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Voice recital
I sang solo, in my voice teacher’s annual spring recital, this past Sunday. It was my third or fourth year participating, and the first time that I felt reasonably well prepared. Every year, my teacher Beverly Diaz encourages us to invite friends and family, and this year was the first time I actually did tell…
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Who is a Jew?
At the end of this month, we will bring our boys to the mikveh, meet with the Bet Din, and, assuming all goes as planned, each boy will go into the mikveh (with my dear husband, who will be immersing for the first time himself), emerging from their immersion as Jews. This act will complete…
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Singing in many languages
I sing in a choir; I’ve sung in choirs since I was 11years old, almost continuously, with only a break for medical school and residency training. The choir I sing in now, Zemer Chai, just performed our spring concert, and it was amazing! Titled “I Am Determined To Walk In Freedom”, our concert included a…
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Learning to manage one’s emotions
There are many things I am noticing as a parent now, that I don’t think I had the perspective or time to notice the first time I parented a small child, nearly 30 years ago. One of those things, that I’m peculiarly attuned to at the moment is the development, in our boys, of the…
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Timelessness
I came across the following entry on the On Being Blog: http://blog.onbeing.org/post/5763399528/wishing-for-less-time and it was timely in that i had the following experience recently, on a shabbat (sabbath) morning. just as an introduction, before we got the kids, we were fairly observant of the Jewish sabbath/shabbat, always home for dinner (trying to start before sundown,…
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No “umm hmmmm”, no “ah haa”
When I don’t understand what a child says, or an adult, for that matter…I tend to use the auditory placeholder “umm hmmmm” or “ah haaa” as a way of giving myself time/space to figure out where the conversation is going. 5yo S, in his year of language acquisition, never seemed to mind this verbal tick…
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Second ECC Carnival
The end of January marked one year of our new family, so, since then, we have been experiencing “seconds” – second Purim, second Passover, and today, our second ECC carnival. Last year, J was not really aware of what was going on, and S was into the activities, but was not really on board with…
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Immigration
I was listening to a recent Intelligence Squared debate titled “Don’t Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses” and it got me thinking about the immigrants in my family, the most near of which are my father (born in Sri Lanka, and came to the U.S. as a graduate student), and our kids…
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Ghosts…
My father died when I was 19 years old, half a world away, and I was left bereft, and disbelieving. Over the years, I have had many occasions of struggle and feeling beat down, and, in those times, especially in the early years after his death, I wished that he would appear to me in…
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Kindergarten orientation
How fun! And we wouldn’t even have known about it except that our dear friends the Schwartz’s were notified because their youngest is entering Kindergarten next fall (but not attending the local elementary school). Even though we have tried to alert the county to the presence of our prospective students in their cachement area, we…
