יגון ושמחה ביום אחד

Just over a week ago I came back from 2 1/2 weeks in Boston reenergized and ready to go.  The month of Iyar was starting - my favorite time of the year.  Buildings, light posts, and cars all over the country get decked out in blue and white.  As I posted on facebook along with a picture of my gan kids waving Israeli flags: Nothing can ruin my Zionist spirit during Iyar.  Really nothing.  I never for a second doubt my decision to live here but you know, we all have our moments, and maybe my cynicism shines through more often than it should.  But not in Iyar.  Iyar is the most perfect month to be in Israel.

When I was in Newton for Pesach my shul rabbi shared this article with us.  The article describes a study in which it was shown that children who know their family stories are more resilient and better at coping with difficult situations.  Having lost my two grandmothers in the past two years (almost exactly two years apart), I have thought about family stories a lot.  My paternal grandmother was always telling stories.  We would joke that she never hesitated to pull the skeletons out of the closet.  I am grateful to my cousin who put together a short video of my grandmother telling some of these stories.  I first watched it about a year after she passed away, and while it was a bit haunting to hear her voice again, I loved that not only did I have a record of these stories - I had a record in her voice, exactly how I always remembered them.  Unfortunately at the end of the video she says that she will not tell the "skeleton in the closet" stories for prosperity because it wasn't fair to the descendants of those family members.  Needless to say, her grandchildren were a bit disappointed.  My maternal grandmother rarely spoke of the past, but little by little details came out, and while she wasn't quick to tell stories plenty of other miscellaneous relatives appeared over the years to do it for her.  My mother also dug out some fantastic scrapbooks when my grandmother passed away.  That's right, you're reading the words of the granddaughter of the nineteen-twenty-something area posture championship team captain.  I know - you would have never guessed.

This article inspired what became the central theme of my Yom Haatzmaut lesson at gan.  I bought a huge map of the world, hung it on the bulletin board, and put thumbtacks in all the places the gan kids' parents and grandparents came from.  I also of course put in thumbtacks for the teachers, as all of us made aliyah on our own.  And I put for Gila and Michelle's husbands because they practically work at the gan too.  We had tacks in eight US states and a total of ten countries.  My idea was to give each kid a story to tell.  Maybe they didn't make aliyah, but their parents or grandparents did, and probably they came from very far away to live in Israel.  Many of them have a sense of what it means to move away from a family.  They know our (the teachers) parents live far away and we need to take airplanes to go see them.  Many have grandparents they Skype with on a regular basis but only see in person a couple times a year.  We taught them that their parents and grandparents moved to Israel because Israel is such a special place, and they wanted to come build new things and make it even better.

It's almost easy at this age.  I can tell them that Israel is a perfect place.  Yes, I had to carefully explain what made the siren on Memorial Day different than the siren they heard back in November, but for a three year old that was forever ago.  When I talked about the fathers that go away for reserve duty, I just said that they were going to help keep us safe.  They don't know enough to ask for details.  And the siren on Memorial Day?  They was to think about the people that got hurt keeping us safe.  In a year or two they will figure out what I really meant by that, but I love that for now they don't have to.  They stood beautifully during the siren.  One kid was waving his flag and humming, but that's okay.  It was still a quiet, reflective moment before we went inside for our Independence Day celebration.  They went home with pretend teudat zehuts and art projects with their family's aliyah story written on them.  They had something to get them excited about where they call home.  And I could continue my month of being of super happy Zionist.  I created a bunch of mini happy Zionists, and what better event to add to my own aliyah story that still feels like it is only just starting?

Yom Haatzmaut is the best day to be in Israel because for 24 hours you can just celebrate.  You can forget about the terrorist attacks and fallen soldiers.  We have Memorial Day for that, and in Israel we do Memorial Day right.  We forget the corrupt politicians, confusing coalitions, and all the other ridiculousness that plagues this country every single day.  We sing Hallel and then... just keep singing.  למרות הכל (despite everything) Israel is one big miracle and lots of tiny miracles happening at the same time.

When I was in 12th grade and the attacks happened on September 11th, I realized that the world was a big scary place and living in Israel wasn't going to make it any scarier.  The following year I was in Israel when a sniper was on the loose in the DC/Maryland area.  A cab driver, upon hearing that I was headed to the University of Maryland, asked why I would go there - it's dangerous there!  My senior year at Maryland a mentally disturbed man opened fire at Virginia Tech, just a couple hours away from UMD, and killed 32 people.  I was reminded at how scary the world can be and at the same time felt that I could be scared anywhere, but in Israel I could contribute to something great.  Then this past Monday happened.  Monday afternoon I streamed the Boston Marathon online.  I didn't leave for shul until I had at least seen who won the women's race.  I came home from shul, ate dinner, checked the men's race winner, and left for town.  Maybe ten or so minutes later two bombs blew up at the finish line.  About an hour later I had several text messages from friends checking in on me and my family, and luckily another friend had called me right before to tell me what happened.

The tables turned.  My mom emailed me to say she was okay.  She spent the day biking around Cambridge, considered going over the bridge into Boston, but went home instead.  My dad had to navigate through police detail later that evening to get to our house because there was an abandoned backpack around the corner.  It's a new perspective that I never expected to have.  I spent Yom Haatzmaut celebrating one home and mourning another.  Someone hurt my neighbors, scared my friends, and no one has any idea who it was and why they did it.  I appreciate the reports of people who have volunteered their time and opened their homes to help those affected by the bombings.  But it's not telling me anything I never knew before.  Boston is full of wonderful people.  It's a fantastic place.  I have experiences all the time that make me appreciate what a wonderful city I came from, both the city as a whole and the Boston Jewish community.  The history of Israel inspires me to no end, but Boston is where my story started, my roots are there, and that is what's going to get me through these next few days.

My Grandma Rose

This is the transcript of what I said this morning at my grandmother's levaya.  When I first got the news that she had passed away, I didn't think it was even possible for Sam and I to get in for the funeral.  Somehow we made it, and I was able to write this before getting on the plane in Israel and fix it up during the short layover in New York this morning.  I also somehow managed to get up and share these thoughts with my family and a room full of people.  I am so glad it happened.

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Fifteen years ago when our Papa Harold passed away and we were asked to share stories about him, it was hard for us to think of a story that involved just Papa Harold and not him together with our Grandma Rose.  Throughout our childhood they were always together, always a unit.  They would come together to pick us up from school, they cared for us when we were sick, and they took us on trips around Boston.

We didn’t imagine how long Grandma Rose could hold on in this world without Papa Harold by her side.  She lived to celebrate the three of us completing high school, college, and graduate school (well almost all of us – Chava and I are still academically smarter than Sam).  She made it to Israel for Sam’s wedding and lived to meet her great granddaughter Hodaya and teach Hodaya her favorite songs.  Celebrating her 100^th birthday last year on Chanukah was nothing short of miraculous.  This year on her 101^st birthday she got to celebrate Chava and Al’s engagement.  She gave her seal of approval when she said that Al was "a handsome young man with a nice smile".  The picture of her giving Al a big kiss on the cheek is priceless.

Having a grandmother who lived to 101 was certainly incredible.  After all, how many life-time Bostonians do you know who were alive to see the past 6 Red Sox World Series championships? But the number of years she lived isn’t what will make her so memorable.  I’ll remember the time Grandma Rose and Papa Harold brought us apples instead of fruit roll-ups to Friday pick-up because they thought a healthy choice was a better choice.  We shot that idea down pretty fast.  I’ll remember how whenever I introduced her to a friend of mine she would say what a nice little boy or girl they were – even when the friends were college graduates like myself but hey, it’s all relative.

My mother told me yesterday that I was such a good granddaughter.  I responded that I will continue to be a good granddaughter.  After all, both my grandmothers will always be looking down at me smiling at my accomplishments, and glaring at me when I put on a wrinkled shirt or don’t brush my hair to their liking.  They somehow managed to do it from 6000 miles away, so I can’t imagine now will be any different.

To conclude I want to thank, on behalf of all of us, the fantastic health aides Grandma Rose has taking care of her.  Barbara, Sharon, Karen, and Hanifah – you became true members of the Zibman household.  You quickly commanded the laws of keeping kosher, Shabbat, and even acquired a sizable Hebrew vocabulary.  You’re all ready to visit me and Sam in Israel.

And lastly, a thank you to our ema for being a wonderful daughter to Grandma Rose while continuing to be a wonderful mother to us.  As you would say, you were a paradigm of virtue, even though I know you will try to argue otherwise. 

יהי זכרה ברוך

The Time Machine

My senior year of college, lots of fabulous things happened.  Among them was the creation of a time machine.  I moved into an unfurnished apartment for my final year of UMD, and while we found some of our furniture in brand new condition on the side of the road and from craigslist (like my bed from the guy from then on known as Hot Bed Guy), I bought a desk chair from Staples.  It came in a big box.  Logically, we decided to cover the box in old Yiddish newspapers and turn it into a time machine.  We put the appropriate WWJD and Go Terps bumper stickers on the sides and used construction paper to make the control panel just inside the time machine.

We made the time machine because we had a big box we could fit inside of (again, it was the obvious thing to do) and because before the start of the year some things happened that would never happen - and I mean NEVER happen.  Except that they did.  And while we spent hours making lists in crayon of possible reasons these things did happen and other lists (also multicolor) about how we could fix the things that did happen (snowstorms, magic potions, decoys), we realized that something bigger had to be done.  We simply had to go back in time and make some changes so that for real these things would NEVER happen.

Unfortunately, we never quite got our time machine to work.  Perhaps it was because we didn't get the wiring right... or because there weren't any wires to begin with.  I am convinced it was because we never got the sound effects right.  We experimented with different variations, and had much fun doing it, but the "situation" stayed the same, our couch got desecrated (long story, but it was OUR couch), and we just had to wait it out.

At gan right now, thanks to Shufersal online (supermarket delivery), we have an oversupply of large boxes.  They aren't as big as our time machine was, but maybe I could connect two or three to make something work.    All I would need is some Yiddish newspapers or maybe some old Jerusalem Posts would do the trick just as well.

I am just as wise as I was my senior year.  Or maybe I'm wiser.  Though sometimes I actually think I was wiser then, but maybe life was just simpler.  Actually life was much simpler.  Cardboard box time machines are a thing of the imagination, though imaginations rock, so cardboard box time machines rock too.

I still think it would be nice to have one again.  Isn't it a nice thought to pretend just for a moment that you can crawl into a box, tap a bunch of colored shapes made out of construction paper, make a series of beeping and whirling noises, and pretend for a moment that it's possible to get a do-over?  To backtrack just a few minutes?  To even just experiment with how something could have gone differently.... or been avoided entirely?

I still have plenty of crayons and markers around and big sheets of paper for list making, but snowstorms are a bit more of a stretch here in Israel than they were in Maryland, and I'm not so sure how relevant a solution it would be for recent dilemmas in my life.  I might just have to stick with the "live and learn" mantra.  Isn't that what grownups always told me though?  And being a grownup is lame.

I think I'll just go ahead and build myself another time machine - for all the things that would never happen (but maybe did anyway), could have happened, should have (or shouldn't have) happened, or would have just been plain cool.

Winter update

I was going to start this post with a comment about how I just watched the first episode of Felicity again (because I am that bored) and make some jokes about my life, but then I remembered that my parents read my blog and... yeah... Hi Ema, Hi Abba, you can go back to today's issue of the Wall Street Journal now.

The last blog post I wrote was probably the hardest ever. Hard to really follow it up with something... anything really. A few days after the funeral I made the trip to Maale Adumim to see Miriam. She of course had no idea what had happened, just that her mother was away in America. It was fantastic seeing her. We had so much fun. It was a big relief (maybe for both of us) after all the sadness the week before. Then on the last day of Chanukah she came back to gan for the day. While she was there, friends of mine came by to sign their kid up for my gan. I made a comment about Miriam being our favorite gan kid ever. Apparently we're not supposed to say things like that. But... she just is. We really miss her! Let me tell you, some of our gan kids set really high standards for gan kids to come.

Speaking of gan kids to come... remember two years ago when Gila and I were begging on the streets looking for kids to join our gan? Well a few weeks after gan started this year some parents started contacting us asking about next year. Then a few more called. Then we told them all to wait because we didn't want to deal with it yet... and then more called. Right now we have 14 out of 16 spots filled. We never advertised. This was all word of mouth. I have yet to hear anything bad about my gan. We have a lot of people to thank for this. Our gan parents have been huge promoters and their kids are kind of poster children for the gan. You know- they're cute, they speak English well, some are bi-lingual, and they know how to say please and thank you. Apparently we did something right. I find that part particularly impressive considering in so many ways we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. I seriously tell people when they asked how we started the gan that we totally winged it. Maybe not totally, but there was and continues to be a lot of learning along the way.

Some other things that happened in the past few months: There was a war. As someone on facebook wrote, this country has rockets falling and life goes on as normal, but there's a threat of snow and the entire country shuts down. Of course life didn't totally go on as normal. Gila's husband was in the army all week waiting for word about whether or not the army was going into Gaza. One morning the father of one of our gan kids showed up after breakfast, gave his son a hug and kiss, and said he was going into the army. We taught the kids the prayer we say to keep soldiers safe and the prayer for the State of Israel. We also went over with them what to do if they heard a siren. The first siren sounded in Jerusalem came on a Friday after shabbat had started. One of our gan kids was home with her mother and said "I need to find a grownup!" to which her mother said "I'm a grownup!" and the kid said "Okay! Where are we going to stay safe?". It gave me an entirely new prospective on what it means to be an educator in this country. The second siren came during gan hours when all the kids (and Gila) were taking a nap. The street outside the gan was being destroyed and rebuilt so there was an incredible amount of noise. I was awake with one kid who heard the siren and said he heard an ambulance. A full thirty seconds later I realized that the siren was not one from an ambulance, and took him to another part of the gan. Residents of Jerusalem have about ninety seconds from the time the siren goes of to get to a safe place. How did people with less time (and far more frequent sirens) cope?

Like with other events like this in Israel, they quickly become the past. A ceasefire was declared. Our soldiers came home. Life returned to normal. There's just no other way to do things around here. Things still come up though where we'll think "Oh why didn't that happen?" or "weren't we supposed to go to...?" and we remember "Oh right, the war" as just another thing that happened in our lives. It's just something that happened to an entire country- a very, very small country.

In other news, hopefully in a couple weeks Gila and I will be going on a babymoon. This is something I insisted on, in anticipation of Gila becoming a mother in a few months. As the gan grows and as our ganenets' families' grow there will be all sorts of changes, and it will be good for us to take a step back and feel confident that the place will be in one piece when we get back. This essentially means that Gila and I will be sitting on comfy chairs by the pool, checking our phones constantly, and talking about how much we miss the kids in gan (you know, like all good parents do when they're on a date). And then we'll probably come back and think how ridiculous it is that we have nothing else to talk about, and that maybe when Gila's baby is born and she only wants to talk about her baby nonstop that it will be a nice change of pace (no Gila, I do not see you as the type to do that).

My niece turned 3 in November. She is fantastic. Just had to stick that in there somewhere. I could elaborate, but for now I'll stick with saying she is fantastic.

Good night from cold, rainy, and windy Jerusalem. So so so cold.

כחלום יעוף

Dear Miriam,

Last week I was thinking that the next funeral of a grandmother I would go to would be that for my own grandmother. Yes, that may sound a bit morbid, but my grandmother is a few months shy of her 101st birthday. She is old, her body is getting weaker, and her time may come soon. I will of course be devastated - there is no questioning that. But how will it even compare to the funeral of your grandparents last night?

We can start with basic arithmetic. The age of your maternal grandparents combined is not even 2 years higher than the age that just my grandmother is now.

I am a sucker for sweet grandparents. Could be because I grew up with four fabulous ones. I've also picked up a few "adopted grandparents" on the way because you can never have enough old people who tell you nice things about yourself (or even constructive criticism, once in awhile).

In my job as a ganenet, I have more than the pleasure of getting to know fantastic kids like yourself (and you are, in fact, one of the most fantastic kids I have had the pleasure of having in my classroom). It's a people job, which has its ups and downs. But among its ups is getting to meet the wonderful people who go along with the fantastic kids I hang out with every day. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and of course grandparents. The grandparents are some of the best, for when I see them, or rather when I see them see their grandchildren, it is often the first time in awhile that they've seen each other. Even if it's just been a few days since the last meeting, there's still that excitement. There's just something special in that relationship.

Your grandparents were no different. They would arrive in gan for pick-up just hours after landing in Israel. Your excitement would be contagious (as it is for so many other things, which is why we love you so much). Hurray! Sabu and Savtu (as you called them) are here! When I was your age, my grandparents were 20+ years older than your grandparents were. How fun it was for you to have such able and mobile grandparents in your life, ones who could technically lived in New Jersey but we would still see here in Israel on a regular basis. You were so lucky.

Your Savta bought you the most fabulous clothes. We constantly joked that you were better dressed than we could ever dream of being. I got excited when my mom bought my niece a skirt just like yours because it was one of my favorites. I loved seeing your grandparents, whether it be for a 7:30am drop off or pick-up at the end of the day. Or there was that one time you came late because they took you out for chocolate milk and a muffin at Tal Bagels, and warned us that you probably wouldn't be hungry for awhile. And there were all those days you played hooky to spend time with your Saba and Savta, which was the perfect excuse to miss a day in gan.

I remember the day your Savta brought you to gan and whispered to me that your mommy was in labor with Meira. You thought your mommy was at work. Your Savta was also the one who shared the news with us that you had a baby sister - that they had a new granddaughter. Try hard to remember the times you had with your grandparents so that you can tell Meira all about them when she's older. Your time with them was far too short, but you are already have the makings of an excellent storyteller.

Last night a lot of people gathered to say goodbye to your grandparents, Ari and Sari Horowitz z"l. Some were there as friends of your grandparents, some as friends of your parents, and I was there for you. When I saw your mommy crying, I thought about the only other time I saw her cry. On the second day of Gan Shelanu's inaugural year, and the first where the parents were expected to leave, only one out of our seven kids cried (obviously it was not you). And one parent cried too. Your mommy looked over her shoulder with a tear streaked face as she said goodbye and walked out. When she returned she said that she was in labor with you for multiple days, but that those were the hardest two hours of her life. She turned to you and told you to say goodbye, and you turned back to your mommy, said goodbye to her, and resumed playing with your new friends. When I think about your mommy crying, I hope I can remember that story first, and not the pain of watching her cry at her parents' funeral last night.

Last Friday, the day before the accident, I was texting with your mommy about finding a time for you to visit gan. She asked if you could spend the whole day, and we without a doubt said yes. Now I don't know when that will happen, but you should know that in the meantime we have been praying for your Uncle Amiad to get better quickly. We are learning more about what tefilah is and about Hashem being the creator of everything in this world. I told your friends that we can say a tefilah like Modeh Ani to say thank you for a new day, but when we say a tefilah like Modeh Ani we can also think about someone who isn't doing so well and ask Hashem to give them a good day too. Your friends at gan will continue to daven for Amiad for as long as it takes.

I obviously could not even begin to tell them about what happened to your grandparents. That isn't just because they are just 2 and 3 years old. You were always wise beyond your years, but you can't possibly understand what really happened. But the other reason I couldn't begin to tell them is because I can't even understand. We taught your friends in gan about how Hashem is the creator of everything, and that we are thankful for such a wonderful world to live in. But how could I now tell them that Hashem takes away too? How can I tell them something I even as a grownup will never comprehend?

Rosh Hashannah davenning took on a whole new meaning for many of us this year. The phrase that caught my attention most was in the paragraph about how man comes from dust and returns to dust, comes from nothing and returns to nothing. The final phrase is כחלום יעוף, that man is like a fleeting dream. There was a lot of dust in the air last night as your Saba and Savta were buried side by side. But I think the idea of a fleeting dream is a nicer (if that's even possible) way of talking about a life that is lost. Your grandparents were full of dreams - for themselves, for your mother, father and uncle, and for you and Meira. Their chances at their personal dreams left this world with them, but the rest of you are still going to live out the rest of them, especially living here in Israel.

Your mommy said last night that she always felt her parents gave her big shoes to fill and she was always trying so hard to make them proud. As someone who loved trying on all your friends' shoes while they slept in the other room and you entertained us in the main room, you can help your mommy fill those shoes. And you can also do wonderful things just by being you, and it will be an even bigger tribute to your Saba and Savta.

Keep making us smile and laugh - we need it more now than ever.

Love, Rebecca

Is this what it's like to be a real person?

I've made a few observations about my life since finishing grad school (well "finishing" here is used loosely, but I might get to that later). The first observation is that I don't clean my room and the rest of my apartment nearly as often as I used to. The other observation is that I haven't written in my blog for awhile. Ironically, cleaning is something I would often do when I'd be tired of sitting still and doing work, and blogging is what I'd do when I felt inspired to write but bored by my schoolwork. In other words, they were key forms of procrastination.

It is now March. I recently settled a dispute with Hebrew U over a 4000 shekel charge they felt I owed them. It was lowered to 30 shekels. I emailed my department secretary to ask if I had anything else to sort out, but I did not receive a response, so instead I'll just hold my breath until I am handed a diploma and then rejoice at having gotten away with not passing Hebrew. However since after digging I found what might be my graduation date but not being certain, I am holding my breath for an undetermined amount of time.

March also means that my gan has been open and running for six months. Six months is a long time. Six months ago Gila and I held our breaths and opened a business we had no guarantee was going to succeed. We had seven kids. Beginning after Pesach, we will have fourteen. Doubling in size in seven months. Not bad. We had to go out and buy new bigger tables. Even better- we could afford to go out and buy new bigger tables. We can also afford to support our crazy sticker habit. For example when we went into the store to purchase the tables, we said "hey lets look at stickers first" and proceeded to make a pile of like ten packages of stickers that we HAD to have. And then yesterday, about a week later, we realized we didn't have good Spring themed stickers so I HAD to go back to the store and buy even more stickers! Life is rough, I tell you.

Needless to say, Gila and I are having a fantastic time running our gan. We also happen to have fantastic kids (and parents). Our kids are so fantastic that last week we took them to the zoo on the bus because we knew they could do it, and they did. They walked up to the top of the zoo and back down. There was no crying, no meltdowns. They just skipped on up. One took big steps while saying over and over "I'm taking BIIIIG steps and BIIIIG steps and BIIIG steps". Smiles all around. And they all thought taking the bus was so cool, especially when other buses pulled up next to us and they could see more people riding on a different bus, because when you're 2, things like that are totally amazing.

Today I was thinking about the post I wrote for Tisha B'Av/ finishing my job in Gan Pashosh. What I wrote then holds even more true in my life now. Now that I play an even more significant role in the lives of a bunch of naive little toddlers, it is that much more incredible watching them learn the basic lessons of life. Like if you lean forward on your chair, you probably will fall off of it, and it probably will hurt when you hit the floor. If you eat with your hands instead of a fork, you might bite your hand and it will also hurt. If you grab a toy from a friend, your friend will be sad. Your friend might also smack you on the head, and that can hurt too. Also if you lay down, you're practically asking everyone else to come sit on you. Don't believe me? Try it out in my gan. Actions and consequences are a big part of life. I don't think we ever stop being reminded of that though.

So I used to pretend that once I was a real person so much wouldn't be complicated anymore because I would be set on what I'll be doing for the next few years. Not surprisingly, I was wrong. Or I guess I was right that I was pretending. I am as confused as ever, if not more so, but I'm having fun (most of the time), and I play with toys all day and get to buy lots of stickers.

Could be worse :-)



And oh yeah, thank goodness for good friends. Now that I'm a real person, I think it's about time I make some more of them.

A Family Holiday

My mother always jokes how Pesach is a "family holiday". It's a week-long occasion when for better or worse everyone is more or less stuck under one roof making varying efforts to get along with each other. It's beautiful to be together, and everybody breathes a huge sigh of relief when it's all over.

Two weeks ago my family celebrated a family holiday of a different sort. On December 23rd, my Grandma Rose turned 100. When Gila and I started discussing logistics for the gan, on the list was how I would take off for this occasion. Chanukah vacation was planned accordingly. I was not going to miss this. My brother and his family made their plans to come in from Israel and my sister made plans to come in from DC. We were all going to be together. No yom tov and a house with an endless supply of bagels and muffins- this was going to be good.

It was spectacular. After my grandma got over the crazy idea that we all just came because we thought she was dying, we all shared a special weekend together. The birthday cards came pouring in. A "little birdie" (who I call Ema) made sure that cards were received from President Obama and Governor Patrick. One of the most beautiful acknowledgements came from Yad Sarah, an organization my grandmother has supported for years. They posted a birthday message to my grandmother on their digital message board outside the building and had it up for all of Chanukah.

On Grandma Rose's actual birthday we had a photographer come to do family pictures. I had been trying to get at least my siblings to do this for years and they would just whine about it. Suddenly everyone thought it was a great idea. I can't wait to see how they came out.

Visitors came throughout the day and over shabbat. Grandma Rose got a phonecall from her cardiologist and a special visit from her visiting nurse and cardiac nurse. They brought her flowers, as did tens of other people. This visit made my grandmother's day and she was glowing through shabbat dinner after they left. Her day health aide had bought a camera special for the occasion of her birthday and took a picture of them. These people have kept my grandmother alive and healthy, and we are grateful for their love and care.

My niece and her parents arrived just in time for the first night of Chanukah. Having four generations light candles together was really special. On Saturday night everyone was together. Can't remember the last time the three of us siblings were together for Chanukah.

My trip started out with my usual jumping around from place to place. I spent my first morning at my Aunt and Uncle's house in New Jersey and then journeyed to NY for an evening out with friends. It's always fun making a bunch of friends for all different times in my life have dinner together and all become friends with each other. But for most of my trip I stayed still. Well, I spent hours and hours at stores shopping for the gan and once in awhile for myself, but I more or less stayed still. I got to light Chanukah candles every night with my family and see my niece every morning when I woke up ("Becca jammies!") and best of all was the monkey pajama party with my niece (we both have footsie pajamas with a monkey on them).

We are confident that Grandma Rose enjoyed her birthday. We did not know what to expect. I hope she realized that we were there fully to celebrate her long life and not in anticipation of what is to come. As exciting as it is to have a grandmother that old it is incredibly daunting, but every day since I got back I have thought about how beautiful my trip and her birthday celebration was.

It was a family holiday, but one we are still celebrating.