I Have a Blog??

Since Arica just linked to my blog from her's, I suddenly felt guilty about never posting anymore!! I guess I kind of missed writing about the rest of the summer and the first days of school. I probably should have documented that milestone of Simon starting FIRST GRADE!!!! He's so grown up. Let's see, what else has happened...here are the major bullet points:

1. Simon started first grade at Yavneh, which is our local public school. So far so good, I think. I've been able to help with his homework thus far, although I just opened his science book and his geometry (yes, geometry in 1st grade...no wonder Israelis are so much better at math than Americans) book and I hadn't a clue what any of it meant so he's going to be on his own for that!! I met with his teacher last week because I felt like I had no idea what was going on and I got the run-down on how the school works, what a typical day is like, etc. So now I feel somewhat better, although Simon has already lost about 6 packages of markers and that is getting kind of expensive!

2. Eli started pre-K at Gan Daphna (where Simon was for the last 2 years, for pre-K and kindergarten) and he is loving it. Sara, one of the teachers, always favors the more wild and psycho kids because she thinks they are more fun, so she is definitely enjoying having Eli around! The teachers tell me that he absolutely understands every word they say in Hebrew and he mostly participates in everything. They've started learning the letters and it's been very interesting to me to see how differently he learns from how Simon does.

3. We went to Canada/America for 3 weeks for Alli's bat mitzvah and to pack up our stuff and ship it here. That should probably be a whole post in itself that maybe I will write some day. Now our stuff is arriving in a couple of weeks and we have no idea where it's going to go!!

Those are the main things to report. Now that we've been back for a couple of weeks, we are slowly getting into a routine with school and work and activities. The kids are in after-school programming until 4:30 every day which is nice and much better than when they came home at 1 every day. We've been going to the country club most days after school where Simon is doing Tae Kwon Do twice a week and Eli is still mostly refusing to go to activities and prefers to just play in the gymboree. Twice this past week instead of the Country Club we went to Park Herzliya to ride bikes and have a pizza picnic. The weather has been really nice for that.

This morning was a bit hectic but really nice--we had a bris and a simchat bat to go to and somehow we managed to make it to both and now I really should be cleaning and cooking while David is out with the kids. And showering because we have a hot water problem at the moment and until the guy comes on Sunday to hopefully fix it, we only have hot water heated by the sun, the electrical thingy doesn't work. That's generally fine as it's often sunny, but it's mostly cloudy today and supposed to be cloudy tomorrow which means we will probably only have enough hot water for one shower and I'd like it to be mine!!!!