the 90th minute

Any Smunch-sized space will do

2009-05-05T10:43:00.003+03:00

As you can see, Rimonit is thrilled to have dumped out whatever was in the basket under her stroller seat in order to make room for her to climb into it. If I recall correctly (this is from about a month ago - okay okay, we take too long to upload our photos), this was the same day or the day after she had snuck one of my shoes and one of Warren's shoes into the basket as we were about to leave for day care; and if shoes can fit inside, why not a Smunch?

She now channels her stroller-related climbing ability into clambering in and out of her regular seat, which she does all the time now, requiring us to keep the brakes on in the house so it doesn't move around while she climbs (it's a stable stroller, so fortunately we don't have to worry about tipping-over issues). All in all, she's quite the monkey.

I expect to get paid by the hour, you know

2009-05-05T09:57:00.010+03:00

Okay, so Pesach is long over by now, but here's Rimonit getting ready for some pre-Pesach cleaning. She just loves pushing around the floor cleaner thingie and/or the broom! Note some of her favorite things: a cup clutched in one hand and a bag over the other.

And here she is in (somewhat fuzzy) action:

Does she talk yet?

2009-04-13T15:53:00.004+03:00

People have been asking me a lot lately whether Rimonit is talking, so here is a list of whatever I can think of that she currently appears to say and understand. (Note: This does not include the stream of babbledygook that only RP understands.)

Says (notice this is in Hebrew and English):
Et ze (=this) (probably her most common words, though it took me a while to recognize that she was actually saying words and not just sounds, since we speak to her only in English - she obviously picked this up from maon)
More (mo)
Abba
Toda (da) (=thank you) (also picked up from maon, and also took us a while to figure out - but once I started looking at when she uses it, I saw that she pretty much reserves 'da' for when someone gives her something. at maon the ganenet says toda when she gives the kids something, which seems like a weird idea, but i guess it works, since she didn't pick this up at home)
Hello (aya)
(?) Bath (ba)
(?) Banana (ana)

Signs:
All done
Drink
Eat
Hello/bye-bye (=wave)

Understands:
Anything she says or signs plus:
Hands up (when I'm dressing/undressing her)
Legs
Nose
Head
Come
Out
Stop/wait
Bye-bye bath (the cue that bath time is about to end)
No
Don't touch
(?) Ima

She has also recently started getting interested in animals, and points and babbles excitedly to any birds, cats or dogs she sees. But she doesn't like when they come too close; a couple of times she's gotten upset when a dog started sniffing her.

Bottom's up!

2009-03-12T14:25:00.001+02:00

There's nothing like the old tushy-in-the-air position to guarantee a good night's sleep!

Purim: A great opportunity to dress up (or not!) as Worst Ima of the Year

2009-03-08T20:18:00.013+02:00

(In Purim-induced bovine distress. Get this thing off my head!)

As Purim approaches (Tuesday in most of the world, Wednesday in Jerusalem), the streets seem full to bursting with kids and teens getting in the dressing-up spirit. Having a kid of my own in day care makes me realize how ignorant I used to be when it comes to just how long that spirit can be made to last; Rimonit has been forced into a different getup every day for the past two weeks or so (her reaction, predictably, ranges from utter indifference to wary, cringing antagonism of the "don't you even think about going near me with that hat" variety). She has already been a chick (well, not really, but the gananot sure did try, and I have the yellow smock and chick mask to prove it), a mushroom, a clown (I think), a (non-)fez-wearing Moroccan (or Turk, as they insisted), and all manner of combinations of random face paint and (mostly resisted) hats/masks.

All this seems orchestrated primarily to ensure that Purim itself will turn out to be anti-climactic. It also seems kind of odd that one of the shortest holidays on the Jewish calendar (only one day, with a quasi-second day as backup!) is being dragged out to last longer than the longest (what, a week each of Pesach, Sukkot and Chanuka isn't enough?).

But the gananot seem immune to this logic, and mercilessly set up Ima Ve'Abba Shel Rimonit (yes, those are now our official names) for our apparent failure of a major parenting test Friday - when, it seems, we were supposed to have dressed the kid up at home and brought her into maon in costume, because heaven knows she hasn't had enough of the grown-ups trying to get her to wear funny-looking stuff lately. Apparently there was a sign on the door. And apparently every single other parent at maon read the sign and remembered to dress up the progeny. That would be, you know, all of them. Except, of course, for us.

Reactions of gananot when Warren dropped off the normally dressed kid amid a sea of Queen Esthers/fairy princesses and at least one King Ahashverosh: Shock! Horror! Shock and horror! (though not on RP's part, obviously). Our crime was so heinous that we got a call at home shortly afterward to let us know that we really should go back to maon and bring in a costume for the poor underdressed kid. Naughty parents! Tsk tsk tsk! (or as they say here, Nu nu nu!)

The truth is, if RP were a little older and could actually absorb the fact that the other kids were dressed funny, and maybe even feel bad about being THE ONLY ONE WITHOUT A COSTUME (oy, I can already imagine the everlasting recriminations if this were ever to occur at a later stage, God forbid), I probably would feel guilty about it for quite some time afterward, maybe even forever. But as things stand, it was just kind of funny that the gananot cared so much when she so obviously didn't.

End of story: We were walking past maon anyway on our way to breakfast, so we dropped off the cow costume I had already acquired, to the vast relief of the gananot (they had, of course, already painted her face so she would at least be somewhat uncomfortable). When I say "we" dropped off the costume, I mean that I made Warren go in because I was scared they would look at me like I had just vaulted to the top of the Worst Ima of the Year list in one mighty bound. I can only hope this will be the worst of the inevitable foul-ups to come, rather than the precursor of further depths of parental depravity and deprivation. In my defense, though, I would just like to add that when you press the button on the cow's head (which, on Rimonit, just kind of hangs off the back of the costume), it emits a very expressive Moo! Beat that, fairy princess!

The Book of Dahlia: Not as good as they say

2009-03-03T23:18:00.017+02:00

I just read "The Book of Dahlia" by Elisa Albert, one of this year's finalists for the Jewish Book Council's Sami Rohr Prize. Even though I recently wrote a rundown of the prize nominees for Haaretz Books, I had only read one of the books ("The Septembers of Shiraz," by a real-life Dalia), and thought I should educate myself a bit more about the books written by the authors the book council's judges consider this year's most promising Jewish fiction writers.

Albert seems to have gotten almost universally laudatory reviews - and I can't help but wonder why. The reviews I've seen tend to fall into one of two categories: the younger set, excited to find a familiar voice in fiction that represents them (as one review put it, "I realize in some ways it reflects poorly on me to say this, but it's been a while since I've read a book that I identified with as strongly as this one"), and the presumably older set, excited to come across a fresh new voice that I infer sounds kind of exotic to them when contained between the covers of a book (writing about Albert's earlier collection of short stories, which I haven't read, one reviewer said, "It is also both refreshing and a little shocking (at least for me) to find such bawdy, hot prose as Albert's in the work of a young female Jewish American writer").

My problem is that being exposed to 256 pages of the running commentary of the protagonist - Dahlia Finger, a bitter uber-slacker and potty-mouthed pothead living off Daddy's largesse and obsessed with the movies of her youth, who is diagnosed with a brain tumor at 29 - made me feel like I was stuck on a never-ending inter-campus bus ride in front of a couple of frat boys discussing how plastered they got the night before, in a conversation consisting almost entirely of the many variations of the word "fuck," with an occasional "asshole" or "whatever" thrown in to spice things up a bit. I found myself rushing to get to the end of the book, not just because it's not exactly a difficult read and certainly not because I couldn't wait to see what happened next (there's not much in the way of plot action here), but mostly because I just wanted to get off the damn bus already.

Chronology puts me in the "young set" camp (I was born the same year as Dahlia, so we share the same cultural references - and the book is replete with them, making it seem all the less likely "The Book of Dahlia" will have much lasting resonance, rather like Dahlia herself). But I have no particular desire to hang out with this character for so long, even if she is vaguely familiar. Albert has said she didn't want to fall into the trap of making Dahlia too likeable, and in a way that's admirable, but in addition to not being a sympathetic figure, Dahlia's also not particularly loathsome or anger-inducing or even all that interesting - which means I ultimately don't much care what happens to her one way or the other.

(I also found myself distracted by the occasional incorrect usage of the Hebrew that Albert scatters throughout the book, mostly in connection with Dahlia's mother being an Israeli immigrant. Was there really no way Albert could have checked whether Israelis would actually be asking Dahlia "Ma shlomcha?" - the masculine version of "How are you?"?)

After I finished the book (ah, my stop has arrived!) I realized that my reaction was similar to the one I had when reading another highly acclaimed female Jewish writer, Allegra Goodman, whose not-particularly-appealing young slacker chick protagonist Sharon Spiegelman turned me off to "Paradise Park." Just coincidence? Or is there a silent conspiracy out there of reviewers/culture-shapers who have come down firmly on the side of disaffected young Jewish female characters, however uninteresting they may actually be?

For all that Albert is said to employ irreverent, conformity-bashing writing (the cynical take on the happy-happy-joy-joy self-help culture! the courage involved in - spoiler alert - killing off the main character, and in a book about dying, yet! creating a character who's a rabbi but not a nice guy!), the book actually contains a kind of sneaky reverse snobbishness, a take on the mainstream that I suspect may even be partly responsible for some of the, let's face it, conformist positive reception of the book.

There are a couple of instances in which Albert seems to use the book to harangue anyone daring to think of criticizing it. At one point, she writes: "Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck." Elsewhere, she basically tells us that if we don't sympathize with Dahlia, we're hypocrites who don't believe that life is valuable just for the fact of its being lived.

One reviewer takes Albert's challenge a step further, implying that anyone who doesn't like the book is probably not very sophisticated: "'The Book of Dahlia' will probably find detractors just as passionate as its champions. As Albert writes, 'A vile, self-absorbed, depressing, lazy, messy, spoiled, f-up [that, of course, is not how Albert actually puts it], probably mentally ill loser dies. So what?' Albert answers her own 'So what?' with a deeply sympathetic portrait, devoid of sentimentality. Readers looking for a depiction of illness as a crucible for the triumph of the human spirit will be disappointed. But this book keeps its steadfast focus on a more complicated truth, and that is its triumph."

Yeah, maybe, if this is the first book you've read that features death. But for readers with high expectations (possibly unreasonably so, I'm sure some would argue, and probably heightened by the good reviews and award nomination), who are on a hunt for writers whose language transports and for complex characters who demand to be cared about, Elisa Albert's "The Book of Dahlia" is just not the hot shit, as Dahlia herself might have put it, that it's cracked up to be.

She came, she saw...

2009-02-24T19:05:00.006+02:00

Forget musical chairs - Rimonit has begun a game of tactical chair. She now realizes that her little orange chair is not only something to drag around, something to sit on and something to put her favorite toys and/or food on, but also something to give her some much-desired (on her part, at least) extra height.

We don't object when she drags her chair over to the old coffee table, which is just that little bit higher than she can comfortably scale on her own, to help her climb onto it. (This is okay with us partly because she's very good at getting down nicely on her own and partly because it's not very far off the ground in the first place.)

But it's a different story when she tries to conquer the dining table, that catchall of newspapers, books, earrings, dirty dishes and a random collection of other stuff that gets cleared off every Friday only to miraculously become just as jumbled a mess by Sunday (to W's dismay). While we have slowly (and, admittedly, not consistently) been getting used to moving things away from the dangerous border zone of the table's edges, the middle of the table has become one of the few sacred spaces left where we can put things without too much fear they will end up in the Smunch's wagon.

(One of W's colleagues learned this the hard way, when RP was making a run for the open door while clutching his wallet, which he had inadvisedly left on the coffee table.)

But now Rimonit very deliberately pulls her chair up to the dining table and stands up on it, wearing a look of thrilled wonder at this whole new world of previously hidden - and eminently desirable - objects. Sometimes she pulls up next to a wooden big-people chair and climbs onto it from her chair to give her even more height. This, of course, is bad news for us.

Yesterday, not wanting her to hang out there but also not wanting to spark a temper tantrum, I stood next to her for a bit to monitor which objects were in her reach, then nonchalantly started playing with some of her favorite toys, away from the table but well within her line of sight. By the time I had placed one of her toys on her wagon and pushed it up and down the living room a couple of times, she started getting interested in what was going on over there, climbed off her chair and grabbed my newfound toys away from me. Phew! Crisis averted, til next time...

Squiggly pasta for a squiggly squirmer

2009-02-03T21:24:00.003+02:00

Pasta (the squiggly kind) was on the menu yesterday and today. The most interesting places I have found it so far (aside from smushed into a gross, slippery paste under my foot) are:

The precisely squiggly-pasta-shaped space (who knew?) at the top of the broom handle (RP really enjoys what we may as well, for lack of a better word, call sweeping), and in the toe of her slipper (which was, in turn, safely stored - along with one sock - in a disposable plastic container that had been used for chocolate chip cookies, and which RP must have discovered while impersonating a raccoon in the kitchen garbage can).

In other news, Rimonit likes to say hello (well, actually, "Aya!") into her toy phone. She also sometimes holds her hand up to her ear and cheerfully shouts "Aya! Aya!" Of course, when she encounters an actual phone at her ear, she smiles toward the voice but is remarkably silent.

She has also found original ways of escaping from her stroller. Though we buckle her in when we're going outside, we didn't bother with the buckles when we tried to get her to fall asleep in her stroller while we were eating Friday night dinner at someone's apartment the other week. (She often falls asleep in her stroller, she was tired, and it was way past her bedtime.) Our stroller can lie flat, but when in this position, it leaves a gaping hole in the back, where the kid's head is (the gap is supposed to be covered with a plastic flap).

The first time we tried putting her down, she pushed aside the blanket we had put over the hole and stuck her head out of the stroller with a huge, mischievous grin that is still making me laugh two weeks later. The second time (also the last one until we left, at which point she fell asleep in about 30 seconds), she turned onto her stomach and slithered out from the front end of the stroller, using the same motion as when she clambers off, say, the coffee table, and stood up with a proud, "Look at me!" smile. Then she scampered off to wreak some more havoc.

I sense a full-bodied berry bouquet...

2009-01-20T23:40:00.001+02:00

(It's Hamper Time! Ahhhh!)

The kid seems to be doing a lot of imitation lately. I recently noticed that I had the unconscious habit of tapping the front of her diaper when I closed it up - as if to say, "All done here," I guess - only when I saw her tapping the front of her own diaper and realized she must have picked it up from me.

Then last week I was taking a long, thirsty drink of water and let out a little "ahhh!" that I would scarcely have noticed had I not suddenly heard an echo of the sound from the high chair next to me. But I don't even need to provide that syllable of thirst-quenching satisfaction anymore - though sips from her own cup ar relatively unaccompanied, she has now been primed to provide the sound effects when I take a drink.

I had described her newest trick to Warren, but he didn't hear it himself until Friday night, when he drank the kiddush wine with the kid on his lap - and was rather startled to hear her say "ahhh!" in evident appreciation of dry red.

Who's a stinker now?

2009-01-18T18:29:00.004+02:00

Two things Rimonit really likes came together in an unexpected context the other day.

She loves holding my (closed) deodorant (one in each hand, preferably), and she really enjoys walking around with a bag on her arm - she's recently adopted a Zara paper shopping bag and an orange cloth bag I frequently put in her stroller to transport crackers and other tantrum-allaying devices - and placing her little treasures inside. I have found a diaper (clean, of course!), her socks, one of Warren's slippers, cornflakes - and of course, my deodorant - among her most favorite things.

The other day I put the food bag I was planning to take to work (I would say lunch bag, but it's more of a dinner bag, which just sounds funny) on the end of the table near the door so I could grab it as I headed out. But someone else grabbed it before me, needless to say, and I had to distract the kid with something else so I could get it back from her clutches.

I didn't think much of it... until I got to work and discovered a familiar-looking container of deodorant snuggled against my food! I guess she's gotten tired of me calling her stinky (but only when she is!) and decided to return the compliment...

Chairman Rao

2009-01-11T18:47:00.006+02:00

RP's newest acquisition is an orange plastic chair, just her size. She already has her very own couch, but she seemed to want a chair. She was sitting anywhere she could find - the low (slightly above the floor) windowsill in the living room, the bottom rung of her high chair, on top of her truck - so we decided to take pity on her and get her a piece of furniture intended for the Smunch-sized to place their little tushies upon.

When she first saw it, though, the last thing she had in mind was sitting: She picked it up and wandered around the house with it, stopping every 30 seconds or so to see how her chair looked in the new location, shifting her grip on it and starting again. She did find a good spot eventually (about a foot away from where her journey first began), where she sat nicely (okay, for about a minute) and read a book! (I guess she is our kid after all...)

She also has recently started getting into hand puppets (like her blue hippopotamus that's also supposed to be a kind of bath sponge). But she's not so interested in being washed, or entertained, by a puppet - she's much more into wearing them herself. In fact, she's already created her own puppet: On Shabbat she stole my slipper right off my foot and put it on her hand. I tried to (gently) steal it back, but she was having none of it, and reclaimed it every time.

Dancing and stuffing her face...

2008-12-30T21:10:00.004+02:00

Rimonit has a new dance move: She likes to turn around in circles now when there's music on. She'll often start smiling or even clapping as soon as she sees me near the CD player, before I even turn it on.

She loves to eat in the morning, when she is practically insatiable. Her faves include pear (downside: there's never enough!), cornflakes (preferred method: walking around with a little container of cornflakes that somehow always end up being crunched underfoot) and bread with leben/cottage cheese/hummus.

Can't wait for her to grasp: the concept of gravity. (As in, "If I turn this container upside down, the cornflakes will spill all over the floor. And that would be a bad thing." Or, "I should be very proud of myself for figuring out how to put a piece of pear on a spoon, for some reason, and I will even be able to get it to my mouth if I just keep the spoon right side up.")

And she knows how to ask for more cornflakes or pear: Just say mo! (She knows the hand sign too.) Nancy Reagan would be proud.

Spiderkid in the tunnel

2008-11-16T20:23:00.008+02:00

Rimonit and I encountered our first bullies the Shabbat before last - two girls (they seemed to be about 9 years old) who got their little kicks making fun of a 1-year-old (yes, RP) and trying to keep others from using the playground facilities in the spot they had chosen to hang out in. As a foreshadowing of the future of Israeli citizenry, or something like that, it was kinda depressing.

This particular playground is often pretty empty, and Rimonit really likes it because it has a spectacular combination of tunnels + slides (with a moderate enough incline that she can climb up them as well as slide down) + stairs (which she is beginning to climb with her feet rather than her knees).

When Rimonit got to the blue tunnel, she found herself hampered by a girl who was just sitting there, doing nothing other than blocking the entrance. I gave her a minute in case she didn't get right away that the Kid, who was standing patiently, wanted to go through. Then I said, very politely, "You're blocking the path. Do you think you can move over?" She gave me a look that combined pure insolence with surprise that I would dare address her directly and a kind of resentment that I was seriously asking her to do something other than sprawl out in the area she had colonized. She did eventually get out of the way, though quite slowly. I pity her teachers.

But that wasn't all. RP got out of the Mean Kids Tunnel and made her way around the yellow tunnel and the slides. Then she decided to climb back up to the blue tunnel - but, lo and behold, the obnoxious girl had doubled herself, and both of them were doing nothing together and had no intention of changing that. When I asked them to move (still politely, though it had already dawned on me that such silly Americanisms as basic human manners were lost on them), they grudgingly budged about half an inch from their position in the center of the tunnel (the part that a person who wanted to get past would have to walk on), apparently imputing to RP certain Spiderman-like qualities that, to the best of my knowledge, she does not possess. I pointed out that it was a bit hard to walk on the curved side of the tunnel, while mentally urging the Spiderkid to drool all over their hair as she clambered across them to reach the other side.

Then came the rather bizarre (not to mention slanderous) making-fun-of-a-1-year-old part. As she climbed over them, I heard them chat to each other in gossipy Mean Girl voices as they attributed a poopy smell near the tunnel to RP. Then they tried to bring me into it. "Lady! Lady!" one of them called out. "She made kaki in her pants like a baby! (giggle giggle). Go change her!"

I don't even really get what that's about. I mean, she IS a baby! And anyway, she didn't do it, I swear! I changed her right before we left the house, and her diaper was remarkably poop-free when I changed her again at home. It just seemed like the kind of thing they might say about someone in their class so they thought it would be just as piercing a blow to RP. But who can truly understand the mind of a 9-year-old tunnel-blocker?

In a totally unconnected update, Rimonit will be taking her first judo class tomorrow afternoon...

Shoes! (for a day)

2008-11-09T22:10:00.011+02:00

(Photo: The little remaining evidence of those first shoes - both of them.)

Today I bought Rimonit her first shoes. As you may have guessed by the previous sentence, in the loooooong time since my last post, she has started walking - and she is really getting the hang of it, if I do say so myself.

On erev Rosh Hashana (end of September this year), I noticed her standing on her own for significantly longer periods than usual, like maybe two minutes or so. I got the feeling that walking would come soon, but I didn't realize how soon; I saw her take a few steps on her own two days later, as Rosh Hashana was ending.

Although the process leading up to those first steps was extensive - from cruising and pushing chairs around to standing on her own (which she started in August) and gradually increasing her standing time - once she took her first steps, there was no stopping her, and her rate of improvement was incredibly rapid. The first week or two she took at least as many falls as steps, remaining largely unperturbed by her frequent tushy-to-floor contact. Warren dubbed her the drunken sailor, but day by day her sea legs gave way to land legs, the amount of steps she took increased until I stopped counting them, and her walking-to-crawling ratio shifted in favor of walking. It's only a few weeks later, but she has become a master walker, and she took well to her shoes after only about 30 seconds of wondering why her feet were suddenly so heavy.

And so it goes: from crawling infant to toddling toddler in the space of a mere month.

UPDATE: The day after I wrote this post (I wrote it Sun., Nov. 9), one of her shoes fell off her foot and disappeared forevermore (I only noticed after it was already gone). It was apparently some combination of the shoe being too loose and the velcro being too weak, giving us something to look out for next time. I wasn't going to put up this post at all, seeing as how it got dated so soon, but finally decided it still makes a bloggable, er, footnote to the Story of the Smunch. In the meantime, she is back to being shoeless (though we'll fix that soon enough)...

HamuDA

2008-09-07T19:24:00.006+03:00

The Smunch is a whopping 1 year old! That's as of last Wednesday - though her Hebrew birthday isn't for about two more weeks, leaving her in (take your pick:) a) confused birthday limbo, b) thrilled extended festivities or (pick me, pick me! as Annoying Donkey says) c) continued absolute non-awareness that there is such a thing as a birthday).

She has recently been doing more standing on her own two feet, though only for a few seconds at a time so far. I kind of feel like I'm one of those spoilsports at a magic show when she does it - I keep looking for the trick, thinking that she must be leaning against something (as she had been in the past), but I have so far been unable to spot the invisible strings, so she must be pretty talented.

Today she discovered that she can fit into a closet we have in the dining area (which fortunately has nothing in the bottom section on the side she discovered), and she had a really great time climbing in and out of the closet and playing with the closet door. Very smunchy!

Completely unrelatedly, I find it interesting that in Israel people ask about the child's sex in a way they wouldn't and couldn't in the U.S. because of the strictures of the language, in which - as with many other languages - you can't say much without knowing whether the person in question is male or female. Although they sometimes assume a baby is a particular sex (generally male, whether for reasons of male linguistic default issues or chauvinist male favoritism issues remains unclear) or ask directly whether it's a boy or a girl ("ben o bat"?), they often pop the question by asking: Is it a cutie (hamud - for boys), or is it a cutie (hamuda - for girls)?

This latter method can also be used by the parent when people assume the kid is a boy. The baby-commenters say, "Eizeh hamud!" (what a [male] cutie) - to which the appropriate response when the boy in question is not one is: "hamuDA."

Cruisin' along and saying goodbye (is this a blues song or what?)

2008-07-30T01:11:00.010+03:00

The main Smunch update is that she's been "cruising" the last coupla weeks, which is apparently the official term for coffee table-assisted walking.

She's also definitely begun dancing, which is the term I am generously using for waving her hands around when I turn on the music. I notice, though, that once it's on she doesn't seem to relate to it most of the time - she primarily responds in that first minute of its being on.

RP, who is almost 11 months old, has also become more proficient at waving goodbye. She started waving a while ago, but would practice her newfound skill quite indiscriminately, with no evident connection to whether there was anyone to wave to, and frequently with both hands at the same time. Now she often waves bye-bye, which is, of course, very smunchy. (I was surprised when the nurse at the tipat halav/well-baby clinic asked if R waves yet - I didn't realize it was a quasi-official action, like rolling over. Sure, it's a physical capability as well as a form of communication [though for RP it was the former before it became the latter], but my impression is that parents teach their kids to wave mainly because, well, it looks cute.)

When I pick her up from day care, she usually smiles and/or crawls over to me, but yesterday she not only smiled at me but waved hello to me, and then raised her arms for me to pick her up. And today she waved hello at a neighbor kid when he came by to play with her. I haven't explicitly taught her to wave hello as I have to wave goodbye (mainly on the way out of day care), but I do wave hello to her regularly in the house, kind of as a way of making contact if, say, she's playing on one side of the living room while I'm on the computer on the other side.

Oh, and here's a really big one (but I'm a bit restrained about it because I'm still awaiting confirmation): On Shabbat she accompanied a waved goodbye with what sounded very much like a spoken "bye-bye"! I admit she did do this twice in a row, so it's quite possible she really did utter her first word. (!) But being ever reluctant to announce a new development without being absolutely sure of it, I am withholding final judgment until I hear her do it again. (What can I do, I like to make sure I have my facts straight - not the worst trait in the world for a journalist.)

In general, over the last few months she has become a bit more choosy about who she will be friends with. She used to bestow a great big grin on anybody who crossed her path, but now she prefers to take a more considered approach, and often likes to have some warm-up time with the new person in my or W's presence. After a few minutes, though, she's usually fine (especially if she's not particularly tired or hungry). The flip side is that she has really started to recognize the people she does know, and now lights up when her babysitter walks in the door, which is nice to see. With the neighbor kid, she already showed signs of recognition the second time (in two days) that he stopped by.

It seems nuts that she's almost a year old! That's so, like, huge!

Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you

2008-07-30T00:38:00.004+03:00

It seems like my attempt last year at doing an end run around the maternity clothing scam (er, industry) has backfired. At the time, I thought I was getting away with not buying a whole new wardrobe because I already had a lot of loose summer clothing that could fit my expanding belly. A year later, I look at my closet and all I see are what now look to me like maternity clothes.

Now I am constantly paranoid (realistic?) about people making incorrect assumptions when they see me in the same loose tops that I bought in regular people stores and that, in some cases, I had worn for years beforehand, but that they may remember as having housed a larger me this time last year - or that just look like pretty much anything could be hiding in there.

I am usually a privacy fanatic who has difficulty understanding women (and sometimes men) who feel compelled to share all around the dinner table, but lately I have wanted to wear a sign around my neck saying, "This isn't maternity clothing! I bought it in a regular store, I swear!"

I supposed if I had washboard abs I could start showing them off, but I never have and I have no reason to believe I ever will, so that's not really an option.

Every time I listen to the part of me that says it's dumb to obsess about this and I should just wear whatever's in my closet and to hell with what people may or may not think, I end up imagining/seeing seemingly knowing or wondering looks or hearing comments that just may be overly solicitous.

So what's a girl to do? Maybe I should just stay home and crank up the A/C. (But wait, I did that when I was nine months pregnant! Oy vey, can't win...)

Zero hour

2008-06-24T19:01:00.011+03:00

In my never-ending quest for Internet access that actually provides me access to the Internet (shocking demand! shocking!), I had the privilege today of overhearing a conversation between the Netvision guy and the Hot chick that revealed a certain confusion on the part of said chick regarding the difference between Hebrew and English and did not do much to raise my estimation of her company as a whole.

Netvision guy Anan, the first Israeli I have encountered who bears the Hebrew version of the flower child/American Indian-sounding name Cloud, took me patiently through a whole lotta steps to figure out what the problem was and concluded that the router was faulty and needed to be replaced. Then he called back and said he needed to make sure it wasn't the modem after all, which entailed a conference call with Hot.

When he finally got the brains of tech support on the phone, he asked her to do an "ipus" (איפוס - pronounced ee-pooss) of the modem. Since she showed little indication of understanding what he meant, he changed the form of the word to ask her "le'apes" (לאפס - to reset) it. Both words come from אפס (effes), the Hebrew for zero. (Morfix translates לאפס as: to calibrate, to zero, to set on zero; to reset.)

The Hot representative clearly had no clue what the hell Cloud was on about (maybe she couldn't check the dictionary because she couldn't get online either?), so she insisted that whatever he was asking was impossible and attempted to make it clear that she knew just what she was doing. She did this by adopting that tone of righteous indignation, replete with a declaration of her experience in the field, that I can recognize from a mile away as a clear sign that the person doesn't have the slightest idea of what to do and, more dangerous still, will never, ever admit it.

"I didn't just start working here yesterday, and I can tell you that there is no such thing," Hot insisted. After a bit of back and forth along these lines, she finally figured out that Anan - whose name, despite its airy-fairyness, puts me in mind of a good cuppa joe, thanks to a certain unnamed world body - wanted her to reset the modem.

"Oh, la'asot [to do] reeeeset!" she said. And then, I kid you not, she went on to ask: "Why don't you speak in Hebrew?"

Anan sounded as taken aback as I was. "Ipus is Hebrew," he informed her. "Reset is English."

Not surprisingly, given the admirable personality traits she had already demonstrated, Ms. Hot blithely continued as though Anan had not pointed out what a total lamebrain she was, and finally accomplished the task.

Conclusion: It turns out that both the router and the Hot representative are faulty.

Vertical new world

2008-06-10T19:18:00.006+03:00

I said in my last post that I could easily see Rimonit pulling herself up... in another couple of months. And I was right... but way off-base; she started pulling herself up the Shabbat before last.

Over the past week and a half, she has stood up by leaning over a couch cushion placed on the floor, by holding on to the coffee table and holding on to her high chair, and by leaning against the back or side of the couch.

A couple of days ago I thought I could sneak in a quick catnap by resting on the bed in the guestroom while she played on the floor of the most Rimonit-friendly (read: empty) room in the house, but the kid had other ideas. I had only just closed my eyes when I noticed that there was a little head peering over the top of the bed, the big blue eyes about even with mine. My incipient rest was disturbed by a mysterious sensation of having my hair tugged just before a little elf tried to steal my glasses right off my face. I looked down and for the first time was able to apply the concept of "height" to the suddenly vertical being next to me. It was a bit of a weird sensation. Wonder if I fell asleep after all and was only dreaming...

RP update: The dog we never had

2008-06-03T23:17:00.010+03:00

The kid started doing some serious crawling last week. She now bears a great resemblance to the dog we never had: She crawls under the table and eats shoes (yum!). She also loves books and newspapers (rustle, rustle!), meaning that she is eating her words before she can even utter them.

She had started moving forward a couple of paces on all fours two weeks ago, and did that for a few days before really taking off on her hands and knees.

And although I said in a previous post that she was getting in some top teeth, they didn't start actually breaking through the gums until this week, in a not particularly fun experience. :( On the bright side, RP has also chosen this week to fall head over heels in love with her reflection, so any time she gets upset (say, once the teeth start hurting but before the Acamoli kicks in), all we have to do is bring her to a mirror, and behold: an instantaneous transformation from crying Rimonit to smiling, loquacious Rimonit, who immediately begins a conversation with herself that almost inevitably begins and ends with "da."

I can also see a marked increase in Smunch communication skills, commensurate with her newfound ambulatory abilities. Now instead of staying in place and crying if she's hungry, tired or wants to be picked up (usually because she's hungry, tired or both), she crawls over to me to hand-deliver the message and pulls on whatever article of my clothing she can reach to get my attention. A couple of weeks ago, she did this partway, crawling (well, scooting on her tummy at the time) to her stroller, which was midway between me and her, and giving me the most pitiable, hangdog look through the mesh of the stroller basket. So I caved in and gave her a doggie biscuit. (Just kidding, savtas!)

The kid, who just turned nine months old, has also shown signs of wanting to reach further still. The other day I was sitting on the couch-bed in the guest room, trying to do some work on the laptop while she played on the floor. When she had enough of this arrangement, she did not satisfy herself with crawling to the edge of the bed and making her appeal from there, but knelt on her knees to give herself the most height and reached up as high as she could to make sure I had heard her plea. It's not hard for me to imagine her pulling herself up in another couple of months.

The smunch has been getting herself to sitting position for a while now, I would say about a month or so. She isn't yet able to sit herself up if she is lying flat on her back, but she gets herself into sitting mode from the all-fours position. She started doing this when she was still in crawl training camp. But when she's tired she sometimes just can't hold herself up anymore and will fall over from a sitting position or repeatedly lay her head down for a few seconds in mid-play.

Two weeks ago Rimonit started clapping (applause!), but I have yet to work out if she does it for any specific reason. Sometimes she does it when she hears music, but other times there doesn't seem to be a particular cause. If she starts clapping and I clap in imitation, I sometimes merit a big smile. I've also been trying to teach her to wave in the appropriate situations (mostly when leaving day care), but that doesn't seem to have caught on yet. I have the feeling that now is a good time to start teaching her sign-language signs for certain key words (food, drink, more, enough), but I'm not comfortable enough with what the signs are myself. I know I could just make it up, but I'd like the signs to be recognizable by others as well so that she can communicate with them too and not just with me.

Over the last few weeks I have also really seen a difference in her understanding of the concept of object permanence. She now can really appreciate peekaboo (called "kookoo" in Hebrew), giving me a big grin when I pop out of hiding, and when her toy drops off the changing table she tries to dive off to get it back instead of just forgetting about its existence as soon as it disappears from view.

As for food, I have been giving her a mix of baby cereal (so far, rice cereal and kasha cereal) and actual pieces of food (white potato, sweet potato, carrots, corn, banana, rye bread, pear, skinless red and yellow pepper) that she can pick up and eat with her hands. Sometimes she is more willing to eat with a spoon and other times she prefers to use her hands, so I try to offer her both at every (attempted) meal. I have also just started trying to get her to drink from a cup. She drinks from it fine if she lets me hold it for her, but if she wants to hold it herself there is the small problem that she likes to hold it upside down just as much as rightside up. I am also trying a sippy cup, which she enjoys putting in her mouth the right way, but I'm not convinced she is actually getting anything out of it.

And that, folks, is RP in a nutshell at this moment in time. No doubt by the time you read this she will have changed in a dozen more ways.

Doing the crawl

2008-05-11T20:57:00.015+03:00

[Photo: Rimonit appearing to be in need of a rescue from her cousin's embrace.]

RP is on the forward march. She has been consistently creeping/slithering/scooting forward, as well as practicing the crawl position, since Wednesday night - Erev Yom Ha'atzmaut which, if you'll permit me a moment of pretentious melodrama, was also the eve of Rimonit's burgeoning independence.

For those unfamiliar with the pre-crawl crawl, just think of a snake with arms and legs. She kind of propels herself forward with her legs and forearms, though she sometimes goes backwards when she appears to have intended to move forward. Actually, what she most looks like is a swimmer doing the crawl on dry land.

But although doing the crawl should not be confused with actually crawling, it's clear the next phase is imminent, as Rimonit has set herself a consistent training regimen to get her in gear for crawling. Not wanting to give too much away, she has refused to reveal the deadline by which she plans to reach her goal. However, observers note that regularly getting on all fours is a pretty sure sign of impending crawlingness, even if for the time being it is succeeded by a collapse to the floor and a blithe return to one's previous preoccupation (namely, getting to the TV cords).

It's pretty cool to see her sight an object of interest and then swim toward it ponderously, with conscious intent, effort visible in every movement. I know that it won't be long before she'll be moving around with even greater ease, but for now I'm having fun watching her steady progression, which somehow manages to be simultaneously incremental and lightning-fast.

You win some, you lose some

2008-05-07T11:51:00.011+03:00

On the one hand...

Givatayim and Ramat Gan have a style of Yom Ha'atzmaut decorations I never noticed in Jerusalem. In J'lem, there are flags decorating the windows of apartments, which are put up by individual tenants, there are decorations that companies or government ministries put up on their buildings, and there are the municipal decorations in the streets. Another type that I haven't seen over there but I've seen a lot in Givatayim/Ramat Gan (including outside our building) is blue and white decor put up by the va'ad bayit (building committee) of large apartment buildings - meaning that not only are the individual apartments all flagged up as per tenant discretion, but so is the facade of the whole building. For instance, the walkway leading from the street to our building's front door is festooned with blue and white ribbons, and the new 20+ story buildings across the street have blue and white ribbons running down the outside of the building.

Not sure if the increased va'ad bayit participation in Yom Ha'atzmaut that I am seeing in the TA region has any significance whatsoever, but it's been interesting to observe the differences. It's probably just because there are more tall apartment buildings here. It might also be a function of the va'ad bayit being more involved, kind of like a condo board maybe? (But fortunately without the selection criteria, for the most part.)

On the other hand...

I was rather surprised to see two Jews for Jesus guys handing out pamphlets on a corner in Givatayim yesterday. Didn't say anything to them. I always kind of feel like I'm supposed to say/do something, but what? Tell them Jews don't believe in human deities? Gee, I'm sure they've never heard that before. Once in NY I took their pamphlet and ripped it up in front of them and walked on, but what good did that do?

Final score: Laurel for the building decor, Dart for J4J (to use Targum terminology). Givatayim comes out even.

Stop the presses!

2008-05-04T18:56:00.005+03:00

While at work this evening, I received an urgent report from the husband manning the Home Front, to wit: Rimonit has crawled! Forward, no less!

I have not actually witnessed this exciting phenomenon yet, but I am told by sources familiar with the case that the incident in question was precipitated by the shrimp's inability to resist the lure of rustling paper being filed. Compelled to do some crinkling herself, she lifted her tummy off the floor and moved forward an inch, dropping down in exhaustion. As the "crumple crumple" sound continued (hey, is that an onomatopoeia, or merely an entrenched mental association? hmm, something to ponder...), she kept up her belly flops until reaching her clamorous goal. Can't wait to see for myself...

This is her third major milestone in the last two to three weeks alone:
- She just got her first tooth - and already she's sprouting what look like three more (one more on the bottom, next to the first one, two on the top)
- She can sit unsupported (which she did for about an hour and a half on Shabbat, quietly playing on her own!!)
- She has added the backwards slither to her repertoire of rolling all over the place (well, mostly toward the TV cords) and pivoting in a circle (a combo that enables her to get wherever she wants, even without the crawl).

She just turned eight months old yesterday.

Getting a lift

2008-04-29T19:23:00.013+03:00

We spent part of Pesach in Jerusalem, leading me to come up with a few counterbalances to my arguable over-sentimentalization of life in the Holy City (though I continue to stand behind everything I said here):

1. Doing things we would normally have done if we had still been living in J'lem (hanging out with friends and taking advantage of free holiday activities - which unexpectedly led to the acquisition of a shockingly purple necklace made out of melon seeds!) is relaxing and vacationesque when you're staying at somebody else's apartment (thank you, R&S and B!) - even if you know the very same activities would have been somewhat more mundane if you had been staying in your (alas, imaginary) Jerusalem home, complaining about having nothing to eat aside from matzah and jelly.

2. Speaking of that imaginary Jerusalem apartment, our stay in the big J brought home the unsettling realization that the roomy elevator we have started to take for granted in our building here in Yuppieville would be a mere wisp of a dream in most buildings back yonder. I used to scoff at those under-70s who purported to need an elevator merely to reach the grand heights of the fifth floor. Even when I was pregnant and the arrival of a little one loomed quite close on the horizon, I haughtily figured - to the minimal extent I thought about it at all - that we could just park the stroller at the bottom and carry the kid up, no problem. And also that all those wusses out there were making a big deal out of not very much.

That, of course, was then - before I knew about the magical sleep-inducing properties of strolling. Yes, I had heard stories about parents putting their baby in the car to get the kid to sleep, but I had not yet experienced up close the full power of Motion the Magic Potion. This is no theoretical concept anymore, but a very real law of nature - which, like gravity, just is, regardless of whether you understand it - and RP exhibits its sway on her at least once a day. But here's the key: If I'm to get anything out of her tendency to capitulate to the charms of what Warren insists on calling The Chariot, then I need to bring her back home and let her continue her slumber indoors, so I can eat lunch/do the laundry/check my email/take a catnap. This is easy when you have an elevator - but significantly less so, as I saw firsthand last week, when you've got a whole lotta stairs separating the snoozer from the house.

And elevator absence is just one element of the bigger picture: the serious tradeoff involved in living in a city, where - to relegate a huge quality-of-life issue to four words - space is sacrificed for location (unless you've got a few million bucks, in which case you can a) have both and b) probably don't even live in Israel, but just deign to visit during the holidays while insouciantly pricing actual Israelis out of Jerusalem... but that's another story).

3. Too many Americans in Jerusalem!!!!! I constantly complained about this when I lived there and was quite forcefully reminded of it upon my return. I did not leave America in order to feel like I never left!

A conversation I would never have had in J'lem

2008-04-14T17:09:00.004+03:00

I'm still fielding calls from people who saw my signs looking for a babysitter, and I had a brief unexpected conversation today with a woman named Esther. After we discussed the kind of hours I'm looking for (since I can use as many backups as I can get) and I made it clear that I don't currently need someone for the regular gig, she added, in a kind of hesitatant tone: "Well, you should just know that I'm religious."

I was rather taken aback that she would feel the need to point this out and said, "Okay, so am I." She said that was good because some people were bothered by having a religious babysitter. What can I say but "??!!!" I am definitely going to interrogate her about this further - if she decides to keep our meeting, of course (see Tip #1).

Pretty wacked out, hey? I wonder if babysitters in Jerusalem feel the need to tell potential employers that they're not religious. I am saddened but intrigued...