It's Eli's Fault

I blame my lack of posting recently entirely on Eli. He broke my camera and without pictures, the blog just isn't as exciting. I've been attempting to take pictures with my phone. All of the strawberry-picking pictures were taken with it and it actually takes decent pictures. However, if the subject of the picture moves even the slightest bit, then the whole thing comes out as a big blur. So I've taken a lot of pictures that look like this:














That would be Eli and Uri playing. Eli wants to go to Uri's house every day and usually cries when we leave Frieda's and he can't go to Uri's. Tali and I came up with a good system of having Uri and Eli play at their house while Boaz and Simon go to Playball. One of us stays with the little ones and one of us takes the bigger ones to Playball. It's a good system because then we don't have to entertain Eli and Uri and keep them from making too much noise and causing too much trouble.
We tried it last week and it worked great. This week we didn't do it because at long last Marcia came back from Brazil and Tuesday was her first day back with us!! Yay--we are all so happy. Simon and Eli both ran for the door as soon as the doorbell rang shouting "Marcia Marcia Marcia." Eli actually got shy for a second when she came in, but Simon ran to her and gave her the biggest longest hug. It was very sweet. She brought them some candy and really cute t-shirts from Brazil. Simon insisted on putting his on right away and then wearing it to Playball.
Eli happily stayed with Marcia when I took Simon.
On our way home, we stopped at the new sushi place that opened to pick up some sushi for ourselves for dinner. It is definitely Simon's new favorite sushi place because he ate his entire salmon avocado inside out roll in record time. It was decent sushi and much cheaper than the other 2 places that we go to so I think this will be our place of choice from now on.
When we got home, David was home already. He said he had been home earlier and Marcia and Eli were sitting on Eli's bed talking and then he had to go back to work and then came back an hour later and they were still sitting on his bed and talking! They had a lot to catch up on.
I'm totally going out of order here, but I have a lot to catch up on. Last Shabbos we went to the Saltzmans' in Chashmonaim. It all started out good because we actually made great time getting there and got there in plenty of time before Shabbat. It went a little downhill from there...Jordy had a fever, Danya had lice, Eli threw up in the middle of the night, Simon woke up at 5:45 am and yelled that he had to pee waking up all the other kids. Oh, and something kept blowing a fuse and making all the electricity go out and it seemed to be the fridge that was the culprit so David and Josh had to bring all the food across the street to put in the fridge at the shul! Despite all of that, we had a great time and it was so nice to finally see them!! And, David and I decided that we need our own 8 year old girl because when all the kids got up at the crack of dawn, Danya gave them all breakfast and entertained them and no adult intervention was necessary for a couple of hours.
In other good news, the scaffolding is down from our building and most of the work is done. It looks really nice. Maybe I will attempt to take a picture and hope that the building doesn't move so that the picture comes out good! They are still cleaning up the mess so there is a big dumpster blocking our parking spot but one of these days we should have that back!! Simon and Eli are happy to have the use of the porch back again, especially as the weather has been beautiful for the past few days. Eli loves to stand on a chair on the porch and yell and wave to the guard at the school across the street. We see him every day, several times a day, whenever we go in or out of our building. He is especially helpful when he sees me coming home and he saves the parking spot in front of my building for me. Eli used to be scared of him but one day he decided that they are best friends. He went from crying and being shy to literally running to him and giving him a huge hug every morning. It's very cute. Yesterday, Marcia picked up Eli at school and I picked up Simon. She and Eli waited outside for us and when we got there Marcia said the guard had come over to say hi to Eli. Eli ran to him and gave him a big hug and then when he left Marcia said to Eli "who was that?" and Eli said "I no know!" He also always says "shalom, boker tov" to the workmen. He's so polite.
Here are the only other decent pictures I've managed to get recently. I'm hopefully going to get the camera fixed either tomorrow or early next week!