Adventures in Mama-Land

We’ve been ROLLING in raspberries!  I’ve been trying to accumulate them for a few days but they keep getting gobbled in the fridge, so I had to go pick a few this morning to get enough to make this Not-so-sweet Raspberry Breakfast Biscuit Cobbler . So far, Gavriel Zev has refused to eat his, but Naomi bravely tried some before deciding she didn’t like it at all.

  This week’s garden high:   definitely waiting for tomatoes! Some years, I feel like waiting for tomatoes even beats eating tomatoes, the anticipation is so delicious. But then, there’s this week’s garden LOW:   potato disappointment!  Or at least, some kind of ugly potato blight.  The leaves are turning yellowish and holey.  Weirdly, it’s only affecting the yellow (Yukon Gold?) potatoes, and not at all the purple ones.  So I may end up with some actual potatoes after all.  But maybe not; like I said a couple of months ago, I have a bit of a potato curse (here’s last year’s potato disappointment ). Getting me past the potential for disappointment is this season’s New Banana Love.  It’s nowhere near as thrilling as last year’s Siam Ruby red banana , but it is a bit exciting because it was only $10 – for what I paid last year, I can’t afford to keep killing banana trees. Its pot is too small; I must MUST buy more potting soil so I c...

It’s July, and welcome once again to Things That Hang! Here, we have a tomato happily growing in my Vesey’s Revolutionary Planter (year 2 in my garden).  Running out of room for this plant, actually; it’s hanging pretty low and kind of encroaching on one of my other tomato plants. Experimental hanging zucchini and tomato – the tomato is hanging from the bottom of a regular (read: FREE) hanging plastic planter that I found at the curb last year.  It’s a good-sized pot with a single drainage hole in the centre.  That’s where I stuck the tomato in:  forget those fancy upside-down gadgets and just get yourself a POT with a HOLE in it.    Easy, cheap! When I hung it up on the trellis, however, I realized the pot had cracked on the bottom over the winter (drat), so I’ll need to chuck it after this season, but meanwhile, it’s holding in the soil and tomato and doing just fine, as is the zuke, which has flowers but no actual zucchinis so far.  I...

Just for “fun,” ie to relieve the Three Weeks tedium (despite the fact that we’re really not supposed to have anything new or delightful), I went out today and bought our second in a not-yet-fully-published series called Round and Round the Jewish Year by Tziporah Rosenberg, with illustrations by Ruth Beifus.  (published by Feldheim / Sifriyat Sharsheret) It’s not bad.  There are stories, poems, pesukim and pictures for each of the major events of the year, grouped by month and presented in a nice, logical order with good flow and segues between the sections. Everything is nicely laid out with great illustrations that are free from the “weirdness” that plagues a lot of Jewish and Israeli books.  I especially like the cover picture, with each month represented by a little yeshiva bochur doing or holding something to represent the month.  Pictures include men, women and children of both sexes, which has become a major criterion for me since realizing that a lot...

NOTE:  To learn more about Shiva Asar b’Tammuz (the 17th of Tammuz), Tisha b’Av or the Three Weeks, please see my Tisha b’Av FAQ !  I don’t usually do “Judaism 101”, but I get a lot of questions in real life and I wrote the FAQ last year when I had nothing else to do with my time waiting for the fast to end… “Holy days [=holidays] used to be filled with activity and heavy with significance; they have been replaced by vacations, literally ‘empty’ times.” (Margaret Visser, The Way We Are , p. 80) This is still the distinction between summertime… and a Jewish summer.  Because the Jewish summer, if you live it right, is not just an empty time between school sessions; it’s full – dreadfully full – of significant moments that you can’t help tripping over.  Moments you can’t help dreading, but I guess that’s the point.  Stuff you take for granted, usually, like: Music:  a secular summer is full of music – it’s the soundtrack of your whole fun life, right?...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! We are a Jewish family of 6 (2 parents, 4 kids) and all our meals are kosher. Newcomers, you can read my MPM intro here which tells you all about who we are and what we eat, or just visit my super-duper-list-tastic itemization of Everything We Eat .  Now that we have entered the Nine Days of mourning leading up to Tisha b’Av , all our meals will be vegetarian, in the sense that they will not include meat or wine (I don’t know if beer is allowed, which seems like a more appropriate summertime beverage anyway).  (Yes, I use the word beverage in real life; my kids learn to use it appropriately, usually before the age of three.) Meat products of all kinds are forbidden except on Shabbos:  even broths, ground meat, hidden meat, chicken, beef… you name it.  It is a real trial at a time of year when the easiest supper option is to slap a side of something onto the BBQ grill.  That’s what we did tonight. La...

How do you balance your Judaism?  Not just for yourself, but for your kids? How do you justify for your kids what you do, and what you don’t do, without making everyone else look like fools, maniacs or fanatics, and without making yourself look either perfect or lazy? Amy over at Homeshuling (great blog!) posted her thoughts today on going to visit Orthodox friends (her word, not mine – I never call anyone, least of all myself, Orthodox).  Thought-provoking indeed.  Here’s my response, which is a little long, but hey, it’s not my fault I’m a fast typist. My experience as a baalas teshuvah is that you NEVER get to the point where you are doing everything.  It's an illusion:  even if you're "completely" frum, there are always people with more chumras (stringencies) and minhagim (customs) and before you know it, you're picking and choosing all over again, because you CAN'T do it all. We keep Shabbos, but use part of that time read novels an...