'Tis the Season

I love Chanukah! I like the candle and the doughnuts and the latkes and mostly the doughnuts. The caramel filled ones in particular. Yum. I read an article in the Jerusalem Post that said that the average person should expect to gain about 2 kilos over Chanukah. That is like 5 pounds...I think I might have just gained that today and it was only the first day!
Tali and I had decided that a replay of last year's little Chanukah party would be a good idea. She was doing most of the work for it and gave me the simple task of getting small gifts for all the kids. There were just 7 of them. Three 2 year olds--Eli, Uri and Roy and four almost 5 year olds--Simon, Boaz, Oren and Mika. I figured this shouldn't be too hard and first I went to the dollar store equivalent to buy wrapping paper and to try to find something but they really didn't have anything good so I went to Big Deal which is a store that imports a lot of closeouts from America so they have good products for cheap. I got mini-basketball hoops for the little boys and spent forever trying to figure out what to get for the bigger kids. I wanted to get them all the same thing to avoid fights, but that was hard considering that 3 of them are boys and 1 is a girl and 3 of them are English speakers and 1 is not. I ended up just going to a regular toystore and getting them each a tiny Playmobil thing for more money than I wanted to spend but I figured that was better than just getting something stupid that would break in 2 seconds.
The party was really fun and the kids did a project decorating styrofoam menorahs and dreidels and then we lit candles, opened presents and ate.
Simon, Boaz and Mika were all playing with something and were talking in Hebrew because Mika doesn't speak English. She moved on to do something else and I noticed that Simon and Boaz were still speaking to each other in Hebrew. It was so cute! But they switched back to English pretty quickly-I think their Hebrew is still pretty limited.
I thought Eli might have a fever when he woke up from him nap before we went to the party so I wanted to give him tylenol. I asked him if he wanted medecine and he said no. The he reconsidered and said "also...yes." I think he gets confused between "actually" and "also" and it's very cute.
When we got home from the party, David was home already and was making latkes. Yum. We lit candles again at home and gave the kids each a Hot Wheels car from Savti and Zaidie Bear. Things went downhill from there, apparently. I went out for a run (I like saying that even though Jodie and I basically walked the whole time, but we only got back about 5 minutes after the other 3 who ran so we must have been walking very fast!) and David gave the kids a bath during which Simon threw his new car at Eli's head and got in very big trouble.
We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Ducky and Papu tomorrow barring any snow delays!!