This morning dd16 and I started our day by going downtown to pick up two friends of hers arriving from Michigan, who are coming for the conference.  Though I left the house and allowed extra time to get there, there was a huge delay with traffic and I got there almost an hour after I had planned.  Fortunately, their bus had arrived late so they hadn’t been waiting long.

I had planned to go directly from picking them up to the Israeli embassy; one thing I wanted to take care of was extending dd16’s passport.  She got an Israeli passport at the beginning of the year that expires when she turns 17 – this is because Israeli teens who reach the age of 17 have to get permission from the army before leaving the country or entering for more than a certain amount of time.  The Jewish Agency representative here had suggested that it would be easier for us to deal with it here than in Israel, and since I needed to go there anyway to sign a power of attorney for someone to sign paperwork on my behalf in Israel, it wasn’t any extra effort to take dd along.

Unfortunately, I forgot to tell her to take her passport with her, so she couldn’t get it taken care of!  However, when we got there, I picked up ds17’s new passport – we had to take care of the army issue before his could be issued when the rest of us got ours – and learned that he’ll still have to go to the enlistment office in Israel when he arrives to take care of some other aspects of his deferment of the mandatory army service.  So dd16 will go along with him and take care of hers at the same time at that point.

It took a couple of hours there to get the power of attorney signed, but it’s done.  Now I have to send it off to Israel so it can be used!

After this we took my husband to work, then had lunch since I hadn’t had anything to eat and neither had dd’s friends.  Or dd16 for that matter, but she still can’t eat much because of the oral surgery.  From there we headed home, stopping on the way at the library and finally getting home at 6 pm.  When I left my house at 9:35 in the morning, I had no idea that it would take all day to do what we needed to do!

(It was funny that both these friends came last year for a few days, and we went to DC (to the National Zoo) when they were here, as well as stopping at this same restuarant to eat and going to the same library – but these aren’t things that we usually do!  It must have felt like it was a replay of their visit last time!)

When we got home, it was so nice to walk into a sparkling clean house with  the table set and ready for dinner, with a yummy dinner prepared.  All thanks to dd14.  We ate and then headed out to catch the end of ds12’s baseball game – we got there just as he got up to bat and hit a home run!  And then he hit another one right before the game ended, and since he hit one before we got there, he’s now earned the distinction of being the only player in the league for the last two years to have hit three home runs in one game.  He’s the top hitter in the league for home runs for the season (you know how they have stats on all this stuff!), and he’s hoping in the last game of the season this Sunday to up his average even more by hitting some more homers.  🙂  I haven’t been to many of his games this season – I usually drive him there and pick him up, but can’t stay to watch – and was so glad that at the game I happened to come to I was able to view some of his accomplishments.

He and ds17 are excellent baseball players (ds17 was also the top hitter in the league), and I know it’s something ds12 will miss when we go to Israel,(since it’s not played much there.  I’m glad they’ve both enjoyed the opportunity during their years here to play regularly.  But we plan on taking baseball equipment with us anyway, and perhaps we’ll find the opportunity to play.  After our family game of baseball on Pesach, we realized that even without anyone else, we have enough people to have lots of fun on our own!

Avivah