Things I might be posting about, if I felt like blogging

Our cooperative summer camp adventure continues. Based on past experience (read: lots of fighting), we split the boys and girls. We have five boys aged 5-8, with two 12- and 13-year-olds serving as counselors. I hosted them last Friday while my 12-year-old A ran the whole program. The girls' group consists of 4 preschoolers and 7 elementary-school-age girls. They exempted me from hosting the girls, since my 14-year-old (DiI) helps out several days a week. The other two days she has a regular babysitting job for two little boys who adore her. I have been getting positive feedback from the mothers about my kids. I needed it.

Some of the camp mothers live about a mile away, but my four-year-old walks back and forth with a minimum of complaint. When we met to make up a schedule, we asked not to give out junk food. Some mothers complained, "What will we give them if not Bamba?" We suggested melon. The children bring sandwiches; surely that's enough food for four hours. The junk-food rule hasn't been strictly enforced, but who can say what would have happened otherwise.

A disadvantage of segregating by sex is that activities tend to fall along gender lines. Yesterday the boys made models of an army camp and the girls baked cookies with red jelly. Today both groups went to the zoo and my junior counselors stayed up till all hours preparing games and crafts.

We are leaving on our annual trip to the US next week; camp may or may not be active when we return. My 4yo loved our visit last year, but now she doesn't want to miss camp. She said I should go without her and bring back special (flavored) yogurt, a treat we rarely buy. I'm taking her, DiI, and my 7-year-old.

Last night we went to a memorial service for a convert to Judaism who had made aliyah and died eight months later after collapsing in the street from a blood clot. The body sat for a month while her fate was decided; eventually her mother insisted on a Christian burial in the US. I had only spoken to her once on the phone, but we wanted to show support, and we met a family from Maale Adumim who had been exceptionally close to her. The family described how every Shabbat between her death and burial, mysterious things happened in their house: Crockery fell off shelves, and candles fell down, for no apparent reason.

I met with two bloggers in one day. I sat with RivkA for a Coffee and Chemo date, and while in Jerusalem I hopped over to Leora's hotel to say hello. We have several mutual friends and I am sure I have met her, but it was my first time seeing her adorable children. By then I was already anxious to get home, because the bus in the morning had taken me three hours. When we were renting our first apartment in Israel, I asked my husband how far we would be from the bus to Jerusalem and he said five minutes. He must have misheard me. It's a twenty-minute ride, and the inter-city bus took forever to arrive. It was too crowded so I waited a short time for the next one. Then we ran into traffic, and the bus to the hospital also took ages. Then I ran around the hospital looking for RivkA, because the oncology ward told me she was in the ER. I eventually found her back in oncology. Even though she was having a long, hard day she was in good spirits and we had fun catching up. She even came up with some shidduch suggestions.

Speaking of sponja: One evening I noticed a puddle, which turned out to be coming from under my neighbors' door. The neighbors are out of the country and their army-aged son was in Jerusalem, but a neighbor had a key so after turning off the water and closing off the source of the leak, we used several squeejees to sweep all of the water into the shower drain--in our apartment. It was a family effort. Their water purifier had cracked open, but the neighbor was still sure it must be the ozeret's fault. The son told me that the only damage was to their rug. If this had happened in the middle of the night, we might have been the ones with the serious damage.

We are going to a bar mitzvah for Shabbat, and staying in my single brother-in-law's apartment. When I heard his voicemail message asking to tell him some good news, I informed him of our upcoming visit. He took it in stride, or at least he had recovered by the time he called us back. Two of the kids chose not to go, but my oldest son feels close enough to the family to drag himself away from yeshiva for two weeks in a row.

My seven-year-old inserted our rechargeable camera battery backwards. It slid in easily, but wouldn't come out. The repairman removed it without taking the whole thing apart, after giving me a lecture about letting my kid play with it. I didn't tell him about the movie that could only have been filmed from a few inches outside of my sixth-story window; my seven-year-old was three or four at the time. Instead I told him that it wasn't nice to lecture customers. He didn't charge and even advised me on how to fix a different problem with the camera.

Reform convention offers separate services

First the liberal movements discovered the mikveh. Now the Reform movement is thinking of implementing its own version of yet another politically incorrect Orthodox practice.

The recent biennial convention of the Union for Reform Judaism offered a men-only prayer service.

The rationale:

"Within the Reform movement we've confused gender stratification with gender differentiation," said Barden, a major proponent of the separate-but-equal approach. "We need to reverse the disaffiliation of men without setting the egalitarian clock back 30 years." Women are more religiously active in most faiths in this country, and have been for a century. But the gender gap in Jewish life, particularly in the liberal movements, has grown greater in recent years.

I recommend the whole article:

Reform Try Separating Sexes in Order to Woo Men Back