Medurot

Two posts in a row! This is for all of you out there who complain, "You don't post enough." Let me explain here that in order to post, something has to happen. Brilliant though I may be, I am not God (at least not most of the time) and therefore cannot create something from nothing. So if I do not post, it's because the day went something like this:

Woke up. Ate breakfast. Kids went to gan. I did stuff. Kids came home from gan. Food was consumed. Baths (maybe) were taken. Kids went to sleep. Yaakov came out of bed. Donny came home. Yaakov came out of bed. We ate. Yaakov came out of bed. We threatened Yaakov with having to sit on the couch and listen to Daddy discuss man's responsibility towards God and country. Yaakov quickly escaped to bed. We went to sleep.

Not very exciting, you understand.
Today though, I will tell you the story of the Barbeque That Wasn't.


Once upon a time there were two little children. Let's call the girl, oh, I don't know, Ariella, and the boy, um, how about, Yaakov. Okay. (This is why I can't write the fiction book Donny keeps telling me to write. I can't even make up names!) Ariella and Yaakov were both home sick on Sunday, because they managed to get through March and April without a trip to the doctor's, and decided to make up for it post haste. However, they weren't, like, so sick. So their mom decided to take them to Yaakov's gan's Lag b'Omer shindig in the evening. Why, you ask? First, except for the aforementioned doctor's visit, the children had not left the house all day and had both taken naps, and therefore had energy to spare. Second, their mother was in charge of bringing the corn on the cob, and did not want the other little gan children to suffer through a shindig without corn.

Now at this point, some of you astute omer counters might be wondering - isn't Lag B'Omer not until Monday night? (Uh-oh - if I wrote that does it mean I can't count tonight? I can tell you one thing - I am NOT asking Rav Aars that question. He'll start telling me to do libun chamur to my omer sign or something. And then marry Jonathan. From now on I stick with my "Don't ask, use the pot" approach.) It seems, though, that because there are so many Lag B'Omer medurot going on on the actual day, many gans/schools choose to celebrate a day early, in order to ensure they will have a patch of rocks on which to celebrate. So we drove to the large patch of rocks where the gan shindig was being held. I drove slowly, trying to identify our gan mothers from among the dozens of other gan mothers. We found the spot. It was exactly 6:00, the time it was called for. And there were exactly two other mothers there. We waited for about a half an hour until the rest of the families showed up. All around us were flaming, ginormous medurot, spewing fire and ash and all manner of toxic fumes. And all we had was a tiny little circle of stones. (No, Momz, not THAT circle of stones.) Apparently someone forgot to bring the WOOD. Eventually, we got the wood and kindling gathered. Then we all sat around, staring at it, until someone suddenly exclaimed, "We need to LIGHT it!" Yes, yes, we all nodded excitedly. So approximately 50 minutes after start time, we had a roaring fire and we sat down to retell the story of Bar Kochba using a stuffed lion and some drums.

Ok, I thought when it was done, time to eat. But, first rule of a medurah: Medurah does NOT equal mangal. In other words (i.e. English) "bonfire" does not mean "barbeque." The fire was simply to be yotzei the mitzvah of medurah b'lag b'omer. (Like cheesecake b'Shavuot.) The food was all pre-cooked: hot dogs, salads, corn (ahem, ahem), Bissli, of course. But first, we had to make pita! Tha's right! Get out your aprons! It was 7:00 in the evening, my children were ravenous, and there we were, bringing out flour and oil and water and sugar. Plus, we were not equipped with a pita-making kippah (I am Crazy Hyperlink Blogger tonight!), so the pitot had to be made one at a time in a foil pan held over the fire. Luckily, the real food was being put out, and my kids decided they'd rather eat hot dogs than make pita. So we ate and beat a hasty retreat. The funniest part was how much FUN all the kids and parents were having! No one cared that it started late, that it was past bedtime, getting chilly, and they had to wait forever for their pitot. Nope. They were having a grand old time, jumping on rocks, watching the fire, peeing (and more) when the need struck, chowing down on hot dogs and marshmallows and (eventually) pitot with chocolate spread. I'm thinking I need to get me a little Israeli spontaneity.

The End