Snow Day!

Yes, it's true - there was a snow day today in Jerusalem. By which I mean that the city might have recieved as much as two inches of a combination of snow, sleet, and freezing rain - more than enough to shut down the entire city. Schools were closed, stores didn't open, and buses didn't run. Sound like fun? Let me tell you that snow days take on an entirely new meaning when they involve an 18-month-old who is stuck indoors all day.

Noam got up bright and early, ready for the snow (which Noam refers to as "no") - at 4:30. After a few unsuccessful attempts to put him back to sleep, we were all up. When Daddy got back from shul, he and Noam played...



...while Eema made pancakes, which Noam ate while fashionably attired for the cold winter day ahead.



He also shared his pancakes his friend Ariel, with whom he had an early morning playdate. These pictures represent a small subset of the many, many times that Noam hugged, cuddled, or otherwise stroked Ariel. Ariel, who is two months younger, several inches taller, and several pounds heavier, mostly puts up with it, but every once in a while gives Noam a not-too-subtle shove. Undeterred, Noam goes back for more. He also enjoys feeding Ariel, and giving him his bottle and pacifier. He loves his "Aye-ah!"

Then Eema and Noam made playdough, a process that mostly involved a lot of flour in a lot of places where flour shouldn't really be...





...but overall, the project was a success, and we spend a lot of time playing with playdough later in the day.

In fact, we spent a lot of time doing everything...because all day in the house is a lot of time. Other than two medium-sized meltdowns, Noam took it pretty well, and ate a happy dinner while wearing his kippah (his idea).




We are looking forward to hopefully leaving the house tomorrow!

The Good, the Bad, and the Socks

(birdwatching from our apartment)







(three cheers for Ari, who figured out how we could start posting pictures again!)



The good news is that Noam has been sleeping very nicely at night, special for Eema while Daddy is away. He slept over twelve hours last night, and woke up singing. His new trick is that when I open the door to his room in the morning, he leans over the side of the crib and says: "HI!"

Less good is that Noam has a cold. So Eema has to wipe his nose a lot. Lately, whenever this happens, Noam has taken to very carefully and deliberately wiping Eema's nose, and then triumphantly carrying the tissue to the garbage can.

In news that is possibly good but may not really be, Noam slept for FOUR HOURS with his babysitter today. That is probably his longest nap on record. Then, at around 5:30, while ostensibly in the middle of dinner, Noam requested that Eema clear his place (which he does by carefully lifting his plate, handing it to me, and saying: "away!") and then said: "Sleep! Sleep!" accompanied by the sign for sleep.
He's never done this before, but Eema said okay, but first we need to take a bath.
This was traumatic, because it turns out that Eema does not permit Noam to bathe while wearing socks. So the socks were removed (have we mentioned that Noam loves his socks? He puts them on...and takes them off...and puts them on) and Noam cried pathetically throughout his (short) bath: "Sock! Sock!"
The bath over, he clutched his socks and again requested "sleep" while Eema put him in pajamas. We read stories and brushed teeth, all the while Noam clutching his (dirty) white socks.
And yes, he went to sleep at 6pm, the socks still held tight, one in each hand.
Sigh.
Is he sick? Just very tired? Having a sock fetish? Using the socks as somehow symbolic of his missing Daddy? We're keeping all our options open as we wait for the next development in the saga that is Noam.

Here are some pictures of Noam bonding with his socks:

Noam's News

Okay, I know, we've been bad. But I really wanted to be able to post pictures! Anyway, in the meantime, we're back due to popular demand.
Noam is almost a year and a half, and he is quite a big boy. Here are some recent (well, and not so recent) developments:

- for several weeks Noam has been walking down the stairs by himself (he's been walking up for months). When I say "by himself," I mean that not only does he not hold anyone's hand, he will actually push me away if I seem like I'm about to reach out to try to balance him. The closer he comes to falling, the more delighted he seems. The other day he teetered on the edge of a step and actually laughed out loud. "Can I help you, Noam?" - "NOOOO!"
Okay then.

- Noam has another favorite stair trick. Sometimes, while walking down the stairs, Noam will receive an imaginary phone call, on his imaginary phone. Yes, some children have imaginary friends; ours has an imaginary phone. Anyway, he will pick up his imaginary phone, sit down on the steps, and talk quite seriously for a minute or two. It sounds something like this:
"HI!"
"mmmph"
"gii!"
"neh!"
"bigii"
"BYE"!
He then puts his imaginary phone into his imaginary pocket and continues down the steps. A moment later, the process repeats. It is not unusual for it to take us ten to fifteen minutes to get down the stairs.

- Noam has a favorite song. A disclaimer: It is NOT our favorite song. Nor will it ever be...this was so not our idea. But somehow, Noam is obsessed with a (Hebrew) song called "Kol Hamitpalel", sung by the Yeshiva Boys Choir. He first fell in love with the music video on youtube. Having decided that our son was too young to be watching music videos all the time, Daddy bought him the CD. Today, in the space of two hours, Noam made me play it for him (just that one song) approximately fifteen times. Thanks, Daddy!

- For about two weeks now, Noam has been climbing the ladder on the climber all by himself. Not that I've seen him do it - when Eema is present he prefers to be lifted. But Yael (his babysitter) reports that he is quite the little monkey these days!

- Noam is a tiny bit OCD. This has actually been developing for quite some time: when his hands get dirty, he says: "hand!" and waits for you to wipe it off. When something falls on the floor (a cheerio, a cornflake, etc) he says: "uh-oh" and will not rest until it has been picked up. When he finishes eating, he insists that we clear his plate away before he can leave the table. And he loves to wipe the table, floor, or chair - whatever he can reach - with a wipe or towel Lately, he has taken to closing any drawers or cabinet doors that we have left open. No matter what else is going on, Noam cannot walk through the kitchen without making sure everything is as it should be.

- (related to above) Noam is obsessed with laundry. When I say: "Noam, want to do laundry?" his eyes light up. "Yeah, yeah!" he says, and runs to the hamper. He helps me fill the laundry basket, which we then carry (together) to the washing machine. There, I must hand him each article of clothing, one at a time, so that he can put it in the machine. Unfortunately, he hasn't quite mastered the idea that once a full load is in, there can be no more laundry for at least another hour. "More, more!" he begs. So then he has to be satisfied with putting away the laundry.

- Inanimate moving objects in Noam's world fall into two categories: "Choo-choo" and "beep-beep." Everything must make one of these two sounds, including airplanes and bikes.

- Last but not least, Noam does occasionally consent to talk on the real phone a little bit. He will say "Hi" and "Bye." This morning when he was saying goodbye to his Daddy he tried to hug the phone!

Talk to you all soon!

Our Little Cow

Dear All,

I have a lot to report! I'll start with the most recent. Eema and Daddy and I just came home from a great Shabbat up north, at Kibbutz Lavi. We went to visit Eema's friend Hadas ("ha-da!") and her family. They live in a very fun place. We drove up Thursday night, and Friday morning I was so excited to go exploring that I woke up at 4 AM! I figured it wasn't worth it to go back to sleep, cause there was so much to see and do! Eema and Daddy were excited too (especially at 4 AM)!
We ate breakfast in a big, big room full of tables and chairs and people. By "we" I mean that Eema and Daddy ate, and I ran all around, checking out the whole room as well as the kitchen and all the exits.
Pretty soon, we headed out for a little tiyul - a trip to see some of the sights of the North. We wound up at a place called HaChula. None of us had ever been there before, and Hadas picked it since it was mostly indoors and by then it had started to rain.
She couldn't have come up with a better tiyul if she had tried. You see, my favorite things in the world right now are birds. I can say "bird," I can sign "bird," and I spend a lot of time looking through windows or out of my stroller trying to find birds. HaChula is a bird refuge, and this is the season when the birds migrate to this area. So after a quick lunch, we piled into a huge tractor and went off to see some birds. Thousands and thousands of birds! We saw ducks, and cranes, and a lot of other kinds of birds that we only learned the names of in Hebrew.




(Eema says: The tractor ride went like this -
flock of birds flying towards us
Noam: Bird! Bird!
flock of birds flies past
Noam: Bye-bye!
pause
Noam: More! More!
another flock of birds
Noam: Bird! Bird!
And so on...)

Here I am signing "bird"!



The tractor ride was an hour long, but I didn't get bored. I ate a lot of Bamba and watched all the birds fly around us! There were thousands and thousands of cranes, and they are really big - much taller than I am!

Shabbat on the kibbutz was great. Hadas' family was very nice to me. Her father and I sang Shabbat songs together, and her mom gave me lots of cake.
But the best thing about the kibbutz was seeing the cows. They have lots of cows there - big cows and baby cows, beef cows and dairy cows. I got to visit all of them. I learned to say "moo!", complete with a cow face (sorry, I haven't been captured on camera doing this just yet), so I could say: "outside! moo! more moo!" every time I was taken inside.

Unfortunately, all this means it's been a pretty exhausting weekend. I'm sort of on a not too much sleep kick, since there are so many better things to do. Eema is considering aggressive action of some kind. We'll see how that goes.

In other news, Steven Exler came to visit us for a few days. It was so great to see him again! I call him "ne-ne" and he doesn't mind at all. He and I played together a lot while Eema did boring things like packing and laundry.



But he's not here now. I checked his room very carefully on Sunday morning and I couldn't find him. It was a little bit sad...

Eema says she'll write too, as soon as she catches up on her sleep!

(P.S. Eema says: When I returned from school today, Noam greeted me with a hug and these words:
Eema! Eema! Mooooo!)