A Vacation!

Our first getaway since moving here in January... BE"H, in six days we'll be moving into this North Carolina ranch house for five days:


And see this out our kitchen window:


And this from the family room window:

Amirah will be blissed out on cows, horses, chickens, goats, a pond, and whatever wildlife is passing through. I can't tell you how much we're looking forward to this getaway. It's been a rough week with viruses for all... I've been sacked out in bed half the day. Somewhere in that blur of a week, the kids managed to get quite a bit of learning done on their own! Amirah made a diorama/puppet show of whales and demonstrated all the different moves a whale makes on the surface. She plowed through a bunch of her spelling book. She read. And read. And read. She's turned into a reading monster. Eli decided he was going to whiz through the last twenty pages of his reading/writing/phonics book (Explode the Code), so he did and was very excited. His writing has been looking great. He made a city of cars out of a cardboard box, cutting and taping all kinds of things together. We read science and history. I pre-read our Jewish history book. We're onto the conquering of Spain by the Muslims. What a glorious time in Jewish and Islamic history. The Muslims actually contributed incredible amounts of knowledge and culture to the world, while Europe remained in the Dark Ages. If only their culture could regain itself and contribute something constructive to the world...

One of my favorite classes I took in college was called "The Three Cultures of Medieval Spain." We read and studied Jewish, Islamic, and Christian poetry and religion. The poetry that came out of Jewish Spain is unrivaled by any other time in Jewish history. Beautiful. And it was a very religious community, while also maintaining a very advanced secular knowledge. When I was 14, I became utterly enamored of medieval Ladino songs, and memorized as many as I could get my hands on. It's still my favorite music. At heart, I'm a sephardic Jew, but by an accident of conversion I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. Oh, well! :) Back to the kleenex box, and maybe sharing some of that Jewish medieval Spanish history with the kids. More about that soon. Fascinating!