Yesterday dh and I had an appointment in the Jerusalem area and I thought today I’d be posting about that.  But literally two minutes before we walked out the door, ds6 woke up.  My husband saw him first and told me to look at him.  I took one glance and the trip was cancelled.  The entire lower third of his face was swollen and instead of the planned trip to Jerusalem, ds6 and I made an unscheduled trip to the pediatrician.

Thankfully, it wasn’t serious though it looked frightening; he didn’t look anything like himself.  I was trying not to panic thinking we were in for another hospital stay.  What it was is what the doctor called apthous; she told me was English but I had no idea what that was.  I looked it up and aphthous stomatitis is basically a canker sore.  I don’t have experience with canker sores and assumed they were something minor; I didn’t know they could have this kind of effect.  When we got home I gave him B12 and probiotics to help speed his healing and then he fell asleep for a few hours.

While he was sleeping, I took advantage of dh being home to get some paperwork for dd17 from the Ministry of the Interior.  In order to get the leniencies she’s entitled to as someone new to the country on different academic testing (she’s studying in a framework that is entirely in Hebrew), I needed to get a letter documenting when she entered and left the country.  After an hour and a half there, I got the paper and headed to the plant nursery that was a five minute walk away.

Ever since I took on the voluntary management of our apartment building, I’ve been wanting to plant some things in the entrance area.  I’ve planted a couple of plants I rescued that were being thrown out and started other plants from cuttings since there wasn’t money to spend from the communal funds.  That was nice but there was still empty space and I wanted some color other than green!  Since there’s now money in the building’s account (which I’ve been managing very carefully since it was in bad shape when I took over) I spent a bit less than fifty dollars on some perennial flowers.  I chose plants that will come back year after year and that will propogate themselves so they will get larger and expand with time.  That makes this purchase a one time expense.

When I got home ds6 was still sleeping but the other kids joined me in transplanting the plants I had planted a few months ago, then planting the new plants.  We filled all of the large stone planters that were empty.  I lined the bare patch owned by the city in front of our building with baby aloes that I took off a rescued mother plant and placed three small flowering  succulents in the center.   In our entrance area I cut back a plant that was mostly killed when someone painted their fence and a lot of paint was sprayed on the plant in the process, sectioned off the shoots that looked random and haphazard with a line of stones that we found when we were digging, and planted a circle of aloes in that area, too.  I’d love to buy white stones to fill in the path between them; it would look very pretty.  One day maybe I’ll do that but for now I’m being very frugal.  I know in the past they’ve spent more than I did on plants to have someone spray poison to kill the weeds so I feel justified in spending what I did.  Considering the budgetary constraints I’m working within it’s looking very nice.  

After a couple of hours of planting outisde, we went in and ds6 finally woke up.  He asked if he could play on Starfall.com, which I agreed to.  The last time I let him do this was a couple of months ago so it was a treat for him.

While ds6 was playing his reading and math games, Yirmiyahu showed us that he knows how to stand without holding on to anything!  We saw a first glimpse of that a month ago and were waiting to see this become something he does intentionally. We’re so excited – and now he can show off at his 18 month evaluation with the child development team in a couple of days.   I would have missed the excitement if I had gone to Jerusalem!  I posted this on my Facebook page, not planning to share it here but then thought some of you would enjoy it.

Yirmiyahu standing by himself

This is the reality of life with kids – you have to learn to be flexible.  Things often won’t go according to plan and that’s okay.  While my day wasn’t at all what I planned and I did have some frustration about having to cancel our appointment, which was something important to me that I really wanted to take care of – I had a really nice day!

Avivah