The true mark of adulthood is not age: it’s whether you react to a snow day with despair or delight.“Thank you, God!” my 4th grader yelled, as he hopped from foot to foot in a spontaneous variant on the hora with his 3rd grade brother (I had thought the school superintendent was responsible for making the decision on calling off school on account of inclement weather, but never mind). My 2-year-old, upon learning she would not be going to school, promptly burst into tears.
I totally know how the 2-year-old felt. With less than two weeks until the interminable winter break–I mean, that joyous time with no school, when babysitters all have better things to do than hang out with your kids–all work for the work-from-home parent needs to be taken care of today, if not yesterday. Having three kids at school was essential in order for me to accomplish anything, whether that “anything” was work, newborn baby gift thank you notes, or simply sitting down.
I’m also the kind of parent who sees snow as something best viewed through a window or in an Ansel Adams photo. I see snow and I start thinking of snow scrapers, rock salt ruining my shoes, and moving to California.
Plus of course, there are the attendant stresses of the snow day for the parent, like the games of Where The F*ck Did I Put Their Gloves?, Let’s See Whose Snowpants Still Fit!, Can The Toddler Hang Onto My Legs For 24 Hours? and Sibling Rivalry: The Over-Amplified Musical.
But then, I started getting gifts: unexpected gifts that fell from the sky like the snow, making everything look different and even kind of beautiful.
Continue reading.
I
am not a practicing Jew, but I don’t celebrate Christmas either. My
husband is a lapsed Christian and a loather of all things Yule. Late
December has always been an uncomfortable time in our house. Until, that
is, we decided four years ago to send our kids to a Jewish school.
A
late-in-life career change isn't so unusual. A mathematician who
devotes his life to klezmer music. A full-time mom who starts her own
business. But even in that context, what Betty Rosenberg Perlov has done
is pretty unusual. Or, we should say, when she's done it. Perlov just
published her first book. At age 96.
On this website you will find:
If
you are a little Jewish kid, Santa Claus does not enter your home via
the chimney on Christmas Eve. Instead, he arrives in late fall, usually
by way of the Target catalog and the television set. And if you are a
little Jewish kid confronting old St. Nick for the first time via
Frosty, Rudolph, Charlie Brown, or the 1966 animated version of How the
Grinch Stole Christmas, you may find yourself with a lot of questions.
"Mamma, who is Center and where are my presents?" asked my 3-year-old,
rather randomly, in October. "Mommy, is Santa real?" my 5-year-old asks
pretty much daily. In the way of 5-year-old boys everywhere, he follows
that one up with "Mom, if Santa and Judah the Maccabee got in a fight,
who would win?"
timeframe
for contacting bookstores, libraries, temples, Jewish community
centers, schools, blogs, newspapers and all my relatives in New Jersey.
(Basically my time window is as puny as a porthole on a really
low-budget cruise.) In other years, I might have had a whole extra month
to let the world know about my sweet little book.
I
always assumed that being a parent meant teaching my children the basic
skills–and with luck, perhaps a few extras they’d need to become
productive members of society. As it turns out, I’m learning just as
much about life from them. Remember that book, All I Really Need to Know
I Learned in Kindergarten? I think the lessons start much earlier. Here
are some that I’ve learned:
There
is a saying that the way your kids were as toddlers is how they’ll be
as teens. (Only bigger and louder and, in some places, with the legal
right to drive.)
There’s
something particularly Jewish about Thanksgiving and quintessentially
American at the same time. Thanksgiving brings us together. This year,
the Jewish/American connection is even stronger as we light the second
candle of Hanukkah on Thanksgiving. Football, turkey and latkes…oh my!
Parenting
has been compared to many things. I like to compare it to playing darts
while wearing a blindfold. Because so often, it really does feel as
though it’s just a stab in the dark.
The
chat I was having with the German journalist sitting next to me at
dinner naturally got round to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s victory in the
elections a week earlier [Sept. 23]. We were a group of Israelis that
arrived in Berlin for the annual meeting with our German counterparts
over the last days of Sukkot, on a program that began in 2000 to promote
Israeli-German leadership.
Learning—and
using—Yiddish is fun for the whole family, from the youngest mamaleh to
the oldest bubbe and zaideh. Introduced to America as the mother tongue
of millions of Jewish immigrants, Yiddish has made its way into
everyday English. The sprightly, rhyming text follows a toddler through a
busy day and is peppered from beginning to end with Yiddish words.
Oy!—will everybody kvell when they hear their little ones spouting words
from this most expressive of languages. Here are just a few that are
included in 
When
we think of rituals, we think of mothers or grandmothers waving their
hands over the Shabbat candles, of an endless Passover seder led each
year by the patriarch of the family, or of a bar or bat mitzvah. We
rarely think of the everyday rituals that we engage in: the kiss
goodnight, watching a special TV show together each Thursday night, or
taking turns at dinner each night, talking about our days. Yet each of
these are rituals also. They are acts we engage in, at a regular time,
that have meaning for us. We look forward to these events and are
disappointed when they do not occur. They are not just a physical
priority, but an emotional priority in our lives.
If only it was that easy to find a friend for our son.
I'll
be honest...I'm not planning on spending the day in synagogue on
Simchat Torah. I know I should probably go. And I don't even have a
legitimate excuse--I work at a Jewish newspaper and have the day off!
But I’m a full-time working mom, and when given a day off, I have a
whole list of things I need to do to take care of my family. Being in
shul all day just isn’t one of them.
Last
week, we got an email, two printed letters, and a phone call from
Josie’s public school, all informing us that unless she got a tetanus
booster in the next six days, she would not be allowed to attend
classes. I called the school in a panic: Josie had just turned 11 and
hadn’t had her annual checkup yet. Too bad, I was told. Rules are rules.
No shot, no school. I quickly called the pediatrician’s office, and
they assured me that there were a couple of hours every day in which I
could bring Josie in to see a nurse, and they’d provide all the
paperwork I needed to prove my child was not a tetanus-laden disease
vector. And so it came to pass. But I had to miss a morning of work, and
Josie had to miss school, just so she could get inoculated at an
arbitrary time the school had laid out instead of a month later at her
scheduled checkup.
In
her beautiful post about her sons’ Jewish identities, Tamara mentioned
getting her first Rosh Hashanah book from PJ Library, and then pulling
several more off the shelf.
If
you have an evil cackle, malicious facial expressions, the odd wart or two or
green-colored skin, and pick fights with heroic, selfless individuals, chances
are: you are a storybook villain, and my son just adores you. 
The other day, kind of by accident, my 1-year-old
figured out how to drink from a straw. He put his mouth on the tube attached to
the cup in his hand and started sucking–recreationally, it seems. I don’t think
he had any expectations that something interesting would happen. His face, as
cold milk pooled into his mouth, registered shock, surprise, delight–and, dare I
say it–wonder. 
1. Yussel’s Prayer retold by Barbara Cohen: The story
of a young cowherd and his simple Yom Kippur prayer. When my children were
small, we read this every year on Yom Kippur night. 
Struggling to get your kids to eat their veggies? How
about making their meal something fun? Meals With Kids is the pet project of
Maor Bar, a Bezalel graduate of the Visual Communication department. Bar manages
his own interactive studio that makes games and mobile apps for major brands in
Israel and abroad. The blog began as a side project because of his oldest son,
Yatir, who is a very picky eater. 
At first Bar uploaded pictures to his Facebook page,
and when hearing from friends that it worked with their children as well he
decided to begin the blog to help parents he didn’t personally know. A Meals
With Kids Facebook page has also garnered a community of parents who even post
their own work. 
My daughters are 4 1/2 and 3, and other than their
short stature, penchant for screaming rather than brooding, and a total
inability to write snarky notes to each other, they’re basically teenagers.
They’re in that unpredictable phase where one minute they want to be treated
like grown ups (i.e. 8-year-olds), the next minute they want to snuggle on your
lap and suck their thumbs, and God help you if you pick the wrong one. 
Three months ago, my husband and I were playing with
our 4 ½ month old when it became quite apparent that it was time to sing “Poop
Monster” (to the tune of The B-52s, “Rock Lobster”). We’ve pretty much created a
song for everything involving our daughter: “We’re Not Gonna Cry Now,” (“We’re
Not Gonna Take It”), “Rolling on the Carpet” (“Rolling on the River”) and “Food
Glorious Food…” that one needed no editing. 
I have dozens of childhood memories that include me
and my siblings waiting in the car for our parents. Most notably, I remember us
waiting at the bank and my little brother, probably preschool age, backing the
car into an adjacent lot. The story is told in jest now, and my mother was most
definitely a helicopter parent of her time. That’s just how it was. 
I remember how the cost of taking pictures used to add
up quickly, and how tedious it was to keep track of your film. On my teen tour
in Israel in 1993, for example, I was always judicious as my finger hovered over
the shutter. I would never have considered snapping a picture of every person on
my trip standing in front of the same stack of rocks on Masada. Who had the
time, energy, money, and interest in developing all of those pictures? Did I
want to load a new roll of film in the middle of a hike? The advent of the
digital camera feels like a curse. Taking pictures is such a regular part of our
lives that my 6-year-old asks to see shots immediately and requests I take new
ones if she doesn’t like something about the picture. And since I have four
kids, it should come as no surprise that I am drowning in digital photos. I
expected to have the classic situation of endless pictures of my oldest child
and next to nothing for my youngest. Instead, I have an obscene amount of
pictures of everyone, and I don’t know how to manage them all. 
1. Book your baby’s ticket. Even lap infants need
their own tickets. Call customer service after booking your own, because there’s
typically no obvious way to do this online. If your child is under 2, she flies
for free domestically, but there are taxes and fees if you fly overseas. Lila
chilling on my lap added about 10% to the price for our round-trip to Geneva.
When
people ask what religion we are–me, my husband Justin, and our two small
children–I answer, “nothing.” 
We’ve all heard horror stories about potty learning.
From ill-timed accidents to elaborate bribes, teaching (“training”) children how
to use the potty turns even the most sensible people into frantic angry
shut-ins. I bought into the hype reading “three day potty boot camp” books and
prepared to sit in the bathroom with my naked kid eating salty foods, drinking
water, and letting his Curious George doll pretend to pee on the toilet. 
I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. Some people call us “The Mormon.” Despite what you’ve heard,
what you think about Mitt Romney, or what Broadway musicals say about us, we’re
pretty normal people who just want to teach our children how to be godly in an
increasingly godless world. 
God
on Kveller is a huge topic. Like, really huge. Many of us have a hard time
figuring out just what we believe about God on our own terms. Throw a 4-year-old
in there who demands answers? Yep, even harder. 
Shabbat is lovely. Shabbat is 25 hours of no phone, no
radio, no piano, no driving, no cooking, no TV (which I don’t watch anyway), no
pressures of the outside world. You hang out with friends, eat lavish meals,
nap, let your kids frolic as you get a “break,” and enjoy the synagogue of your
choosing which both enlightens your soul and tantalizes your children. Unless…