Daylight Stupid Time

Well blossom my cherries and mow my grass: we're officially sprung spring-wise. The weather is alternatingly glorious (sneezy) and mud-rain-breezy. Often changing back and forth within seconds. Time has shifted to its new odd semi-permanence... a semipermanence that maybe we are going to stay on this time, except now all the sleep experts are saying are you f'ing serious??? so maybe not, who knows but time - the measure of it anyways - is totally make believe ... except how it's internalized to mess with every single bodily system when you randomly move it around willy nilly.

Savings Time seems like a misnomer, by the way. Nothing gets saved. Daylight Jerking Around Time, works better for my tastes. And "Standard" is only a few months out of the year, so I fail to see how it is a "standard" but whatever's going on, could we just go a halfsies and call it good?

 but... um... spring, it's spring! Achoo!

However it goes, time did pass and during said passing, many events occurred. Highs and lows ensued... 

Like Purim! Which is a holiday! On the Jewish Calendar! That we like to celebrate. 

A little background if you aren't familiar with the ins and outs of our familial spiritual orientation. I'm not Jewish. People get that confused for some reason, probably because I am generally keeper of the holidays. Also, a little sexism. Er uh matrilineal heritageism? If we bring Allan to Shabbat Junior, I always get the interested engagement even though Andrew is there in all his Ashkenazi bar mitzvahed glory. Moms just care about their kids' religious upbringing I guess. 

Not that they're totally wrong. See above about keeper of the holidays. Primary parents tend to be female and they also tend to run the day to day stuff that religious outreach organizations are most likely to be engaging through.

 But to be clear, I've done a little Hebrew on duolingo. I've been to several Passover meals as my hubba hubba's plus-one. I've studied some ancient history and plenty of theology in my painfully erudite educational odyssey of pointlessness. And I do do some serious scurries of research to hit some high notes on all the aforementioned holidays (yay google). Sure, sometimes my very secular husband will shake his head and say I might be a better Jew than he is, but in actuality... I'm generic mutt Christian in heritage, with a heaping side of "kumbaya, it's all good and god is more like being the verb than a being and i love you let's hug... rainbows!!!"

Which is to say, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on Jewish holidays. Take this as coming from the mouth of a Shiksa who kind of mouth-hums awkwardly along to all the songs at Shabbat Junior, but Purim is an awesome holiday. It's kinda of Halloweenish. There are treats. There are costumes. People party. And we all hate Haman cuz, you know, he wanted to kill all the Jews, which is not super cool. So everyone's pretty ok with him getting offed in the final act (spoiler alert, sorry!)

And so we celebrate Esther saving her people from being all genocided and stuff with a costume parade. Also eating treats and snacks and doing a little play about how things all went down once upon a time. It's good stuff. 

In honor of the occasion, Allan resurrected her monarch costume one more time! How is this still surviving? It may be immortal. It is probably some kind of miracle in its own right. She wants a bunny costume for her birthday, so we may be seeing its retirement. Nonetheless, it went well with her crown. 

 This was an event hosted by Kol Hanashamah, the local West Seattle synagogue. They're kind of adorable. Nothing like the massively slick mega-synagogue of Seattle/Bellevue that we attended from Renton. The drive there is now pretty ridiculous, but pre-covid and from Renton they were friggin' amazing. They had Shabbat Junior once a month and it was always a HUGE deal. Like damn, Ben Folds was good, but have you checked out Shabbat Junior at De Hirsch Sinai? 

Nonetheless. This place is nice and homey and full of families. Also pretty expensive to join, so we haven't yet. But it's nice it's around. 

The Rugeleh Chronicles

After loving Hamentaschen last year, Allan turned a blind taste bud to it completely. Plus side for Andrew: he got to eat an entire very-large box of assorted hammentaschen in one and a half sittings. But she did rather love the rugeleh we also had bought. So much that she wanted to share it. With her teacher, Ms Ferrell, because "she teaches me lots of good things and I like her."

 Which was really really sweet. I was very excited to help out on Thursday morning when this idea occurred to her. 

We put some in a little baggie and wrote Ms Ferrell's name on the bag. I put it in a special place in her backpack and... finally remembered Ms. Ferrell had just said that she was going to be gone at a wedding until next week. I thought it would be less traumatic to remind Allan at home, which it probably was except of course that meant I got to deal with the agony instead of the substitute she was going to encounter at school. Which ... I'm not sure I planned that right actually! 

Allan was devastated. She refused to go to school on Monday, when Ms Ferrell was verifiably returned. It took a lot of heart to heart talks, some bribery, and a few threats to eventually get her to the car twenty minutes after we had begun (luckily it had been an early start). She cried the whole way, and repeated that she didn't want to go to school until Monday. Which at the rate we were going, seemed like the earliest I was going to get her there anyways.  As she finally walked into the school building, I heard her screaming to discover she was late enough that her class had already gone to her classroom.

 I... walked away quickly. Not on my clock anymore, baby!

... But it continues. We had frozen the rugelah to try again the next week. On Monday she remembered. I did not. And she only remembered on the way to school, once we were driving in the car. Allan was very excited to tell me that she'd be giving Ms. Ferrell her rugelah. I - hoping to avoid the inevitable - said "yeah honey, how about I bring that when I pick you up." She said "no I can give it whenever I want..." We had a few rounds of this exchnage before she realized that the rugelah was still at home. That I had, essentially, failed her as a parent and a human being. It got screamy. And sobby. And baleful. 

I got all ninja mom and said something about how I was feeling sad that morning and asked if she could help me figure out what to do when I feel sad. That got her talking about hugs and love. Which was bittersweet, because she was saying how hard it was when she needed a hug and the other person (presumably Yael, because I saw this happen once) did not want to give her one. Sad as it was, the conversation seemed to distract her. Then the school neighbors had hung easter eggs from their trees and that helped immensely. She rallied. We walked to school happily. It was all going pretty well until... 

... we were a little late and Allan started running for the bell and... ugh... it was raining ... and... she face planted into a puddle! Uffff. Really scraped up her knee (didn't know this until later) and her face. I once again went ninja mom, kneeled down in front of her in the rain and got her to breathe with me while looking deeply into her eyes... It worked. I got her settled down after some long jags of screaming. But, man, I had to go to my car and cry a bit myself. That felt like not the most promising start to the week. 

Funny story... after all that Ms. Ferrell wasn't there that day either! Her mom had gotten sick and she'd stayed an extra day. Allan was totally fine by the afternoon and she and Yael had an extra long after school play session building a nest and populating it with "eggs" (pine cones). 

Later in the week, the pinecones hatched into baby birds - crows or hawks - and now the babies poop and vomit and fart and need showers. It's serious business. Sometimes they "fly" which seems to involve throwing them at random. They don't fly very well though... Oh and we have several that we're caring for at home now, because, you know, they're babies. 

Ms Ferrell did get her rugelah on Tuesday - phew - and we were only all moderately traumatized when Allan took off her leggings on Monday evening and the congealed blood nobody had known about pulled off the scab with the leggings for a little extra evening bloodshed!

All's well that ends... period. Forget the modifiers!

 Glass

Whatever she was reflecting on from before, I'm pretty sure most of the time, Allan and Yael both feel like hugging... 

And creating a little havoc!

So naturally we had to take them to a Museum of breakable priceless objects! Like ... duh!

In this case Chihuly's Museum of Glass at the Seattle Center. 

Actually nothing was broken and everyone survived a few heart attacks to have a very pleasant weekend. 

But one can need a little break, it's true. 

And this weekend we had a ballet to attend! So off we shuttled her to have some kind of candyland orgy of Kindergartner Ecstasy. I kind of picture her at my mom's in a giant bathtub of reeses pieces, buried in art supplies and stuffed animals and sitting in front of the big screen tv that plays Paw Patrol 24/7... Prove me wrong, Gramma Pam! 

But honestly, I"m just glad she's having fun, 'cuz this lady could use a break. 

Andrew and I finished up Bowser's Fury this weekend. Little known fact: Andrew can sit and play a video game for three hours straight and still be ready for me. This is one of the reasons he's the A player and I prefer "the hat" or "Bowser Jr". Among others, like him actually being good at the games and me mostly preferring to just mash buttons randomly and then get distracted by something on my phone then mash some more buttons...

Wheeeeee! We make a good team. And it's a fun game. 

We didn't just sit on the couch though. I'd never really been to the International District so we decided to check it out yesterday. It's kind of China-et-al-Town, a mish mash of generally Eastish Asian communities and properites. 

... and retro game stores!!

No really. We did other stuff too. But classic Sonic was pretty rad. 

It was a cool place. I really enjoyed Kobe Terrace and the descent through the Danny Woo Community Gardens. And everywhere abouts smelled like frying oil in the most pleasant of ways (I might not be able to eat that stuff but I enjoy it nonetheless)

And on Sunday we did indeed attend the ballet. 

OMG I know!!! So cute! So cute!

The proximity perfume levels were acceptable enough I got to stay for the entire performance (two in a row, I'm getting cocky here!) and it was lit! 

All good things must come to other good things, and the beast is back. 

After a rather extended battle of "I'm bored. I don't wanna clean," the beast is in good form and happily back at school and going about her day to day comings and goings. 

Onwards! Through the fog and mist into the random sports of sunshine! It's game night tonight, so best get your pieces all lined up in a row.