the 90th minute

Until September 2007, when my oldest daughter was born, this blog covered daily life and politics in Israel, as well as Hebrew-English linguistic issues, from the perspective of an American-raised journalist and translator living in Israel. Now it mostly serves as the SmunchMonk&Bear news agency, a portal into the bizarre universe of the little people. Read more at: www.shoshanakordova.com.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The lollipop bluff (and other random stuff)

* Moriya loves apples! She goes crazy if she sees me eating one, and I am forced to cut her some, or else accede to her theft of mine.

* I recently started noticing that when Kinneret wants Rimonit to do something, she tries to threaten her with not sharing her stock of nonexistent lollipops if Rimonit doesn't cooperate. This is rather unsuccessful, since Kinneret is in the unfortunate position of having a big sister who is perfectly aware that she is bluffing. (She always refers to lollipops in Hebrew, so I think it's likely she picked it up from the other kids in gan.)

On Friday night I discovered that Kinneret was extending her persuasion campaign to me as well. She had somehow decided that we don't say Shma on Shabbat (I think because the kids take naps at home on Shabbat and I've had to explain that we don't say Shma before an afternoon nap, just when they're going to sleep at night), and she told me: "If you say Shma I won't give you a sukariya al makel - just to Abba!"

* Rimonit has taken to stealing the line I have occasionally used when she's refusing to put her markers away so we can eat dinner or some such thing. On our walk home from gan the other day, when I wouldn't give in to some demand of hers and I asked her to move along because she was passively aggressively lagging behind the rest of us, she said: "I won't cooperate with you if you won't cooperate with me!" Uh oh! Didn't you get the memo that that line doesn't apply when your version of "cooperation" means I'm supposed to give you a second pre-dinner ice cream cone?

* Warren is really into beer, and has been offering Rimonit tastes of it ("tastes" rather than "gulps" only because I'm in the room) since she was a baby. (Kinneret, on the other hand, says in no uncertain terms: "I don't like beer.") Warren's influence can be seen in the fact that this is one of the few words they regularly pronounce the way Warren does, and it comes out sounding like "bee-yuh." Anyway, the other week he opened a dark stout and was so taken with the scent he enthusiastically asked "Who wants to smell my beer?"

Both girls did (Kinneret agrees to smell beer even if not to taste it). Every day of the week after that, whenever Kinneret drank a cup of water, she would ask, "Who wants to smell my water?" and then I'd have to smell it and say, "Mmm, smells like water!" and she would happily proceed to drink it. She stopped saying it quite so regularly, but when Warren offered another beer for smelling this Shabbat, I discovered that Rimonit had picked up Kinneret's habit as well, and they started bickering over who would smell each other's water first. Warren has created a monster!

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