a potty trip. Still dry! Abba gave him a high five, while I was in the other room nursing Iyyar and listening in.

"Barak, are you the man?"

"No, I not the man. YOU the man."

"No, I'm not the man. You're the man."

"No, you! You the man!"

And so on.

3. Iyyar has discovered the hall. He is very good at crawling now and has decided that his room is just, you know, so last week. So every time I put him down on the floor he immediately rotates toward the door and heads out to explore, making funny little "ha! ha! ha!" sounds as he goes.

4. After checking fifty billion heads of lettuce and spinach and whatever for bugs, without ever finding anything (this is supermarket produce, not organic farmer's market stuff), I finally found a genuine bug on Friday in a head of Romaine. It had legs and everything.

5. I had guests for Shabbos for the first time since, um, Iyyar was born I think. And really, I have to remind myself of this--it is not as bad as it seems on Tuesday night. I made gefilte fish, mock chopped liver, chicken, rice, sweet and sour celery, a vat of a Sephardic vegetable dish I can't remember the name of (guvetch? something like that), challah, chocolate chip cookies, guacamole, green salad (see "Romaine with bug," above) with homemade Caesar dressing, cholent, challah kugel and, um, that may be it but I'm probably missing something. I started at 8:30 on Thursday and was in bed by midnight; I also did another two hours or so Friday afternoon. I did have my faithful dishwashing assistant helping me, but otherwise I did it on my own. And it was fun. I forget, in the craziness of making dinner every night, that I really do like to cook. And we liked our guests (people we didn't know, that a friend of my husband's had asked if we could host) and it was all good.

6. Last week, my friend Chana came over and helped me organize my loom/guest/computer room. It has been a wreck, off and on, since we moved here--it is the only room off-limits to kinderlach, and so inevitably it is where everything gets dumped. One trip to Target, an unconscionable amount of money spent on Sterilite boxes, and three late nights of mad organizing later, it is transformed. The closet now has shelves, the floor is naked and bare, and everything I own is tucked away in neatly labeled and stacked plastic boxes. Or that's how it feels, anyway.

7. Iyyar is getting quite good at feeding himself, after resisting this useful skill for quite some time. On Friday I came home from work to find him in his high chair chowing on a bowl of grated cheese, literally shoveling it into his mouth with both hands. He was so into the cheese he didn't even care I was home. Who needs Imma, when I have cheese?

What I bought today

Two tickets--one adult, one infant--to Vienna. From there, we'll go by train and bus to the lovely and scenic and laughably titled "town" of Pervatpuszta. (Don't bother looking on the map. It's not there.) We'll be there for a week, leaving on Sunday and coming back the following Sunday. Never in my life have I bought such an expensive ticket--it was four times (four! times!) what I used to spend ten years ago, or even seven years ago.

Right, so, I'm going to the backwaters of Hungary by plane, train, and bus, I'm going to be bringing a 13-mo on a nine-hour flight, I have no idea what I will feed him or me or how I will do this, and I will be dispensing with my entire tax return and then some But right now, I don't really care. I just can't wait until it's 8 am in Hungary and I can call my granny and tell her we're coming!

...and sunny day fun

Rainy day fun in the Uberimma household

Just turn your head sideways--it's easier than my figuring out how to rotate the picture. And for those wondering, it is the entire Hebrew aleph-beis made out of challah dough. Educational and tasty (and only a couple of them fell apart after baking).

Now hiring

The position of Travel Companion to Hungarian Nursing Home is currently open, with the possibility of a second position. Potential candidates must be willing to travel light, hang out with little old ladies who don't speak English, and smile. A lot. Duties include baby-holding, polite nodding, and endless double-cheek-kissing. The ability to ride Hungarian buses without throwing up is a must; the ability to knit is a definite plus. Position start date: sometime in June. Benefits: the chance to see a part of Hungary you ain't never seen before. Salary: none, but aren't the benefits enough?

Interested applicants please leave details in the comments section.

jiggity-jig

When I took my third year of Russian, almost everyone else in my class was actually Russian--almost all engineering students taking the class for an easy A. I am not Russian, and was finding it hard to keep up--and not getting much out of it either. A couple of weeks into the semester, I pointed this out to the instructor, a really wonderful Russian guy-with-beard named Slava. "Okay," he said. "We will do one-on-one." For the rest of the semester, that's what we did, meeting up in one of the campus eateries for an hour to go over whatever I'd translated during the week--mostly five-year tractorization plans and that kind of thing. Every so often, I'd have a sentence that would make no sense at all. He'd look at it, and chuckle. "Oh no," he'd said, "but there's no way you would know that. This sentence here refers to a medieval Russian nursery rhyme, and it is the last three words of the fourth line. So the reader is supposed to know that really, what the writer means is this completely different thing." I'd grumble about these ridiculous Russians, fix my translation, and grumble some more.

Anyway, now I've done the same thing. Jiggity-jig--we're home. Again.

Oh, wait. I didn't mention we went anywhere, did we.

Well, we went out of state for the weekend, for the unveiling for the friend who died right after Iyyar was born. Having a brand-new baby who had just gotten out of the hospital, and no one else to take care of Barak, there was no way I could have gone to the funeral (which was, in addition to being a plane ride away, the day before the bris). She was a good friend, and I wanted to go to the funeral, and since I couldn't do that we all went to the unveiling. Yup--all four of us. It was on Sunday morning, and we couldn't get flights that would get us there in time leaving after Shabbos, so we stayed Shabbos with friends of friends who turned out to be absolutely lovely and very hospitable people who, incidentally, happened to live three houses away from the brother of one of my favorite cookbook authors. (Funny world, isn't it.)

The weekend, the whole thing, was just so... not real. Shabbos was lovely, and every time someone asked us why we were in town I said, um, an unveiling actually. I had never been there before. My friend was someone I met through her blog, and whose blog I took over for the last few months when she was too sick to write it herself. She was, as I have mentioned here, Jewish but not observant; when it was clear she wasn't going to recover, I was the one who had the conversation with her about vidui, a Jewish tahara and funeral, what the chevra kadisha does. We changed her name. I talked to her, a few days before she died, when Iyyar was back in the hospital with jaundice and she was at home, knowing we wouldn't talk again--it was, I found out later, the last real conversation she had with anyone. She was my age. In a few weeks, I'll turn 34, which she won't get to do; a few months ago, I had a wedding anniversary she never got to either.

Even though she and her family and her illness were so much a part of our lives here, they were still, physically, very distant; I had known for months that she wouldn't get better, but had no sense of how imminent it was until I was back in the hospital with Iyyar and completely wrapped up in my new and suddenly very sick baby. I never saw her sick, never saw her house, didn't go to the funeral, and never even met her husband or parents until after she died (although I had met her sister). I met them a month or two later, while I was still on maternity leave, but it was all so... removed.

Going to the unveiling, seeing her name on a piece of stone, standing in her kitchen without her in it, and seeing all the people who I knew only in context of her now in a context of absence--it made it suddenly real. Not that it hadn't been before, not that I hadn't been aware that she had died, but my only real loss in a day-to-say sense had been of a cherished email correspondent. It wasn't in my face--I didn't wake up in the morning to an empty bed, or sit down to breakfast across from an empty chair, or even walk past a house I'd once gone into. When things happen that I want to tell her about and can't, I can still just write the email anyway, and send it off into email oblivion. For her husband and her parents and the rest of her circle of family and close friends, the ones who lived nearby and saw her often, things are very different.

And of course, in the middle of trying to connect with these people, and assimilate all of this, and be there, I was also trying to keep Barak from tipping over the chairs at the cemetery, and convince him that their doggie was not going to eat him, because he was a nice doggie, and change Iyyar's diapers behind a car, and make sure we had a ride back to the airport, and navigate the minefield of being the only Orthodox Jews in a group of Catholics, Reform Jews, same-sex partnerships and everything else, all while keeping Barak from climbing on the white couches with his shoes on, and preventing Iyyar from eating dirt.

I guess that's why I'm up at 1 am, the day after coming back, just sitting here and blogging in the late-night quiet. Her first yahrzeit is past, and my husband has finished saying kaddish for her. The year of aveilus is over. The blog is deleted. Her Hebrew name is there on the headstone, the way we changed it two summers ago, and I am here.

Why children need mothers

The scene: our friends' house in New Jersey, the last day of Pesach. I stopped by a friend's house with the baby, and MHH took Barak to a playground. It was a very nice playground with a shiny new climbing structure. A couple of hours later, I met up with them at home. The characters in the following dialogue: me and MHH.

Me: "How was the park?"

MHH: "Good."

"Did he have fun?"

"I think so."

"What did he do?"

"Played."

Sigh.

"Did he play on anything in particular, or just run around?"

"Um, just ran around mostly."

[Barak walks in.]

Me: "Barak, did you have fun at the park?"

Barak: "Yeah! Play onna slide."

Me: "Oh, you went down the slide?"

Barak: C'I go play inna masement?

Me: Sure, go play in the basement. [To MHH] He was into the slide?

MHH: Oh yeah. He went down a bunch of times. Both ways.

Me: Both ways meaning on his back and on his stomach?

MHH: Yeah.

Me: Or head first and feet first?

MHH: That too.

[Pause.]

Me: You let him go down the slide headfirst?

MHH: Yeah, he did it a lot.

Me: Um, did you think maybe you shouldn't let him go down headfirst?

MHH: Why not?

Big boy

He does usually wear a kippa now--that was one of the big milestones we hit over Pesach. All the other men and boys in the house wore one, and Barak had his new excavator kippa, so he started wearing one automatically. If he drops it, he exclaims, "My kippa!" and puts it back on. If he realizes he's not wearing, he'll ask for it; if I tell him he's not wearing it, sometimes he'll ask for it, although sometimes not. And if I just plunk it on his head, he says "Thank you," and adjusts it how he likes it--back on his head.

Black velvet kippa, back on his head, with his name. And payes. And an excavator. He's going to be the frummest construction worker in town.

Another one of those list posts

1. This was the boys' birthday Shabbos. Barak turned three on Friday, and Iyyar turned one on Shabbos, so we combined the celebration. Barak got a birthday hat and party at playgroup, and Iyyar, well, Iyyar kind of did his usual. Presents were opened Friday morning (Duplo and sandbox toys) and Ada took them to get a doughnut in the afternoon. She let him have a whole doughnut, with sprinkles AND chocolate icing. I called in the afternoon to see how it was going and got no answer. When I tried her cell, she picked up. "We're outside, running laps around the building," in an attempt to burn off the sugar high. Oh well, it's been a while since he's OD'd on sugar--since Purim. He'll survive.

2. Our apartment was originally conceived as a poorly laid out 2-bedroom with a kitchen, dining room adjacent to kitchen, and living room at the opposite end. A previous owner walled off the dining room to make a third bedroom, and this is now the boys' room. It is now an even more awkwardly laid out apartment, with a closetless bedroom. A closetless bedroom is not an issue when the occupant of said bedroom is a single baby or small boy--you don't need to hang up baby clothes and they don't need that much stuff. Now that there are two kids' worth of clothes, and two ages' worth of toys, it's gotten a little out of hand.

So, for the last couple of months I've been trawling message boards, physical and online, in search of some used furniture. Last month I got a small dresser, which now holds pajamas, socks, and underwear, and has provided Iyyar with endless hours of pleasure as he stands there holding the open drawer with one hand and emptying out the Elmo underwear with the other. Having the short-term memory of a goldfish, the experience of smashing his fingers in the drawer has done nothing to dissuade him from pursuing this activity; now I turn the dresser around during the day so that the drawers are against the wall. Iyyar saw me do it, and gave me a look that said very clearly, "Well, that was a mean trick."

This past week, I finally, after a lot of headaches with the movers I won't go into, got an armoire for their room. It's a used one from Ikea, but one of the largest and most solid things from Ikea I've ever seen. It's huge. There are two doors (latchable with a baby latch) that open to a bunch of shelves and space to hang clothes, with two drawers underneath, and the whole thing stands on legs that leave enough space underneath to slide a few Rubbermaid containers of toys. The room is looking much more tidy now, and I'm quite pleased with my purchase.

It arrived while MHH was at work, and Barak helped me move things in. The bottom drawers are now for blankies--one has Iyyar's, one has Barak's. While we were doing that we talked about being careful with the drawers, not climbing inside, how climbing on furniture is dangerous, what things we do and don't climb on, etc. So when MHH got home from work, Barak ran in to show him the armoire. "Issa armoire. Iss got drawers and dere's blankies inna drawers anna money inna drawer. You can't climb on it. Gotta be very careful."

3. Back on the subject of blankie drawers--Barak has his preferred night-night blankies (yellow fleece blankies from Target, the first of which was a gift from Savta and subsequent versions of which were purchased by Imma), his quilt from Mrs. Peasley (knows as the blue blankie, for the blue flannel back), and his knit-by-Imma wool blanket, which is usually scorned and tossed on the floor. When I was putting blankies in the drawer, I left the blue blankie on the bed (it's hands-down the prettiest) and folded the rest and put them away. Barak, when he saw me put away the knitted blankie, instantly objected. "No can't put it inna drawer! Iss pretty. It goes onna bed."

Aww.

Skulduggery

You may have noticed the strange silence on the knitting front lately. That's because I've been feverishly working on this. You can read all about the story of its inception here.

And for those of you to whom the title of the linked-to blog is a mystery, I offer this excerpt from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Sarah obviously needs to read:

'But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.'

'Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.'

'But the plans were on display ...'

'On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'

'That's the display department.'

'With a torch.'

'Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'

'So had the stairs.'

'But look, you found the notice didn't you?'

'Yes,' said Arthur, 'yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.'

Droop

I don't really have the energy to post right now. I feel, to be honest, like a jellyfish. My knees are jelly. My hands are jelly. I'm amazed I'm not spattered on the floor right now.

Why, you ask?

I just drove a car. In traffic. In the notoriously bad traffic of the neighborhood where I live.

The car was a stick.

I have not driven a car regularly since 1992, and I have not driven one at all since 1999. I dislike driving intensely, and have such strong driving anxiety that even at my peak of driving comfort (relatively speaking) I could not enjoy being anywhere I had driven, because all I could think about was the drive home. Add my dislike of driving to a fondness for walking, a generally urban lifestyle, and a generally tight budget, and you have the car-free lifestyle of which you have heard tell.

However.

Barak is headed, IY"H, into preschool this fall. His third birthday is this weekend. I think he is past the basement playgroup stage, and I am not that comfortable with the basement playgroup concept in general. The available playgroups are not my thing--close, convenient, and affordable, but waaay too hefker for my liking. There is, however, a good Jewish preschool in town. It is well and professionally run, and though expensive, it could be managed.

However.

It's a little under a mile away. That's not a bad walk in general, but four times a day, every day, with one or two kids (and who knows, maybe even a third by the end of the next school year, by which time Barak will be four and a bit) it is clearly Too Much. I could take him on the bus, but that's not a big improvement. I could pay someone else to take him. Or I could learn to drive. Again.

A friend of mine had offered, a few months ago, to give me some driving practice on her car, which is a stick. On Sunday, I took her up on it, and we spent a couple of hours driving around a parking lot. It was fine. I was fine. She was very impressed with my ability to start the car in first and second, the infrequency with which I stalled out, and my general comfort with the concept of a clutch. "You've got really good hand-leg coordination!" she said. "You've really never tried a stick before?" I assured her I had not. She pondered. "I know!" she said. "I bet it's the loom!" And I bet she's right. That or spinning--what spinner does not remember the difficulty, the first time you try out a wheel, of preventing the wheel from spinning backward?

Anyway. Be all that as it may, the parking lot part was fine. So tonight, we went ou driving. In traffic.

It was fine, in that I met my primary goal of killing no one, my secondary goal of inflicting no damage to man, beast, or property, and my tertiary goal of avoiding being the object of road rage. However, the heart-pounding moments, the gutwrenching fear, the stallouts at red lights--verily they were there, and in spades.

It's not the machine I don't like. It's the people in the other machines, and their unpredictability, and the people on sidewalks and strolling obliviously across streets, and the potential, unknown in my ordinary existence, of bumping someone off without actually meaning to.

Gah.

There's other news, I'm sure, but I'm a little too jellylegged to think of it right now.

Overheard

Barak, in the living room, is making a huge amount of noise. He is banging on his xylophone with sandbox toys, stomping his feet, and singing "rah! rah! rah!" at the very top of his very able lungs. It is earsplitting. I am in the kitchen considering asking him to tone it down when suddenly it stops, and I hear, in a conversational tone, Barak, telling himself quietly,

"I being very loud."

Pause, and then the racket begins again.

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.

Chol ha'moed

We're in New Jersey, and went to Borough Park today by way of a train, a ferry, and the R. If you saw a family walking along the edge of lower Manhattan past the heliport, and said family included a small boy screaming, "Hock clockter! Issa hock clockter!", that was us.

Remind me to tell you about Iyyar flirting on the subway and the train, Barak's stunning announcement in the middle of afikoman-eating, what time Barak finally went night-night on the first seder night, and just how much potato kugel Iyyar scarfed this afternoon.

Stay tuned. And a guten mo'ed.

Roundup

We are, as I have mentioned, planning on going away for all of Pesach, so this may be the last you'll hear from me for a while. The things that need to be happening are, gradually, happening; the laundry is in progress, Iyyar's transition out of our bedroom is nearing completion, and the house is getting cleaner and more organized. I don't need to be cleaning for Pesach, obviously, but I do want it tidy when we leave. I went shopping last night and bought new ties for MHH and two new skirts for myself; the boys are set for clothes already.

I wanted to write up the whole hospital experience, but probably won't do it justice. Things I remember are riding in the taxi in the predawn darkness, pointing out the red and green lights to Barak and asking if we needed to stop or go; helping him put on his hospital gown ("Issa clown shirt!") and socks ("I gotta yellow socks! Iss too big. Iss falling off! Imma help you please!") and, oh the heartbreak, waving bye-bye as he walked off with the anesthesiologist ("I gonna go this way!" as the door closed behind them).

While he was in surgery, I went down to Public Safety to reclaim the cell phone I had left behind on our ER trip; a good distraction. I called Grandma E, knitted a little bit (disastrously, of course--what was I doing bringing Thinking Knitting with me?), and, of course, drank Diet Coke. I had a nervous stomach for the first time since, um, college I think. When the doctor came out, she complimented me on how well Barak had behaved ("He was an angel,") and brought me back to see him just as he was waking up. He was still mostly out of it, but saw me, and the first thing he said was, "I wanna come out!" and then, when he saw the IV in his hand, a wailed "I don't like it!" Who would?

I held him for an hour or so as the drugs wore off, and then we went back to his room--on the same floor where I had been with Iyyar and Grandma E almost a year ago now--and cuddled on his bed for a bit. I tried to get him to take Tylenol, which ordinarily he loves, but he'd had enough of being messed with. "Do you want to go back to the playroom and play with the trains?" "Yeah..." He had a couple of sips of juice, and the IV came out; I held Commander Toad and his new stuffed rhinoceros at a strategic angle so he couldn't see it happen. He didn't like it, but it wasn't bad.

We went back down the hall to the playroom we'd been in for a little while earlier that morning, taking along a box of juice and a melting orange popsicle; he wasn't into the popsicle and, when I suggested it, thought that chocolate ice cream would be a much better idea. We went to the nurses' station to ask, and there was the same nurse who had been there with Iyyar. Two chocolate ice creams in styrofoam cups, and his concrete mixer truck shirt back on, and he was more or less back to his usual self. He found the great big red Radio Flyer wagon, and I pulled him up and down the hall in it a few times (shockingly, those things are really hard to steer in reverse.) There was another little girl there, the cousin of someone who'd just had his tonsils out, and I gave the two of them a couple of rides. Then our babysitter came with Iyyar, who promptly fell in love with the train table himself, and stood there laying waste to the entire yard; we got our discharge instructions, and transport came with a wheelchair, and we headed downstairs.

And this is where our story abruptly lurches into Part II.

As we went downstairs and I had the slightly surreal experience which I am about to relate, I thought, "I want to blog about this, but there is not going to be any good way to make the transition from Barak's surgery to Medrash a la Transport Guy." Well, whatever, it's all part of the narrative of the day.

So the transport guy came up with the wheelchair, and there I am holding Barak's hand, and Ada is holding Iyyar, and our stuff is piled on the wheelchair, with Barak's little backpack hanging off the IV pole. Because I had Barak, I was walking a bit behind, but I could just overhear the conversation. And I could definitely get every one of Ada's, "Get away from me, you weirdo" vibes. Loud and clear.

You can tell, in about half a heartbeat, when you meet an evangelical Christian who sees you as a target. Woohoo! A Jew! A soul to save! They're just a little too friendly. Just a little too interested. Just a little too...

Now, I should interrupt myself here to state that some of my best friends are Christians. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) But I am not just talking about the ambient "I live in America therefore I am Christian by default" Christians. I have close friends who are hard-core born-again Christians. My very best friend from grad school is currently at Texas Christian University. We talk religion all the time when we're together, and it is always with the understanding that you won't try to convert me, I won't try to convert you, and should we put the noodles in the soup or have them on the side? No, I don't think it makes a lot of sense, but I'm sure Yiddishkeit doesn't make sense to Christians, so we're even. In a nutshell, Christianity is fine, as long as you are not trying to a) push it on me or b) use it to justify killing me, my family, or any other Jews.

Where was I? Right. Pesach. So, Ada went to get her car, and I was sitting there with Barak and Iyyar, and I had already overheard the transport guy ask her if she was my sister. (Which, folks, if you saw the two of us together... not so much.)

"So," he said brightly. "When's your Passover?"

Oh, dear. "It starts in about a week and a half."

"Yeah, that's when it starts for me too."

Funny, you don't look Jewish.

"Are you a Seventh-Day Adventist?"

"No, I'm a Bible Christian. I'm cleaning out my leaven. And last year I took the whole eight days off from work!"

For a moment, I thought, wait a minute. Is there some sect of Christians that thinks halacha is binding on non-Jews?

No. No, there's not. I have no idea what this guy's hashkofa is, but halacha was not what he was talking about.

I have to say that while in general I find the idea of co-opting Pesach and sedarim into something not Jewish sort of odd, there are ways of doing it that seem more rational than others. I worked once with someone in New York who had a "freedom seder" at her AME church. That I can see; escape from slavery, God's mighty hand, it's logical. But anyone who thinks that the seder is about the coming of Jesus is either a) on crack, b) incapable of actually reading a haggada in anything but an English translation, c) trying very, very hard to read into the text or d) all of the above.

But what do you say to someone who, completely ignorant of the entire mesora, tries to tell you that really, the seder is not about the flight from Egypt but a Christian prophecy, and tries to darshon text he cannot read and does not understand except in translation? With no idea of the history, background, commentators, or anything? There is just nowhere to begin that doesn't involve some version of, "Get back to me when you can to read the text you're trying to darshon, will you? But by the time you're able to do that, I don't think you'll still think there's anything to discuss."

Oh, well, never mind. I don't think I can tell the rest of that story without ranting, which isn't what I feel like doing right now. So let's just leave that one there, and return to Barak, who, after a brief nap at home, spent the rest of his afternoon recuperating on his bed, where all three of us (Barak, Iyyar, and I) sat eating ice cream and watching Muppets DVDs on Abba's laptop. By bedtime, he was informing me that the hospital had been fun. I don't think he remembered anything but the trains and the ice cream.

I was thinking about posting a picture of Barak, just so that you could all have some idea who you're reading about (those four or five of you who don't already know what he looks like). But I feel a little funny about posting anything that identifying, especially since I might want to take the permissions off the blog one day and don't want to have to go back changing old posts. So here is a little picture of Barak as a baby. He looks pretty similar now, just bigger, and with a backhoe loader yarmulke. Grandma E made the poncho, which is in Iyyar's drawer now.


Chag kasher v'sameach to everyone who would like to have one, and happy Easter to everyone else.

The fastest way to find a lost wallet

is spending the morning on the phone canceling your credit cards.

Mmmmmmmmmm.

I am eating noodles with cheese. Not just any cheese, but the first Parmesan cheese I have bought in its block-of-cheese state since I started keeping kosher about, oh, a decade ago now. And I probably didn't buy Parmesan then either, since I was in grad school and couldn't afford it.

But I was in the kosher grocery on Thursday, and I saw a great big hunk of kosher l'Pesach Parmesan. And I couldn't resist. Ask not what it cost--it was worth every penny.

Two-minute post

I promised my husband I'd be in bed by midnight, so this will be short.

Barak is, B"H, fine. He woke up right after I finished the last post, and for about half an hour both he and Iyyar howled in stereo. Once they'd both calmed down, the afternoon got much more pleasant--we watched Muppets DVDs and ate ice cream (or nursed, as appropriate) on Barak's bed until almost dinnertime. He seems mostly recovered now; his voice is still high-pitched and funny, but otherwise he is acting his usual self. What I can't get used to is how quietly he sleeps now--at night the house used to be full of the sounds of stereo snoring. Now you can only hear Barak breathe if you put your ear right up to his face. Kind of unnerving.

After the surgery, his doctor came out and told me, "His adenoids were enormous! They were completely blocking his nasal passages." I didn't realize until a couple of days later that she was right. Barak picked up a tea bag in the kitchen--orange blossom tea, and very fragrant. I sniffed it, and it smelled wonderful, and I handed to him asking him if he wanted to make a bracha. He sniffed and--the look on his face! It was the look of someone who just discovered a whole new sense he didn't know he had, which was, of course, exactly the case. He hadn't been able to smell anything for who knows how long. And he probably hasn't been tasting that much either.

Oops. 12:04. Good night!

All done

Surgery at 7:30, out at 8:30, ice cream at 11:30, home by 1.

The beginning and end of his hospital experience--the parts in the playroom with the table set up with Thomas the Tank Engine trains and tracks--were a blast. The part where he woke up from anaesthesia with an IV and a pulse-ox monitor--not so much.

They're both napping now, and I thought I would do some writing, but instead I think I'm going to join them.

Thanks for all your good wishes. Full round-up to follow, when I get a chance.

Updates

1. I took Iyyar to the pediatrician this afternoon. The more I thought about it, the less happy I was with the care we got at the ER last night--a medical student so clueless he thought only fat people had apnea and all new parents are advised to put babies to sleep on their stomachs. When I heard that last one, I couldn't help it--I asked him if he was a doctor. "I'm a medical student," he said. "Haven't you ever heard about Back to Sleep?" "I'm going into radiology." Well, then. The attending (not a pediatrician) thought Iyyar looked fine, and is he your first child? I felt that my concerns (MY BABY STOPPED BREATHING) were not being addressed, and that I did in fact know the difference between normal sleep breathing and absence thereof. So we went to the pediatrician. He instantly, when I told him what happened, said, "that sounds like obstructive sleep apnea!" Ya think? He looked down his throat. "Wow, look at those tonsils. Yeah, he should definitely see the ENT." And I left with my referral, and another ER crossed off my list of good places to take a child in the middle of the night. Or ever.

2. Barak is scheduled to have his adenoids out and tubes in his ears tomorrow. I am so freaked out about this I am in a state of complete denial.

3. On the way back from the pediatrician's, we stopped off at the barber's and Barak had his first real haircut. It is buzzed and he has payes. He looks, and I mean this in all sincerity, like a completely different child. It is hard to overstate the difference the haircut made. He was unbelievably cute while we were waiting--he saw the jar of lollipops and speculated with me which lollipop each of the bearded men with black suits and white shirts would choose. "He's gonna getta lollipop? Hiss also gonna getta lollipop? Think hiss gonna getta blue one!" I wished I had had a camera, to preserve the image of Barak perched high up on a barber chair, under a yellow striped tent, grinning and giggling at me in the mirror.

4. This is Barak's second night in a real bed--well, a crib-sized mattress on the floor, not in a crib. I'm trying to find him a used Little Tikes racecar toddler bed on Craigslist. There have been a few, but none in our area--I think he would love it but it's not something I would spend a lot of money on. Anyway, he's sleeping in a bed now. And has had a haircut. Milestone after milestone.

5. And speaking of milestones, Iyyar woke up crying a little while after I put him to bed and when I went in to get him, he was standing up in his crib. That's another first.

All right, time to get things together for tomorrow. Barak's surgery is scheduled for 7:30 am, so we have to be there at 6, so we have to leave at around 5:40.

Trying not to panic.

What's your poison?

My friend Jasmin works in an emergency room, and one of her principal gripes is people who use the emergency room when they shouldn't--when they really should be making an appointment with a primary care doctor, or when they're there for something silly. One of her examples was, "my baby's breathing funny!"

I hope I can still be her friend, because tonight I took my first-ever run to the ER with a child, because the child in question was breathing funny.

In my defense, the child in question was in fact having distinctly un-funny periods of not breathing at all. Iyyar, when I went to pick him up when he cried earlier tonight, snuffled around a little bit, tried to breathe, and for whatever reason wasn't getting any air. You could see his chest working at it, but nothing was going in. He tried a few times, and then--stopped.

A couple seconds went by, he twitched and gasped and got air. Now, I know that children often start and stop breathing at night, because Barak does it all the time. I'm used to it. I'm used to it in Iyyar too. What I'm not used to is a baby who is obviously trying hard to get air in, and can't because something's blocking it.

I called the pediatrician, who said, "Sounds like obstructive sleep apnea. Get it checked out. Go to the ER."

So I did, where the staff took one look at my (when awake) happy, smiley, curious, unbelievably flirtatious baby and instantly pegged me as a crazy mom. Baby is obviously fine. Go home.

In my defense, I pointed out that a) the doctor TOLD ME TO COME, and b) this is my second kid and my first-ever trip to the emergency room, and c) HE STOPPED BREATHING! Did he turn blue? I don't know, the room was dark. Go home, lady.

What's important here? Everything's fine. B"H.

So... when you're intensely stressed, or coming down from being intensely terrified (OH MY GOD MY BABY IS NOT BREATHING) what do you eat? I'm not talking "I'm waiting to see if the guy I dated twice is going to call again, where's the chocolate," I'm talking waaaay past that. Past chocolate chip cookies or Hungarian noodles or even cheese melted on tin foil in the toaster oven. What do you eat when you need 180-proof comfort food?

Bread and butter. White bread. And butter. And diet coke. That's my poison.

What's yours?

Pizza

Barak and I share many traits in common, among them our preferences in food. Neither of us is a very great fan of most traditional Shabbos food. It's not that I don't like potato kugel and chicken soup and cholent. I do. But if you made a list of my fifty favorite foods, forty-eight of them would be dairy or parve and the other two would be not-suitable-for-Shabbos fleishig.

So when the end of Shabbos rolls around, I am usually very much looking forward to my milchig malava malka. Sometimes I make Hungarian noodles or macaroni and cheese, sometimes I make pizza (I have that Bosch and all), sometimes I make cheese pretzels. I usually don't get around to eating anything until pretty late, and since I'm usually too busy with the kids to eat much of a seudat shlishit, by then I'm hungry.

This week, MHH invited some of his boys to a malava malka. I planned pizza. I made six pizzas' worth of dough, and cleaned, and had cheese and toppings and drinks on hand. On Friday, MHH came home and said, vaguely, that he wasn't sure how many would come. On Saturday night, I s asked him when he'd called it for. "Well, I never really set a time. I was having trouble keeping them on task and forgot to mention it." Oh.

Strangely, nobody came. Hmm.

Since I had pizza dough already, I made pizza for myself. Like I said, I like pizza, and I was hungry, and I wasn't really all that put out about not having a bunch of teenage boys descend on my houseful of sleeping children.

Did I say sleeping children? Sorry, my mistake.

I got the pizza in the oven, and Iyyar woke up, wanting to nurse. I nursed him, put him back down, and took the pizza out of the oven, practically rubbing my hands together with anticipation and glee. Children in bed! Kitchen clean! Husband otherwise engaged! Pizza!

Yeah, right.

Iyyar started crying again, and when I went to get him, there was Barak standing in his crib (Iyyar's old pack and play, where Barak sleeps now, since he still scorns his toddler bed) looking his most winning. "Imma," he said, positively dripping sweetness and hope, "I needa come out. Needa poop potty please."

Oh, right.

"Do you need to poop right now" [I am, remember, nursing the baby] "or can you wait a few minutes."

"I ca' wait a few minutes." Pause. "Come out please. C'I come out."

"Sure, come out. Abba will take you to the potty, okay."

Barak positively cannot believe his good fortune. He climbs out. "I just gonna play a iddle bit, 'kay?"

"No, Barak, you're not going to play. It's 10 pm. If you need to poop, that's fine, but it's not time to play."

Barak decides not to push his luck.

"'Kay. I just gonna poop onna potty."

"Just wait a minute, and Abba will come get you as soon as he's off the phone."

"Iss okay. I just gonna go poop potty by myself."

"Oh no you're not. Wait just a minute for Abba." Abba does not in fact get off the phone, so I put Iyyar back in his crib, mostly asleep, and take Barak to the potty. I set him up with his monster book, and think, would it be terrible to go eat a little pizza while it's still warm?

"Barak, I'm going to go to the kitchen, okay? You go ahead and poop."

"'Kay." Barak is happily sitting reading his monster book, clearly in for the long haul.

I head back to the kitchen. I wash, again. I take one more bite of pizza when

"Imma! I pished! Imma!"

I go and duly admire. Barak flushes. I head back to my congealing cheese.

"Imma! I pooped! Imma!"

"Abba, please, can you go help Barak on the potty?"

I take three bites. Three. I counted them. Barak is in the kitchen, dancing with joy.

"I pooped! I pooped onna potty! I gonna getta ice cream graham cracker sprinkles!"

"No, sweetie, it's too late for that. You already brushed your teeth, and we don't do treats in the middle of the night."

"I getta jellybean M?" [A jellybean/M & M from the Jar of Potty Treats]

"No, sweetie, no treats now."

You know how people talk about faces crumpling? Barak's looked like someone reached over with a first and scrunched it. Hard. He was crushed. I got out of bed, I pished, I pooped, and I get NOTHING?! Clearly, this would not do.

"All right, Barak, how about we go listen to Hashem is Here."

Sniff. "'Kay."

We go into the back bedroom, find Hashem is Here on RealPlayer [How annoying is it to pay for a download that is write-protected so that you can't load it onto your iPod?!] and listen. Twice. Barak is pleased. He goes back into bed with minimal fuss.

And I eat my stone-cold but still quite tasty pizza.

Unbelievable.

I did it again.

Singing

So, Barak is scheduled to have his adenoids out and ear tubes in a week from today. Over the weekend it was just so obvious how much he isn't hearing--he's frustrated, we're frustrated, and it's not good. So. Tubes. I am assured by the doctor and most people who have either had them or had their kids have them that his hearing will be miraculously improved; I am also told that he may very well have a big jump in his language.

In case that is what happens and he starts talking more like an almost-three-year-old, allow me to regale you with a few current Barakisms:

Last week, MHH was suffering from too much work, too little sleep, and general under-the-weatherness. We decided to be nice and bring him lunch. I had made him lunch, put it in the stroller basket, and gone with Iyyar to pick up Barak at school; then we went from there to Abba's school. I called to tell him we were coming and he came outside to meet us. "Barak, let's go to Abba's work. Let's go bring Abba his lunch." "Abba gonna eat it lunch?" "Yeah, he's going to eat his lunch." "Iss very yummy?" "I hope he likes it!" "'Kay."

Fast forward to today. It was a little after six, so we were expecting Abba home shortly. Barak wanted to do something that required my undivided attention, and Iyyar was requiring the same; I said, let's wait for Abba to come home, okay? Barak considered this. "Where Abba go? Abba inna bafroom?" No, Abba's at work. "Abba's 's work? Wass he doing?" I think he's teaching. "No. Hiss not teaching. Hiss eattinga lunch." No, I think he's all done eating his lunch. "Yeah?" Yeah. (Pause.) "I think hiss earning." What? "Hiss earning. Hiss earning a book." Ohhh. "Yes, he probably is learning. He probably is learning from a book."

Iyyar started crawling on Tuesday. This is late--he's 10.5 months old and some kids are walking at this age--but it's exactly what Barak did so I'm not concerned. He's very excited about this crawling business and will spy something he wants, fix it with his steely gaze, and head straight for it, huffing and puffing (hoo! hoo! hoo!) with the effort of it all. The things he wants most of all are a) Barak's Little Tikes car, purchased for five bucks at the rummage sale where we got our couch last summer, and b) the loader-less toy formerly known as the backhoe loader ("Broke it backhoe loader." "How did you break it?" "Gotta share it.") The car is okay as long as I am keeping an eye on him; the loader is not, because I have seen those wheels come off on other similar toys and they are perfectly sized to be a menace to babies who put things in their mouths. Most of those toys have quietly gone into hibernation, but I have not yet made the backhoe loader disappear.

At least ten times a day, Iyyar spots the backhoe loader, drops down onto all fours and heads out on a mission. "Hoo. Hoo. Hoo." Laboriously, hand after knee after hand, he pursues his quarry.

And then Barak sees him.

"No no baby! Iss not for you! You no can't have a backhoe loader!" And he moves it a foot or two away.

Iyyar looks at Barak as if to say, well, that was a dirty trick, but I'm sure there was a good reason for it. I'll just crawl another couple of feet. "Hoo. Hoo. Hoo." He gets there. He gets his slick-with-drool little fist tight around the backhoe. And:

"No no baby! No can't hold it! Iss not for you!" Barak pries fingers off loader, and moves it another two feet away.

I think the loader needs to go to the garage for a little vacation. Don't you?

Oh, and on the title of this post: singing. We, like any self-respecting Orthodox family with small children, own a number of Uncle Moishy albums. None of them, however, have the Uncle Moishy classic number, Hashem is Here (song number 5). It goes like this:

Hashem is here
Hashem is there
Hashem is truly everywhere

Hashem is here
Hashem is there
Hashem is truly everywhere

(pointing with your finger)

Up, up, down, down, right, left and all around
Here, there and everywhere is where he can be found,

Up, up, down, down, right, left and all around
Here, there and everywhere is where he can be found!

Got that? Good. So, when we took Barak to see Uncle Moishy after Iyyar was born, he was very taken by this song he'd never heard before. And now he sings it by himself. It sounds sort of like,

"Hashem seer, hashem sare, hashem everywhere! Up, up, down, right, left, he ca' be found!" Then, "You sing it."

Today, for whatever reason, on the tenth or so iteration of this I started with the finger-pointing part. Barak was outraged. "NO!! First Hashem Seer!" I obligingly started again at the beginning.

"Now sing ma nishtana please."

Three weeks. Less than three weeks...




"

Random

The scene: a silent auction for the bais yaakov. I have Iyyar in the sling. A lady in a sheitel spies me and frowns. She comes up to me. I sense the beginnings of a mothering drive-by. I am not disappointed.

Lady in sheitel: What is that you've got him in?

Me: A sling. It's called a Maya Wrap.

LIS: Oh, how interesting. Where did you get it?

Me: It's made in Guatemala, but I got it online.

[Pause while LIS tries to figure out how to tell me indirectly that I should not have my baby in the sling.]

LIS: Is he comfortable in there?

Me: He looks pretty happy.

LIS: Doesn't that hurt your back?

Me: Not if I wear it right, no.

LIS: Wouldn't he be happier in a stroller?

Me: I don't think so. He's close to me like this and he can see everything much better.

LIS: Do you carry him in that a lot?

Me: Pretty often.

LIS: Aren't you afraid he'll get a little... too attached?

Me: No.

* * *

The scene: Our kitchen, late Shabbos afternoon. Barak is eating yogurt, I'm feeding Iyyar mashed banana, and MHH is eating leftover cholent.

Barak: Wassat?

MHH: It's cholent!

Barak: Abba eating a cholent? Iss yummy?

MHH: It's cholent! It's so geshmak!

Without any warning, MHH and I burst into the Uncle Moishy cholent song, at full operatic throttle. "Cholent! Cholent! Cholent a la kiddush! Cholent! Cholent! Cholent so delicious..." He sings a line, I sing a line, we sing a few lines together. Barak watches and grins. After the grand finale "... say, l'chovod Shabbos kodesh, and put it on the flaaaaaaaaaaaaaame!" MHH is bent into the refrigerator looking for something.

Me: Are we weird?

MHH: We have character.

* * *

The scene: The bathroom, erev Shabbos. I'm getting dressed. I'm getting over being annoyed at MHH, who was an hour late getting home from work and put about 3/4 of a stick of butter in the two-people's-worth of pasta I'd asked him to take off the stove when I raced out to get a few things before Shabbos. Drain it in the colander, put it back in the pot, and add a little butter so it won't stick, I said. He obediently added three quarters of a stick of butter. And some olive oil, because, you know, that's healthier than butter. And then he returned the pot to the flame, because I hadn't said anything about turning the stove off. [Think Amelia Bedelia.] So the noodles that had been destined for Barak's eponymous doodles cheese became deep-fried doodles. Good intentions and all, but I am slightly grumpy and MHH knows it.

Barak: Poop potty please. Abba, read a book please! Read a cat book!

MHH: I can't read you the cat book [Millions of Cats]. That's a library book. Imma doesn't let you read library books in the bathroom. Should I tell you the story?

Barak: Yeah!

MHH: [I am totally not going to do this justice. I was hurting myself laughing. But I'll try.] So, this is a story about Jimmy. [All his stories are about Jimmy. Jimmy has sort of a Brooklyn accent, and sounds like he drives a cab.] Jimmy, his wife, she's lonely. She says, Jimmy! Go get me a cat! And Jimmy, you know, he wants to make his wife happy. He's a good guy, and he wants to make his wife happy. So what does he do? He says, sure, I'll go right now. I'll go get you a cat. And his wife says, I really want a cat, okay? So don't come back without a cat. And Jimmy, you know, he takes his wife very seriously and he says [with determination] okay, I'm gonna go get you a cat. And he goes to get a cat. So he walks and walks and walks, and it's really late, and he's kind of tired, but he's gonna get his wife a cat. And because he really loves his wife, he stops and picks her up a diet coke, too, 'cause she likes that. So he's looking for a cat. And you know, it's not easy, because this isn't Yerushalayim where you just shoot a tranquilizer dart down the middle of the street and you hit a fifty-pound cat you can haul home. No no. This is America, where it's harder. And Jimmy, he's a yiras shamayim, so he's not going to go steal someone's cat. What's he going to do? Well eventually, he hears the sound of meowing. He hears kittens meowing, and he thinks, gevaldik! Cats! He goes to the house where he hears the meowing, and he rings the doorbell. And this lady, she answers the door, and he says, "Lady! I'm lookin' for some cats! My wife, ah, she needs a cat. You gotta cat?" And the lady says, well, yeah, I've got this cat, but she just gave birth to a hundred kittens. And Jimmy says, "A hundred! Well, my wife only wants one." And the lady says, well, my cat, you know, she was having some a, some difficulty conceiving, you know, so we got her on ["What's that drug that makes you have triplets?" "Clomid."] So we got her on Clomid. And we didn't know, you know, that she's a Yerushalmi cat. And I guess they react funny to Clomid, because she had a hundred kittens. But they're all very attached to each other, so you'd have to take them together. And Jimmy, he looks at this cat, and she's like a tiger! Like a saber-toothed tiger! ["Tiger so scary?" "Yeah, they're very scary."] She's like fifty feet long! She fills up the whole living room. And Jimmy thinks about it, because they live in a one-room apartment, but the room is pretty big and he thinks she'll fit as long as she doesn't stretch out too much. So it's okay. So he says, okay, I'll take 'em. Boy, is my wife going to be happy! She only wanted one cat, and looka what I got her! And he takes the mother cat--she's looking kind of tired, because you know, she's nursing a hundred kittens, and that's not easy--and he thinks, my wife will really like this, because it'll be some company for her while she's nursing the baby--and the hundred kittens, and he takes them home. But his wife's not there when he gets there, so he doesn't know what to do. Because the cats, they all, you know, they need to poop potty. Just like you. And he doesn't have a litterbox. Now all these kittens, they're crossing their legs, all four hundred of them--four hundred and four, counting the mother--and he doesn't know what to do. And they're hungry. So he goes and..."

[I forget the rest. But I forgave him for the noodles.]

Tubular

Barak can't hear that well. I've been noticing this for a long time, and took him in to the doctor for it last fall sometime. He said, yeah, there's fluid in his ears. Bring him back in six weeks and we'll see if it's cleared. When we came back nothing had changed, so I asked for a referral to an ENT.

We went last Friday, and she was absolutely decisive. "He needs tubes. And he needs his adenoids out." Ten minutes later, she was gone and I was holding the phone number of the surgery coordinator.

On Wednesday, I took Iyyar for his ten-month checkup and Barak in for a preoperative (choke) physical. My pediatrician seemed to have nothing at all to say on the subject of tubes. I asked him what he thought. He said, "I hate to put tubes in a kid in March. It's only been four months. It'll probably clear in the summer. Why not wait?" Would he do it if it were his kid? "Probably not. If he still has fluid in June, sure. But right at the end of cold season? The surgeons who do tubes talk about it like it's nothing and there are no risks, but that's not true. You can get..." and he reeled off a whole list of scary-sounding things. "I'm not saying I'd never do it. I'm just saying it seems worthwhile to wait until the weather warms up."

I called the ENT back. She was just as sure as she'd been. "He meets all the criteria. He's probably hearing at 40 decibels. You'd want to do something about that if it were your ears, wouldn't you> It's a very, very low-risk procedure, and it will help so much. He'll sleep better, he'll breathe better, he'll hear better. Don't you want to take care of that? Why would you wait?"

Why indeed. Um, because he's my baby and I don't want anyone to operate on my baby if it isn't absolutely necessary? How about that for a reason?

Don't I want to take care of it? Of course I do.

There is, by the way, no question that he can't hear very much, and I know the adenoids will have to come out sooner or later. So why not just do it all at once?

Argh.

Did you have tubes? Did your kids have tubes? Do you have any wisdom to share?