Sara told me a story this morning that I can’t get out of my head: last night, Ari was saying "Abba" before he went to bed, and held a picture of me while Sara read stories to him. He carried the picture to sleep. I was at a dinner for work.
This year, I will only be with Sara and Ari for five of the eight nights of Hannukah (you can debate the spelling in the comments). That’s just not enough.
I don’t want to be the picture dad! I am on my way to Seattle, and I miss my family already…
Hanukah (I’m going with the easiest, least confusing transliterated spelling). Roy and I never did much for Hanukah before Ari arrived, which was totally fine. But as with many things, his arrival prompted us to consider how we wanted to mark Hanukah as a family.
So we combine our mostly secular Israeli and mostly secular American upbringings, combined with a dash of who we are, and come up with traditions we like. For Hanukah, I felt strongly about gift-giving as a part of the American holiday experience, but at the same time, we both feel like that can go overboard. Good thing there are 8 nights of Hanukah! Our solution? For now at least, Roy and I split the week (as in we’re each responsible for 4 nights), and we are buying one gift for each night that the whole family can enjoy. Two nights, we’re giving back.
Thus far, the most practical of these was night 2 (a Roy night, we are keeping them as surprises), our new camera!
These are my (many) favorites from the last week:
Sorry, no Roy in these. He’s in device-mode 
.
Another day another milestone.
Ari just took his first poop in the bath.
Funnily enough I remember this milestone for my sister. Fortunately for us all, this time I was not in the bath and the bath was not so full of bubbles that I mistook the poop for the soap.
Head: 49 cm (95%)
Height(!): 32 1/2 inches (90%)– I’m so excited we’re finally measuring height and not length!
Weight: 26 pounds 13 ounces (75%)
Ari has taken to making out with me. As in a million kisses on the mouth over and over. Aside from my husband and Ari, and my very deep appreciation for their existence, it may be the best thing thats ever happened to me.
I haven’t always been that good at picking good girlfriends, or at being thankful for the really good ones. I’m not sure when exactly, but both of these things have definitely changed.
At our wedding, I inadvertently caused a small scandal by inviting a few of my friends to help me get ready. We didn’t have a wedding party other than my sister and Roy’s brother, so it was my way of including those friends privately. Then, I remember thinking a lot about those women that were essential to who I’d become at that moment, those that had brought me there, if you will, and those were the ones I invited.
Life is different now.
I’m still thankful for those women, and many more, but now I’m thankful in that I recognize there are people I can really depend on for all my (and our) daily trials and tribulations. That the standard needn’t be serious or formal. There is a lightness that has come with this shift, a joy and a profound thankfulness.
Roy said something to me recently after an evening with one of my mommy friends and her family– that he loved our banter in that it was totally fun and smart and exciting and not competitive.
Another mommy friend had a friends-only Thanksgiving party Saturday (their 9th annual), and watching her around her friends, recognizing I’d been welcomed into a family of people she’s known her whole life (“should I have warned you that once you’re in I don’t let go?”) made me feel immensely fortunate for all that they add to ours.
One of my oldest and dearest friends came over with her and her husbands entire immediate family on Friday, many of whom I’ve known for almost 20 years. At the end of Thanksgiving itself, Jos and I had a drunken lovefest (I mean, she is practically my sister-wife and she did delivery my son).
I could go on and on…the point being that I guess you have to be pretty whole yourself to really appreciate and promulgate the same in the people around you. A couple of weeks ago, I felt a little Mean Girls’d by a subset of women in our local moms group, who omitted to invite me (and others) for a moms night out. In thinking about why I was bothered, I realized I wasn’t really bothered. I mean, my ego was (I’ve never not been a cool kid, and it hurt my feelings a little to think that I wasn’t perceived that way any more), but I find most of that group in particular to be competitive and judgmental and kind of nasty, and I realized– I have better friends than this– why do I care?
I have two points to make here. First (and I say this as a girl who was a guy-friends-only-girl for a long time), women friends- the really really good ones- are special. We get through things together. Second (and excuse me for laying on the cheese), when we are at our best, we really do make the world go round. I’m serious! I don’t know what we or the men in our lives would do without our collective wisdom (cause you know they aren’t really talking about it with each other like we are).
I love you guys.
It’s been a packed weekend. We had a bunch of people over Friday for leftovers (which of course required more cooking), and went to a Thanksgiving remix on Saturday at Sara’s friend Katie’s house. Ari got sugar high on pumpkin pie. Shula and Moti have been here all week, and it reminded me how much I miss having them around. Today we took Ari to Sausalito and went to Heath Ceramics (wonderful, but pricey) and had lunch at Fish, an outdoor shack. Ari ate us all under the table.
I’m sure Moti will link to his Flickr photos in the comments.
Good times. I fell asleep for an hour during dinner. Sara dropped the brine bag (with turkey inside) on the floor. Moti held his drinks. Ari loved it all.
