Vibrant Moms

I mentioned a few days ago several areas that I want to focus on growing this year, one of them being to not feel that I need to control what happens.  That means to accept when things don’t go my way instead of feeling tense or negative, to let go of the results once I’ve done what I can do to achieve the desired result.  Today I was sent a beautiful opportunity to test my mettle! 

A few days ago someone had called to ask if I could drive her home from a medical procedure this morning.  I agreed, but when it was time for me to leave, dh wasn’t home with the van.  I decided to trust that he remembered I needed to be there and that he’d be home in time instead of feeling annoyed.  But after a half hour, it was time for me to be there and he still wasn’t home.  I called the medical center and asked them to tell her that I’d be late, and they told me she was already waiting since she’d finished early!  

I called my mother and asked her if she could drive me there to pick up this lovely woman, and she was happy to come over on the spur of the moment, putting her plans totally to the side.  Naturally, we got kind of lost on the way there, and when I finally got there, I was an hour late. 

Now you have to know that I’m a punctual person, particularly when other people are counting on me.  I take my commitments seriously and it bothers me very much not to meet those commitments.  So I had a lot of emotion involved in this scenario - I felt terrible to let down someone (who was coming out from under anesthesia), irritated with my dh, and my ego was definitely involved.  Who likes to look like they’re totally irresponsible?  My natural reaction would be to feel annoyed at my husband for causing me to be in this situation.

 No, I wouldn’t yell at him or even be nasty when he finally got home, but I would ask him if he remembered that I had needed the van because I had to be there.  Of course that would leave him feeling terrible to have forgotten, and I still would have felt annoyed.  I really didn’t want to open my mouth or do anything nonverbal that would indicate my frustration.  And especially since I felt my feelings were reasonable and justified, I needed to work hard to overcome them.

I spent a lot of time reminding myself what a wonderful husband I had, giving him the benefit of the doubt for being late.  I told myself he was probably so focused on getting all the yom tov errands done early in the day - to make me happy - that my plans slipped his mind. 

I’m happy to say by the time I got home, I felt totally calm and accepting of the situation, and loving and appreciative towards my husband.  When my dh answered the door, he immediately began to apologize for forgetting, but I was honestly able to tell him not to feel badly, that it all worked out fine, and thanked him for taking care of everything. 

It wasn’t easy for me to keep my mouth shut, and to focus on feeling love and acceptance of him instead of feeling justified in my annoyance for being inconvenienced.  But it made our erev yom tov so much more pleasant - I’m sure that’s a big part of why he so readily agreed when I said I wanted to go to the library to post here - on a busy erev yom tov, when we have so much left to do! 

Change isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth it!

Avivah

I hope your Sukkos preparations have been going smoothly!  The kids put up the main part of the sukka before Yom Kippur and then ds16 and ds10 built a couple of sections so we can extend it.  So now it’s four feet wider (for a total of 16′ long by 12′ wide) and it feels so expansive! 

Ds16 put the schach on yesterday and the kids also did most of the decorating yesterday.  That was nice since it means we are focusing today on the cooking and cleaning. 

Here’s our menu plan for the next two days - for simplicity, I’m listing all the foods at once instead of saying what we’ll have for which meal.

• challah
• roast
• turkey
• chicken
• potato kugel
• stuffing
• mashed potatoes
• sweet potato pie
• tabouli (cracked wheat salad)
• beet salad
• corn salad
• coleslaw
• roast vegetables
• fresh salad
• power bars
• snickerdoodles
• cake (don’t know which one the girls decided on)

We’re going out for lunch tomorrow and having guests for lunch the next day.  The night meals will be just the family, unless dh brings someone home from shul.  We’ll be enjoying having our newly expanded sukka on our new patio!  We wouldn’t have been able to make it larger this year if we hadn’t built the patio. 

Have a wonderful yom tov!

Avivah

I  hope everyone had a meaningful Yom Kippur!  For us it was great - my older four kids spent all day at shul (except when dh sent dd13 home in the late afternoon to check on me, and then sent ds10 home around 6 pm for the same reason).  Dd8 and ds7 were amazing - they kept everything running beautifully and I basically sat in the recliner and nursed the baby all day!

(Note - my home computer is down so I might not be able to post as regularly until it’s fixed - hopefully it will be quickly and easily taken care of.  I’ll also have to delay announcing and setting up the new blog, but it won’t be long!)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this last week about personal growth.  My breathing difficulties have been a wonderful health opportunity, and I’m looking at changing how I’m spending my time in several ways. 

I’m coming to think that most physical problems begin with an energetic/emotional block.  I read a book by Louise Hay called You Can Heal Your Life, and she correlates various physical problems with the emotional blocks.  Interestingly, what she wrote was what my chiro said about the breathing issues.

What I’d like to work on regarding this ties in with a lot of what I’ve been thinking about - where my energies are best spent and where they’re frittered away.  I recognize that in the name of being responsible, I’ve spent too much time reading the (negative) news online, and that’s making me less positive, less trusting, and more fearful.  That’s not the kind of person I want to be but if I keep spending my time reading negative things, it’s going to continue to influence me.  So first of all, I’m not going to be frequenting a couple of my daily sites that I get news from. 

Secondly, I don’t leave enough space in my life for quiet time for myself, where I can meditate, think deeply, or just breathe.  I tend to feel like I have to DO something.  Yes, I rest, but it’s not a purposeful connect with myself kind of resting.  So the next thing is to consciously take time to spiritually and emotionally ground myself.  During that time, I plan to do affirmations, writing, and reading, in addition to whatever else I do.  I’d like to do this is the early morning but will do it before bed if that’s when I find the time - I’m not making rules about this.

Lastly, I’m going to try to emotionally release the need to be in control.  That’s a much more subtle thing and it can even look positive on the outside, but it’s not good for me.  I can’t control the world, other people, or my family members.  I can just work on myself, and that’s where I want to stay focused.

What are your thoughts/plans on how to make this year even better than the past?

Avivah

We got home from our camping trip 1:30 on Friday afternoon and immediately got busy unpacking and cooking for Shabbos!  We once again had a wonderful time.  And maybe what was so remarkable about that is all the reasons that it could have turned out badly:

- initial delay of a day after finishing packing to go because of car trouble and the unexpected $820 repair bill.

- got to campsite and found out that the campsites ranger told us were right on the river, weren’t.  After choosing our first campsite discovered that there was a steep drop right behind it and had to repack up and find another site. 

- unpacked van and discovered that we didn’t have the necessary poles to assemble the tent we borrowed (we have one of our own that we use for me, dh, and baby, and borrowed a second large one with two rooms that are split between boys and girls).  Ds3 and ds2 (birthday was yesterday!) came into our tent, other kids decided to sleep out under the stars and woke up badly bitten by various bugs. 

- were told by ranger in advance that there’s a problem with bees if food is left out; weren’t concerned since we don’t leave food around when camping.  Found out very quickly that bringing out even a small bite of food attracted large numbers of yellow jackets (ds got stung when eating a plain piece of bread within 15 minutes of arriving).  They come out at the first sign of daylight and were still flying around when it started getting dark.  Several kids were stung, including ds2, and ds3 got stung twice. 

- had lots of beautiful deer in this state park, and lots of not so nice deer ticks.  We discovered this when dd8 took off her socks on the second day and asked a couple of siblings what was on her legs -lots of tiny ticks.  Other kids got them, too.

- ds16 and dh couldn’t sleep the first night because of congestion and wheeziness.

- I had my first asthma attack ever, totally unexpected and for which I was totally unprepared, on the second night which was beyond scary and for a very long couple of minutes couldn’t breathe no matter how hard I tried.  I begged H-shem to help me - and He did.  When I could breathe again somewhat, spent the next few hours sleeping upright on a chair inside the shower stall area of the restroom.  Then moved to the drivers seat of the van for another couple of unrestful hours.  And on the last night I sat in the van again, with the whine of mosquitoes in my ears, waiting for morning to come and periodically dozing off for short periods.

- we had to drive to an area for ds16 and ds10 to fish, and they discovered there was nothing to catch but seaweed. 

- the swimming area was also not in walking distance; had to drive seven minutes to get there (remember, dh told a ranger what we were looking for and were clearly told we could camp on the river and have fishing and swimming right there).  We got there and discovered that was mainly filled with seaweed, and the sand on the beach was packed down hard like a rock, not comfortable to rest on at all. 

But fortunately we get to choose how we think about things, and I told the kids on day 2 that we were going to use this as an opportunity to focus on what we liked and practice accepting reality as it is, not being annoyed about things that weren’t as we expected them to be.  We actively reframed everything.  So here’s the flip side of the above:

- mechanic got our van fixed in time for us to still have a camping trip, and charged a lot less than we were quoted at a different shop.

- because our first site wasn’t good for us because of the drop, drove around different loops of the state park and found one that was right across from the water pump and bathrooms.  Since this was furthest from access to the water, no one was choosing this section and we were the only ones in the entire loop, except for the campground host (who didn’t show up).  We had lots of privacy, so we didn’t have to worry about our noise bothering other people.  

- the older kids got the experience of sleeping under the stars for the first night, and we had a second tent so we weren’t totally stuck.  Went shopping for a tent the next afternoon and in spite of when you need to buy something it generally being the least economical way to shop, got a good buy.  The next two nights the kids enjoyed the tent and for our next trip we won’t have to borrow one!

- when we got there, the kids were very leery of the yellow jackets.  They got so used to them that they’re quite casual and almost impervious to them, now - they enjoy flicking them away.  That will come in handy for Sukkos!

- now the kids know what deer ticks look like; had them read the flyer posted where the announcements were about dangers of deer ticks, what to do, etc, - got an early start on the school year since that counts as science! :)  Learned that deer like miso, since one came into our campsite while I was resting and ate a chunk out of a container that hadn’t been closed well, apparently!

- there was hot water in the showers there, and ds16 was able to take a shower for 1 1/2 hours in the middle of the night until he felt better.  Dh joined him (though he was only in the shower for half an hour), and they had some late night bonding, chatting together from their individual shower stalls.

- I started breathing again.  There was a sheltered building for me to stay in at night.  There was a perfect amount of space between the bench and the curtain that closed off the shower area for my chair to fit.  We had one chair shaped a bit differently than the rest that allowed me to partially lean my head back, and my snood when pulled down over my nose did a great job blocking out the fluorescent lights.  No one else was there so I didn’t have to worry about anyone coming in, and it was a very short walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  :)  Got to take a nap both mornings and one afternoon, so that refreshed me.

- got a fun picture of ds16 with the seaweed he caught.  :)  And ds said it was relaxing for him to go fishing even if he didn’t catch anything.

- the beach area had a really nice park near by.  We met a nice family there, an older couple with several of their adult kids and grandchildren.  I chatted with one of the married kids, dh with the grandmother - when he told me afterwards they were homeschoolers, he was surprised when I told him I was pretty positive about that before he mentioned anything.  Strong extended families, friendly and open, and their kids played nicely with mine at the play area - all key markers for homeschoolers. 

This park ended up being a highlight for the kids, as they turned one of the play structures into an obstacle course, and took turns running over it as fast as they could while being timed.  Trying again and again to beat their times had them all excited and enthusiastic.  We wouldn’t have discovered this park if we hadn’t gone to the beach.

Though we generally enjoy parking ourselves in one place for three days, we enjoyed singing together with a cassette during our short drives from place to place.   The weather was perfect the entire time, the food was great, and the nightly singing and talking around the campfire was so, so nice.  We had a family hike together to a historic lighthouse and the kids helped out with holding ds3 in their arms or on their backs, ds2 in the hiking backpack and the baby in the mei tai, enjoyed seeing some wildlife up close (deer, groundhogs, foxes, frogs and toads, interesting insects), and just generally enjoyed one another’s company.  For the first time we had to get two campsites because of our family size; this gave us a lot more room and felt very expansive, and the kids really enjoyed the independence of sleeping in their own site (the two sites were adjacent).

We may decide to go back to our old spot for next year’s trip, but we had a great time this year!

Avivah

We got the new keyboard right after our phone lines went out due to some faulty wiring.  Hopefully dh will be able to fix it tonight or tomorrow but I decided to go to the library to use their computers so I wouldn’t be uptight about when the repair happens and can be a smiling and patient wife when he walked in the door.  I don’t have very positive thoughts about the internet usage at the library (since the library has a handful of people looking for books but the computers are always taken), but I’m grateful now for the ability to connect with all of you even though my home computer is down.  This isn’t very easy, though, since the person right next to me is using his time to look at very revealing pictures of plus sized large chested women and I’m really having to try hard not to use any peripheral vision.  It’s kind of distracting and very unpleasant.  I can’t believe people aren’t embarrassed to have others see what they’re watching.

On one hand it’s been challenging not having easy computer access for a week - the hardest thing has been not being able to post here since that’s something I love to do!  But on the other, it’s been liberating.  I’ve been more present emotionally for my family, gotten more done around the house, and most importantly, gone to sleep lots earlier!!  I’m going to hopefully use this as a reminder to be more careful to limit my online time and focus on doing what I really need to do.  It’s easy to get drawn into all the info out there, especially when there are so many things to learn about….

I have lots of things to post about but very limited time (31 minutes left), so I’ll catch you up on what’s going on in our house this week.

My oldest ds came home from camp yesterday afternoon.  Like dd14 a few weeks ago, he’s spent most of today sleeping.  She took at least a week of sleeping for hours later than usual to get back into her regular routing. This reminds me of the sleep needs of infants - I don’t think adults and infants are very different in this - we all need a certain amount of sleep and when we don’t get it, we need to either make it up or we get crankier and crankier. 

Ds16’s birthday was July 4 but we didn’t make much of a big deal about it, and then when dd13 had a birthday on Aug 4, we also didn’t do much.  Tonight we’re having a surprise birthday dinner for them both.  Dd is particularly difficult to surprise - she notices every single tiny thing that’s a little different.  She had a sleepover at my inlaws a couple of days ago so dd14 baked the brownies for her then and prepared the french fries - and of course dd13 came home and commented on a pan being in the freezer that wasn’t there before!  I bought a cheesecake for ds (he loves cheesecake) and we’ll have pizza, onion rings, french fries, and salad for dinner.  We’ve done what we can to keep dd from catching on, but we’ll see if tonight we actually manage it or not. 

Tonight would be the first dinner in almost 2 months that we would all be here for, except for the fact that ds10 is away.  He was invited on Sunday evening by a friend to go to Indiana with them first thing the next morning, and I shocked ds by immediately agreeing that he could go.  He’s having a great time. 

This week I’ve canned peaches (bought three cases of 24 lb each for 9.50 each on my shopping day last week) and peach fruit spread. I wasn’t happy with the fruit spread - I used frozen strawberries that I didn’t realize came from China and they were terrible.  I’ll have to check where the frozen fruits and vegetables come from, from now on.  The strawberries were tiny and a lot hardly had any color - I should have just composted them but I didn’t and I won’t make that mistake again.

Today I’m dehydrating pears that we picked last week.  They’re now very soft and ripe so they should be very sweet when dried.  I also have a basket of apples that the kids picked on Thursday when we out for our shopping day.  I have to decide what to do with those since they are rather tart.  They are HUGE - I was amused when I was told they are called Rambos.  They are very appropriately named - each apple is at least 1 - 2 pounds!

Avivah

>>So I see you make almost all food from scratch. Now I see that you are making a deck from scratch. What else do you make from scratch? Do you build any furniture from scrach? Sew your own things? Just curious in which other ways you can be self sufficient.<<

This is an interesting question. I answered it briefly in the comments section when it was asked, but I was thinking a lot about what is meant by self sufficiency.

To me, the root of self sufficiency is being willing and able to think for yourself and finding solutions to the needs that come up in your life. It’s not just about making clothes or growing vegetables - that can be part of it for some people - but being able to take care of yourself in a variety of areas. That means for us that I actively take responsibility for my family’s needs. Yes, that includes their clothing and food, but also includes areas like education and health that many leave to the government or other institutions.

To do that you have to believe in your ability to provide for those needs. As a nation, we’ve become overly dependent on the experts to tell us what to do and how to do everything. Unfortunately we live in a time where an attitude of disempowerment is very prevalent.  Most people really believe that the ‘experts’ have all the answers and trust them more than themselves. While I respect the knowledge and skills of those who have aquired certification in their areas of specialty and would certainly take very seriously their opinions if I consulted with them, that doesn’t preclude me aquiring knowledge that will be valuable to my family.  There are never ending areas to explore if you’re really searching for self sufficiency, but  fortunately, there’s very little that a person can’t learn about if they have the desire to pursue it!

Avivah

This morning I got what started off as a typical solicitation call - someone wanted to speak to me about sending a donation to their organization.  This wasn’t a personalized call, it was one of those automatic calls when you know they’re going through the phone book.  Anyway, the person on the phone informed me that I had made a pledge that I hadn’t yet paid, and belligerently told me to send them money. 

Now, I’m pretty careful about making pledges and I’m also pretty careful to send  payment promptly for any financial commitments.  We have checkbook used exclusively for charitable donations and all requests or pledges that we get in the mail are put to the side to either be paid right away or if it’s something I don’t remember committing to, I check with my husband to be sure that he did.  (Because I keep a separate checkbook for this, it’s also very easy for me to check when someone calls and asks me to match a previous donation from an earlier time - within a few seconds I can run through the dates and see if it’s there or not, and sadly, a lot of the time, the claims have been inaccurate.)  I rarely give pledges over the phone unless it’s an organization I’m familiar with, and I even more rarely donate to an unknown overseas organization since I try to keep my charity dollars directed towards local needs.

While I didn’t remember making any pledge to this organization overseas, knowing that things can slip between the cracks, I asked when the pledge was made.  November 2006, he said.  And then I made another pledge in October 2007.  Hmm.  They’re calling me almost three years after I first made the pledge?  I told him that I didn’t recall doing that - and it’s not consistent with how I handle my money, because I wouldn’t spend more money ‘on credit’ before paying for everything outstanding.   He insisted that I promised them money, was breaking my promise, and was costing their organization money because they kept sending me envelopes .  He said I had an obligation to them and demanded that I keep my promises. 

This was an interesting (though offensive) approach to take, I thought.  I’m not very responsive to charitable organizations aggressively making demands as if they were bill collectors.  I told him to avoid wasting any further envelopes on me and for the sake of absolute clarity, that I was officially revoking my supposed pledge.  He told me I couldn’t do that, that I had to fulfill my commitment and pay for what I had cost them.  I incredulously asked him if he wanted me to send a check for a dollar to cover the cost of the envelope.  He aggressively told me that they had sent me 18 envelopes (not one single one that I recall receiving, and I check all the mail) and I owed them $1.50 for each one.  

At this point I was pretty fed up and I politely ended our conversation, though he kept yelling as I hung up. (I try very hard not to hang up on telemarketers or soliciters, because as fellow human beings they’re deserving of respect - but if they insist on continuing a discussion after it’s clearly over, I  let them know that I’m unable to continue speaking to them and then say ‘good bye’.)   A minute later, the phone rang, and it was the same man calling back!  As soon as I answered he verbally accosted me and said I call myself a religious person but I’m breaking Torah laws because I’m lying and stealing from them.  Can you say emotional manipulation and guilt tripping?  I told him he was being presumptuous about my religiousity since I certainly didn’t discuss that with him, and told him he needed to be more careful about his own behavior (he said he wasn’t religious - I didn’t think that was an excuse as I’ve never believed that only a religious person can be a decent human being!). 

I suggested he stop yelling for a minute, and asked him if he felt his approach was an effective way to convince me to donate to his cause.  He told me that I wasn’t going to give them money anway because I was a dishonest person.  He told me again that I clearly wasn’t a religious person (because of my behavior), and ‘G-d will punish you for this’.  I told him I guaranteed that I would never donate a penny in the future to their cause because of him and it would be a very good idea to make sure my name was taken off their list.  I really did hang up at that point - there’s just a limit to how long you can try to be polite!

I know that times are tough financially right now for individuals and organizations, but being verbally abusive to potential donors isn’t, well, it’s just not smart! 

Avivah

>>Would you be able to write a list of all the handy kitchen gadgets you own that help in your food preparation and preservation?<<

 Sure, I’ll be happy to.  I’ll preface by saying I’m not into gadgets - if I don’t need it, I don’t want it around.  So my list won’t be very long.

Pressure canner - I think this is the most valuable kitchen tool I have. It doubles as a pressure cooker, making cooking beans or any other food super quick, and it enables me to can any food I can think of.  That means I can buy lots of fruit, vegetables, or meat when the price is right and have a safe method to preserve it for using at my convenience at a later time.  It wasn’t an expensive purchase, and even combined with the cost of all the jars/lids that I bought, it didn’t take us more than a couple of months before the free/inexpensive food we were able to take advantage of because we had a way to deal with it that we recouped our expenses.  The more expensive the food you can, the faster you recoup the costs.  Being able to can meat at sale prices has been a major money saver.  I have the Presto 23 quart model.  

Canning jars - this connects with the above.  In addition to obviously using them for canning, I use them for making kefir soda and making lacto fermented vegetables.  Also good for storing grains, nuts, etc.  They look nice on the shelf. 

Dehydrator - another very valuable food preservation tool.  Also saves us lots of money but I can’t say that we’ve recouped our costs yet.  I’m planning to give it a good workout this summer and fall to take advantage of cheap produce - I didn’t have this model yet last summer and relied mostly on canning as a preservation technique. I have the Excalibur 9 tray version.

Apple peeler/slicer/corer - this was very useful for us when we were able to get many, many pounds of free apples; it made processing the apples for canning much easier.  If you don’t need it for a lot of apples, it’s not necessary at all.  I have two, one from Pampered Chef and one from a company that I can’t remember - I paid $6 for one and $7 for another.  Hopefully I’ll have the chance to put them to use again this fall!

Food processor - we eat a lot of vegetables and this saves lots of time in preparing them.   I got a manual one to replace the electric one when it broke, but some kind of fast way to slice/chop/shred vegetables is very helpful for me.  Since the manual model chops and grinds but doesn’t slice and shread, there’s still room for me to get the electric model, which I’ll only do when the price is right. 

Grain grinder - because I like the nutritional aspect of freshly ground flour, this is a valuable addition for us.  We have the Nutrimill.

Blender - useful for making smoothies, homemade mayonnaise.

Handheld blender - I keep my main blender pareve and like being able to blend dairy soups with this. 

Good set of knives - I wouldn’t have put this on the list if you asked me a month ago.  But I just bought a new set since the knives we got as a wedding gift started to break.  The new ones are lousy even though they are the same company that made the originals and I really see what a difference good knives make (if anyone has recommendations for good knife sets in a moderate price range, please share!).

Griddle - this covers two burners on the stove and makes it possible for me to cook pancakes much faster than in a regular frying pan since I have more surface frying area.

There are other things I have which are useful, like a manual cherry pitter or a waffle iron, but they fall into the category of convenient but an extra.  You have to be careful about spending lots of money on unnecessary kitchen items.  Even if you get them for free, there’s the hidden cost of the space they take up.  To me, they have to be very useful to justify the room in the cabinets they use.  There are things like breadmakers that I don’t personally find to be of value that others swear by, so there’s really no universal list of what everyone needs.

If I had to recommend two kitchen tools that I think are worth buying for the person interested in saving money on food, it would be the canner and dehydrator. Since I got these, I feel like my food costs are going down while the amount I can buy goes up.  But you have to have an idea what you’d do with them once you get them!  They won’t save you any money sitting on the shelf. 

Avivah

I hope you all had a good and meaningful fast.  BH, here it was much less eventful than last Tisha B’Av, which was unfortunately too easy to feel the spirit of the day.  At that time, my friend’s 16 year old son died from injuries in a car accident and I went with my oldest two kids to his funeral (also attended by a huge number of people in the community), and then afterwards to pay a shiva visit to her.  It’s hard to believe it’s been an entire year - I can still remember everything from the moment I heard about the accident all the way through the funeral  as if it happened yesterday.  I called her yesterday a few hours before the fast to check in and see how she was doing with all of the emotion this time of year must be bringing up.  It’s very hard.

It’s a funny thing about Tisha B’Av.  It’s supposed to be such a sad day, but what I find the hardest is it’s usually a more pleasant and relaxed day due specifically to all the things you can’t do. Does that sound strange?  I find this challenging every year.  I sit on the floor, and my little kids get all excited climbing all over me.  I don’t chat on the phone, go online, read my typical reading material, eat meals, clean my house - so I have all this nice relaxed time to just be physically and emotionally present. There are no other things competing for my attention, and I can really be there for my family in a way that is hard to do most days of the year. 

Physically the fast was a good one, and I’m SO grateful that our weather today was much less humid than yesterday.  I was dreading the fast with hot and muggy weather.  I can handle the heat, but I tend to feel almost claustrophobic from the muggy air weighing down on me and I’m less receptive to my small children being very close to me at that time. 

Towards the end of the fast, dd12 (she’ll be 13 in the coming week) was bored so she started cooking for Shabbos.  Very constructive use of her boredom, isn’t it? :)  Since we’re going out for Shabbos lunch, our dinner preparations are in large part now complete, which is good since we want to work on the patio after chatzos.  I don’t think we’ll finish the details of it, since bricks at the end of each row will need cutting, and I think we’re going to come up short a couple of rows of bricks.  If that’s the case, I initially told the kids we’d make the patio a little smaller. But after digging up the area and framing it to the size they want it to be, they didn’t go for that idea, so now I’m planning to go to Home Depot to see if I can find some complementary contrasting pavers, since there’s no way I’ll be able to match up what we have.  Then we’ll have to pull up a couple of the first rows on one side, so we can edge both sides of the patio with the new pavers.  But we’ll see how it actually works out tomorrow after we get all the bricks we have left put in.  I’ll keep you posted.

At the end of the fast, the middles (ds10, dd8, ds7) starting taking the meal ‘orders’ from those fasting.  Ds10 came over to me with a pen and paper to write down exactly what I wanted, the specific foods as well as the amounts - they wanted to prepare individual plates of food for each of us for when the fast was over.  Isn’t that sweet of them?  I don’t know what made them think of doing this, but they did this for the first time this past Yom Kippur, and their initiative was definitely well received! 

But after ds10 took my order, then ds7 asked me if he could prepare my meal, so I agreed since ds10 was also preparing a meal for someone else and I saw how much ds7 wanted to also be involved. The only problem was ds7 was so tired by the time the fast was over that he really didn’t have much energy to do much of anything!  After he brought me a big cup of warm water - because he couldn’t reach the faucet for the cold water - I saw how he was dragging and suggested that he sit down and rest.  His heart was very much in the right place, though.  It’s the thought that counts! 

To break the fast, we had the watermelon that I bought to eat before the fast (but hadn’t had enough time then so had fresh pineapple instead) as well as fresh salad, potatoes, and eggs.  Dh put all the whitefish salad I was planning to serve in the freezer, but we’re all very flexible about food so it wasn’t a big deal.  We stick with our usual manner of eating both before and after a fast - though before a fast I tend to go heavier on more nutrient dense foods (like putting avocado in my salad), and after a fast I have something lighter.  (I also have an extra meal the day going into the fast.)  But I keep the proportions of protein, carbs, veg, and fat the same.  It works well for me - I don’t go into the fast feeling too stuffed to move, and I don’t go to sleep after the fast feeling sick from overeating. 

I can’t believe how fast the summer is flying by - before you know it, Elul will be here and soon after that the official beginning of the new school year.  I’m really loving our relaxed summer schedule, so I have to make the most of it while it lasts! 

Avivah 

Have you been wondering what’s happening with the patio we’re making?  It’s been a really big project due to the size of it and because of hauling all our own materials.  It’s been lots cheaper but lots more work!  It’s ended up that most of the time, we work one day, rest a day, which I didn’t purposely schedule but worked out well.  It kept everyone from getting totally wiped out. 

We were hoping to have it finished by last night when the Nine Days started but didn’t make it.  For the last couple of hours in the evening, the kids were working fast and furious, trying to get it done, and realizing how close they were (earlier in the day everyone was feeling like it would take forever and there was no possibility it would be done in time, so they were moving in slow motion).  In case you’re wondering, I do actively participate in these projects - I spent hours chipping the mortar off hundreds of bricks, and hauled lots of bricks and gravel.  We still have two or three hours of work on it but it’s going to have to wait until after Tisha B’av.  Midday they went to our monthly homeschool gathering, while ds16 went shopping for last minute camp things (more socks, undershirts).  If they had stayed home we’d easily have finished, and though they didn’t realize how close it would be, I knew we wouldn’t finish if they all went out. But I encouraged them to go anyway.  As the saying goes, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 

Actually, we easily would have been done by now but after two days of working on it and having it half finished, ds16 decided to pull it all up and start over.  It wasn’t an easy thing for him to choose, after putting in so many hours and so much work.  But he wasn’t happy with how it was turning out - the pattern was irregular and it was a bit uneven.  He told me he thought about how he would feel to have it all done and and after so much work for the final result to look like that, and realized there would be very little satisfaction in it.  I would never have asked him to redo it, but was glad he chose to because I felt the brick pattern looked somewhat haphazard. 

(Parenthetically, he wanted a certain style of glasses, and a while back I jokingly told him I’d buy him a pair as payment if he made a patio for us.  He asked me if I would really do that, so I said, sure.  That was definitely a motivating factor, and I ordered them from zennioptical for him a couple of weeks ago.  He’s very happy with them, and I’m glad they came before he went to camp since that was important to him.  It was a definite win-win situation: he was happy to do the work and get the glasses, and I was happy to have it done and the glasses cost me under $30.) 

Today we started our morning by going to a local art exhibit.  The artist is a friend who offered to come down and give us a personal tour of the exhibit, which was really nice of her.  The littles were very fresh from a full night of sleep and weren’t interested in standing around and listening to someone talk, so that made it a little harder.  And the baby who rarely spits up, spit up several times and naturally it was one of the rare occasions that we didn’t have a burp cloth with us - isn’t that always how it goes?  But in spite of that I enjoyed it and so did the older kids. 

After that we took the littles to a local playroom where we stayed for an hour and a half.  It was very pleasant to let them run around and enjoy all the new toys.  While they did that, the middles signed up for a summer reading program.  When we finally came home, we had lunch, put the littles in for their naps, and the middles spent time studying their reading club materials and then spent the rest of the afternoon with a new bead kit, making keychains from plastic beads, kind of like macrame.  They’re pretty complicated and look really nice.

And my dh got a call from a friend in EY today who he hasn’t spoken to in years, who called to say mazel tov on the baby.  How did he know we had a baby?  This is something fun about having a blog!  It seems one of you in another country said something to a friend in yet another country about me and my blog, and the friend realized she knew me.  So she called me two weeks ago to say mazel tov.  Then that person told her best friend, who is married to a friend of dh’s from twenty years ago, that we had a baby.  So dh had a nice shmooze catching up with him today.  And my blog was the catalyst for the connection - isn’t that nice? 

Avivah