We’re already well into Q2, so I can say with the certainty of retrospect and the vividness of recency that everything on this list helped me get through Offspring’s first few months at daycare and my own first semester teaching a new-to-me-course. I’m hoping several will continue to help through…
My nuclear family doesn’t keep kosher. My sister and I didn’t grow up with separate dishes for milk and meat; eating only products with a hechsher on them; or observing the many other kosher laws. We didn’t usually mix milk and meat, and we avoided pork and pork products, but…
Totally squeaking in while these three months are still technically last quarter! Above all, said months were busy, but these little bits of fun and coolness helped make them less stressful. a New York Times digital subscription The New York Times offered first-time subscribers a full year for only $20,…
I started this blog overview of my thoughts before I’d finished Agatha All Along, the MCU miniseries that aired on Disney+ this past fall. More fool me! I should have seen it coming, because I felt the exact same way about WandaVision, the previous miniseries in this storyline. But I’m…
It turns out, returning to work after parental leave is a lot, and returning to a 130% full workload after… well, literally anything is a LOT. Don’t worry, I’m okay: it was just for one semester, which is winding down now. (Hence the return to blog-dom and wonderful things like…
On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the congregation forms a Jewish beth din (court) and, among other things, declares that it is permitted to pray with sinners. This point never struck me as significant, try as Hebrew-school teachers might, until recently. That’s because I’ve been thinking…
Last post, I wrote about some things, big and small, serious and not, that I learned later than I should have in life. Sometimes, that “should” meant that I wish cultural norms had been different and supportive; sometimes that “should” just meant I’m aware I didn’t follow typical timelines for…
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look back and think “I should have known that sooner!” while forgetting what it was like to actually be your younger self. Sure, older you would have put that knowledge/skill/perspective together much faster… but older you has different resources and experiences. This is why…
If I were choosing based entirely on the impact on my life, this list would be full of diapers and bottles and so forth, but I’m sticking with my plan of not including baby-centric things. Still, you can tell that baby life has been getting easier to manage, because I’ve…
I am struggling to maintain a dayenu mindset. On Passover, one of the highlights of the telling of the story of the Exodus is the song Dayenu. One by one, singers list each of the miraculous things God did for B’nai Yisroel–aka the kin group that became us, the Jewish…