EYE-PHONE!

(For Sheryl who asked what my excuse was)

While walking with Xander along the walkway to a strip mall just after dark, we passed an AT&T cell showroom. Or, rather, I walked past it - Xander was drawn to the glass display like a magnet, pressing his face and hands to the glass. I stopped and asked him if he wanted to go inside. Instead of answering me, he ran to the door and started pulling on the handle with all the might of his 29 pounds.

“Hep!” he said to me, so I went over and assisted him by pulling open the door that must have outweighed him by a good 50 pounds. He ran into the store the moment he could squeeze his body through the opening, darting with utter abandon to the nearest technology. The showroom was aglow in blues and greens with shiny button-packed objects. It was also large and open with lots of room to run. The allure to my son was obvious.

“Can I help you find something?” asked a smiling AT&T associate. He was big and bearded and seemed to radiate jolly.

“My son is only two but loves technology, and he badly wanted to come inside and see some of your tech,” I said, as I watched Xander go over to the peg display of SD memory cards and begin taking them off their pegs, piling them up and then sorting them back correctly onto their pegs.

“I see. Has he seen the new iPhone 4?” Mr. Jolly said with a smile.

“Um… no,” I replied. I’m an avid Android enthusiast (the competitor to the Apple iPhone) so iPhone is kind of a bad word in my household. I start to mention this but stopped myself, deciding that this wasn’t the forum for that discussion. “But I’m sure he’d like it.”

I called over to Xander who had moved on to organizing the AC adapters (the organizing thing comes from his mom). He was reluctant to abandon his project at first but when I pointed to a shiny glowy hand-sized object he ran over full tilt.

Mr. Jolly handed him an iPhone secured to the desk by a cable. My son held it with reverence. “This is an iPhone,” said Mr. Jolly.

“Eye-phone,” Xander said, and began poking at the touch-sensitive screen. Instantly the iPhone began responding to his touch and he started to giggle. “Try this,” said Mr. Jolly, and he pressed an icon that activated the built-in webcam. Suddenly an image of Xander and his arm holding the phone was visible. Xander smiled wide.

“Eye-phone!!!” Xander yelled in excitement. He was almost jumping up and down.

Even after we had moved on from that table, he would run from phone to phone asking “Eye-Phone?”

“No, that’s a Blackberry.”

“Eye-Phone?”

“No, that’s a Nokia.”

“Eye-Phone?”

But after all, he does have the attention span of a toddler, so we moved on. We did a game where I walked backwards and weaved between the displays of phones with him chasing after me. We then reversed roles. The large open areas with their displays also made a great area to play hide and seek. The AT&T staff were wonderfully patient with us. I was showing Xander a large touch display that flashed different things on the screen as he touched it when Michal came walking in. “THERE you two are!” she said. It was close to Xander’s bed time so it was time to go.

Xander cried as we left, reaching out his arms to the door and crying “ Eye-PHOOOONE!!!!!!”

I placed my face in my hands. I had created a monster.

Note to family

Why I haven't posted pictures of Xander's birthday party last week:

- have been writing a history midterm
- have been making lesson plans for my adult ed series Wednesday nights at our synagogue
- have been doing regular homework
- have been working on my new research job at the American Jewish Archives, on this famous Jewish guy in the early 1900s
- have been schlepping Xander to a sitter's because our regular person has been off since she got married today (we just got back, and Pentecostal weddings are interesting, in case you wondered)
- have been de-fuzzing the house because allergies suck

The past week has been crazy - and next week isn't looking much better. But I'll post at some point, I swear!

I still forget sometimes

How different it is here than in southern CA.

The power went out tonight for two hours - all the neighborhood kids had gotten together to play a game of baseball in the street, and one of the balls hit a power line and knocked it down.

Life is the midwest is really good at times. Or at least... more Rockwell-ian than I had imagined.

Cute pics of the day

Checklist for the weekend

Back from Simchat Torah services, and am trying to accomplish things before bed.



Happy relaxed cat - check





Winter gear for Xander - check






Catching Xander on tape saying words - check

I can go to sleep, my job is done!

Important Xander things

1) Xander spoke his first full sentence! "Please water with ice."

2) He kept saying what we thought was "money" whenever we drove in the car, and he would act angry. Then inside the house he showed us the toy Mini Cooper Jonathan had given him, and explained to us that that's what he meant by "money." He'd been upset that he hadn't been able to ride in the Mini, and had been forced to sit in the Toyota! Jonathan was near beaming.

3) We went to a Simchat Torah celebration tonight. He was fascinated by the band, danced with tons of people and clutched his plush Torah everywhere. At one point he even pulled out his toy saxaphone-shaped kazoo and joined in with the music.

Oh yes, also at Simchat Torah? A woman I hadn't seen since summer asked me how far along I was. I told her 14 weeks. Her mouth dropped open: "I thought you were six months!"

For Marleena

Who just recently sent me an email asking, "How is Xander's music?"

Behold, the child music prodigy. :)

Long-overdue pictures

So this first batch is from I think over three weeks ago. We went to a place called Totter's Otterville in Kentucky. It was a fun alternative to the Cinci Children's Museum, but was a little run-down for my taste. Xander had a fabulous time nonetheless.

Very excited to be stacking in the play store.

Inspecting the mailbox for lost letters.

Focusing on shunting balls into tubes.

Water play is paramount.

Magnetic fishing outside.

King Tut lives!

Then there was Yom Kippur:

Our little family.

Helping me off the bima after the end of services.

Showers are so relaxing.

Videos to be posted tomorrow.

Things that are happy

1) Xander stopped throwing up! Who knows why he started, but two days ago he was a mess. As were we, as was our house. Thankfully he feels better now, so we're all sleeping. The only downside is that we're monumentally behind on laundry because we had to put bedding, blankets, clothing, small rugs, stuffed animals, etc in the washer.

2) I finished all my homework, including reading The Merchant of Venice for my Converts in Literature class. I'd somehow managed to miss it before in all my previous Shakespeare experience. I have to admit, I wasn't such a fan of it. It will be very interesting to discuss, though.

3) Antonio is here for an inpromptu visit! Between him, Maura, and Xander's friend Yasha (who was visiting for Sukkot) it's been a very full house.

4) The third novel in the Rashi's Daughter's trilogy is quite good! Or, at least, not bad. I loved the first book but thought the second was only so-so (it got too soap-opera-y for my taste). The third is in-between. It goes back to the less sensationalized narrative and includes a whole lotta Talmud. The part I found hard was that by this point in the series, Rashi has like a dozen children and grandchildren, all who are named repeatedly in the story. I had to keep referring back to the family tree listed in the beginning of the book, which made for frustrating reading. But it was definitely a fun read, worthy of being a vacation day book.

5) The nausea has almost disappeared! As well it should, seeing as I'm 14 weeks. Thank goodness. We were starting to invest good money in ginger ale purchases.

Also, I've now downloaded all the pictures on the camera. Watch for a new picture post soon.

Random blabbing.

Oy. The High Holidays are barely over, and I'm already feeling behind on schoolwork. I hate that we had so much work assigned over the "break." I'm making a good dent, but not quite there yet.

Yom Kippur went well though! People liked my sermons. I sang Kol Nidre three times. I don't think the tune was perfect, but at least it was consistent. My mom gave me a really simple piece of advice that worked wonders for my voice: open my mouth wider when singing. I think I was able to project a lot more and hit stronger notes.

Xander and Jonathan were the life of the congregational parties, as usual. The best was when Xander came up onto the bima at the end of services, when we were doing Havdalah (blessings that end Shabbat). He climbs behind me, points to the ark and says really loudly - "TO-WAH!" People cracked up. Then he proceeded to point to the shofar blower, hold his hand in a fist in front of his mouth and go, "boo boo!" in his best imitation of the last shofar call. The congregation ate it up with a spoon.

His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, I can't even list the amount of new words he's picked up. But his sense of humor is growing along with it - for example, today Maura handed him a grape, and asked if he could say, "grape." He shook his head no. Jonathan said to her, "R's are hard." So Maura turned back to Xander and said, "Can you say, 'gwape'?" He giggled and said, "Fun-nny!" We all thought it was very funny too. :)

Remember all the trouble we were having with teeth-brushing? Visiting Holly did wonders: I copied what she did with Gregory, and now we ask him whether he wants to go "eee" first or "aah" first, and we brush his teeth accordingly (if that sounds weird, make the sounds in an exaggerated fashion with your mouth open and you see that you get all the teeth that way!)

My World of the Talmud class is increasingly awesome. Today was Roman history in a nutshell. Why do we need to know about the Romans? For interfaith work, when people talk about Jesus, we can't say, "oh, we didn't do it, the Romans did" without understanding a little about their system of law. We can't explain Masada or Bar Kochba or the Maccabees or any other Jewish history without knowing the greater context. We can't lead trips to Israel and talk about many of the sites without knowing where they came from. So today was pure Rome day. Next class will be Jews in the Roman Empire, generally.

In honor of Sukkot, I thought this was really interesting: Sukkah City, NYC 2010. Talk about re-imagining the rules! And in a more controversial subject, this article is about mezuzahs on NY doorways. I don't know, that last woman quoted rubbed me wrong... I feel it's appropriating someone else's religion. What do you all think?

And now, I'm falling over in front of the computer and should get offline... lilah tov.