More To Come

it is now 2:00 a.m. and i am on a roll. got to see my sister who finally made it back to zefat. but my teenage niece was no where to be found. brought over some banana-nut-chocolate chip muffins and half of the infamous white coconut cake. found out that my married niece, husband and baby grandnephew returned home yesterday. go know! so i will probably go to my sister's for the friday nite shabbos meal. it is about a thirty minute walk. zvi and gal and baby sahar are going to the sephardi safta's this weekend. i will join them for the third meal on saturday afternoon. my sister bought a lovely but fragile, musical ,mobile for sahar. it has soft and stuffed, smiling religious articles dangling from the top. about an hour ago, zvi was still struggling to attach it to sahar's plastic portable crib. i left before the cursing started. i watched sahar all morning long and he was awake and crabby and colicky and hungry the entire time. i was very lucky that he was open to drinking water from a bottle. i rocked him, and rolled him, and burped him, and kissed him, and swung him, and cradled him, and diapered him and bottle fed him, and put him down a couple of times. i felt a certain sense of calm. i had limitless amounts of patience and empathy for this little bundle of love that i sorely lacked with his father at this age. i remember threatening my two month old baby that if he didn't shut up soon i would throw him out of the second floor window of our one room apartment. it sounds so horrible but i must have been at the end of my rope that day. zvi, unlike little sahar, would let out blood curdling screams. and as a single mom and habitual people pleaser, i worried about the noise and what the neighbors would think. so i kept this tidbit about the threat to myself for some time until i engaged in a conversation with another american mother who unlike myself, had several other children. when she admitted that she had threatened all of her kids to throw them out the window if they didn't shut up, i felt validated. i remember a time when i told young zvi that he was driving me up the wall and he replied,"which wall mommy, that wall?''. all my friends say that the beauty of being a grandparent is that you get to give them back when you want. but i don't want. i actually want more time to sing to him and do my goofy song parodies. he already knows my rendition of "The wheel's On The Bus". i am planning to post some new pictures on the next blog and share some of my recipes and diet tips. so stay tuned there's more to come! shabbat shalom, zelda