I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

In recent years we have occasionally had seder for the 3 of us at home, but this year we had first-night seder for 10 - mostly Mr Y's non-Jewish bandmates, who are all lovely smart interested people, plus my synagogue friend David from the next town over, with his two no-longer-so-little kids (9 and 6 now, though they're still tiny compared to my towering 10yo). So we had a kids' table in the kitchen and 7 adults around the dining table, which is just about as full as we can get without starting to feel crowded. Ms. A was amazing at entertaining the kids and helping them find snacks, everyone enjoyed the matzah ball soup and overnight brisket to the fullest, and we were done by about 9:30pm, with still enough energy to do one load of dishes before we sacked out.

Thursday (second night) we went to the potluck community seder at the Other Shul, which we have attended before but not recently. It's a 90-person affair, of whom I only know maybe 20 (alas, my friend the rabbi was out of town with family, which was apparently a bone of some contention in the community, but that's another story). We sat with another young family, so Ms. A got to work her magic with the littles again. The seder portion was under half an hour (!), but it was nice to be able to sit back and not have to handle anything. They did hand me a reading as soon as I walked in the door, which actually felt nice to know they know me well enough to trust me. :-)

Sunday we had my mom over for what passes for Easter dinner. I had gotten a lamb roast at Costco for the occasion, and way too much chocolate, and I made parsley potatoes and green beans almondine and Rakott Krumpli. This last is a casserole recipe that my mother's family inherited from my Hungarian great-grandmother as simply "potatoes and eggs"; apparently the traditional Hungarian version also involves pork sausage, but the Hungarian Jewish community makes it with just potatoes, eggs, and sour cream (with a layer of butter for good measure). Just one more data point in the "crypto-Jewish" theory of the Rosenberg side of the family.

My mom showed up about 12:45, shortly after church. We hadn't really set a firm time for her to come over, and I was just thinking about taking a nap when she rang the bell, but I tried to rally myself to the table and be a good hostess. Apparently I didn't do a very good job, because she chased me upstairs to take a nap after all ("I'll just lie down on the couch too! Go rest!"), so I came back 2 hours later feeling miles better, and we had a good afternoon and early (for us) dinner.

Kiddo has been on break all last week and yesterday, but had to go to school today, matzah lunch in hand lovingly packed by Mama. Now just 3 more school/work days until pizza night!

Happy 2018!

... See, this is why I never post, because all I wanted to do was make some quick notes about the fun things from the past month-plus. And by the time I get it all out, it's taken like 3 hours (cobbled together in 10-minute chunks).

Nevertheless... ( December 2017 highlights )

I get my birthday as a paid holiday off work, so here is what I did this year:
( Friday 10/6, also known as Sukkot Day 2 )

Saturday night, the three of us went out for ceremonial birthday pizza dinner. And Sunday night, my dad came over and took us out for birthday dinner #3 (Indian food) and then, at last, we had cake. Cake!

One of the best things etrace regularly does for me is roast me a chicken (over a bed of vegetables) every Friday night for Shabbat dinner. He's refined his technique over the past 3 years until he has it pretty much perfected. Which means it's kind of a pain in the ass relative to the "throw it in a pan and turn on the oven" I used to do, but he does it because he loves me, and it is fantastic. And while I love everything we do Friday evening -- lighting candles with Aria, opening a bottle of wine to go with dinner -- my hands-down favorite moment of the whole week is sitting down and pulling the beautifully roasted skin off my piece. NOM.

Hilariously: A few weeks ago he made a roast beef on some other weeknight, using the same pan he roasts the chicken in. And when it was done and Aria saw it resting on the counter under a sheet of tinfoil, she said "Candle time! Candle time!" No, lovey, I know it looks a lot like a chicken, but it's Tuesday!

Shul friends D (the lawyer) and R (also a lawyer) passed along some toys to us last weekend that their youngest grandchildren had officially outgrown... one of them being a little wooden Shabbat set: pretend candles, wine cup, and bread board with two loaves of challah "slices". I thought, Aria will get a kick out of the first two, but it's too bad I never make challah! Maybe I should get in the habit, just so she can have the full experience. Anyway, but we'll try them out tonight and see how it goes.

Shabbat shalom, y'all.

We didn't actually go see Wonder Woman last Sunday when we had the babysitter. The morning of, as we were getting ready, Etrace said "I don't think we're going to be able to enjoy a movie if we're listening every instant for the phone to ring," so we shifted smoothly over to Plan B and went on a lunch date in the courthouse square in Crown Point (barely 5 minutes from the babysitter's house).

There's a fancy steakhouse we'd been wanting to try, but Google said they didn't open til noon and we had arranged to drop Aria off around 11am. So we first tried to go shoe shopping (also closed Sundays, alas), then went for donuts and coffee at the local donuts-and-comics shop, like ya do. (Etrace: "Dessert first?" Me: "This is breakfast! Then we'll have lunch!" They were quite good donuts, especially when surrounded by Star Wars and Marvel paraphernalia. Would nom again.) Next, a nice grownup lunch where we actually got to chat about things other than our child in a leisurely fashion. And then we browsed the Antique Mall next door for another 20 minutes, until I got too antsy and we headed back to get her.

We got back there right around 2pm, and all of them (mom, kids, and Aria) were playing contentedly with blocks on the living room floor. Aria jumped up and ran to the door calling "Mama! Dada!" and then remarked, perfectly calmly, "You came back!" Amanda said Aria was perfectly fine the whole time and never got anxious in the slightest. Really good to know.

The next few weekends are pretty busy (nephew J's birthday and, oh yeah, we should try to hold a garage sale one of these Sundays), and then my mom will be here July 22-29. Maybe *she'll* be willing to watch Aria solo for a couple hours one afternoon/evening....

ETA: While I'm here, I should note that Tuesday was July 4, and after a quiet day at home, we went over to Etrace's cousins' house (also in Crown Point) for a small toddler-friendly cookout and fireworks. Aria was way more interested in the swingset, sand table, playhouse, and toy cars (the ride-in kind) than in the fireworks; maybe next year. Myself, I had never seen home fireworks that actually go *up in the air* and explode like real grownup fireworks, so I was impressed! I said to Etrace that we never had anything like that growing up, all we ever got were the little ground works like snakes and sparklers and smoke bombs and camellias; he said "That's because that's all that was legal in Indiana until 2006." That explains that! We bailed out at 9pm to take Aria home to bed, but driving home we could see other people's home fireworks displays all around us. It reminded us of arriving home from our roadtrip honeymoon 3 years ago on July 4, seeing fireworks all along the horizon for the final several miles as we drove north up I-65 at twilight. <3