Last week, my husband kept asking me, “What do you want for Mother’s Day?” “Nothing,” I replied, which was the truth. Thankfully, I have everything I need, and there was no gift I wanted which came to mind.Read More
The phone rang, and I could hear the tears in my friend’s voice. She explained that she had complications during pregnancy and was hospitalized for an extended period. Her twins were delivered prematurely and would need to stay in the NICU indefinitely. She worried about her babies’ development both short and long-term. “Why are other people having healthy babies but not me?” she asked. “I’ve lost my faith in God.”Read More
Each weekday morning, my day begins the same way. I roll out of bed and make the kids’ lunches. I pack a sandwich in a Tupperware box and then gather the fruit, granola bar, and cheese-stick, and shove them all in the lunchbox. Some mornings, the items fit in the lunchbox with ease. Other mornings (if I’m too sleepy and not paying attention), I have to take everything out and rearrange the items. As I do this mundane task each morning, I am reminded of something one of my teachers taught me in rabbinical school.Read More
My six-year old son, Jeremy loves maps. He enjoys playing with Google Earth and finding our home and the homes of his friends and family. The other day, I was reading the weekly Torah portion and left my bible on the table. Jeremy picked it up and discovered that it contains maps. “Where do we live on this map?” He asked.Read More
Each day, when I pick up my son up from school, I ask him: “How was your day?” His answer is always the same: “Boring.” When I then ask him what he did, he tells me about activities he enjoyed, who he played with on the jungle-gym, and the new things he learned. Whenever I see him at school, he’s running around, happy as can be, and doesn’t want to leave at the end of the day. Still, his initial response is always that it’s boring.Read More
The other day, my son Jeremy discovered an unopened birthday present in his closet. It was a Kinex Ferris wheel building set. We took out all parts, and I was instantly overwhelmed. The game had 25 pages of assembly instructions! Despite my reservations, we started putting it together. The process was inordinately complicated. Although the box said it was for ages seven and up, I wondered why I, being three decades older than that, was having such difficulty figuring it out. Maybe I needed a Ph.D. in engineering.Read More
My six-year-old son Jeremy recently became obsessed with Google Earth, a computer program which shows a satellite picture of the world. When you type an address, the program zooms in and displays an aerial photo of exactly where the building is located. Jeremy loves inputting the addresses of family and friends and watching the program go to each place.Read More
Recently, when I was finishing up the dishes after dinner, my son Jeremy came to me and said, “Mom, we have a surprise for you.” I followed him to his room wondering what the surprise was. Had the kids drawn me a picture or built a tall LEGO tower? He opened the door to his room to show me that my two-year old daughter had taken all the clothes from her bureau and spread them across the floor. Oy Vey!Read More
This week felt like a comedy of errors. My son came down with a cold, which he was kind enough to share with me. On Saturday morning, I woke up with laryngitis. I was invited to speak as a guest rabbi — but giving a sermon is a little tricky if you can’t speak! Having laryngitis any other week would be no problem, but the one week I needed to speak, I couldn’t.Read More
Sunday was my daughter Hannah’s third birthday party (which came just three weeks after my son Jeremy’s sixth birthday party). My husband and I threw the same kind of party for my daughter as for my son. I baked a cake — shaped like Dora the Explorer this time rather than The Cat in the Hat. We had Hannah’s class over for a party in the back yard, just as we did for my son — with a Moon Bounce and entertainment.Read More
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