Tonight I attended our shul’s annual banquet. I really appreciate our shul – it’s a very warm and accepting place. It’s an important value to me that my children see acceptance for all kinds of people within the mainstream structure of Judaism, ie, not just within our family, and this has been a place where our family messages are enhanced. I also think it’s valuable for kids to realize that substance over form is what is most important in serving H-shem, and it’s too easy to focus on having a certain ‘look’ and feeling like that’s enough to be a religious person. This is the only annual dinner that I attend – at $100 a seat, dinners are expensive and take time away from my family, but in this case, I’m happy to spend the money to support my shul. I don’t see a lot of things as being necessary to spend money on, but shul membership and the dinner are both things that I feel are important – if I say that being a member of my shul enhances our lives, I have to put my money where my mouth is, right? So skimping on this isn’t a way that I choose to save money, and I hope H-shem will continue to keep us in a position of being able to support our shul to at least this degree.
Before I went to the dinner, I decided that tonight I would have to wear something maternity-like, because it’s an easy way to give a heads up to a lot of people in one evening that we’ll be having a baby soon. A friend recently commented that it looks like I’m going to surprise everyone again when I have this baby. Last week I was wearing something that I was sure made it very obvious, until I bumped into three friends within an hour. And when I mentioned it, two of them were shocked and had no idea. (In the past, I assumed most people realized but weren’t saying anything. I realized that I was wrong about that.) The third said she thought I was at the very beginning and she didn’t want to say anything so early on. Since I have less than six weeks to go, you would think it would be more apparent, but I guess it’s not. It was fun that so many people were surprised in the past, but it kind of freaked a lot of people out that they saw me right before (even up to the night before) the baby was born and didn’t realize I was pregnant. (If you’re wondering how it’s possible, I think it’s several factors: 1) I don’t gain a huge amount of weight; 2) I’m tall; 3) I don’t wear maternity, just wear larger sized clothing; 4) it’s been the winter/spring season so layers make it less obvious.) But then I tried on what I was planning to wear. Being a person who doesn’t wear loose flowing clothes, I felt like a ship sailing into harbor, and decided it was too much for me. So I just wore my regular clothes, and no one said anything. They’ll figure it out eventually. 🙂 My kids keep asking me when I’ll tell people, and since I told them I would wear something more obvious tonight but didn’t, they’re now bugging me to try it on for them so at least they can see how huge it makes me look. 🙂
The dinner was lovely, as always. Most dinners are boring and filled with speeches, but there’s always a special atmosphere at our shul dinners. I think it’s the authenticity and ‘realness’ of the people who are honored each year, as well as the rabbi. One thing I’ve found unusual is that those who are honored aren’t necessarily those with deep pockets, but those who have contributed to the shul or the community in a meaningful way.
There was also a wonderful a capella group that performed several songs – I was delighted to able to buy their cd at the end of the dinner to take home for the kids to enjoy (and because it was directly from the group that performed, it was much cheaper than from a store). All of our kids enjoy music, though ds15 is probably the one who most influenced the others in this regard with his obvious enjoyment of music. This will be nice to have in time for sefira, since we haven’t had anything else we listen to during that time.
To top off my lovely evening out with my dh, we came home to a spotless house – my kids sometimes like to surprise me by cleaning up everything when I’m out. But today the credit all goes to one child, dd12. Isn’t that nice? I told her that it was really too much work for one person to take on, but it was her choice and she wanted to do it. Since we did the week’s worth of Pesach cleaning earlier today, I wouldn’t have expected anything from anyone – I thought they did more than enough getting the basement finished off today. I gave them a choice of spreading it out over three afternoons as planned or doing it all today, and they chose to do it all today. It was a beautiful warm and sunny day- there’s something about cleaning on such a nice day that makes it so much more enjoyable, don’t you think? It makes it feel like spring is almost here. I love the spring. The littles ran around the yard for the entire time the olders were cleaning, enjoying the warm weather – my ds18 month particularly loves being outside. As soon as he sees the door starting to open, he makes a break for it. 🙂
So as far as Pesach cleaning goes, now I just have the living/dining room/kitchen to do next week. It’s nice to be able to know that three floors of the house are basically finished, and we can enjoy the rest of this week in whatever way we want.
Avivah
