Shabbat

We had a nice, mostly restful Shabbos. (I will continue to use "Shabbos" and "Shabbat" interchangeably, so get used to it.) Friday night for me used to be synonomous with "Soup, followed by collapsing on the couch with People." Shabbos morning was "Work my way through the NY Times, and Read People Again, Because Once is Never Really Enough. Also Drink Coffee." Hence the title of my book on child-rearing. (See: earlier posts.) But now, I am bereft of all newspaper, except for the Hebrew newspaper I get at ulpan on Tuesdays, which is written in "Ivrit kalah" i.e. Ivrit for Dummies. So I've been doing a lot of reading books, but I'm almost halfway through my third book. I only brought 3 new books, so this is causing me no small amount of panic. I take comfort in knowing that there's always rereading all 7 Harry Potters. However, the upside to my lack of reading material is that I am forced to actually spend time with my children, and I have discovered, on the whole, that they are not such bad little people, really. We read books, play Memory, I break up the not-so-occasional fight, and then we start all over again. On Friday night, the kids were actually really cute. They took out this wooden fruit toys and some other random toys to the mirpeset. We have a little kiddie table and chairs out there, and they decided to set the table and have Shabbos dinner. They were so funny, especially when Ariella decided to bentch. First she bentched, as much as she knew, then she began singing gibberish to the tune of "Adon Olam." When she gets started, let me tell you, she could rival the minstrels in medieval times. She goes on, and on, and on... Today, Donny went to the far away shul, and we tried to meet him coming home but the timing didn't work out. Yaakov was very disappointed that we didn't see shul or Daddy. Donny liked the shul he went to today, which I am happy about, but I kind of wished he liked the closer shul, because that would be much more convenient for me.
In the afternoon, Donny and I basically left the children to their own devices and tried to sleep. It kind of worked. Donny locked the front door so they woudn't be able to escape, thereby limiting the amount of damage they could do to themselves. Of course, since Yaakov has managed to break his leg slipping on a magazine, we probably didn't limit all that much. Eventually everyone fell asleep, and then of course I had to wake them up so they didn't sleep too long. It is one of the ironies of life, that children sleep when you want them awake and are awake when you want them asleep. One of the hard things about school on Sunday is that they have to be in bed at a reasonable time after Shabbos (or "motzash") as it's called here. As I write this, it is almost 9:30 and I'm pretty sure one or both of them is awake. After naps and Shabbos party, we walked to a little park down the block from our apartment. It was very convenient, and pretty empty, so my kids got to be the crazy ones, unlike last week. We also met a nice couple at the park, who had a little kid and spoke English and were very sweet and said they would invite us for a meal! Nice people! Here! They don't actually live in Dimri, which might account for this anomaly. It got kind of cool at the park, so we went home and read more books until Shabbos was over. Then I checked Ariella's hair for nits - I am becoming very paranoid about this. Her gan sent home a note, first asking for money (in post-dated checks, naturally), and then letting parents know a couple of other things, including the importance of checking for lice once a week. My favorite line was how lice had already been found in some kids, "vezeh rak inyan shel zeman ad shezeh yagi'a eilecha habayta!" - and it's only a matter of time until this comes to YOUR house!
Food update: Ariella LOVED the chicken soup...phew! And as for the carrot kugel, it tasted fine, but I should have used a different setting on the oven because the inside was all mushy and gross.