The Ten Commandments

The holiday of shavuot begins Thursday night and celebrates the day that Moshe brought the torah down from Hashem to the Jewish people. It is a tradition to stay up all night and study torah (er, like I'm doing right now?). I decided that this year as a family we would study the ten commandments. I found this *wonderful* mnemonic for memorizing the ten commandments in order and I can't wait to share it with Amirah and the grownups! It's so incredibly simple. I just loved it!

Lovely (Free) Music

I accidentally learned about an incredible recording that was made a year ago in the UK celebrating the land of Israel. The arrangements and compositions are really beautiful. It's all available for a free download here. I've only briefly listened to parts of it since it is the omer (the period between Passover and Shavuot during which we are in a period of semi-mourning), but I look forward to really reveling in it after Shavuot.

AHA!

I've been looking for this recipe for a couple of YEARS. I lost it a while back, and now it's been found again. This is the BEST milkshake recipe, and it doesn't use any ice cream...

1-1/2 cups cold water
1-1/2 cups nonfat dried milk powder
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 to 1-1/2 trays of ice cubes
2 tablespoons oil to help it stick together

Whiz it in the blender for a couple of minutes. Haven't had them in a very long time, obviously, but I think I'll make it for the kids tomorrow if I can find the ice cube trays! :)

The Menu

challah
roast chicken
mashed potatoes and gravy
spinach almond orange salad
roasted ginger carrots
roasted asparagus
chocolate birthday cake with handmade chocolate trucks on it!

and for tomorrow....

mergez sausage soup

HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY TOMORROW, ELI!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Raizel!

That girl has graduated from troublemaker to bubblemaker. She had a very nice birthday today. We had our learning time in the morning, followed by cupcake and frosting making. She decided on purple cupcakes and pink frosting. After lunch, we went to the toy store to spend some "free" money... we had filled up our purchases card (took 4 years!) and had about $30 to spend. They decided to put all the money into one present and get a remote control car. I also let Amirah get a nice little plastic horse. She followed me all the way to the register sighing, "Oh, mama. THANK you. THANK you. I love it..." It was very cute.

Then we walked across the street to Starbucks and sat and had a drink treat. They were very excited about that one! Then we went to pick up papa and I went to teach, then home for toast, eggs, and oatmeal... with cupcakes for dessert. And a few presents. Tennis balls were a big hit. As was the fancy-shmancy skirt and shoes from grandma. A nice birthday for our girl. And now for 3 more days, she and Eli will both be 3 years old. OH! Another big highlight was the phone calls. Her favorite thing (after fancy shoes) is definitely talking on the telephone. She kept coming up with names of people we should call. Very funny girl. Time for sleep...

Laundry

Exciting topic, I know. But if there are six in your family you think about laundry A LOT. I've found a new method that feels like it saves me lots of time. For the heck of it, I'll tell you about it.

By the drier, I started keeping a laundry basket for each person (4 for the kids and 1 for the grownups), one for upstairs miscellaneous, and one for downstairs miscellaneous. As stuff comes out of the drier I sort it on the spot. Most of the girls' clothes and all of Eli's shirts now get hung up, so I'm not really folding anything any more either. As a basket fills up with clean clothes, I put it away. One basket only takes a few minutes. I run laundry through here and there. I also got our wardrobe down to an 8-9 day supply for the basics.

I used to do all the laundry in one long marathon on Sunday, then dump it all into a big (giant!!) pile and watch a movie while I sorted and folded. But this could take 2+ hours! Then it never seemed to quite get put away before I started the next Sunday marathon. Now I feel like I spend almost no time doing laundry. It's been great!

Anyway, very mundane, but things like this make a big difference. :)

It Won't Die

Well... the van isn't toast after all. Yay! (Boo!) Yay! (Boo!) Apparently, all you need to do to fix a latch that won't unlock is kick the door really hard. Our nextdoor neighbor, who just fixed the rear side latch on his car a couple of weeks ago, got this advice from a yahoo group. So... we're back in business (for now!), and this 5' 11" mama doesn't have to crawl through the van to buckle in the littles. Sure beats the $800 we were going to have to spend to get it fixed!!

Quote of the Week

We have someone who comes to clean twice a month to help keep the house "showroom ready." (Ha, ha.) Here's what Eli had to say...

Eli: Mama, does Rosemary come to help us clean?
Mama: Yes, Eli, Rosemary comes to help us clean.
Eli: Is that 'cause you don't clean so good?

:)

First Siddur

A lot of birthdays coming up here... Eli's & Raizel's this coming week and papa's and Amirah's next month. I just ordered Amirah her first all-Hebrew siddur, traditionally received when a child turns six. Amirah has been very excited about this and can't wait to daven from a real siddur! Other than some Hebrew supplementary materials I've ordered everything I want to use for first grade except for her handwriting and spelling books, which I'm off to order... NOW!

Butter

Today the papa went into work to work on job applications and a class he's taking at PSU (last one!). So, any day that papa works we do too! Had a great learning time. I've been enjoying First Language Lessons so much that I decided to go to Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading (same author), which I'd gotten a long time ago and never used much. Amirah did really well and we'll be trying it out for a while, I think. Explode the Code has been great for reading/spelling. Math is going well too. And Hebrew and torah. I'm pretty happy with everything, and very glad that we've been able to keep up a nice amount of learning time through all the crazy house stuff.

After the basics were done, I got all the kids together in the kitchen to make homemade butter. They loved doing this. We put a pint of whipping cream into the mixer (after tasting it, of course!) and let it go on high speed. We stopped it when it was whipped so we could have another little taste. Then we let it go again. Just when it seemed like we would never get butter, suddenly the butter and the buttermilk separated. Another few seconds and it was one big glob sitting in a bowl of buttermilk. I strained the butter and kneaded out the last little bit of liquid. We divided up the sweet, mild buttermilk and tasted it. I kneaded a little salt into the butter. Then we made toast. They all thought it was the best butter they had ever eaten. :)

the butter makers

the buttermilk and the butter

Afterwards, we went to play in the Beaverton fountain since it was so hot today (mid-80s). It stopped working 15 minutes after we got there! :( But we had fun on the playground, then went to pick up papa. A very nice day. And a very tired mama... Good night!

The Menu

Simple, since it's been a bit crazy today...

challah
roast chicken
butternut squash kugel (a recipe from the end of my most recent murder mystery book!)
roasted cabbage
roasted zucchini/carrots/onions
salad
cous cous/cracked wheat/lentil stuff
chocolate-covered strawberries

And for lunch...

I have no idea... YET!

A Toasty Van

The van is toast. The back latch stopped working and won't open. $800-900 to repair. Needs new brakes and rotors. Another $800. Gee, darn. Drat. Guess we'll be getting that new-to-us van now after all. At least the van got hit by a branch in December! Already got paid for it, and we ought to be able to squeeze a little more cash out of it. So, if anyone hears of a Ford, GMC, or Chevy full-size van, from 2000 or later, we're in the market for one! Hopefully in the next couple of weeks...

And....

Now I'm downloading the manual for our home phone because I have NO idea how to change the outgoing message. Seems like it should be very obvious, but the buttons don't indicate anything that's relevant. This is really ridiculous.

Phones Are Too Complicated

But we need one for those realtor appointments... So, I spent a good amount of time figuring out how to actually USE my bare bones cell phone. In 3 years I've only used about 300 minutes on it (and that's mostly from when we use it out of town), which gives you an idea of how ignorant I am. After becoming an expert I realized that Tracfone does not have a call forwarding feature. We used my cell phone as the contact number so I would get notice of appointments wherever I was. Seems reasonable, right? Wouldn't want to come home and find out a realtor was coming in 5 minutes. So what's the problem??

When someone leaves a message, unlike an answering machine, you can't hear it. Over shabbat we don't use the telephone. If a message was left, but we didn't hear it, someone could show up on our doorstep without us realizing they had made an appointment. So instead we added call forwarding to our home phone, so that we could change that to the main contact number and I could forward calls to my cell phone whenever we left the house. It cost almost the same to add voicemail, which we did, which is a bit of a waste but our answering machine is not sounding so good anyway... But of course, when a message goes to voicemail you don't hear it either. I'm going in circles.

So, I just figured out that I can record the Friday/Saturday message to realtors explaining that we have limited hours available then, leave the answering machine on during shabbat, then turn it off afterwards. I won't have to change the message every Friday to explain the shabbat rigamarole. I can't believe how many hours I've spent on TELEPHONES. OY. I was wishing we could plug in the corded phone, dump it all, and have people talk to us when we're home, which is often. But people - especially realtors and their clients - expect instantaneous contact availability. And of course I would hate to miss an appointment with someone that could be THE person who buys our house. On the other hand, if all of this instantaneous communication weren't available, then it wouldn't matter at all. On the other hand, I do like having my $9/month cell phone for those occasions when it avoids great inconvenience. Oy. I need shabbat! Baruch hashem, it's only hours away. I have no idea what I'm cooking, but there's plenty of time... unless a realtor calls! :) Shabbat shalom!

John Day Pictures

DAY ONE - Shabbat

Sorry, no pictures! But it was a lovely day...

DAY TWO - John Day National Monument, Sheep Rock Unit; fossil digging; Murderers Creek

the lovely hills

resting in the Sheep Rock area

digging for fossils at Fields Creek

our cow friend


playing at Murderers Creek

DAY 3 - Lake Magone and horseback riding

Digging holes at Lake Magone

Deer bones at the side of the road. A bit odd!

Can we please live on a farm, mommy?

DAY 5 - Fossil (too wet to dig for fossils in Fossil); John Day Nat'l Monument, Clarno Unit

great clouds

We hiked up to those spires above. It got so windy near the top
I thought we'd all tumble down, so back down we came.

She can't have keys until she's 25.

Farewell, John Day National Monument!

Our Amish Cousins

This article is so funny! When you see Amish and orthodox Jews standing side by side you realize just how very similarly they dress. In the pictures you have to squint to figure out which ones are Jewish and which are Amish.

Ethiopia Adoption Statistic

Avi and Raizel were 2 of 1,725 children adopted in the US from Ethiopia in 2008. It was the fourth most common country from which to adopt. Guatemala had 4,123 children; China had 3,909; and Russia had 1,861. China has dropped off a lot. In 2004, 7,044 children were adopted. In 2008, it was only 3,909. Just interesting...

Really Great Book

We have nearly finished reading The Hebrew Kid and the Apache Maiden by Robert Avrech. I was a little skeptical when I ordered it from the library, but the reviews were all so high I thought I'd give it a try. Most Jewish children's fiction that is written from an orthodox perspective is, well, bad. Other Jewish fiction from a less traditional source barely delves into the religious life of the character at all, or is so non-traditional that I just can't read it.

This book is a wonderful, sometimes humorous, often touching story of a boy from a Russian shtetl who escapes the pogroms in Russia to arrive in Arizona to face dangers of a different sort. The boy is a young man grounded in tradition and it informs all of his actions. The book warmly explores multicultural understanding without ever being trite or annoyingly "politically correct." Someone who does not know anything about Judaism will find it immensely accessible and very educational. All the Judaism in it rings true.

The conversations are smart. The Jewish aspects are not forced at all. They are an organic part of the story. We have two chapters left, and it has been a long while since I have enjoyed reading a book this much. I will be very sad when it is over. It is Mr. Avrech's first novel, and I hope there are many, many more to come.

Another touching note - the main character, Ariel, is named after the author's son who died of cancer when he was 22. Mr. Avrech wrote the novel in the midst of his grief. I can't recommend this book enough. One of the best laughs - Ariel serving up his mother's kugel and cholent to Doc Holliday (as in Gunfight at the OK Corral). Funny. I just love, love, love this book.

Horse Photo

It's way too late, but just had to add these before bed...

Wonderful Vacation

We are back from 5 days in the ruggedly beautiful desert of eastern Oregon. Highlights included seeing the incredibly pastoral John Day River (which brought on intense daydreams of getting our raft in the water), walks in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, digging for (and finding!) fossils, Amirah's first horseback ride, learning about Chinese workers in Oregon 130+ years ago, and missing the 11 visits from realtors that happened while we were gone.

The air was bright and fresh. The sun poured down. We battled the GPS that kept telling us that the "better route" was on one-lane dirt roads full of potholes. We enjoyed the extra-friendly hospitality at the Best Western in John Day, where we were surprised with a 2-room suite with three queen beds and a crib. Made a 5-day stay in a hotel very pleasant! We usually prefer vacation home rentals or yurts, but there were no yurts and very few vacation homes. We almost had a house, but it had to undergo emergency repairs.

So, we're exhausted, but really had a great time. I'll post pictures soon, especially the ones of a blissed-out Amirah on horseback.