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!)