Ashley

We spent last weekend at Poppa and Nana's since we haven't been there in a long while (since Thanksgiving!)

My mother recently had hip surgery so she wasn't very mobile, and Laila is still not allowed to do a lot of her usual physical activities since she's recovering from her surgery, so this was a very low-key visit. Nana read some books to Laila, Laila rode her tricycle around their house--still pushing off the floor, not pedaling, despite our attempts to teach her how to pedal--I went on a walk with Laila and Poppa, and we watched Frog and Toad. Since Nana couldn't prep a full dinner, we ordered Thai food the first night and ate that and Poppa barbecued some fish and hamburgers the second day. We mostly stayed in the whole weekend, and Laila didn't even throw any tantrums about not being able to go jump on the trampoline. It was nice and low-key.

The one external thing we did was visit shane.suydam and meaghan.figg, who now live only a couple blocks from my parents' house! They have twins and we arrived just when one of the twins was waking up from her nap (the other was already awake). They were a bit unsure of how to handle Laila, especially since they'll be turning two soon and Laila is almost five, but they got along well enough. For her part, Laila was very happy at two full rooms filled with toys and spent a bunch of time in the ball pit, though she did play directly with one of the twins too--there was a stacking toy with pieces that had from one to five holes in them and pins to put them on, and the twin handed pieces to Laila while Laila put them all on the pins. Then we ended with a bit of time in the backyard (though Laila sadly wasn't allowed to climb on the playset) before going back for barbecue and then going home.

Nana's restrictions end in May, just before Laila's. It'll be a long wait for both of them but hopefully they recover okay.

This year, because britshlez wasn't hosting her usual seder, and because sashagee didn't want us to host a seder what with everything that had happened in the last month, so I signed up for some of the household sedarim that Mishkan members were offering. One was on the south side in Hyde Park, and initially I was the only one going but when Mishkan got back to me and said that the organizers preferred that families attend, I signed up Laila too. The second one was just me.

First Seder:
I had never met the hostess or most of the people there, and Laila had also never met anyone there. The hostess had a five-year-old daughter and told me that she was excited to meet Laila, but in the end, Laila spent most of the seder just sitting on my lap and burying her head in my neck whenever anyone asked her a question, including when the hostess was trying to engage her. The other kids were mostly much more raucous--probably one reason Laila was a bit nervous--and the hostess would occasionally ask some questions about how the seder worked, which was the kids' cues to all yell over each other in the hope of getting candy. That really got Laila's attention.

I had to wrangle Laila near the end, when she wandered off to go find toys to play with, so I didn't get to talk that much to the other adults. But I did have a nice time. Laila even ate the karpas dipped in salt water! Now sure, she ate a ton of the potato chips too--apparently in Russia they used potatoes traditionally as the karpas--but she ate the parsley and I'm proud of her for that. I've never had to worry about her being a picky eater.

Second Seder:
This was a grown-ups only seder, and so it was a big more disorganized because there were no kids and therefore they wouldn't lever into that disorganization and shatter everything into pieces. The hostess had written up her own hagaddah...and we ended up skipping around three-quarters of it because we started late, people were getting hungry, and we wanted to get to dinner. There was more discussion this time, about what freedom means to me and more about our lives--it actually turned out there was another person there who had had infantile spasms as a children, so she was very happy to hear that Laila had come through without permanent damage. She also kept kosher and was similarly disappointed when a bunch of people had not read the hostess's email and brought dessert with butter in it.

These was not like the old sedarim I hosted, where we'd start at five and talk for so long that we wouldn't eat until ten. People at the first seder actually talked about how much they missed those old discussion-focused sedarim, and I miss them too. But it's going to be a while before we can do those again--the social expectations that let adults hold the sedarim the way they wanted to and the kids just had to deal with it are fading in modern America. So we have potato chips and quiz sessions.

I don't want to turn this into a big post about tradition (maybe that should be its own post?), so I'll cut it off there. Because we were rushed in both sedarim, we skipped some parts I really liked. We didn't do the plagues. We didn't sing Ḥad Gadya at either seder and didn't do the third or fourth cups of wine. But I had a lovely time at both sedarim. Hopefully next year I'll be able to host (in Jerusalem) but I'm glad these were there for me this year.