Yom huledet sameach
Filed under: Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
Just experienced another first as a mother of toddlers, as we ‘hosted’ our first gan birthday party this morning. As is de riguer, at least in many ganim, or Israeli daycare centers, we had to bring a) a cake b) small gifts for each of the kids in the gan and c) a gift for the gan.
After consulting with many fellow mother friends, I learned that not all of these are always required at a gan fete, but that’s what you do at the one that our boys attend. And, I have to say, I was slightly more stressed about this than I thought I would be. First of all, the boys’ second birthday was weeks ago, but due to several circumstances, including an intestinal flu, a major deadline, a husband traveling for work and the fact that the gan party can only be held on Tuesdays, we waited until today.
And so, following the advice of friends/mothers who have done this before, I bought Mickey Mouse stickers for each child, a plastic front-end loader vehicle and finger crayons for the gan, and made banana cupcakes with banana frosting for the party. We loaded up the car with said accoutrements, including candles and the camera, and made our way over to Gabi’s.
In the space of the hour-long party, the boys wore their artificial flower wreaths, mostly, and we were all entertained for 20 minutes by Rena the music teacher, who put us through the paces, including dancing, singing, clapping, banging wooden sticks, shaking scarves and playing with balloons. Michal, one of the kids, cried because there were parents there (us); Lev, one of my twins, was clearly wierded out by our presence or is getting sick (very possible); Ziv (the other twin), participated nicely and the younger kids seemed nonplussed by it all. And then there was the gift presentation. Gifts from each child to our children (who knew?), gifts from the ganenet (gan teacher) to our kids and the gifts from us to the gan (hopefully we bought the right items).
The finale? The banana cupcakes eaten at the kitchen table, and compliments from Gabi the Ganenet for making cupcakes, and not just a cake. In all her 18 years as a ganenet (wow), she’s never had a parent bring cupcakes. Sigh of relief. The Anglo parent did something right.
And now, home again, celebrations over. Until next year.
Nostalgia Sunday – Kibbutz Centenary
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday
The Kibbutz Movement launched its centennial celebrations last week with the message that collectivism is alive and well. These are glad tidings for a movement that was declared dead and gone time and time again over the past few decades. The Kibbutz Movement reports that a growing number of young people – singles and families – are seeking to join kibbutzim, either as permanent members, or as non-member residents.
A few more statistics: there are currently 256 kibbutzim in Israel (including 16 religious kibbutzim), most located in Israel’s outlying periphery. The total registered kibbutz population is approximately 106,000 persons, of which over 20,000 are children under the age of 18.
Every kibbutz celebrates the anniversary of its founding and many have begun uploading videos and slideshows about their histories to YouTube and the Kibbutz Movement site. Here are just a few:
Kibbutz Gvat – Photos by Amatzia Ben-Dor
Collective Adventure – Kibbutz Negba
En Gev Pioneers 1937
Kibbutz Shaar Golan 70th Anniversary
Tel Yosef – Then and Now
Gesher HaZiv Seniors – Youth – oral history project
Turning 50
“Today I become a man.”
That’s a declaration more commonly associated with a bar mitzvah boy but, as I turn 50 tomorrow, I feel I am passing a milestone even more auspicious.
For what does one really know about being a grownup at a mere 13? Perhaps, once upon a time, that was closer to marriageable age. But today, it’s just the beginning of the turbulent teens.
At 50, however, you have decades of experience to define what being an adult really means. And if you have kids, your designation as parent – be it disciplinarian, dispenser of wisdom, or even friend – propels you far beyond the wide-eyed wonder of your own childhood.
I’ve heard that joke that 50 is the new 40 and I suppose it makes sense. I found 40 to be a mere way stop on a career train that was still full of possibility, nothing too terrifying. And 30 – despite the stigma that I would no longer be trustworthy to anyone under that age – came and went without a hitch.
But 50 – that’s the point when you’re closer to death than birth (unless you live to be 120, tfu, tfu, tfu). Yes, it sounds overly dour, but 50 is 37 years from 13. Can I reasonably expect to outlive that difference on the other side?
And you can’t avoid the general system failures your body constantly surprises you with. I now need three pairs of glasses; standing in the audience at a recent rock concert blew my hearing out so badly I couldn’t pick up high frequencies for a week; and my memory’s not doing so well either (though I’m learning to embrace “who are you again?” as a state of being rather than an embarrassment).
Maybe all this is why I decided to eschew the birthday bashes my friends (who all seem to be turning 50 within months of each other) have been throwing of late. I wanted to do something physically challenging…while I still can. So, come April next year, I’m taking the whole family to Nepal to do a 10-day trek on the fabled Annapurna Circuit.
Why wait until April? Ah, that’s where it all comes back to being a bar mitzvah. The trip is not just for me – it will also my youngest son’s 13th birthday and the Himalayan experience will be a way for us to celebrate these two milestones together. And, in the lead up to that trip, we are hiking all over Israel – 12 tiyulim in 12 months – I’ve written about this already at length here, here, here and here.
Barbara Stauch has written a wonderful book called “The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle Aged Mind.” In it, she posits that, while our facility with faces may fade over time, our abilities with pattern recognition hit their peak later in life. We’re in many ways smarter, more creative and, studies now show, happier – with 65 being the age we are most satisfied with our lives.
Ironically, when I was 13, I never had a bar mitzvah. All that Jewish stuff didn’t interest me. And now here I am, writing from Jerusalem where I’ve lived happily, as a proud and outspoken Anglo-Israeli for nearly 16 years with an unceasingly supportive family.
Truly, I have no regrets. Other than a dollop of my own teenage angst (you can read about it here), it’s been a good ride. Middle age – watch out because, today, I am a man!
Happy 1st birthday, Ziv and Lev
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life
Lev, Ziv and the rest of us
Ziv and Lev are a year old, and 365 days have passed since they were born, at 2 and 1.2 kilos each, respectively. We’ve gone through learning about the Hadassah NICU, how to nurse (me and them), bath and feed. We’ve figured out the tag-teaming that is twin-care, from lifting two at at time and feeding with one spoon (it’s a lot simpler) to figuring out who really needs you when both are crying and not worrying so much about favoritism issues.
We’ve become friends with our Tipat Chalav nurse, Nira; have become accustomed to the grins, smiles, stares and well-meaning strangers who constantly stop to ask if the two similar-looking boys sitting side by side in the stroller are twins; and now know that in Israel, red is considered a color for baby girls, not boys. We’re into the park and playground circuit, and despite our ‘advanced’ age as parents (and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins), it’s kinda fun to hang out with all sorts of people at the playground. Turns out that when you have kids, you have a lot in common with anyone else who is or has ever been a parent.
Which means that if you can hack it, there’s a lot of good advice out there, which I’ve been wise enough about taking so far, and hopefully will continue to do so. If it wasn’t for my sisters and a good friend, I never would have sleep trained my boys, and consequently, wouldn’t be getting good nights of sleep for the last four months. And almost everyone, when you’re the parent of twins, has something to tell you. It can be the guy at Aroma the other day, who showed me the video on his cellphone of his 15-month-old twin girls, and he also has an older daughter, similar to our blended family situation. Or the friend who’s also a mother of 19-year-old triplets, who gave us a photo album for each boy, with a designated page for each month of their first year. Better get working on that. (Thank god for Mac and iPhoto, which separates your pics into months.) Or the neighbor who has six-year-old twins and told me — when I’d had a particularly harrowing day around five months — that things get much easier after they’re six months old. She was right.
But all in all, it’s been a fantastic year. And we’re looking forward to many, many more. Happy birthday, Ziv and Lev.
Bauhaus travels
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture
If you can’t make it to Tel Aviv this year to celebrate its centennial birthday, there’s a great traveling exhibit by a favorite photographer of mine, Yigal Gawze, showing his collection of Bauhaus photos, Fragments of a Style. The exhibit opened in Chicago, recently moved to San Francisco, and will then be moved to Europe, including the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany, as part of the 90th Anniversary of the Bauhaus school.
What’s really lovely about Yigal’s photos in this exhibit is that he hones in on the details and sunlit curves that we all see in Tel Aviv, but in a much gentler light on the normally harshly sunlit buildings.
In his explanation of the photos, Yigal writes:
“It was during the winter season, when the normally harsh outdoor light was softer and more easily tamed, and the white facades stood out against the backdrop of the deep blue sky. I was a tourist in my hometown, and my eyes developed a new sensitivity to my surroundings.
I chose to work in color (in contrast to the historical documents and the modern photographic work done on the subject), in order to better convey the character and the atmosphere created by the local light. The shadow of the palm tree falling on the white facade represents the special encounter that takes place in Tel Aviv between a building style originating in Europe and the Mediterranean glare.From the start, I chose to focus on the fragments. I felt that I could capture the spirit of this architecture by focusing on an essential part of the structure, which carries within it the genetic code of the whole. It was also an attempt to convey something of the utopia of the years which saw the building of the ‘White City’. Only in the last part of the work, did I step back to deal with the whole building and its relationship to the street as part of the city.”
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