Tikkun Olam

I can't believe I only posted four times in the month of February.  Unbelievable.  That's what happens when I work full-time and come home exhausted every day.  At any rate, it's the last day in February and I felt the need to put pen to paper, er...or the digital equivalent thereof.  I only have a few moments because it's after 10 p.m. and I need my beauty rest (translation: am too old to do all-nighters anymore; can't function without 7 or 8 hours sleep.). I have the sort of job which one takes home with one, even though I vowed never to teach again. Well, all right.  I didn't actually vow . More like I prayed .  Nevertheless (and always the more), here I am, teaching again, and this time toddlers--with a vengence!  It is sometimes much easier to teach grade school (even with the grading-papers-at-home-syndrome) than 18 month to 2 year olds, which is the age-group that I work with.  I come home exhausted (am I repeating myself?), needing absolute silence . 

Here is a great Rabbi Manis Friedman video (thank you to my friend Shoshana Z.) on the Torah view on raising children.  No matter what you do, you "raise your child." If you neglect him/her, you're still raising him--with neglect. Another interesting point: in the past, children learned about life from 'living it' with their parents.  And then they invented schools. Listen to the message Rabbi Manis Friedman tells us about what 'raising children' really means. Beautiful and insightful. Visit Jewish.TV for more Jewish videos .

So those of you on Facebook already know what we've (read: me) been going through.  Not that my D.H. isn't exhausted with working on the town home practically single-handedly--but that on top of putting house back together, flood in basement, inventorying what was damaged (dozens of books which were stored away in boxes on the utility room floor), I got very sick, the worst during Shabbat.  I actually had a fever.  I can't remember the last time I had a fever. I wasn't able to help him at all.  He put our new bed frames together without my assistance (did I tell you we had to buy new frames because the 30-year old one finally gave up the ghost? It just wouldn't put back together. Oh well. We got our money's worth out of it.). Tonight will be the first night we are not 'guests' in our own home.  By that I mean, from the day we returned we slept in Rambo's old room because we had no bed frames.  This room will now be the guest room.  Toodle's old

The latest Haveil Havalim #303 is up and running here ,  as well as the KCC: Kosher Cooking Carnival, over here . Meant to include these in my last post, but everything got waterlogged.  Happy reading (-and stay dry)!

As I mentioned many posts ago (or maybe I didn't), we were forced to move out of our town home for 'renovations' which we didn't ask for nor wanted.  Quick review: the new owners of the rental complex in which we live had signed their contract (so they said) with the stipulation that they would renovate every apartment and town home within a certain period of time.  Ours was one of the last un-renovated town homes , and we had the option of moving to another one, moving back to ours, or vacating the premises le-gamrei *; in other words, we had to get out no matter what.  Unfortunately, the management was perfectly within its rights, because they weren't breaking our lease--they were just not renewing it. To make a long story longer, we had to move, one way or the other.  After checking out several other town homes in this complex, we came to the conclusion that we really liked our place, which we had chosen 7 years ago and waited two weeks extra until the tenants