obstruction

Never a fun word to hear from a medical practioner and not one you want to hear in conjunction with bowel or any part of the human body that expells waste.
Thank goodness the one that we were concerned about in our extended family managed to find a way to work itself out, sparing the patient and all involved a nasty bout with surgery.
It is most obvious that she does not have the "pissy poor protoplasm" that plagues those of my blood relatives - wherein if there is to be a problem to be found, we will rewrite the book on it.
For example, with Jonathan the moment they brought up surgery as a final option, I started wondering how long it would be till we did that and after about 2 weeks, I started to get antsy to get on with it already so we could get on with our lives.
Funny that it may be, I ran into his pulmonologist just yesterday at our ourdoor block party, who re-admitted him to the hospital after the intial pneumonia. She wanted to know where he was (just so she could keep tabs on him I'm sure) and being the wonderful mother that I am I answered "I dunno"
You see I was late in arriving to the party after my nap and redressing the twins.
So I really had no idea, but it was likely that he was jumping around in the bounce house or climbing the rock wall or otherwise enjoying himself in the spring weather.
So you see, when I overheard the flamboyant XRay tech (who explained everything on Jonathan's films to me-and even got a dig in at the original dr about using a smaller tube rather than a more effective one-this was my favorite tech for sure!) nonchalantly chat about my son's case with the surgeon outside the elevator after it was all over, in one of those medical term kinda ways...you know that it is obvious that Jonathan, just like his grandmother and his great grandmother and his mother before him, re-wrote the manual on how his body works.
They told me to expect him to be intubated in recovery, he was not and his oxygen levels barely ever dipped below 90 even with the "obstruction"
Here's a hearty Hooray that the current obstruction was able to mostly work itself out and that we won't have any more of that anytime soon.
And its a good thing our ppp isn't catchy. My mother's best friend had a 7 cm obstruction removed from her nether regions. The prognosis on the biopsies was not good, but my mom is going in for some hand holding and meetings with doctors in the next few weeks since she understands the lingo and the severity of the situation much better than the one who is going through it. Not a good year for that family as the patriarch shattered his hip in a fall on a slick porch stair.
Guess these things come in 3s and now we're done!

June Cleaver

upon re-reading my Itamar post that was hastily pecked out and has now undergone 2 revisions for clarity. I found this nugget of wisdom. This about sums up my current state of affairs:

• I'm a June Cleaver, albeit it with an outside the home, FT J-O-B in a downtown office building, but my mind is filled with-and therefore I'm talking-about raising kids and Japanese nuclear horrors in the same POST as ANOTHER terrorist attack in Israel dammit! SIGH!***

I just have to laugh. I am not a very GOOD June Cleaver since my house is constantly in a state of chaos-just ask my husband-it drives him NUTS. But the point was, that I focus more on my family and I am most definitely not a Holly Homemaker except when the mood strikes me to get in the kitchen. Then I can bake or cook or whatever for days at a time, but just don't expect me to have dinner on the table every night at 6.

I am constantly on the computer, for hours at a time at the office, and sometimes I come home and want to be connected too. I follow friends and cooking blogs and jewish stuff and all of it is relevant to the jigsaw puzzle person that I am. [wish I could claim that this is my art work. I found it here]

more musings

so my Itamar post from earlier this week was still a work in progress as far as helping to solidify my views on the matter.

yesterday, when picking up E I literally jumped down his throat. I guess its not fair to take out my frustrations on where I am on him, but he was an easy target and was totally unprepared for my barrage.

All the hard issues I want him to realize that we are in a different position now than when we left Israel. Granted I left in a bad way. I was DONE. I was going through my first pregnancy alone (my mother and other family were in Texas) and it was a difficult pregnancy at that. Ignorance is bliss - I didn't know it was that bad even, though I was hospitalized 3 different times for observation because of high BP [which still plagues me today] and had bi-weekly clinic appointments complete with urine-protein checks, fetal baby monitoring, ultrasounds with doppler to see and hear the heartbeat of the baby. Thank G-d it was all worth it in the end, but I somehow blindly knew everything was ok, and I realize now that E needed to go through the journey of asking all the rabbunim to pray for the safety of his unborn child who had some potentially catastrophic virus in-vitro.

So I left with a small teaching job that he had arranged for me (less than 10 hrs a week) and he is concerned that I will go back to that low point in my life. That is why I ended up leaving Israel. And that my mother's cancer diagnosis was in the next few months was a really stong coincidence, but that is how my life works. I just knew it was time to come back to TX. I am not 100% sure that the time is right to move back to Israel for me and my family, but the first draft rumblings and warning signs are coming into view.

on their recent trip here, the in-laws and their myriad issues weighed heavily on my mind and on my heart. These are truly simple, down to earth, small town, muddle through life without pretention people, who probably never thought they would travel to America and have now been twice to see their son and maybe more importantly their grandchildren. Now they are not extremely healthy people (nor are my parents, for different reasons, who are maybe 10 or more years their senior) and the fact that we are so far away has been extra difficult on them. The internet is almost foreign to them so even a Skype chat with us has to be at the home of one of the many relatives.
The vast distance and the fact that my mother in law can not readily see her son and grandchildren is becoming more and more of an issue. She calls literally every day and if she does not speak to her son she is not calm till she can reach him or get me word that she is looking for him. They dote on their other grandchild (which is a whole other set of issues) and would love to have all their grandchildren grow up and play together as that is the heart of the culture.

This added to the fact that E is not overly happy with the way things are going here is a big factor. I know he needs to make a trip to Israel, but he is not willing to do so in his current state and this is a vicious cycle.
He is not aware of all the support systems that exist as an anglo oleh. Having been there once and not having completely gotten it out of my system, I know that these things exist and the networks are different even than when I was a single girl as opposed to a wife and mother with small children. which was part of my railing at him yesterday. He has goals and numbers in his head that may or may not be realistic and I think he needs to be made aware of some of the other options that are out there that he is completely oblivious to. He still watches his Israeli TV almost every night and will always and forever be the Israeli he is (see these former posts for proof) Why should he continue to be miserable here amongst things that have no real meaning to us other than an expensive roof over our heads.
His boss recently moved his whole family back to live in Ceasaria in a villa overlooking the sea close to Israel's only golf course. Obviously this would not be the kind of life that we would choose to live. We are living now in a Jewish bubble of sorts. Our kids thankfully go to private school with much financial assistance. Maybe a prolonged visit to Israel would make me see things in a different light. The more things change the more they stay the same. My summer trip felt very comfortable, albeit not in the right medium. My time was not enough of my own and I was forced to some things that were not of my liking.

flower picking

Now that I have yesterday's ranting out of my system, I can refocus on the fact that my kiddos are absolutely scrumptious!

The weeds we try so very hard to eradicate from our lawns, the ones that make little flowers that spread their pollen to further populate the weed garden, are the very flowers that my munchkins have been enjoying.

The love to pick the flowers and bring me sweaty bunches of pure and innocent pleasure. The pleasure of bringing me the flowers (which they think are the most beautiful thing in the world for their mommy)

The joy they get in going out and finding every last bloom in the yard and proudly announcing that I am now the proud recipient of ALL the flowers in the yard.
It is such a childish thing to do - to have the joy in picking flowers for your favorite people.
The best part is that when they have too many to hold they improvise. Instead of a basket they have used a coffee cup or even most recently the blue bucket we would normally use to mop the floor. And then when their friends came over for a visit, the 4 of them were in the yard, eradicating all the helpless flowers and piling them high in the bucket.
Too bad the big dog across the back fence scares Yael and her friend is seriously allergic
x

Oh to be so entertained by the garden flowers that others want to eliminate. It is what makes childhood so amazing and such a shame that it is but a fleeting memory before they move on to other more important and crucial things like homework and reading.

Itamar and Monday Musings

So I heard about the slaying of the 5 memebers of the Israeli family that chose to make their home in Itamar. Eran mentioned it in passing, asking nochalantly if I had heard about the "pigua*" that his mom had just told him about. Since I tend to shy away from the computer over the weekend when I prefer to spend my time coddling my babies who won't be babies for long, and clamoring over my daughter who will forever be my little princess even as I watch her grow before my eyes, and "fighting" with the choices of shows my oldest chooses to watch -from annoying Spongebob to annoying sports (esp basketball), but in the same breath explaining how I prefer basesball, and that it drives his dad crazy just like the basketball drives me nuts.
But back to the tragedy at hand. I feel like that is so far away from my world - but it is not just because I am completely tied up in baby-land. I feel like I am so far removed from that part of the current conflict. I feel (and this admission in hard for me to make) that maybe the "settlers" were asking for it - not this kind of murderous event, but by choosing to make their home in the place that they made it fenced off from their completly surrounded by hostile neighbors - I can't even beleive I am typing this sentence much less thinking it, since that is probably what the rest of the uniformed world feels about Israel being surrounded by Arab neighbors that are now in turmoil since we are living in these "cursed interesting" times. ***

***Note: It is also because I am a news junkie. I was really sick of hearing about the Charlie Sheen antics and cannot bear to watch the devestation in Japan including all the impending horrors that are on the horizon with the nuclear meltdown looming-did I just wake up and find myself in 1950? I'm a June Cleaver, albeit it with an outside the home, FT J-O-B in a downtown office building, but my mind is filled with-and therefore I'm talking-about raising kids and Japanese nuclear horrors in the same POST as ANOTHER terrorist attack in Israel dammit! SIGH!***

And until I read this, (several hours later ) and came back to this post to "finish" it,
I was pretty indifferent about the whole thing. Then I realized how it was to be in her shoes - the women who choose to build their homes and raise their children in such a place. They would rather think of themselves as the pioneering spirit of today's generation - ones that will face the brunt of the fight and rely on their enourmous faith in Hashem to keep them from harm's way.

some of the more recent posts I have seen have alluded to the fact that perhaps the whole disgusting incident was a result of a foreign worker not getting his salary and that the Fogel family was somehow responsible for not properly compensating their help. If that is truly a motivator and I am not convinced that it is, isn't it more likely that the man would still want to see his money and would more likely resort to petty sabotage and other misdemeanors of the same ilk. He would want the family to pay in money and not in blood.

The fact that there have not been many incidents that have come to light in the past few months, years or however long ago the last event was does not diminsh the fact that the danger is always there in the back of the minds of the people who live there. The PA claims that their "citizens" are banned from entering the yishuvim, but clearly what took place was not carried out by a law-abiding citizen of any nature. Just typing this out and really lettting the words flow from my fingers is more about clarifying my positions and my way of thinking than my over-tired, sleep-deprived, dis-engaged confused brain can actually manage.

I was disgusted with myself. Why was I not able to muster up the usual and natural feelings of solidarity and "how horrible", etc until I hunted - and I choose to use the word hunted here - because it wasn't enough for my brain to know the images were readily available and then to leave well enough alone. The original sites that I turned to made mention of the disturbing images and made concerted efforts not to display them or make it too easy to stumble across them. I had to make a concerted effort on my part to find a site that displayed a link to them, and then at that point I had to really decide to look at the images after I clicked. It was literally a 3 step process. 1. Know they exist somewhere within reach, 2. find a site that had the link to the images (and in doing that research I was exposed to other interesting sites and other points of view that inadvertently broadened my horizons - Steven Amsel and Pam Gellar were unknown to me before today) 3. press the link which opened another small window which I had to choose to enlarge to view. This last step was the hardest.  I literally turned my head away from the screen as I glimpsed the first view of the small window that only showed a part of a sleeve. 
In the end I looked and the reaction was what I used to be able to come up with all on my own without needing the violent images to prompt it. It makes me wonder about the person I have morphed into and whether I want to encourage this somewhat more laid-back outlook or be horrified by the fact that I needed a journey to get to the place where I once was.

*Usually "pigua" to me means a bombing. I know the literal translation is something like terrorist attack, but in my mind the first jump is to bombing and then when I hear the details I categorize it appropriately. This attack in Itamar has many (too many) causualties and in my mind it is classified as a senseless murder - no matter of who carried it out. Babies and small children can not make the choice to live where they do and so are of course the innocent victims. The Fogels made the choices that were right for their family and that is their right to be able to do so. I, however, would not necessarily knowingly put my kids in that particular kind of danger on a daily basis. This is something that is a hard issue for me to struggle with as well. I know that we ultimately want to live in Eretz Yisrael, but in a place that my Americanized children will feel comfortable adapting to.

Another interesting thing is the offhanded remark made by another new mother who I know from a meeting or two at the supermarket and as the guidance counsellor at the HS part of my oldest's school. She mentioned that they had just come off of a recent trip to Israel to scope things out. She has a small baby (maybe 3 months old) and 4 or more other kids in tow. This was one thing  - that if we are really considering a move to Israel at this point, then a pilot trip is a natural progression. Another family I know who has 3 boys (and the head of the family is a lawyer-ie they're not hurting for $$$) made a stab at a year-long stay in Israel and the experiment was over after the summer citing money as the #1 issue. But back to the offhand remark...After asking if I hadn't gotten Israel out of my system having lived there previuosly and my emphatic, no pause answer of no, that every day is literally a struggle for us, she said that it is really easier to move as a family if you move with another family or more of a support group. Much food for thought!