Mickey D's

One of the things that was so great about keeping kosher in America was not being able to take the kids to McDonald's or Burger King or any other of those gross (but easy) take-out fast food places. Not that we always ate so healthy, but there was always something especially disgusting to me about McDonald's. Other than the occasional special treat of KFC when we go to Jerusalem and the infrequent visits to the Burger King in the food court at our mall, we haven't been part-taking too much in the kosher fast food here. I took pride in the fact that although we had played in the play area at the McDonalds on Achuza (the main street here), we never actually ate there. Sadly, that all changed last week. For some reason, Simon started asking me every day if we could please pretty please go to McDonald's. I kept pushing it off but finally caved in on Thursday. Marcia had to leave early to pick up her car, and I wanted to get the kids out of the house anyway so it seemed like a good plan. Simon was SO happy to be there that I suppose it was worth it. He did eat his entire hamburger and Eli ate 3 out of 4 of his chicken nuggets. And I ate possibly the most disgusting salad I've ever had. And then they ran around the play area like psycho-paths for a long time. But it tired them out and they were ready for baths and bed when we got home. I don't think we will make that a frequent event though.
On Friday, my cousin Byron came to stay with us for the weekend. The boys LOVED having him and Simon keeps asking when we will see him again! David and Byron and the boys spent a couple of hours in the mall while I shopped and cooked for Shabbos and then Byron took a nap while the rest of us went to the pool for a couple of hours. Simon did a lot of jumping in and hardly used his inner tube at all. Eli still just loves floating around in his tube.
We had a quiet dinner Friday night and then Tali, Arjon, Boaz and Uri came for lunch on Shabbos. We took turns taking naps in the afternoon and had a relaxing day.
This morning David and I went to IKEA to try to buy a couch. As we got out of the car, a reporter came over to us and said that he is from Galgalatz (the radio station I like to listen to) and asked if I'd be willing to say something about the claims made by a Swedish newspaper. I kind of looked at him blankly because I wasn't sure why he'd care about some random person's thoughts on the issue and then he pointed to IKEA and said "did you have second thoughts about shopping in a Swedish store?" I told him that the thought hadn't crossed my mind until he said that just then so he asked me to say that into the microphone. I did, but I stumbled over the Hebrew so I can't imagine that he will actually use my quote on the radio! David said they will use it to laugh at the stupid American who can't speak Hebrew.
Anyway, we had no luck with the couch because when we finally found one that we liked and both agreed on, we discovered that to get it in the fabric we wanted meant it would have to have little legs at the bottom (as opposed to fabric all the way down) and we both hated the little legs. All the other ones that we liked were really expensive--turns out IKEA is not all that cheap. Maybe they inflate their prices in Israel because they are anti-Semitic Swedes;)
We left IKEA and started walking around the area because there are a bunch of furniture stores there but then we got sidetracked by an ice cream store. So it's back to the drawing board for a couch.
David picked up the kids and took them to the bike store to get Eli a bike for his birthday from Ducky and Papu. They didn't have yellow, but he happily picked a blue one that he will get tomorrow because it had to be ordered in his teeny-tiny size. He's very excited about it! David had to go to work in the late afternoon, so I took the kids to the pool and we had a great time even though we didn't go with any other friends.