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Homeshuling

Today, after school, I took my girls to a book fair with 16 local authors and illustrators. We got to meet and talk to Jane Dyer, Rich Michelson, Mo Willems (gasp) and Patricia Maclachlan (author of Sarah, Plain and Tall) and a dozen others, in a tiny school gymnasium. And it wasn’t even crowded. I shelled…

  click me! One of my all time favorite casseroles, posted by request for our shabbat guests this week. I can’t believe I didn’t take a picture, to prove how unappealing it looks. But….YUM. And while it has more prepared products in one dish than I usually use in an entire week, it’s also the…

Pics, as promised: Now we face the real dilemma – what to do with all this candy? While we usually have cookies in the house, and occasionally ice cream, we don’t ever buy candy. My children have had so little in their lifetime, that at every house we went to, Zoe (my self-described treat-atarian) would…

In my daughter’s day school, talk of Halloween is off-limits, because of its origin as a pagan holiday. If I had to guess, I would bet that 96% of the 100 students who attend her school celebrate the holiday, which, judging from the number of gravestones popping up on our neighbors’ lawns, is taken far…

Despite our green instincts, we bought paper cups for our annual sukkah party. I took out a sharpee so that people could label their cups, rather than reaching for a new one each time they put one down, and Ella asked if she could decorate them. She returned with a set of what I like…

My appreciation of shabbat has increased about a zillion percent since going back to work full time. While I’m not as traditionally observant as I once was (you know, before I married a goy), I take the idea of a day off from my job very seriously. While it’s not technically prohibited, I will not…

I’m nowhere near as crafty or fastidious as the Bible Belt Balabusta, but we did make some adorable model sukkahs in my first grade classroom. The goal of the lesson was to reinforce the concept that a sukkah is made of walls and schach, but we enjoyed adding decorations even more…… We used model magic…

It was a wet sukkot this year, and we didn’t have the chance to invite our friends to join us in decorating the walls. But we managed one good day of painting: Here’s Ella writing on the walls of the sukkah. Can you guess what it says? I’ll donate $10 to the tzedakah of your…

Early fall is an exhilarating, but exhausting time in our house, involving a lot of cleaning, cooking, inviting, celebrating, and a little more shul that we are used to. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot fill almost three consecutive weeks, during the Hebrew month of Tishrei. Fortunately, just as we are about to drop dead…

I’ll be back when this crazy month is over. Maybe a post a day to brighten *mar cheshvan? (*The Hebrew month of cheshvan is known as mar cheshvan, or bitter cheshvan, because of the absence of a single Jewish holiday in the entire month. I don’t know about you, but a month without holidays sounds…
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