What Not to Wear...Seriously....

Some recent excitement in the Rose family (not that anything can compete with the Return of Uncle Jonathan, but you know, we can't have that every day.) (Thank God) (Just kidding, Jonathan!)

Fashion: Help!
Whilst waiting for an appointment, I had the rare opportunity to watch some Really Bad Israeli Television. A talk show was on, and the guest was Israeli Fashion Guru, telling the audience what kinds of clothes should be tossed out of the closet. These are clothes, dear Readers, that I hope with all my heart none of you ever owned to begin with: Glittery t-shirts decorated with skull-and-crossbones, oversized, baggy, tie-dyed stretch pants...
Just give me a minute to get rid of all those clothes in my closet ok done.

Also amusing was observing what the Israeli Fashion Guru and her Fashionable Hosts were wearing themselves - a combination of leather-studded jackets, bad dye-jobs, see-through pocket t's, baggy shirts decorated with, I think, black poodles - and the look all tied together with hot pink lipstick.
Stacy and Clinton, you have your work cut out for you. Just brush up on your Hebrew. Actually, don't bother - did you know "Beeg no-no" is actually a Hebrew phrase???

Jelly and Paint
Today was the pre-Chanukah party sponsored by misrad haklitah. Though Ariella had been invited to a birthday party tonight, she chose to skip the party in favor of the Chanukah activity. Of course I, having not read the chapter of my own child-rearing book ("Leave Me Alone So I Can Read the Paper") entitled "Stop Projecting, You Twit" said to Ariella, "Are you sure you don't want to go to the birthday party? Your friend Rebecca is going - I don't want you to feel left out if all the girls are going to be there...." She responded, with the patience reserved for stupid people or olim at the bank, "Mommy, I've been to LOTS of birthday parties before. I really want to do the Chanukah activity!"

So off we went. The evening started off with sufganiot - can't go wrong there - well, you can, because the misrad haklitah seemed to have found the only doughnuts in Israel with jelly actually inside, rather than just dotted on top. And as Yaakov munched on his, the jelly squirted out the other end. Onto his sweatshirt. And shirt. And pants. And shoes. Oh well.
Then we, somewhat strangely, lit the menorah and sang maoz tzur. I said last year that Chanukah lasts about 3 weeks in this country - apparently the MHK takes that seriously.

Then, there were 2 rooms of activities - one for gan kids and one for school-age kids. However, there was only one of me, who could not be in 2 places at once. Since the gan room was a balagan (hmmmm.....gan.....balagan....I'm seeing the etymology here) we sat with the big kids. There was a slide show of different menorahs from around the world and then the follow-up was creating your own metal menorah. However, the slide show was longer than 3 minutes, meaning the natives were quickly growing restless.

So we trooped back to the gan room. (Luckily, they didn't card Ariella and realize she was actually in kitah aleph). By this point, many of the early raiders had left, leaving a mess, but also plenty of space and plenty of supplies. And there was paint! How fun is that? Soooo not something Mommy ever lets us do at home! So we sat down and painted a kad katan (anyone have a good translation for "kad?" "Pitcher" just doesn't seem to do it.) Yaakov painted his green, then pink, then yellow, then poured glue over it, then finished by covering the whole thing with silver glitter. It is quite bling-y. And the sparkles and paint went really nicely with the sugar and jelly on his shirt. Ariella did a "splotch of color" motif which looks quite spectacular. Then, they spent half an hour doing coloring sheets. Yaakov likes to color his sheets all black so he can see the outline of the picture when the light shines on it.

Although I worried during the slide show that Ariella would regret not having gone to the birthday party, at the end of the evening, she said, "Mommy, this was so much fun. Thank you for taking me."