It’s soccer season. Jake is on the Ninjas. And Nate is on the Thunder Bears. Fortunately or unfortunately, neither team is quite as menacing as they may sound. The games consist almost entirely of a swarm of kids kicking the ball past an unsuspecting goalie. Generally ours. There are an…
Lately Nate has developed quite an affinity for apples… dipped in honey. He tells me it’s so good. I was having trouble understanding where this constant request had originated. But then last Friday he came home and reported that Rabbi has hair clips. That’s how it stays on his head.…
On Friday I asked Nate how his day was at school. “We had Shabbat today.” “Oh neat. Tell me about that. What do you do at Shabbat?” “Well, we go to the Temple House and sing songs.” “And then what happens?” “We ate hollow. We ate hollow. And Rabbi comes.”…
Saturday, the fifteenth day of the eighth month in the year of our Lord, two thousand fifteen. A day that will forever live in our memories… as the very first time Nate ever held hands and sang Motor Boat, Motor Boat. Aaaaaaaah… that’s the sound of mermaids singing, streamers flying and…
Four-year-old Nate seems to have developed a real panache for the dramatic. I’m not sure exactly where it came from… possibly too many cartoons, or too many Legos, or too many Lego cartoons. He seems to fancy himself some sort of Lego man. Things will happen to him and he…
Alas, summer has already come to an end. Jacob started first grade last Wednesday. He’s no longer insulated in the safety of Kinderworld. He’s now on the other side of the tracks, also known as Dana Avenue, with the rest of the big kids. Summer vacation went by in a…
Saturday night we threw a very casual going-away party for our little house on Park Avenue. As a colleague at work called it, a “Housecooling” party. It consisted of 15 cupcakes, several bottles of wine, four chairs, 9 adults, a pack of crazy children and a pig. Our impromptu gathering…
One of the best Christmases of my childhood was the year I found a My Little Pony unicorn named Stardust under the tree. She was gold and sparkly and I poked a little hole in the wrapping paper so I could peer through it in anticipation every day. I loved…
I vividly remember getting in trouble the summer before third grade. My mom overheard me praying on my younger brother’s pre-kindergarten anxieties: “Geoff, kindergarten is so hard…” He looks up at me, blinking his big, blue, Bambi eyes. “… they make you add one hundred plus one hundred.” He was…
It all started with Grandma. What started with Grandma? We call it “Family Speak.” She read an article about it many years ago. Finally, a verifiable piece of journalism documenting the bizarre dialect of my childhood household that was fundamentally English, but in many ways more an amalgamation of Pennsylvania…