mornings

there are two kinds of mornings in our house: morning when everyone's busy and i have a minute to myself (lately at night everyone goes to bed at the same time-late)... and hard mornings. on the days when the morning is hard the rest of the day becomes a trying journey. there are many possibilities of rethinking my motherhood... which is always alluminating, but (un)bearibly hard.
today the day started off well. i am always encouraged when it happens.

photos

i have to figure out how to turn the pictures around (I take photos on my phone and then upload them to the blog)... if anyone knows, please let me know!

breakfast

after a prolonged cry (took me literally an hour to calm him) ilay joins his friends on a picknick in our yard. how great that we can all relax and enjoy our time together! i so often take it for granted that i can live the way i see right, but this ofcourse is far from obvious... thank you all those who make it possible and who are not as fprtunate to see each of our kids grow. (thank you sasha and mom and dad).

morning in the garden

Ramat ha nadiv

Volunteering in Ramat haNadiv. Yesterday was our first day volunteering there next to the stream... They are getting ready to plant a garden of native to this land vegetables and other plants...he (machfuz) call it ancient agriculture.... I have to understand why he wants to calls it ancient and not say organic - because he always stresses the fact that they are not going to use any chemicals... Anyway we were supposed to help. Well, it was verynhard for me - first, people were very late (we said we will start at 11 (I actually came at 10 to have some time to swim beforehand) but most of the people arrived around half past 12... Machfuz was not worried, but he gave us an impossible task - to clean one of the terraces from rocks... He also acted very much like a teacher this time (asking kids questions and lecturing a little on how to garden "the right way") what upset me the most was that he didn't even tell them his name (you see, this is unimportant, what is important is a bunch of facts you are going to forget or not understand... His name, where he is from, why he does this... He didn't really want a relationship with them...) I remember how we started in the Haifa zoo... It was the same, a huge group of "volunteers" (moms who are happy to send their children to do something and hopefully without their direct involvement and kids who don't really want to be working. We were given very hard and boring jobs - cleaning the mice cage, cutting salads etc. I had to work hard, Eran would disappear every time we would show up. In the end though, after getting rid of the group and baking cookies and drawing pictures for a year we had a real friendship that involved really helping and learning. For me the best part was seeing and being friends with real people doing real work that they loved, that they wouldn't trade for anything else... So here too, I have to get ready for a year of making connection, of showing them who we are and finding out who they are... It will be good - I just know it!

thinking love outloud

Love. I want to give love to my family unconditionally - this is my dream, but i also have another, no less important one. I want to learn to recieve love. This recieving/giving is it really that different? When you recieve, don't you also give and when you give, don't you recieve as well? Perhaps here it would be appropriate to think of a gift (as Derrida writes it). So recieving...how do you understand and recieve the love of the other? The bursts of love that resist the regular economy of giving is what i am looking for in my life...love that doesn't seek payment, in any way, nor appreciation, nor any other condition, but is given freely (perhaps even without being really "given")...maybe here it would be interesting to think about being in love, and not loving, as something passive...in love (whose love?)...

garden produce

this is from the graden today. need more raised beds and much more planning! ahhh... this is hard for me... but then - kids love the garden as it is and certainly love eating produce right away so i shoukd be happy for what i already have! (now i remind myself of eshel, who a lot of times wishes things he doesn't have and forgets the things he has... like now he dreams of a scateboard and forgets that we just bought a scooter that he dreamed of for a looong time. .yes, that is exactly why it pushes my button-i have this problem too!) my gardening started as a project with kids to acyually learn together the hardships and the hard work it takes to grow food and now i already want a garden that produces enough vegies to actually eat ... hey, i forget!