On Fasting, Hungry Hungry Hippos & Extra Terrestrials...

What's more fun than being sick and a quasi-single parent over the weekend? Having to atone for a year's worth of sins at the exact same time. Although, I think that the whole "sick and single parenting" might just be the penance for a year's worth of sins. No, really. It's not like I'm that bad during the year and I may have even muttered under my breath at one point, "seriously, G-d, if I get through this weekend without completely losing my mind, you go on ahead and inscribe me in those books of life, happiness and health for the next year, mkay?" So, hopefully he was game and I'm home free for another 365.

We were supposed to spend Saturday and Saturday night at a friend's house, playing games, watching movies and after sunset, partaking in excessive noshing (well, everyone else before sunset, me after sunset.) (and by "noshing" I mean "drinking wine"--but again, just the grown ups). Since I had to cancel those plans lest I spread this creeping crud o' plague, I promised Ethan I'd make it up to him. We'd play games, watch movies and (after sunset, for me) eat pizza and ice cream snuggled up in bed. We'd have our own sleep over!! Yay for Fun Mommy!!!

This required a trip to Target, to purchase the Objects of Fun: the happy fun classic game Hungry, Hungry Hippos & the cinematic classic, E.T. And frozen pizza. I got Ethan apple juice and a chocolate chunk cookie at the Target Starbucks, and then partook in my only real "cheat" of the day--a tall soy chai. I choose to believe in a G-d who would totally understand that the warm soy was *this* close to medicinal. The rest of the day, I staved off the hunger by sucking on cough drop after cough drop, which is totally allowable, and was also almost like extra penance for sins, since I purposefully selected the grossest, medicine-iest flavor I could find: "honey lemon", which takes exactly nothing like either honey OR lemon, but rather like some sort of slow-dissolving evil. If I'd wanted to go for maximum effect, I could have opted for Sucrets, but I didn't want to atone quite that much. It's not like I killed anyone or cheated on my taxes, for cripes sake.

I hacked my way through the aisles of Target, me & my germs making friends all around, and then headed home. Ethan jumped around me like an eager puppy dog as I put the Hungry Hungry Hippos together & then the inane children's game tournament began on our living room floor. I am so grateful for the no-reading, no-counting, no-following-any-real-directions rules of play for Hungry Hungry Hippos because I was so not up for Ethan making up his own rules or having to explain to him eleventy billion times that he had to move his piece to that ladder or that gumdrop forest. I was going for "keep him busy, keep him happy with the least amount of effort possible. because you're awesome that way," kind of day. And I got it.

We had a blast with the Hippos. I have to say, the kid was en fuego with the Hippos. I wasn't trying to let him win, I swear, but he cleaned that board up every single time. I'm sure this says something about the quality of my reflexes, but oh well. Something about the green hippo--it got the most marbles every time. Some sort of weird marble vortex or something; I have no idea. But we'd pop the marbles from their feeders into the middle of the board, Ethan would present a very dramatic countdown from 5 and then we'd lean into the board, each of us working two hippos and scream at our hippos to "EAT THE MARBLES!!!! GAAAAAAHHHHHH" until the board was empty. Come to think of it, all that encouraging of the hippos *might* be why I could barely speak yesterday. Because everyone knows that when you've already got a sore throat, yelling at hippos to eat more marbles will definitely send you over the edge.

But I wanted Ethan to have fun, so these are the sacrifices we make. After countless games of encouraging the hippos to eat to full-on obesity, we "made a traffic jam" with Ethan's gazillion matchbox cars (apparently he's not forgotten the hours he sat in LA traffic yet, either). We also made zucchini muffins, which was pretty much torture for me, but fun for him. In my quest to lite-ify things, I've been experimenting with substituting apple sauce for things like oil, but I'm coming to the conclusion that no matter how good my intentions are, I end up with dense, gooey bricks of baked good instead of light, fluffy, easily-identifiable muffins. When your muffin flat tops out at the top of the muffin cup, that's not good muffin. So we're going back to the full-on oil and egg excess, baby. I'll just have to wrap things up in pretty cellophane and give them away because as much as I love baking, I can't eat everything I bake. I'm striving to avoid being a contestant on The Biggest Loser.

As the sun was getting low in the sky, my stomach started growling and I started feeling that gnawing nauseas "you've repented enough" feeling, I decided, in a show of symbolic solidarity with my family on the East Coast, to break my fast on EST. So Ethan and I had pizza around 5:30 (Ethan was eating all day, by the way; no fasting for preschoolers!). This sounds like a cop out and like "well, you've already got something to atone for NEXT year!!', but when I get too hungry, "the beast" comes out--crazy, irrational, weepy, angry Sarah. And seriously, with 2-3 more hours of solo child care ahead of me? The most loving and compassionate thing I could do for both Ethan and myself was eat that pizza. Really. Ask Husband.

We then moved on to the "this is either going to be totally awesome or entirely traumatizing" portion of our day, and watched E.T. Ethan's not a big fan of the scary movie--and by "scary movie" I mean, Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Any Movie with a Wicked Witch In It, etc. He doesn't have a high tolerance for a lot of action or scary, shifty figures--the sharks in Nemo? Scare the crap out of him. The weasly bad-guy monster in Monsters, Inc.? Scares the crap out of him. And then there's all that stuff about the Wicked Witches. So I didn't really have high hopes for E.T., what with the aliens and the zig-zagging flashlights and the Halloween sequences and the overall intensity of it. But his friend Olivia had recently seen it and loved it and even though she's generally a bit braver than Ethan (and he knows it), he wanted to give E.T. a try.

He was completely enrapt. He was sitting on my lap almost the entire time (which was awesome right around the time my fever came back), so I couldn't see his face much, but I would safely guess that he didn't blink more than 5 times throughout the entire movie. I'm also not sure he heard more than five minutes of dialogue because he asked questions nonstop. And you might be tempted to think I am exaggerating on the "nonstop" description because, well, you know me and my love of The Hyperbole. But no, really, people. Nonstop.

Everything from the occasional plot-based question: "Where are they going on the bikes? Are they going to fly E.T. back to outer space?" to questions which lead me to believe he's going to need a lot of practice at "not being annoying" at the movie theater, "Why are the cars like that?", by which he means, "I have no concept of how car models change over time and this is blowing my mind almost as much as the idea as a little alien man coming down from space. let's spend some time talking about this whole car thing." Oh. My. Head.

He pulled a totally stereotypical male move when the movie got scary (and I felt badly because I forgot how horrible E.T. looks when he gets really sick)--he got down off of my lap and went over to the other couch. He apparently needed his own space to deal with this turn of events. But the questions kept coming. "Is E.T. sick?" "Why is he sick?" "Elliot's sick, too." "Is he sick because E.T.'s sick?" "Are they going to get better?" "Is E.T. going to die?" "Why did they put him in that?" And then of course, the "Mommy, why are you crying?" questions started because I AM A WUSS AND I CRY AT E.T. Feel free to judge, whatever. In a move of complete and utter sweetness, Ethan returned from the other couch before the end of the movie because he wanted to hold my hand, "so you won't be sad, Mommy. E.T's all better now." Ethan's not really clear on the concept of "happy tears." I'm a big crier of the happy tears.

Long story short (ha! as if), he loved the movie. I asked several times if he wanted me to turn it off when it got intense or scary and he would not hear of it; he insisted on watching all of it and at the end he talked for almost thirty minutes about how Elliot was so sad that E.T. had to leave, but E.T. promised to always be in Elliot's thoughts and he told Gertie to "be good" because she taught him how to say it and he was a good friend even though he had to go away. And I swear, he was killing me with The Sweet and reminding me of how much the movie impacted me the first time I saw it and the whole "oh my gosh, I'm watching one of the first movies I ever saw as a child WITH MY BABY and having a conversation with him about what a great movie it is and my heart, it is busting with the joy and the bittersweet and the loooooooove."

Fasting will make you a little overly emotional, people. Even if you do get pizza at the end of it.

As an aside, can we talk for a second about the parenting FAILS in that movie? The mom? Who lets her teenage son and his friends SMOKE cigarettes, at the kitchen table?!!! And who says to her 4-5 year old girl, "I have to go down to the school to pick up your brother--you stay right here and be good!" as she leaves her home, alone (and with an alien!!! even though she doesn't know that. still. you don't leave kids home alone! because there might be aliens!) And who tells her 4-5 year old girl, at another point in the movie, to "get in the car!!!" as she holds open the front door for her?!! Seriously, its amazing Gertie survives to the end of that movie!

I'm kidding, for the most part. It was an interesting snapshot into what parenting used to be like and how many more "rules" we have today about how to not be a horrible parent. No one in 1982 was clutching their pearls in horror as Gertie got left home alone in front of a television (and with aliens!!!) or shuttled into the front seat of the car, nary a booster seat in sight. But seriously. Wow.

SQUEEEEEE!!!! They're heeeeeeere!!!!

THE APPLES, PEOPLE! THE APPLES ARE HERE!

This has not been, by anyone's standard, a stellar weekend. Unless your idea of a rocking time is canceling plans for your kid's first sleepover (which you were going to stay for--for his moral support, of course. and also? for the wine)(for the moms. wine for the moms. not the kids. really, people), having to turn down super-reduced admission tickets to the local garlic-themed amusement park (which sounds hella lame, but is actually super fun, and the invite was from people we haven't seen in forever and have been missing), all while laying on the couch with a fever hovering between 100-101, a cough that rips your chest and throat apart every. single. time., and a razorblades-in-my-throat kind of sore throat.

And let's not forget the whining 4 year old who is beseeching you to go outside and play with him, get on the floor again and play with him, feed him again (from my perspective, this kid should be a linebacker; why is he so tiny?!)(a linebacker is the big guy, right?), and constantly asking you, "why do I need to use my inside voice?!! why? why? why? WHY?????"

And you can't get too mad at him because he's just confused as to why you're a lump on the couch (this is where the short-term memory issues of preschool come in and he doens't remember from one time to the next that "mommy is sick!") and why is his dad still in London and talking to him through a computer, instead of playing in the back yard with him with his new remote control carssssssss???!!!!

If all of that sounds like fun to you? I wish I'd known that on Friday--I could have set you up with a fabulous good time living my life for the last 48 hours.

So this morning, after sucking back 2 bags of cough drops in 24 hours (can you overdose on those? because I may have) and taking more deep breaths and counting to 10 more times than I can count and feeling like the crappiest parent ever in the history of the world, I decided that we had to do something. Not a super busy something or a super active something or a super involved something. But something to keep Ethan and I from spending our days in either straight-jackets or tears (and just as an aside, even with doing something, we narrowly avoided a strait-jacketed, teary evening tonight. super).

After tossing a few ideas at him, we decided to go apple picking. Same farm we went to a few weeks ago to pick strawberries. It was a little ridiculous--an hour drive for what turned out to be about 20 minutes of actual apple picking. But since we were not equipped with a wheelbarrow, I was the one carrying the bucket, and Ethan picked pretttttty much every single apple he saw the second he saw it? It was destined to be a fairly short trip. And that's good. Because by the time we got back in the car, I felt so rotten, I was wondering if I shouldn't maybe take a nap before heading home. But since nothing says "grade A parenting" like strapping your kid in his car seat and then catching a little shut eye in the front seat, in the middle of the day, I thought better of it and we just headed home. With a giant bag of Gala and Golden Delicious. Two breeds of apples, by the way, that I have no idea what to do with except toss in his lunch box.

Ethan had a great time--this is the first time we've gone apple picking in his memory. There was this:

but I'm guessing this golden moment doesn't live on in his "10 ten coolest things I ever did," list. So I'm glad he got this opportunity, and early enough in the season that the trees were heavy with fruit and still had apples at his height so he could pick some himself. I told him we could go again when Husband gets home & he's already talking about picking more apples. Just like I'd always hoped. What a mensch.

File Under: Whiny First-World Problems

People, I am sick. In a low-grade fevery, body achy, even my skin hurts, chest-coldy, scratchy throat kind of way that makes me miserable while not actually being severe enough to make me take to my bed w/ hot water bottles on my head and thermometers sticking out of my mouth (by the way, don't google for images of "sick"--it's not pretty. And apparently all cartoons of "sick" are of men, puppies or pigs--apparently cartoon women never have water bottles on their heads and thermometers coming out of their mouths. Hence no funny picture of "me" being sick) So that means sick enough not to want to play with my kid for hours on end but not sick enough that he can tell I'm feeling like crap aside from me saying, "But I can't play, honey; I feel like crap!!!!" (no worries; I'm not really saying 'crap' in front of him (often)).

And to top it off, Husband is away on business, so its kind of like being a single parent (without the burden of actually providing any of the financial stability--which? really? means its not really like being a single parent AT ALL).

Actually I kind of blame Husband a little bit (why would I bother blaming my own lax hand-washing skills or my penchant for opening door knobs, or being out in the general public while breathing?) See, I don't sleep very well on nights that he travels because he is 37,000 miles high for 12 hours (which happen to be comprised of the 8 that I would normally be sleeping through) and that whole idea makes me twitchy to the point of temporary insomnia. I may have mentioned that I am becoming a very anxious traveler when flying is involved--I am just as antsy when it is a loved one in the air. So Tuesday night brought little, if any, sleep and a whole lot of tossing and turning and randomly flipping on CNN and Twitter to make sure no planes had fallen out of the sky while I was staring at the ceiling. If my immune system is already compromised? A bad night's sleep is basically the onramp to the Germ Highway for me and I'm bound to wake up with a scratchy throat and some of that fabulous "general malaise."

Why was my immune system already compromised, you ask? That *might* be because of my wine intake at a dinner party on Sunday night, two days before Husband's departure. This I blame on my friends (because again, why would I take responsibility for my own wine glass being filled over and over again in a social situation?!). Since college, I've known that if I overdo it where the booze is concerned, I am asking for a cold within 48 hours. It's a 50/50 sort of thing--sometimes overdoing it = cold; sometimes, it doesn't. Of course, this time, combined with the sleepless night, VOILA!

Sick. Excellent planning on my part (although, really, I blame Husband and my friends). Today after dropping Ethan at school, I headed to Target for throat lozenges, tea, vitamin C and all that good stuff so that when I pick him up, our afternoon does not resemble yesterday's, in which I laid on the couch, muttering and begging for quiet while he clomped around the house in the highest pair of my heels he could find while playing his ukelele and singing Bon Jovi. Oh please, let there be no Bon Jovi this afternoon...

(note to the grumpy old anonymous troll who seems to like to surface and scold me when I am whining about life: I AM JOKING ABOUT BLAMING MY HUSBAND AND FRIENDS FOR MY COLD. I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MY OWN ACTIONS & I KNOW IT. HAVE A NICE DAY.)

Lives Less Ordinary...

I grew up in love with libraries. When I was old enough to walk from my house to downtown (which was, in the 80's, probably substantially younger than I'd even consider letting Ethan play on his own in our front yard, but whatever), I used to trudge down Concord Street & Main Street, past the town square, the Dunkin Donuts (oh, New England, how I miss you) and the building that housed the town's newspaper, to arrive at the library--silent and waiting for me, housing a billion lives for me to choose from.

The childrens' section always overwhelmed we with it's bright colors and giant books with more pictures than words, and posters of famous people I didn't know, reading. Even before I was old enough to read the grown up books, I loved walking through the aisles in the adult fiction section--running my hands over the cool plastic protective covers of the spines, pulling the books with interesting titles off the shelf and flipping the covers open to read the synopsis on the inside. I couldn't wait for the day that I could choose 15 books, by their covers, naturally, throw them in a big bag and walk home with the weight of them on my back and lose myself between their covers.

Not much has changed. Sure, I went through a long protracted phase of dropping an obscene amount of cash on books--in Barnes and Noble, Borders, in college at a used book store called Bold Faced Books--anywhere I could. Before I moved from NH to Washington, DC, I donated at least 100 books to the library (and while it felt good to donate to the library of my youth, I would by lying if I said I didn't regret it and miss those books, whatever they were). People hate helping me move---they do it (or did it, before the age of hiring movers) because they love me, but seriously, I am a big old pain in the ass to move. Because of all the books. I've become better at shedding them as I go, lending them to people, mailing the to friends in far off places knowing I'll never get them back, etc. But I remain a bit of a book hoarder. I feel okay about it, though, because not much makes me as happy as the random piles of well-worn books that can be found in most of the nooks and crannies of our house.

But given the economy and the cost of living in our chosen area, I've reverted back to wandering the aisles of the local library. I've been picking out 15 books at a time (this time based on authors and awards and recommendations from trusted friends and sometimes, the cover) tossing them in a bag and walking home with the weight of them on my back. Lives to be explored. It makes me very happy.

Two books I've read recently which I've really enjoyed are A Window Across the River by Brian Morton and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.

A Window Across the River is about two artists, Nora & Isaac, former lovers, who rediscover each other after 5 years apart. One a writer, the other a photographer. They are reunited at a point in their lives when one's career is taking off and the other's career has most likely peaked (and far below the artist's expectations and hopes). Morton is not especially kind to his characters--he draws them overflowing with faults (the biggest of which for Nora is that she bases her fictional characters on her lovers and is incapable of writing any of them sympathetically--this gets her into some trouble, both with those she loves and with her own sense of self and goodness) and forces them to face their inadequacies as individuals and as a couple as the story progresses.

The novel is, at its core, a question about whether the artist can remain true to his/her soul-devouring creative impulses and still have room left over in their world for the rest of their lives. And can they exist as a couple, given what they must do to be true to their art. And I love the way Morton answers this question at the conclusion of the novel.

Bender's novel reminds me a lot of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife or Her Fearful Symmetry, where a family's drama meets the supernatural in a way that seems completely plausible and not at all CRAZY. Even though a girl who can taste the emotions of the person who made a cake (or any other food) just by taking a bite of the cake, kind of is crazy. I'm always so impressed by authors who can craft character that are so believable and fully-developed that you can totally buy their step over into supernatural. The second that character becomes a cliche or stock, or the focus of the conflict ceases to be the human cost of the supernatural element of the story, the whole book falls apart, in my mind.

But in this case, like in Niffenegger's books, the supernatural is just a part of the conflict, a part of the dynamic that makes the characters lovable, if not relatable. Even without her ability to taste emotions in her food, Rose Edelstein is a fascinating, lonely character lost in the silence of her family's dysfunction.

Rose's "gift," she discovers throughout the course of the novel, is not the only gift in the family and in a way, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake's conflict is similar to that in Morton's story. How consumed do you become in your own gifts, art, secrets, etc, before you are absorbed by them and lose your ability to connect to the people closest to you? And what would happen if you truly revealed yourself to them? Would the result be acceptance or rejection?

So these two books are heading back to the library and I will dig into that pile on the dining room table, now about 12 books deep.

Today I am starting Richard Bode's Beachcombing at Miramar: the quest for an authentic life. I'm sure it's a result of the blog-to-book phenomenon that has taken place in the past few years, but I am really drawn to memoirs these days because I'm loving the idea of reading about the experiences of real people, whether they are travels, family dramas or mid-life crises. I love the truth that we all have our own stories to tell and that while fiction can take us to amazing places we'd otherwise never experience, our real lives are rarely ever as "ordinary" as we think.

The Eternal Apple Quest....

...continues.

Remember last week when I was all, "I don't care that it's still 90 degrees out and that it's not really fall! It's fall! I want to go apple picking!! Whooohooo!"? And all that? And I ended up picking strawberries instead? Yeah, me, too.

Well, I thought I was going to get a little bit luckier this weekend. A friend emailed me a link to a Fall Apple Festival in the East Bay. Apple festival!!!! Apples! A whole festival about apples! Yay!

Apparently, to hold an apple festival, you really only need to set up a couple of card tables, have one old-timey apple press for making apple juice and a few long tables with an assortment of apple slices for tasting. I feel like "festival" was too strong of a word; maybe a "here's one thing you can do with apples" demonstration would have been more appropriate marketing. No apples for sale, no apple-y treats (aside from the dixie cup of apple juice each kid got at the apple press), no apple trees, even--I know there were orchards on the grounds somewhere, but even a walk beyond the "festival" boundaries did not reveal them (although it did reveal a scurrying gopher or two).

We had fun, but not really in an APPLEFESTIVAL!!!! kind of way. Sigh. Maybe next weekend?

The East Bay area is gorgeous, with it's rolling sun-scorched hay hills and green trees.

These apples were the only ones we could find, on trees, in the whole place. And they're in the parking lot, surrounded by chicken wire. Friendly!

The theme of the day (which surprisingly wasn't really "apples!") was "old timey"--Ethan played with a bevy of old fashioned toys, the likes of which my cousins and I would have found as children, in our parents old childhood toy boxes, if such a thing existed. Old hand-painted spin-y tops, clippity-clop wooden horses and chinese checkers boards were set up for kids to play with.

This is the expression I get these days when I ask for a smile. It looks more like a "I just slammed my finger in a door and in about 5 seconds will be screaming bloody murder" face than a smile, but whatever. Get used to it.

There was supposed to be ice creaming making, where the kids could help out with the churning and what not. But when we got there, the ice cream was already made. So...

...Ethan ate his thimble full of ice cream and mini-cone (hidden by the pink napkin). A couple of times, he looked at his napkin and asked if he was eating cotton candy or ice cream. You'd think he'd know the difference, but really, the napkin was super pink and the ice cream wasn't that good...

The barn was lovely--I do love a big red barn. And this one was full of antique tools and working black smith set up and a blue-grass folk band.

I'd love to learn how to play the fiddle violin whatever that is. I'm not really a blue grassy girl, but every time I see a blue grass band, I feel like I should be.

Clearly not happy with the saddle experience.

Making horse shoes? (I have no idea, let's pretend, shall we?)

chicken incubator, people! That is authentic old-timey stuff!

And the big thrill of the APPLE!FESTIVAL! was getting to press a bucket of apples into juice. I will say, that is cool & Ethan loved it. When I was in kindergarten my class went to an orchard that had its own cider press and I remember being agog at the machine and the sheer vastness of how many apples went into making a small container of juice. Ethan was equally amazed and even got to participate:

apples go in...

you turn the press...

...again....

....and out comes the juice...

mmmmm, that's a delicious dixie-cup full of juice, my friends!

On the way back to the parking lot, we had to play Tetanus Roulette with the giant old rusty farm vehicles.

Not quite big enough to help out at the farm yet...

After all that Not-Really-Appley-Apple-Festival fun (and yes, I recognize that my expectations were probably unrealistic and that Ethan had a blast regardless of how many actual apples were there), we headed to Berkeley for lunch and had the privilege of paying $40 for 2 minutes of parking, as we got back to our car literally 2 minutes after the meter expired and found a pretty little love note to the tune of $40 on our dash. Super!

But on our after lunch walk (read: $40 un-guided walking tour of Berkeley) we did discover this one tree that appeared to internalize the entirety of autumn in its own little microcosm:

everything else is still blooming all summery, but this tree? Ready to take a long winter's nap.

crunchy, smells-like-fall!!!!!! leaves

We take our chance to stomp around on falling leaves very seriously here...

...and leave no crunchy, fallen leaf unstomped.

It takes a little more effort here in Northern California, but if you're looking really closely, you can find fall.

New Year? New Hair!

Oy.

Today is the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah (as was last night and as is tomorrow--we loooove us some 3-day holidays, people). I love Rosh Hashanah--for me it stirs up memories of crushing fall leaves under my shiny black Mary Janes on the walk to synagogue, the smell of brisket cooking for 15 hours, braiding the fringe from my grandfather's prayer shawl as I sat next to him for hours on end in the sanctuary and the rich tenor voice of my father singing beside me as the torah was placed back in the ark. Vivid, woven-into-the-fiber-of-my-being type memories that make up my sense of spirituality and religious identity perhaps even more than any sense of a direct relationship with a higher power. Tevye didn't sing about "tradition" for nothing, you know?

As Ethan gets older, I am looking forward to creating traditions and memories with him as well. He already goes to a Jewish preschool, so he's been talking about the shofar for days now because, please. You blow into it and it makes a crazy noise. And the guy who blows into it turns bright red and omigoditssocool, mom!

So I was excited today to take Ethan to the temple's family services--the kid-friendly service which I imagine takes a special kind of rabbi (and by "special kind" I mean either abundantly patient and kind-hearted or heavily sedated) to perform. A sanctuary full of other peoples' kids, baby through kindergarten? Next year I will prepare by bumming a Xanax off of someone. Maybe I'm kidding. Likely, I'm not.

Before we took part in the "listen to the stories and sing the songs if you want....or if not, writhe on the floor screaming or chase random other kids through the aisles" service, Ethan decided that he needed a haircut. Which broke my heart just a tiny little bit. But its his hair, so if it's making him crazy and he wants it cut, what can I do? sigh.

I snapped a few pictures before heading out to the kid's hair place:

Am not too proud to admit that these pictures make me a little verklempt now. That hair!

And then during the cut:

This is where I usually freak out, change my mind and say, "just a tiny little trim, okay?! Like a quarter of an inch!" And then pay $25 for my child to walk out of the salon looking exactly the same as he did when he walked in.

But he is so happy! "Mom, I look like the Beatles when they were really young!"

And then we headed out to services:

The official "after" picture

I got my yarmulke and my prayer sheet--I'm good to go with this New Year stuff.

I have no idea what he's doing here. I spent most of the services, when I wasn't twitching over the preschoolers who were writhing on the floor and kicking their siblings, simply trying to process how different Ethan looks now rather than figuring out what he was actually doing.

Shortly after this, on what had to have been a sugar crash from the tootsie-pop the stylist gave him after his cut, Ethan fell apart and spent the rest of the services on my lap, alternately telling me he wanted to go and wanted to stay to hear the shofar, which, like the weather report on the 11 o'clock news, is always last because it's the biggest draw.

I may have led him astray at one point when I encouraged him to join the other little children at the edge of the bimah (which is our word for altar) when the ark was opened. So lovely to see all the kids gather around and watch in awe as the rabbi hoists the open Torah up over her head for all to see. Except my kid translated, "go on ahead up there" as "Go, up ONTO the bimah, stand next to the person holding the Torah and then realize you are the only one up there with her, freak out in absolute horror at being in the wrong place and then cry inconsolably for 10 minutes. Note to self: next time, you might want to be a *bit* more specific with your vague-ass "go up there" instructions. Super. Nothing like a little embarrassment trauma to really make the New Year special.

After that, though, we were all about listening to the shofar, in all its Tekiah, Sheverim, Teruah and Tekiah gedolah glory (those are the four different sounds made with the shofar and they are pretty cool, if I can pull a serious Jewish girl geek-out and say that). The final note of Tekiah gedolah is held until the person with the shofar is beet red and just this side of losing consciousness, so of course the kids think that is the coolest thing ever.

And once the shofar is sounded, it was outside for some apples and honey, symbolizing the sweetness of the New Year:

Later in the afternoon we headed to our friends' house for dinner, which was fabulous (read: I had a lot of wine and Ethan ran around with his friend, fell down and bit his lip bloody, stuffed a few noodles in his mouth, freaked out at the idea of eating anything called tzimmes or kugel, and ran around with his friend some more until we were all completely exhausted).

We're a long ways off from having established traditions for ourselves, and honestly a part of me grieves a little bit that we live so far from family and that Ethan will likely never sit next to his grandfather during Rosh Hashanah services, braid the tassels of his prayer shawl and hear his voice singing in prayer--the things that truly resonate with me and my memories of this day throughout my childhood. But I hope that going with services with him today was a step in the right direction for him and will lead us eventually to our own sense of tradition as a family.

Happy 5771, interwebz!