Twins at Tipat Chalav

December 19, 2008 - 9:47 AM by Jessica

Laura and Aliza at Tipat Chalav

Well, we’re nine weeks and counting on this new life as a mother of twins, and I’m sure that as many of you could have told me, it’s a very different reality. They should be using sleep deprivation as a torture device on ’24′, and then maybe I would have had an inkling as to what it’s like to live without sleep.

But this is a blog about the reality of life in Israel, and I’ll stick to the subject. There are many stories to tell when you’re a new parent in Israel, and even though I’ve been here 14 years, this latest turn of events has turned me onto a whole new slice of Israeli society.

Because our twin boys did not both come home at the same day — Ziv came home at 10 days, Lev more than five weeks later — we were more than a bit frazzled. We were told by the good people at the Hadassah Ein Kerem NICU to bring Ziv to our local Tipat Chalav, translated literally as a drop of milk, one of the national chain of Well Baby clinics, a few days after we brought him home. The clinics are well-known; everyone has to bring their babies, particularly for innoculations. And the nurses are always slightly curmudgeonly and old fashioned, badgering nervous new mothers about their baby’s weights. This was true 20 years ago, and it’s still true today.

We got there at our allotted time, little boy in tow. I was post-partum and nervous, he proceeded to poop upon arrival. Whereupon we realized that we had no diaper bag of any kind; forget diaper bag, we didn’t even have a diaper or a wipe with us. Not a great way to impress Nira, our assigned Tipat Chalav nurse. She borrowed a diaper for us, and I felt she threw a look of disapproval at us for being so unprepared.

We sat in her office, while she poked and prodded at her computer, letting us know that the ‘machashev‘ (a sort of old-fashioned way of referring to a machshev, the word for computer), was on the blink, as usual. While we waited patiently, worrying that Ziv had lost weight since coming home, Daniel jiggled Ziv on his arm. He was trying to calm me down, and told me that she was probably going to tell him to stop jiggling the baby. Sure enough, she looked at him sternly and said, “You know, it’s really not a good idea to jiggle a baby; they’ll expect to be jiggled all the time.” Daniel looked back at her, and said, with a smile, “Well, I have two other daughters who are 17 and 11, and I still have to jiggle them.” She looked at him quizzically, didn’t laugh in response, and went on with the checkup.

Luckily, Ziv hadn’t lost weight — although Nira said her scale was always a little off — his color was good, and she was impressed that I was nursing a preemie. (I had had suspicions that she would press me on feeding the boys formula, another Tipat Chalav tradition.) She gave us at least a dozen pamphlets on baby health, told us to pay our Tipat Chalav fee before the next visit, and made us promise to bring him back five days later to be weighed.

We went out and rented a scale instead, but I won’t be able to avoid these Tipat Chalav visits forever. After all, they’re a rite of Israeli parenting, and hey, why would I want to avoid any part of that?

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