Adventures in Mama-Land

If you do narration with your kids, what do you do with the tears? (Or are you the perfect parent who never inspires any?) This happened last Friday, so I couldn’t write about it at the time. Naomi was super-tired and crabby all last week, which culminated with tears over her narration on Friday. I don’t know why she was crying – honestly, I don’t. She probably had something else she’d rather have been doing, but that is ALWAYS the case. She always has stories and parties and activities on the go with her Barbies and other various things… every single lesson pulls her away from her “real life,” but she usually handles the intrusion well. Not so on Friday. Anyway, I read the short passage from The Shabbat Book and then sat back to listen, as usual. I try to ask as few questions as possible. Except last week, she started crying again, and finally sobbed, “I don’t know anything.” And it was such a memorable parsha! Anyway, I stubborned it out and asked a few questions an...

Naomi’s narrations always seem to begin the same way:  “I don’t know… I don’t know anything !” Here’s how it goes today:  I read the one-paragraph parsha summary in The Shabbat Book .  She sits beside me on the sofa, whining and rubbing against me for a few minutes.  Half-heartedly (knowing I wouldn’t), she asks me to read it again. I sit there with my pen on the paper.  I write “in this week’s parsha…”  I avoid eye contact.  I avoid showing weakness.  I wait. And then, finally, she starts…! Today, there were so many words, I couldn’t keep up, I had to abbreviate and at one point skip a couple of words because she was going so fast.  She brought in far more detail than the one paragraph I’d read her, incorporating facts from this week’s parsha narrative .  I had to continue with a couple of lines on the reverse; we’ve never run out of room before. And her picture!  Here’s Paroh at his palace, greeting bnei Yisrael as the...

(previous search-engine roundups: Roundup #1 , (mini) Roundup #2 , Roundup #3 , and Roundup #4 ) Yup, it’s late and it’s quiet and I have already posted my menu plan for the week, which means it’s Blog Statistics time… the time when I go and see what you’re looking for and hopefully finding in my blog. And it turns out you are almost universally desperate… for kids’ parsha resources! I already knew this, or suspected it… but it saddens me nevertheless.  We are such an intelligent, literate people (at least, some of us are; I know we can’t defy averages, so some of us are no doubt morons…) – why do we put such a low value on educating our kids, on making Jewish education fun and LIVELY??? If you’ll recall, Amy Meltzer at Homeshuling has been wondering the same thing . A lot of people are getting steered here via Google to my Shabbat Book recommendation , which is a great start.  (try my parsha summaries or Parsha Poems , too! Some other top searches that are findin...

(In case you’re here from the Charlotte Mason blog carnival, “parsha” refers to this week’s portion in the annual cycle of weekly Torah – Bible – readings followed by all Jews worldwide.  Click here for more parsha-related posts.) This was only my second time asking for a parsha narration, and I chose a VERY short paragraph out of The Shabbat Book to read to her (I was in a hurry!).  I’m thrilled with the detail of her narration and she was thrilled at the chance to draw a WEDDING.  (I suggested getting a coloured marker but she seemed to enjoy the challenge of black-and-white) The chronology in the book I chose is not clear, which is why she’s made the same mistake I made for years – Yaakov didn’t actually have to work seven more years BEFORE Lavan let him marry Rachel.  He married her almost right away, and only then had to put in the time. I do plan to work with Naomi a bit on “beginning, middle and end” when she’s narrating.  I would have liked a...

p.s.  If you have arrived at this post because you’re looking for decent parsha resoures, may I also (humbly) suggest that you take a look at a few of mine while you’re here…?  I write a Parsha Poem for kids each week, and I’m also writing a narrative summary/overview of each weekly parsha. I wasn’t sure about The Shabbat Book: A Weekly Guide For The Whole Family when we first got it out of the library.  Honestly, I thought it was some “light” Reform-style parsha thing.  Dunno; guess I shouldn’t judge a book by its fun clay-sculpture cover. I am liking The Shabbat Book more and more as we read each parsha.  Eventually, we’ll have to return it, but I saw it in Israel’s for about $22 last week, so I may just have to buy it.  (they had a newer edition, with a slightly different cover, but the same inside) For each weekly parsha, the book presents a VERY short, 1-2 paragraph summary, synopsis, or touches on a major theme (some of the parshiyos don’t h...