#ItsTheLittleThings

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Nicki

Orange October has brought way more than the awesome San Francisco Giants to the World Series. A tiny life lost in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, a brave army reservist senselessly gunned down in Ottawa, nationwide Ebola panic, a beloved friend quietly battles a ventilator, and another awaits a worrisome surgery. Is surgery ever not worrisome? Strep throat, Halloween mania, lost teeth (finally!), a very skinny dachshund, and nothing screams frightening 40s like smooshed boobs at the first ever mammogram.

In full spin on a very wobbly axis, I whiz through this agitated orbit. It takes a lot of output, seemingly limitless energy to keep that axis spinning. Even though it’s wobbly and erratic. Not only to make sure it doesn’t all fall apart on its unpredictable, hurtling journey through time but also to keep the love, the happy, the optimistic going, and going strong.

But of course everything, everybody reaches a limit eventually.

The very old, skinny dachshund is definitely not my favorite right now. For all his supposed inability to see, hear, run and jump nothing stops him from brazenly climbing onto the dining room table to gobble the last of the chicken, from gingerly pulling himself into the dishwasher to sneak a last lick of the stew, and if I said he peed in my bed the other night that would be TMI.

But after all is said, done and cleaned up he snuggles his warm small body right up next to mine, like he did in the days when Pretzel made three… and I smile. Breathe deep. Feel the crazy spinning axis slow some. “It’s the little things,” I think.

It’s the rare morning coffee date with my always-traveling husband. He is mostly somewhere, and hardly ever here. But a travel schedule includes flights that leave at off-hours, so I get a bittersweet hot chocolate and an hour of Just Him before the 11.35am to Arkansas.

source: foodspotting.com

It’s the news that my niece has an imaginary friend. G-d bless the child, she is too clever, too busy and too chatty for her three-year-old self so she invented a friend for the overflow! Wonderfully creative and imaginative, inspired and whimsical. And simple. To create what she wants, how and when she wants it, using only the power of her 38-month-old imagination.

This beautiful photo, taken by my mom, of the jacaranda trees in my hometown squeezes my heart and lifts my cheeks with a smile. Pretoria is famous for these blossoms that tint the air lilac and carpet the wide roads with messy purple every October. This scene makes me homesick, but in a good way. In the way that feels warm and comforting, even though I am far away.

photo by Dianne Faktor

These hilarious-to-me texts from my friend Stephanie, who thinks I am the “challah Jedi master” (her words). Her confidence puzzles me, since the one time we did make challah together my dough was too sticky, the braids were misshapen, and the end result was edible but definitely not delicious. Be that as it may, my weekly attempts at rise-to-perfection inspire her inner Princess Leia to text me these hashtags. Even the rising dough laughs: #ChallahJediMaster #MayTheYeastBeWithYou (my favorite) #QueenAmichallah #HansSchlomo. Her hashtagging rules the Empire. Yep, #itsthelittlethings.

Hengry. This is what my little guy calls his friend Henry. Somehow, his five-year-old tongue gets stuck at the back of his throat when he says Henry, and this delicious modification provokes a giggle every time. Luckily, Hengry isn’t bothered by the creative slip.

The surprise purple cauliflower in my salad (purple again – love it!), the 4am blood moon moment with my son as we caught the lunar eclipse together, the garden-fresh rosemary I pick for the lamb chops, this amazing song from Hozier (the way he says Honey makes everything better):

All give me pause, and clear a space in the chaos, a tiny space big enough to find a few ounces of me in the heaviness of everything else. These little things, these small moments remind me to turn in instead of out, to breathe, to find the calm and the happy. To replenish before I reach my limit.

After his cataract surgery last week, my father the optometrist marveled at his suddenly clear vision: “I can’t believe how much brighter the colors are!” The little things between the not so little. Bright orange October.

source: Brocken Inaglory

My Kids Only Want to Talk to Me in the Bathroom

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Nicki

My kids are pretty self-sufficient. We’re over a month into the school year, they have a vague idea of where they’re supposed to be and when (like school at 8.20am, so stop reading, talking, eating, brush your teeth goodbye), and in theory they are all of the age when they can dress, entertain, toilet and feed themselves. If any of that fails they know how to operate the remote, and although the five-year-old is able to recognize only the sight words he’s learnt during the first seven weeks of Kindergarten (I, am, is, are, the, a, play), somehow he can read the on-screen channel guide fluently. Xfinity is sneaky that way.

So there’s no real need for them to talk to me. And they mostly don’t.

Even when I talk to them. They answer questions with one-syllables, specifically: fine, yes, no, ok (that’s two syllables I know, but it’s barely a real word). They stomp their feet if frustrated, do that “yessss” fist-pump thing if excited, and grunt, yell, whine and tattle-tale in between.

But occasionally they do want to talk to me. And they are very, very selective about when that is. Usually, not always but usually, they talk to me when I am obviously in the middle of something else. When I am clearly not able to give them my undivided attention, which is suddenly exactly what they are clamoring for.

E.T. Phone Home

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Nicki

This post was first published on RedBoots in February. I am reposting today as part of Finish the Sentence Friday on the delicious prompt: “I know my child would rather I not reveal this…” Or maybe it wouldn’t faze him at all. I don’t really know. Which is my point. Since writing this eight months ago, he has turned 13, had his bar mitzvah and moved up a grade but little else has changed. He’s still pretty far away from me most of the time.

Red Boots

My teenage boy is an alien. And by alien I mean foreign. Far away from me. It’s not so much that I don’t understand him, or that he communicates as if he’s from another planet. There is some of that going on some of the time, but I’m learning to decode and even speak that language (Mmm mmm mmm means “I don’t know” in Teenglish). It’s more like he and I are in different countries, and we call each other only when necessary. To check in. Or remind him to wash his face. Or ask me to email the karate teacher.

He’s actually not quite a teenager – he’s 12 and a half. Exactly. And I know much is likely to change in the next six months before his barmitzvah. His voice might break. He could grow a whole foot. The glimpses of sullenness and defiance I’m seeing now…

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Teen Trouble, 2014 Style

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Nicki

I love a party. Really any party at any time of day, but especially a nighttime dance party.

Bar mitzvah parties are my favorite. Balloon bouquets, party dresses, disco lights and sparkly shoes. Colorful candy and bright eyes and giddy laughter and the promise of “Footloose” on the dance floor. The boys are appealingly cool in their awkwardness, and the girls are squeally and sweet, and all the parents think this is actually their party and we’ll show you kids that yes, it is all about that bass! Good times.

We celebrated my son’s bar mitzvah just like this a few weeks ago (the DJ forgot to play “Footloose”, but he brought his own trumpet to accompany Macklemore, so he’s forgiven). There were cake pops and jars of jelly bellies and glow sticks, and a screen to live-stream all those fun Instagram pics the kids (and adults) were posting. Yep fun, 2014-style!

And a guaranteed invitation for trouble, 2014-style.

New Kid in the Neighborhood

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Nicki

It sucks to be the new kid. Lonely and intimidating. It feels like everyone is noticing you, snap-judging you and the dorky whiter-than-white shorts you chose to wear, but really nobody is… and you’re not sure which you’d prefer.

I was 13 when my family left South Africa. I departed the cozy womb of my small 8^th grade class at the only Jewish high school in Pretoria, and entered the loud, frenetic, unfiltered school of new everything in Hod Hasharon, Israel. The faces I knew even better than my own, the voices I had heard every day since Kindergarten, the secrets and jump-rope games (24 Robbers Came Knocking at My Door!), netball practices and Liquifruit juice boxes, blue blazer with the school badge and sensible black shoes… all were replaced with unfamiliar, uncomfortable, daunting and overwhelming.

I stood in the doorway of my new class, in my ridiculous white shorts, my almost-grown-out perm caught up in a scrunchie (omg I know, but it was 1987) and tried to smile as every strange face turned toward me. Gulp. Then turned away. Double gulp. Would I ever feel familiar here? Would I ever learn all their names? Recognize these voices? Would anyone ever greet me, never mind tell me a secret? Who wears white shorts when she wants to blend in and be cool? We called the teachers Shmulik, Malka, Naomi… Mrs West, Mrs Burger and Mr Coetzee were unimaginably far away.

Within weeks, I had ditched the white shorts. Learnt how to play Five Stones and basketball. Fell in mini-love with a cute, shorter-than-me boy named Dani. And shared laughs, secrets, dance moves and sleepovers with my new friends. Lonely, scary and intimidating made way for happy and comfortable. Hebrew colored my dreams. Unfamiliar became home, and I never did miss wearing that blue school blazer.

Twenty three years and a drastic hairstyle change later, I was once again the intimidated, lonely new kid. This time with a baby in my arms, a clingy child wrapped around one shin, and a flailing, angry seven-year-old. Who inappropriately and very loudly declared to all those gathered on the blacktop in excited anticipation of the first day of school: “I’m not going to school with these freaks!” He didn’t declare it loudly, I correct myself. He yelled it. And by all those on the blacktop, I mean the entire student, teacher and parent population. He too was a new kid.

Heads turned. The baby cried. My little girl tightened her koala-grip on my leg, and I tried to dash after my indignant, scared boy who didn’t know what to do with these new feelings of bewildered and uncomfortable loneliness. I felt them too, and I wished for any length of badly-permed hair to hide behind, instead of the short spikes that were surely standing every which attention-grabbing way on top of my head.

New year. New school. New teacher. New friends. I hoped. For both of us.

It had been decades since I had been the new kid. Since I had felt out of my element. Lonely and alone. And there I was, wishing I were anyone, anywhere else, the 36-year-new kid, feeling 500 hundred shades of glaring invisible on the blacktop.

My newly minted first-grader was mad. He hadn’t wanted to leave his old school. The friends he had known, played with, shared meals, toys, germs with since he was two-years-old. That was my decision. And his dad’s. And as my heart shattered on the blacktop into so many sad and lonely pieces that first day of new school, when he floundered and raged against a decision that wasn’t his, I wondered if we had done the right thing. For him or for me.

“It’ll be okay. Here, give me the baby,” a kind, firm voice said in my ear. She had a baby and a clingy kid of her own to deal with, but she whisked mine away so that I could help my distressed son. And myself. Her blue eyes looked straight into mine, “First days are hard. It’ll be okay.” I passed the baby into her waiting arms. And I believed her.

Four years later, there is not a new kid my son doesn’t notice. Befriend. Invite over. He shows them the pass-through in the fence between our house and the neighbors’, and all the kids fill water balloons and throw them at each other. They leave flip flops, hair ties and other bits of themselves in their wake.

“It’ll be okay,” the blue-eyed-stranger-now-friend said, when she drew me out of my lonely, bewildered new-kid moment on the blacktop. It’s not okay. It’s wonderful. Because of her. And all the moms and dads and kids and teachers and grandparents and people like her. It’s a small-ish town, with a big, big heart. Where everyone is a neighbor, a friend, someone to help, to care about. And hopefully the new kids don’t feel new for very long. Especially if they do not wear white shorts!

This post was inspired by the Finish the Sentence Friday prompt, “When it comes to my neighbors…”
Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee and guest host Allison from Go Dansker Mom.