Have a Happy(ier) Hanukkah this Year :)

This year I learned to make my own sufganiyot!

We were all trying to remember what we did last year for Hanukkah and why it was we remember eating zillions of sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts) but we don't remember encountering the traffic from the crowds all over the city and getting early days off from Shalva.

Oh yea - because we were in the hospital! Just a year ago we were escorted with flashing lights and sirens via ambulance to a place in the lovely rolling hill surrounding Jerusalem. We spent both Hanukkah and Christmas in the hospital and even Lucas' birthday!

See, in the hospital, happy volunteers came through the pediatric department every day with copious amounts of free donuts, which kept us distracted, occupied and sugared up. They lit candles every night at the central nurses station. I was visited on a daily basis by expert doctors, athletes, clowns and other entertainers. Of course Grandma and Grandpa (or Nene and Dede, my Armenian grandparents) kept us fed and happy, visiting several times from the other side of the city. And very importantly, Mimi and GongGong made a special visit all the way from New York!

Despite having RSV, invasive blood tests, an oxygen mask, a noisy O2 saturation monitor and awkward hospital pajamas, we actually had a great time! Well at least I did. I joined my friend Ephraim on the very same ward. And I was there (in the same building) to welcome Lucas, which would not have been allowed otherwise. I planned it perfectly.

But this being the one-year anniversary of all that, it means all sorts of holidays are converging upon us: We are at the tail end of Hanukkah, we are trying to conjure up some Christmas spirit and we have a most auspicious event right in between those two - Lucas' first birthday!

So this year we haven't had any such health concerns and we also got to experience Hanukkah at school. I learned how to make donuts and also put on a play for our mommies at Shalva. Here in the pictures you can see me leading the role of the Sabbath ritual. And in the videos which follow you can see me both in rehearsal where I dominated the choreography, and then in the real play where I was content to watch everyone else.

Sharing cookies with Ephraim

I read in Hebrew and English

(That was me executing my own personal rehearsal a few days before)

(There are many more videos where the videographer, mommy, waited in vain for me to perform. This was the closest I came to putting on a show for the assembled audience of mothers and siblings.)

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