Our First Holiday Season

Chanukah came early this year. It started BEFORE Thanksgiving. Crazy? Right? 

So we celebrated. Duh. 

We lit candles each night - first time we didn't miss a single night. And Eliana was enamored with the candles. We lit them with dinner each night. She watched them the entire time she ate.  

We hope your holidays were as wonderful as ours. 

While Eliana and I are Jewish, Matt is not. So we celebrate Christmas with Matt and his extended family. 

Like I explained about Thanksgiving, Matt's family celebrates the weekend before. This was that wonderful weekend in December with 70 degree weather. So yes, Matt & Eliana are walking in the woods in a T-shirt. So we went to the shore to celebrate at Matt's uncle & aunt's house with the whole extended family. We got there early to spend some extra time playing outside in the park. Someone LOVES the swing!

We play games. Sometimes trivia. Sometimes funny. This year we played reindeer antlers. One team member had to wear nylons on his head with the toes cut off. And they rest of us filled them to make antlers. I'm filled with hot air, so our team won!

Unfortunately, we weren't going to be around on actual Christmas day. So we celebrate as a family on Sunday. We attempted to go to Church with Linda (someone's nap got in the way). And then came home for lunch and presents. We didn't really do presents for Eliana for Chanukah, so this was new. 

Eliana watched Matt intently as he "helped" her open her gifts. 

We have a favorite book around here. Nana found it while we were walking around NYC over the summer. Dinosaur v. Bedtime is a crowd pleaser around these parts. And Lauren & Phil gave us the next book in the series, Dinosaur v. Library. Let me just tell you ~ AMAZING!!!!!! We are in so much love.

Christmas is a strange holiday. I hate all the commercialization that has happened in the last few decades. I hate listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. But I love the actually holiday. I do enjoy going to church with Linda. 

And this time of the year will be very complicated in 2014. Eliana will be old enough to ask questions and wonder why we are celebrating both holidays. How do you say that everyone believes something a little different, but that is also really complicated. and that it's okay because we support each other's differences. And that we believe one thing and Daddy believes something different but we can celebrate all together. Wish us luck! 

We hope that your holidays were filled with family, love, and happiness. We hope that they holidays were exactly what you wanted from them. And maybe a little more. 

L'Shana Tova

I have to confess, in my family I am the most secular Jew. They might not know it, but it is how I feel. I do not actively seek out my Judaism on a regular basis, nor do I participate in being Jewish. We do not light the Shabbat candles every Friday night. We do not attend services. We are not members of a congregation or the JCC. I am Jewish, it is just part of me. Like saying I have brown hair. It is just factual information.

As I was sitting in temple last month for Rosh Hashanah services I was struck by the amount of community I am missing by not being more involved. I was sitting in services, by myself, when a couple sat down next to me. She introduced herself and started talking to me about the synagogue. She engaged me in her community. She could have left me alone, but she didn't. Then, the president spoke about how the synagogue as a community needs to be looking out for the new people and the people who are not yet involved in their community. And I felt like she was talking to me. She said L'Shana Tova means Happy New Year, and I knew that, we say it every year. Then she said that L'Shana comes from the same root as  L'Shanot, change. Let Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur serve as a moment of decisive change in your life. 

It resonated with me. 

It happened again at Kol Nidrei services. Kol Nidrei is a prayer for those who cannot pray. It is the community asking forgiveness for those who cannot ask for themselves. A different couple sat down next to me and we began to talk about the Rabbis and Cantors. A former student sat down with her family behind me and engaged me for fifteen minutes before the service and again afterwards. They asked if I was a member, and when I said I wasn't, they asked if I had enjoyed myself. No pressure to join. Just make sure you still get involved in the yearly programs. 

It resonated with me again. Like listening to the shofar sound. The universe is talking to me. I miss prayer. I miss being involved in the temple. I miss being an active participant in my Judaism.

And in the last month, I have thought about it a lot. And I have started looking into the Temple. I have started doing the research. I have started making plans for us and for our household. My hope for this New Year is that the "little" change Eliana has been (little in size, not the change) will continue until we can fill the void. Let me take these feelings seriously and act on them. Let me make changes that last. May this year be a Happy New Year and a Year filled with Happy Changes.


On a similar and different note. My goal this year is to forgive those who hurt me. I want to not take offense as quickly or as deeply. I want to learn how to let it go better and faster. There was a prayer in the Kol Nidrei service that really stuck with me - even now a month later.

Give us the grace to show forbearance to those who offend against us. When the wrongs and injustices of others wound us, may our hearts not despair of human good. May no trial, however severe, embitter our souls and destroy our trust. When beset by trouble and sorrow, our mothers and fathers put on the armor of faith and fortitude. May we too find strength to meet adversity with quiet courage and unshaken will. Help us to understand that injustice and hate will not forever afflict the human race; that righteousness and mercy with triumph in the end. 

There are people we live with, work with, are friends by association with, who drive us up the wall. In a high school, I work with bullies on a regular basis, whether student or adult. I am tired of it. I am looking for my armor of faith and fortitude as well as the quiet courage and unshaken will to stand up for what I believe is right. More importantly, I want to stop focusing on the wrongs done to me. I want to be able to focus on all the positive things that happen during the day. I want to change my focus. I want to focus on the change. 

Shabbat Shalom & the Floors

This post is going to have a lot to say. So keep reading. There are at least 3 different stories about to happen.

Let's start with the floors. Every day when I come home I am surprised by how much of the floors are done! So much has been going on with them. Matt is a flooring-MACHINE!

Recently, the living room was finished. You saw that. And put back together! YAY!!!!! Then it was on to get the dining room and kitchen ready. While Matt was installing a new sub-floor and fixing the squeaks, he discovered that one of the beams supporting the kitchen had a huge crack in it. So he fixed it. Like, duh. He bought a new beam and supported it. I got to help.

Then we opened up the boxes of knotty (I thought it was naughty, just kidding!!) wood that we got on clearance. In the store it looked really good. They had a little 3x3 area sample on the floor, and we liked the variations a lot. Then we opened up the boxes. They were all 12 inch pieces with 1 or 2 2 foot planks thrown in. No wonder they were clearance priced! Garbage. So we returned them and bought more of the beautiful wood from the living room.

Then it was Memorial Day weekend! I thought I would give Matt the house to himself to be able to keep installing the floors to his content. But the wood had to acclimate to the house, and it was delivered on Friday. So by Sunday, he was happily back to work. And by Tuesday night, the dining room was done!

And now it is Friday. And Matt was hard at work all afternoon. He finished half of the kitchen, then installed molding in the dining room and one side of the kitchen. I hope that this is the last weekend of floors! HOPE HOPE HOPE!!! He told me we could put the dining room and island back tonight! Oh wouldn't that be a Friday miracle!

Which leads me to Story #2. Recently, we had a disturbance in the force. The disturbance is not important. The outcome is very important. We are at that point in our lives where things that haven't really mattered are becoming more important. We are deciding what rituals are important and how we want to deal with them. 

Tonight I brought home dinner. And dessert. But most importantly Challah. Tonight we celebrated our "First" Shabbat. We are going to be more observant. This was important (wow how many times have I just used that word) enough to me to stage a small war between us before we got married. We will be raising Jewish children. It was important to both of us to raise children in one faith not both.   




Both is too confusing and makes children choose between their parents. We are not okay with that for our children.

Before I tangent too far off, we had a picnic tonight. On the new floors between the kitchen and the dining room. We ate burritos. And Challah. And Mondal bread. And B&W cookies. I lit the candles (first duh) and said the blessings. We didn't bless the wine (or beer) because Matt would be using more power tools after we ate, and that just didn't seem safe. And we sat on the floor and talked about the day.

The weirdest part? After dinner, and after we welcomed Shabbat, I was able to sit down and relax. It felt natural. It felt right. It felt like coming home.

Good Shabbos. May your life be blessed with joy, love, and happiness.

Passover 2012

Passover has a weird reputation. Did you know that? Well it does. The story is one that everyone knows. But the food? Oy. The food. For those who know and eat this every year, it is not the best - although that is self-imposed, because I can cook like a champ. And Passover only gets rid of the carbs. Not the end of the world - but everyone still complains about it. Jews hate matzoh and non-Jews think it is delicious. But then they go home and eat chicken nuggets and tater tots... But I digress.

Passover is one of the most well known stories in Jewish traditions. It is the retelling of the exodus from Egypt. From slavery to freedom. From oppression to redemption.

So my family. Let me tell you about our traditions. Growing up we did the whole traditional Passover. We sat around the table and read the Haggadah (the book). We did the whole traditional boring Passover complete with kids who misbehave. Then we moved to Connecticut. And it continued for another few years.

Then my mother completed her course in GENIUS. I am pretty sure she has a Doctorate in it. But I was a kid and I didn't pay attention.

Focus. Again. Passover. Genius. She decided that we should use more imagination and move the Seder from the dining room table to the living room, under the "tent." We hung canopies from the ceiling (years ago) and we feel like we are in the desert coming from Egypt and towards our redemption and freedom. We began using the Haggadah more like a program and stopped reading the whole book.

We do so many things that are not the norm. We play games to help us better understand the message. We play BINGO, Scattergories, ask the 4 Questions in every "language" we speak. We have to put the actual story back in order - all 60 lines.

Originally we did these things to keep us kids on task and paying attention. We designed the Seder in our family to cater to the younger generations.

Just as we grew up. Our Seder has been growing up. Over the years, we have played fewer games. We have been asking more challenging and pertinent questions. We have been learning to be Jewish adults. This year we had a 95% adult Seder. We didn't play any games officially (we played the ghost version - you know as if we were still playing, but we weren't) and this year we had a theme.

REDEMPTION. Mom said there are three themes to the Torah. Creation, redemption, and revelation. Of the three themes, two of them happen to us without our consent. God makes that decision and it happens. God creates us and God gives us the Torah whether or not we are interested in it. However, she pointed out that we have to work for redemption. We have to take ourselves out of Egypt. We have to ask for help and work to complete it. So this year we talked about our personal redemptions.  Matt explained that his was helping students. He works in a low SES school and he helps them achieve in high school to help them towards higher education. I understand that. Another person explained that her redemption was asking for help and being strong enough to ask for help. That is hard to do.

My personal redemption is similar. My redemption comes not from asking for help, but in being receptive to it once I have asked for it. I am not very good at taking advice. Ever. I don't like to be told what to do. I like to think for myself and make my own mistakes. My personal redemption comes from asking for advice and then LISTENING to it and really taking it in without getting on the defensive.

It was a lot to think about. And even though I knew the question ahead of time (and others did not) I could not come up with a response that quickly. I wanted to process it and make it meaningful for me.

Throughout the evening we also talked about, explained, and debated some of the details of the Seder. The Seder always ends with "Next year in Jerusalem" and we discussed the meaning. Did it mean physically? Spiritually? Is is a metaphor? Does it discredit Jews living in the diaspora? Or is it about survival? It could be any of these or something entirely different.

Next year may we be in Jerusalem. And may we work all year to redeem ourselves in our own eyes.

Spring Break 2012 - The Overview

I have been avoiding writing this post for almost a week. It needed to be started, because without a start, there would never be an end in sight. Eeks. That is how I really felt. So to the beginning of the story.

We have been on Spring break for 10 days! Hallelujah! No one loves a school break more than the teachers. Seriously. You have your teenager to deal with, and the friends. We have an average of 150. And we see them EVERY DAY. All 150. Not just your kid and maybe a best friend. All of them. And they smell. But I digress. I don't have any interest in talking about the stinky kids. After all, I have to see (and smell) them again in two days. Oh how sad.

So 10 days. Spring Break. Lots of stuff happened around here. Well, around us. So from the beginning. For the first time (that I can remember) our grades were due the day before break started. Which means that if you get your work done early you have an extra day off. We have one day at the end of every quarter to make sure our paperwork is done. And if you finish early, then stay home on the work day. So I did! And to be honest, I don't have any clue what we did that day. At all. None. Nope. Nada.

Wait, this was supposed to be the overview post! So just the highlights! FOCUS!

So first. Matt did some work to the backyard. A new patio off the deck. A new set of stairs (that he is finishing right now). And a DIY jewelry rack for me!


Then, the lovely Tricia came to visit! Well, she had a wedding and stayed with us. And then we played hooky on Monday in DC. Who doesn't love going to the zoo when everyone else has to go to work?

On Tuesday, we dropped Tricia off at the airport, with the intention of her going home... more on that later. Matt, the doggies, and I drove up to CT to visit my family for a few days. And to do more tourist stuff. We went into NYC on Wednesday. Another day of playing tourist! We saw the Empire State building, the Intrepid, and Ground Zero. Then we went out for beer with a side of dinner with Dan.

On Thursday, we went up to Groton Ct to see another submarine. And then to Mohegan Sun to gamble. Because we could. I won money, and Matt broke even. Wonderful!

Friday, we finished getting ready for Passover. And had a wonderful last meal of pizza. There were about 25 people over for the first Seder. For the first time in a long time we didn't play games. Growing up, my mother (the genius) made a lot of changes to the traditional Passover Seder. But I am going to do a separate post on this too. Look back for it. After the Seder, my siblings and I stayed up very late hanging out. It was one of my favorite moments of the whole week.

Saturday I went to get a manicure with my Mom and sister. Then had lunch. My best friend of all time came in Saturday morning to have Seder with her family that night. And since we were on our way home (as soon as lunch was over) Janna and folks came over and we had a huge lunch together. Then we drove back to Maryland. The dogs slept the whole time. And they cuddled.

Sunday. Today. Easter. We woke up early and drove up to Linda's for Easter. Then back to her house for brunch. It was nice to wind down this week with Matt's family.

So Spring break. We did it. We have one day left. I will be spending it here and quilting. Love you.