First joke?

Ayala is right that Mikael has really had Ayala's birthday pumped into him pretty intensely for the past couple of weeks. We also talked about it quite a bit yesterday as we planned for the restaurant and when we drove to the restaurant and once we were at the restaurant. We sang all the birthday songs we know in all the languages we know. There was a brief lull in the intensity while we ate, but when desert came around, we came back to the same theme. So, one the fourth time we asked him whose birthday it was while waiting for he desert, he got a sly grin and he said "Savta Rina." Everyone laughed. He was pleased as punch that he'd gotten a reaction, so he said it again, "Savta Rina yesh hayom yom huledet." Savta Rina laughed so hard, I thought she'd never stopped. Mikael was quite proud of himself.

סיפור טרי מהבוקר - התמונה שלא צילמנו

A fresh story from this morning: the unphotographed picture

אתמול התארחו אצלינו דונחין מבשרת - תמונות יופיעו כאן בעתיד.

הם השאירו אחריהם תבנית מלאה עוף טעים מאוד שמילכה הכינה.

לעופר אין אלוהים כשזזה מגיע לעוף. לארוחת בוקר, בעוד אני מאכילה אותי ואת מיכאל בקורנפלקס מלא עם חלב עיזים אורגני, התיישב עופר לידינו עם פולקע עוף מטפטף וריחני. מיכאל מיד דחף את קערת הברנפלקס וביקש עוף כמו לאבא. אנחנו זורמים עם הילד והיגשנו גם למיכאל פולקע עוף מטפטף וריחני. שניהם יושבים ואוכלים עם הידיים. עד שמיכאל נזכר פתאום שיש לו קקי. קקי אומר לרוץ לסיר ב30 שניות הקרובות.

אז אפ על הידיים בריצה לסיר, תוך כדי השתדלות לא להלחיץ את הילד.

ומכאן אתם יכולים לדמיין את התמונה, שלא צולמה, של מיכאל יושב מרוצה על הסיר , במכנסיים מופשלות ובידו פולקע עוף מטפטף וטעים .

Yesterday, the Mevasseret Donchin's came for dinner (we'll have pictures 'real soon'). They left behind a whole baking pan of very excellent chicken that Milka made. Now, Opher has no god when it comes to Chicken. For breakfast, while me and Mikael are eating whole wheat bran flakes with organic goat milk, Opher comes and sits next to us with a chicken drumstick dripping juices and quite odorful. Mikael, of course, immediately pushed the bran flakes away and asked for chicken like Daddy's. Since we do our best to go with the flow, we gave Mikael his own drum stick, dripping juices and odorful. Father and son sit at breakfast eating chicken with their hands, until Mikael suddenly remembers that he needs to go to the toilet. That means we need to run to the potty within 30 seconds, and so you can imagine the picture, that I didn't take. Mikael sitting on his little potty pot, happy as a clam, with his pants around his knees and a tasty, dripping drumstick in his hands.

From Indigo

Indigo sent us this sweet Rosh Hashanna e-mail.

It starts with a children's song that's really popular right now at Indigo (clear the way / I'm a bull with horns on my head (two finger at the forehead) / I'll dip my head low (dip head) and ... / ole! The crowd goes wild (clap)) and then gives a list of some of the different things that all the kids are busy doing. Mikael is described as 'exploring the territory' and 'excelling in gentleness.'

Opher

הורים יקרים

לכבוד השנה החדשה: הצצה לאינדיגו

שיר השור
(שתי אצבעות משמשות קרניים)
"פנו דרך שור אני
על ראשי קרניים
את הראש מרכין אני (מלשון רוכן. מכופפים ראש)
הקהל מוחא כפיים
אולה אולה אולה.... (כפיים.)

שיר שעושה שמח ושכולנו באינדיגו שרים אותו כל יום כל היום ובמיוחד אביגיל שזכתה בתואר זמרת החודש ושעסוקה בימים אלה בבישול דווקא עם חברתה מבקרת הטלויזייה והוגת הדעות אמה. שימו לב הבנות מבשלות אוכל לאו דווקא אורגני...

בזמן הזה מתכנס מועדון המעריצים של הצמד עמית וקלרה (הגיטרה).
מתארגנת להקת הרוק הצעירה ביותר בישראל שמורכבת מיאן, עמיתי-תי וזיו.
בן כנראה יצטרף אליו כשהוא יגמור לאכול את הריפיל השלישי של ארוחת הצהריים.
שירי מבלה את זמנה בחקר ההליכה ואחר כך מפנקת את עצמה בבקבוק ובשינה טובה.

עילי ואלינור מפתחים רומן. אלינור לא מסכימה לשבת ליד אף אחד חוץ מליד עילי, ועילי בתמורה צועק אחריה לכל מקום: לינור לינור לינור. . .

רומי רוכב בשמחה על סוס עץ ומחזר אחרי הנסיכה אלהיה שלא שמה לב שהאביר על הסוס עובר כי
היא עסוקה בבלונים הנהדרים שלה.
ליה מטפלת ביוסי התינוק ומקשטת את האינדיגו במדבקות ומיכאל חוקר את הסביבה. שניהם מצטיינים בעדינות.
אורי לומד לגזור, צוחק עם הבנות ומחזק את קשריו עם רוי שמחפש הרפתקאות, שופך את תיבות המשחקים ומנסה להתחיל עם אביגיל.
ליהיא ושירה נהנות מסיפור טוב ואפילו כבר יודעות לספר אחד כזה.

אז שתהיה גם לנו שנה של גילוי ולמידה
שנה של שינה טובה, אוכל מצויין והרבה פינוק
שנה של משחקים, סיפורים והרבה יצירה
והכי חשוב, ששנשמח ונאהב ושרק נהיה לנו בריאים.



אוהבים צוות האינדיגו תשס"ט

The New Years cards

I'm going to translate Liya's latest post for anyone who doesn't remember all of the Hebrew they learned in Sunday School:

All the parent's at Indigo, Mikael's nursery school, were asked to prepare Rosh Hashanna cards for their kids and promised to read them to the kids during the day. It turns out that reading them during the day means every day.

In any case, Mikael's highly devoted parents thought hard about the sort of creative New Year's card that they could make that would be fun for him and make him happy. Aba Opher sat late into the night and produced a lovely card where you can see all of us together on the beach.



Unfortunately, it turns out that when they showed Mikael the card he burst out crying and didn't calm down for a very long time and kept looking for us all around the nursery ...

So, after additional discussion, we decided to change the card. Opher sat and designed the second card which is attached here with pictures that we hope will make Mikael happy. Cross your fingers; we don't need any more snafus.

Mr. Potatohead

I'm playing with different video hosting sites. Here you can compareDailyMotion and Vimeo where what we've had up until now has been Google. The quality is much better, obviously, but the uploading isn't as convenient and Vimeo doesn't allow private videos. Please feel free to let me know what you think.

Mr Potatohead
Uploaded by opherdonchin

Mikael playing from Opher Donchin on Vimeo.

Mikael's shadow

Mikael discovered his shadow today! Liat sent Liya an SMS congratulating us on our two year anniversary. Lucky thing because Liya and I had both forgotten. So, we went out for sandwhiches and ice cream and on the way home from the ice cream store, Mikael wanted to walk. All of a sudden, he stopped. And then he walked a little more, and then stopped again. Liya figured out what he was doing. The bright lights on the boulevard made for very strong shadows, and he was really fascinated by the funny black shape that went everywhere he did. He spent some more time playing with it, until he suddenly noticed the playground and went to climb the slide.

New header

Well, it only took 3 hours, but we now have a functioning new header. I've probably crippled the entire blog template in the process.

Ready-Set-Bumbo

In a comment on my Bimba fleet, Sarah (whose kids blog I already linked to in an earlier post) pointed out this excellent site Ready-Set-Bumbo. The Bumbo is a baby seat that allows babies who are not-quite-there-yet to sit up for themselves and see the world from a different perspective. I'm sure that the Feldenkrais people think it's terrible, but the Ready-Set-Movies are very funny.

The hike

After the first picnic the Gotlieb's and us went on a short hike. Eran was laden down with both the girls, but he didn't seem to mind too much. He used the opportunity to complain about what poor physical shape he's in, but I got tired enough with just my one baby.

We also put Mikael in the rear carry for a while. He liked it a lot, and it's very comfortable. It's a little disconcerting not to be able to see him at all. Also, when he started to fall asleep his head kept bouncing against my back and we decided to move him around to the front.

The hike went down from the hill where the picnic site was into a nice valley and then back out again. It's certainly not going to make any book of Asia's 50 most spectacular hikes, but it was great for us. I thought about how I used to wonder what kind of people went on family hikes. I guess it should have been obvious then, too. Liya found another stone to bring back that would be a good size for Mikael to play with. It's sort of white to counterbalance the brown stone door stop he likes so much.

One great thing about having kids and hanging out with people who have kids is that you have no trouble finding stuff to talk about.

Return of the Schooleys

Kathy and Bernal and Alicia and Emily finished their pilgrimage to the Bahai holy sites and stopped over for an evening on their way to the aiport. They showed me lots of pictures of very well kept gardens and I learned some more of the history of Baha'ulla, the founder of their faith. In turn, I showed them pictures of themselves on this blog.

Now, what we have here is a picture (now on this blog) of them looking at pictures of themselves on the blog. Alicia is thinking of coming back to do a year(?) of service at the temple, and then we'll be able to have on the blog pictures of Alicia looking at pictures on the blog of herself looking at pictures on the blog of herself.

 
 
 

Blogging for money

Here is an NPR story on blogging which includes a piece on a stay-at-home mom who makes several thousand dollars a month from advertising revenue from her blog about her kids. Anyone think I should go public?

No posts

I want to apologize for the lack of posts this last week. It's not that it's so bad to let a week go by. Just to give you some highlights of what you've missed:

1) Opher's joyous homecoming and reunion with his son after nearly two long weeks

2) Mikael's debut in the new clothes his Grandmother bought him in America

3) The new folding baby bed I bought at Babys'R'Us

4) The excellent doll, called Blabla, that my parents bought in California

5) The beautiful wool blanket Clara Feldman knit for us and that travelled all the way to Israel and back and then back again before it got tous

6) Mikael and Ofer spending the day at the University together, first in my friend Sharon's office, then at a lecture by the manager of the NIH's Center for Scientific Review, then at the Department Office, and finally in my lab meeting

Unfortunately, the camera is wandering its way around Israel because it got left somewhere by accident. Luckily, Ayala just landed and so we have some nice new pictuers that Ayala took.

Birthday

I created a new label called 'Birthday' in order to let people easily compare the jump from one month (and before we know it 'year') to the next. You can find it in the tags on the right hand list, or just click here to see them. Of course, we weren't planning to do this and photos were not always uploaded on the birthday itself, so I'm sort of approximating with these. I'll try to get them right in the future.

Mikael was 4 months old yesterday.

The ergo

Both Liya and I really like the Ergo baby carrier (featured so often and so prominently on this blog), but Mikael has, to put it gently, 'mixed feelings.' He can be gotten to be quiet and apparently comfortable in the Ergo, but he very often complains about it. Certainly, it doesn't live up to the promises of the internet hype. We generally don't get a baby who is so happy to be in the carrier that he's just always beaming. We're wondering if the problem is technique, or the specific carrier or the method of carrying. There's a lot of internet hype out htere against the 'facing ourward' style popularized by the Baby Bjorn, but we have a strong feeling that it will be quite comfortable for our baby. Ido Kallir has one that we can borrow and try out.

Out there?

So, I have to admit that I never followed any baby blogs (or personal blogs of any sort) before I started my own, so I'm a little surprised (proud?) to know that there are 14 people subscribed to the blog, and a couple of people have told me that they check it regularly even though they aren't subscribed. I haven't thought very hard about the reasons for this, except thinking that maybe my son just is that cute.

Anyway, Liya says that I should let you know how much I appreciate knowing that there is an audience out there. She also says that I should let you know that if you leave comments, then I will see them. If you like a picture, or a post, or you thought something was funny or interesting, or if you have some weird random thoughts, go ahead and leave a comment. I see them all, and then I know someone is really out there.

Similarly, I know there are 14 of you subscribers, but my feed tracker doesn't tell me who you are, so, if you don't mind letting me know in comments to this post, that would be cool.

By the way, this is (as we used to call it in elementary school) a warm-fuzzy blog. I'm mostly sharing the warm-fuzzy sides of parenting, and putting less of a focus on the difficulties and frutstrations. In the feedback, I'm also looking for the warm fuzzy feelings, and I'm less worried about a real hard-hitting critique. There are enough places for voicing and sharing our criticisms.

Preserving the blog

I'm starting to get worried about the long-term viability of everything in this blog, and I'm interested in help from anyone who is knowledgable. Right now, the blog is here on blogger, the pictures get stored in my picasaweb account, and the videos are stored on video.google.com. That all belongs to google, but if any of these services disappears, then so does the blog. I don't know of backing up the blog in a way that preserves the picturs and videos. I don't know how to migrate the blog to some server where everything will be in the same place and easily backed up.

Anyone have any ideas? Comment here or e-mail me.

Baby carriers on the web

I just wasted, er, spent a lot of time looking at information about wraps and other types of baby carriers on the web. There's a lot out there, but much of it is repetitive. I found out a few interesting things. One of the questions I had is how much baby wearing are people really talking about. Mikael seems quite happy, quite often to spend time in the university or in the crib. It always seems silly to put him on me when I'm around the house. Didn't find a good answer to that one except one site that said that even if a baby fusses when they go into the sling that doesn't mean they don't like it. How do they know?

Anyway, the site babywearer.com had an enormous amount of interesting information. I particularly liked the page "Using your baby carrier" which had links to tips for different types of slings. That page had a section for the Ergo, where I found the most useful link to be the one to ErgoLady's Tips and Tricks.

Another link there that I thought was very important reading was "Correct positioning for safety and comfort of your newborn". That would have helped me a lot early on and still had some important tips.

They also have a forum.

Ketti visits

Keti or Ketti came to visit us from the anthroposophic community in Harduff up North. I've been thinking about anthroposophy lately for a couple of reasons. First, I've known Ketti and Amit, who live in Harduff, for a couple of years now and I'm still unclear on what anthroposophy actually is. Second, our friend Ziva told us that the new attitude towards those cool high contrast pictures (see earlier post) is that maybe they create too much stimulus and noise for the baby. The baby gets sucked, sort of like toddlers do to DVDs. Now I have no idea whether the pictures are necessary for my child's proper development or ruining his creativity.

Anyway, none of that is really important. What matters is that we have some excellent pictures of Ketti, Liya, Mikael and all of them together.

A quiet home

Liya is off at work and here I am at home. Mikael is sleeping. I sort of thought, before the birth, that at times like this I would be particularly efficient. After all, everyone says that you get more focused and so on because you have no choice. I haven't found that yet. My quiet times seem to be spent recuperating.

Days of rage and thunder

Just so you don't get the impression that every day is sunny in Mikael-land, today was a day of much crying and sadness mostly of un-ascertained origins. The evening was better and bath time, like usual, was highlight.