keyboards, Explosions and Life, Oh MY!

This week has been busy and crazy both weather wise and life wise. On Shabbos it was nice enough to get all the kids to the park. Yeah!!!! Since then the weather has gone downhill and we are now back to freezing our buns off! Although thankfully it is only raining not snowing. Well due to the lovely weather everyone is getting cabin fever. It seems that even if it is nice and we dont make it out, everyone is OK. Probably because they can still play on the merpesset(deck) out back. But when it rains the kids all get a little nutty. This is where the keyboard story comes in. Yesterday morning I was on the computer in the bedroom when the phone rang. I was going to ignore it, but after listening to the answering machine I discovered that I needed to answer the phone. Well one phone call led to another right behind it. Meanwhile Curly and Mo were still in the bedroom unbeknownst to me. When I looked back to check on them, what should my wondering see, but two tiny babies gleefully pulling everysingle key off the laptop keyboard. I wanted to pass out and barf all at the same time and I am pretty sure that the shriek I let out was heard by the people in the neighboring town over! I sent S over to get D to see what damage control could be done and I am grateful to say that we were able to replace almost all the keys. Some dont work quite right and eventually we are probably going to have to cough up $100 to replace the keyboard, but thankfully we can get by for now.

As if that wasnt enough excitement for oneday, I took S with me to check out an apartment in an area outside the city in a place called Brechfeld in Moddiin Elite. It is about an hour by bus from Jerusalem. So off S and I go running to catch the bus. This means catching one in the neighborhood to get where we need to catch the bus the Brechfeld. Fortunately we caught the first bus on time but of course missed the second to Brechfeld by minutes. Grrrr.....but OK even if we catch the 2nd one 45min. later we should still make our apointment on time. In theory.... About 3 minuted before the next bus is due to arrive we had a total Jerusalem, Israeli experience. We are standing at the bus when in Hebrew a police officer starts moving everyone down the street. So of course I am with it and know something is up, but I want to know more details so I ask for the english version. Answer, there is a suspicious object in the area and they are moving everyone down the street. We go to the end of the block and of course silly me I am thinking the bus is still going to come down the street, it will just stop further down. But No.......of course not, they are closing the whole street! OK no problem I think to myself, they will get rid of this thing and then we will get the bus a few minutes late. Wrong again. They did two controlled explosions of the mysterious objects as S andn I about 100 other people stood around watching. It was actually fascinating and the first one they did, I could really feel it! It really surprised me. Were the mystery items really bombs? I doubt it. It looked like someone for got their bags. I could see them lifting things out with a stick type thing and it looked clothes and a plastic bag. (Besides this really is not so uncommon, we know someone who had a personal experience with this. One of our friends have a child who left his school bag in the park. It was a smaller town than Jerusalem and a neighborhood park so the police went dutifully from door to door trying to figure out if the bag belonged to anyone. By the time the parents figured out what was going on and what the question was and that the bag belonged to them, it was too late and one little back pack belonging to a 4 year old was blown to smitherines. Thus sparing the good people of the city from the dangers of a 4 year old's school bag.) So anyway, back to our story...45min. later they finally re-open the street. Did the bus come? NO! The street was closed so long that the bus was rerouted and we had to wait for another one. During this half an hour wait it started to get cloudy, then it proceeded to rain and then hail! Fortunately we managed to stay dry under the bus shelter, but we were sure cold! We did finally make it to our apt. to see the apt. and it was worth the trip but we are still debating the neighborhood. I wont go into it here as it would take to long and be too confusing to explain. When we finally land I will let everyone know where we are. Suffice to say that yesterday was a long, strange day.

Today the cabin fever continued so after a whole day of being ready to strangle my kids I finally hauled everyone to the park at 5:30pm in the freezing cold so they could sit in the wet sand for a half an hour and dig in the dirt until it got dark. Am I a good mommy or what?! And the scary thing is, it is only Tuesday! If this keeps up I am going to need a lot of tea and lot of chocolate to get through the week!

Hope your week is going better than mine!

Here we go again!

Well I finally have a few minutes to update the world and don't you know, the topic has not changed! It is snowing, AGAIN!!!!! OK, seriously, I loved the snow last month. It was fun and happy and reminded me of my happy childhood with marshmallows and hot cocoa and a big fire. I was thrilled to take the kids out in it and build a snowman. But a second time, this is too much! We live in Israel!!!! A big sunny desert right?!! Actually the desert part is only partially true, that only accounts for the southern part of the country. But we are known as the land of eternal SUNSHINE, NOT SNOW!!!!! I am freezing my everloving buns off here! And this time it was all wet and sloppy and here is S going, why can't we go out in it? Forget it! I did not have energy to dress three kids in 6 layers for 10 minutes of slogging in huge puddles so we could go back in and turn the house into a lake from all the wet clothes. Am I a great mom or what?! I did however, have to go out myself to run errands today. Fortunately the city was prepared this time so the roads were plowed and most of the businesses were open and the busses were running. The other thing that was really great was that we got our organic grocery order today. And early to boot, maybe we should have snow more often.......Nah! We usually get our order anywhere from 5-8pm, but today we got it nice and early at around 3:30p. It really was awesome. I was truly afraid that the driver would not make it due to the weather and terror would ensue over the house as we are usually pretty empty by Tues. since everything is weekly. Although I did pick up some staples while out just in case, including a container of peanut butter. Our house is not a pretty picture when it lacks bread and peanut butter. Like mother, like kids, what can I say? It is the one thing they got from me!

Other than freezing our ecole's off, it is business as usual at the house of J5 where chaos reigns. What is really interesting is that most people seem to enjoy this. The last two months have been quite busy for us actually. It seems that while between Channukah and the end of the month everyone took a break from socializing, starting Jan. 1, we have had everyone through our door. We started off with Av coming to stay with us for the month of Jan. which was great and also brought with it a few of her friends visiting. Then after Av moved out, last week NB came and stayed the week with us in order to finish her radio project with D so she could count it as part of this year's school credit instead of the following year as it all has to be done by March. They have not been able to make their weekly visit due to weather and other things beyond their control. In between we have had a couple of the guys from Kollel pop in to eat lunch with us as the house is heated, not always the case with the Kollel, the neighbors washing machine broke so we were one of 3 families that volunteered to share, plus one of the single guys, Sm, from D's kollel who is with out washer pops in now and again to borrow ours, at our invitation, of course, then we have assorted friends who come to use the internet and finally we have one of Av's friend's from Seattle we have "adopted" Dit who also pops in and out from time to time and tends to come to us for advice. Dit also gave me my first nickname, she decided my full name is too much to say and has shortened it to the first 3 letters, it is actually pretty cute. We find that we rarely have a quiet day or night anymore, but we love the socialization and of course the kids suck up the extra attention like a dog with a bone! We know our kids are cute, they are our kids afterall.....But I had to laugh when Sm came by a with a friend for a visit one Shabbos afternoon and the first thing his friend said was, "Oh my gosh, your kids are so cute!" He had been here all of 5 seconds! And we wonder why our kids act so attention deprived when it is just us! We just can't keep up with all the outside feedback. Because we are far from organized here it always surprises me that at times we get a large amount of foot traffic here. But one day our friend and teacher of S was here using the internet during one of our busy times and was the last to leave. She said to me that it is great that everyone feels so at home here, regardless of personality, background or otherwise. It was such a huge compliment because we really had, had an assorment of people through during the time she was here. It really has been a privelege for us to play host, den mother, teacher, friend and neighbor to so many people.When we lived in P-town we were the hot spot on Shabbos because we were one of 3 or 4 families that lived closest to Shul and after I had Shmuely I was not able to take him, so we had everyone over. It was something we really enjoyed. Living in Jerusalem has really given us that sense of purpose and belonging again. We have really enjoyed it these past months. However, as most of you know this is only temporary and we will be moving in a few short weeks. I hope that in our new place, which will please G-d be very long term or permanent, we will also be able to connect and reach out to so many different people there as well.