Trip to Israel, Dec-Jan 2012-2013: Second week in Tel-Aviv: Sunday and Monday

1. Trip to Israel, Dec-Jan 2012-2013: Second week in Tel-Aviv: Sunday and Monday

2. Sunday was a very rainy day I was still with a bad cold and we all got up very late (Hahgoot got up at noon!) Morning routine took forever (didn’t help that Hahgoot decided to do a puppet show with her socks for Alma...) We did very little all day, Hahgoot mainly drew and Alma slept a lot.

3. The girls used new stickers from Yaffa they got the day before to make creative collages. I spent the day sorting items to send by post and items to take in the suitcase, as the many gifts, clothes, books, toys, DVDs and workbooks were starting to pile up.

4. One of Alma’s favourite Israeli children’s books is “Tiras Ham” (meaning “hot corn”), so I bought her a dinner set with illustrations from the book. She was very excited about it and enjoyed eating real hot corn soup (organic corn from the grandparents’ field) and cow’s tongue, which is a family favourite.

5. In the afternoon there was more TV, drawing and Kiwi, while the non-stop rain kept pouring outside. Grandpa Ido sat with Hahgoot and discussed Archimedes’ famous experiment (“The eureka moment”).

6. Amitai had a cold so he stayed with Revi another night in Zichron. In the evening poor Ilan arrived, nearly by swimming from Zichron (the trains couldn’t go on time due to the wild weather). He joined us for dinner and a play and helped with the girls’ bath-time routine. They were perfectly behaved, he was very impressed. When he left to his hotel, he missed the 4 hours it took to put them to bed... I had a good laugh with the grandparents about it...

7. Monday morning was again stormy with lots of rain. I went with my dad to collect boxes for my parcels at the exceptionally stinky cargo area of Dizengoff centre (unfortunately, my blocked nose cleared...). Ilan arrived, followed by Asaf, who brought Revi and Amitai, who was still coughing with a cold. Amitai quickly joined the drawing.

8. After drawing for a while, the kids moved on to LEGO. Amitai announced he does not share, and I broke the news to him that in our family we do share. That game didn’t go very well (Alma gets very annoyed if people don’t interact well), but I was patient, he’ll know the social rules very soon, he is a very smart kid.

10. The kids had dinner together and watched TV with grandpa before bath time.

11. Bedtime became very tricky as Revi insisted that Amitai has to sleep from 7 pm to 7 am (he was to sleep with us in the living room while they slept at a hotel nearby). As you could see from previous presentations, we didn’t really have the ideal sleeping arrangements... Add to that the new settings and a cold, and of course Amitai wasn’t asleep by 7 pm. We managed to put him to sleep an hour and a half later but keeping Alma quiet was very difficult and she only dozed off around 10 pm. Hahgoot finally fell asleep around midnight. Revi insisted that we need to keep the house in complete darkness, so we were all in a curfew of darkness and silence from 7:30 pm onwards. In the middle of the madness (9 pm) arrived my friend Yulia Rechtman and we spent the evening whispering in the kitchen in the dark over a cup of tea (it was raining in torrents so we couldn’t go out, and besides, I couldn’t leave my parents alone with three kids who weren’t settled). Crazy night... The weather was so bad, only at midnight we found a taxi for Yulia. I slept very little that night as shortly after going to bed, Alma woke several times, suffered from gas and asked to go to the toilet. The rain was very heavy and disturbed our sleep a lot – I only fell asleep at 2 am.