Skip to main content

Kids and Work

Perhaps my daughter was feeling a bit sentimental. Or perhaps it is because complicated braids are now in vogue, but my daughter asked me to braid her hair into a complicated braid.

 

It’s been a really long time since I have done anything like this for my daughter. The hair braiding used to be part of our daily morning ritual.

SAM_1549

We probably haven’t done this for seven or eight years.

SAM_1550SAM_1552SAM_1553

And while the camera was out, my older son was sitting in the living room.  He has the same square head my father had. I know that the term blockhead is often derogatory, but you could easily replace my son’s head with a cube.  He may have a block head, but he does not act like one.  I love how his face and body create so many right angles.

SAM_1554

I don’t just spend al of my time admiring my kids. I also think I have finished transferring all of the texts for the table book.

 

Since this book is a wedding gift, I had discussed using verses from the Song of Songs with my client.  I changed my mind and added some poems by H. N. Bialik that are a modern take on the old biblical love poetry.  unlike the biblical original which is a dance of unfulfilled longing…in the modern version the couple end up under the cuppah/wedding canopy.

SAM_1556

I’m very fond of the ugly old fashioned  typefaces. Some come from the prayer book I used throughout  high school. SAM_1557

 

I like the accidental fact that the texts that the recipients probably know by heart are slightly fuzzy and the ones where they will actually read the texts carefully are very clear. SAM_1558

Next, I have to interface the pages, sew the fronts to the backs, bind the edges and sew the pages together. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...