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My dad was a DeadHead…
Well, kind of. I’m sure lots of kids about my age, and younger, were born to the crowds of people who followed the Grateful Dead around the country, creating a moving community of people unified by an organic style of music, and music-making. My dad never traipsed around the country, and, to my knowledge, never…
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Wedding Bells
I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings lately. Last Sunday, Tikvat Israel hosted the annual spring Cantor’s concert, this year titled “Under the Chuppah” The concert was amazing, with members of the community providing explanations of the various elements and traditions in a Jewish wedding. Over several weeks before the concert, the event was previewed…
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Sister-strife
I have one sister. Only one sister. She was born when I was six years old, and, unlike my friends now, who encourage their first-born children to hold their newborn siblings within hours or days of her birth, my first memory of my sister was that I was not allowed to touch her, let alone…
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Tot Shabbat
Our Friday nights and Saturdays follow a rhythm that varies rarely. Most Friday nights we try to be home before sunset (an almost impossible challenge for us in winter, but achievable in the summer months). We have a nice meal together, in our dining room rather than our kitchen table. The meal is structured with…
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What a ride!
So, as promised, the second children’s book that we downloaded to review was: “Speeding Down the Spiral: An Artful Adventure” by Deborah Goodman Davis and illustrated by Sophy Naess. Verdict: we all loved it!! It’s 33 pages long, with some pages containing some complex and extended text, but our 5yo was engaged and excited about the pictures and…
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Not the lesson on nature or biology I was expecting…
Sometimes the cover of a book is deceptive. And, I think this may be one reason why selecting e-books can be so challenging. The cover of this book appealed to me, and the title suggested to me that I and my kids might learn something. Sadly, I was disappointed. Their response? They liked it well…
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Reading electronic books
There’s been a lot of discussion on the news and on the web lately about the influence of e-books on our brains, and on how we read and how we learn. And the net is so ephemeral, that I can’t find, now, an article that I read and found fascinating just a couple of days…
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Big Brother Poetry…
We found two pieces of paper in S’s red folder (the folder that facilitates communication between home and school). Dad had read them already, and was upstairs doing the bedtime routine when I found them. I read these in the kitchen, while cleaning up the dinner dishes, and couldn’t stop laughing! S said from upstair,…
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Story of a tooth
I haven’t broken a single bone in my body, in my whole life, except for my upper right front incisor. And I’ve broken that one three times. The first time I don’t actually remember, although I remember having a direct memory at seem time, but now it just feels like hearsay. It was on one…
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Providing an anchor, an invisible rope
“…my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in—splash!—and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty. And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, …[but] she’s still the little girl in the pink-and-orange flowery swimming costume to me, and I still have my invisible rope around her…
