The New Normal

Five shiny new gas masks hanging off my stroller.

Some nights I'll be sitting on our couch watching reruns of Seinfeld and eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and it feels like I'm back in California. We live in a nice house. I drive a Mazda 5. My kids have playdates. Organic free range eggs are a fortune. It's all the same as it was. And then I remember that my daughter goes to ballet lessons in a bomb shelter. Someone checks my bag whenever I enter a large building, like the mall. My kids have lice. My housekeeper is a Jewish man. I buy my fruits and vegetables in the West Bank. My seven year old has a cell phone. And I pay $8 a gallon for gas.

Not normal.

Last week I met a friend and her three kids in Ramle, a town outside of Tel Aviv known for its poverty and excellent kabob restaurants, to exchange our old gas masks for new ones. It was the first day of Passover vacation so I packed all the kids in the car and we drove to an elementary school downtown where a squadron of adorable soldiers took my two outdated masks and issued five shiny new ones. Everyone was friendly and professional and efficient. Someone from the BBC even interviewed me. When asked how I felt as a newcomer getting gas masks for my children, I was honest. I told the guy I had no intention of using these things. They will go into a closet until the next recall, a decade from now. And then we hustled our six kids back into our cars, drove to a nearby playground, worked up an appetite and then drove downtown to Halil where we snarfed down two plates of kabobs, a plate of fries, hummus, pita, pickles and malabi for dessert. Mmmmmm.

And so it goes. I shift back and forth between there and here, feeling used to it all and feeling shocked by it all, letting go of what I knew as normal and embracing what is now the new normal.



Gas mask tutorial


Playground in Ramle


My daughter stepped out into this parking lot and asked, are we in India?


Cutest ten month old ever

Light-filled

Notice the light  dancing around in little heart-shapes over my son's head. Like a tiara.

Well we are coming off of our eight day Hanukkah vacation. The kids are back in school tomorrow. Our second, smaller container, the one with all of the bookcases, storage units and hangers, the one that will help contain the piles of books, toys and clothes, is coming tomorrow. We've lit a total of 135 candles over the last eight days and the world seems a little brighter. I was happy to have this time off with the kids to be with family and friends. Trying to see everyone we know with only Saturdays to do it (six day school week here...) meant we might not get to everyone before we moved to some other country, so it was nice to have a little extra time for visiting. There were a lot of reunions. We saw friends who had moved to Israel three years ago who we hadn't seen since. And maybe for even a year before they left. The last time we lit candles together our oldest was two months old and their three girls (now nearly teenagers) took turns smothering him with love. We visited a family who we last saw in London seven years ago when our oldest kids were babies. Their daughter and our son are only two weeks apart and hadn't seen each other since. It didn't seem to matter. And of course we saw our son's betrothed, the little girl he's known since they were both a month old. Our families have grown at the same pace so get-togethers are especially easy and enjoyable.

It's hard to believe it was exactly a year ago that we told our parents about our plans to move back to Israel. Before they were even plans really. Just ideas. And now we're here a year later. We're eating sufganiyot. We're cleaning the floors with a squeegee. We're drinking coffee at 4pm. We're driving through check-points. We're paying bills at the post office. We're texting in Hebrew. We're parking on curbs. We're eating a lot of olives.

We're definitely here and we're starting to feel settled.

The empties

The best thing about this pile of boxes is that they're empty. This week started out great but quickly deteriorated. We were so excited to greet our container on Sunday, the one to which we bid farewell in California exactly two months ago. The one crammed with ten years worth of stuff we obviously don't need since we haven't seen most of it since we put our house on the market last February. The one that was full of plastic toys made in China only to travel back to China, switch boats, and then continue on through the Suez Canal to the Port of Ashdod. And while I should have been deliriously happy to watch the four delivery guys deposit box after box in what I thought was our largish new house, instead I felt an emptiness set in. Why do we have so much crap? Why did we pay money to move it here? How will I ever move back to America if all of my stuff is here? How can we unpack if the shelves and bookcases we need to contain all of our crap are only arriving next Wednesday on a different container? FUUUUUUHHHHH. K! And how the eff am I going to get through all of these boxes with Mr. New Tooth Bronchitis Walrus Snot Face McEye Boogers as my constant companion?*

It was not a great week. And yet somehow I managed to unpack the entire kitchen into a space that has half as many cupboards as our old kitchen.** And we managed to get the kids' room functional. And Mr. Rosen built our bed. The one I thought I didn't like but now I ABSOLUTELY LOVE. And all the bathroom stuff is in the bathrooms where there is incidentally a ridiculous amount of storage space leaving us to ponder whether or not it is inappropriate or even gross to keep our tupperware or ziplocks or wineglasses so close to the toilet. Chime in if you have an opinion about this.

We did have some wins this week. The kids continue to like school. We might have made some friends. The psychotic clown at the Israeli birthday party we attended did not give my daughter nightmares. Our kids have health insurance.

One day at a time.

* I love my baby.

** At one point there was one giant box remaining in the kitchen and I thought there is no way this kitchen can absorb even a single extra teaspoon, let alone a giant box of dishes. Miraculously I opened it to find a hamper inside of bigger hamper inside of a still bigger hamper. And the angels wept. Amen.

Same old story

Back in the day.

It turns out that having a lot to write about makes me not want to write anything. The stories pile up in my brain and then there's like a bottleneck in there. I have storytelling constipation. I happen to have the regular kind of constipation too but that's from all the moving around. So where are we these days? We're with family in New York. And we fly to Israel on Tuesday.

Our last week in the Bay Area was ridiculous. Even after sending all of our stuff on the container we still had a house full of odds and ends. We decided to have a goodbye/u-pick party as in, come say goodbye and take a can of tuna for the road. Or a toaster to remember us by. Lots of teary goodbyes. My sister-in-law and I had a sob fest that I think caught us both by surprise.

And then, without much ado, we got in our rental minivan and left Northern California. Eleven years earlier, to the day in fact, Mr. Rosen and I left Israel to embark on a new adventure together. We were only two of us back then. Now we're five. Back then we each had a backpack. Now we have eight suitcases and a twenty foot container. Back then we had palm pilots. Now we have iPhones. The cast has grown and a few of the props have changed but it's basically our same old story unfolding again. Can't wait to see how things turn out this time around.

Pssst...

The kids on a photo shoot inside our container.

I'm still here. Surprise. I did not intend to take a month off the blog. In fact I think I only took a week off after the baby was born. That will give you some idea as to just how hideously busy we have been in the last month. Let me explain.

No, too much. Let me sum up.

1. Mr. Rosen flies to Israel to interview for a job in Jerusalem.
2. Mr. Rosen takes the job.
3. I find a house outside Jerusalem on the Israeli version of Craigslist and Mr. Rosen goes to see it
4. Mr. Rosen loves the house and rents it for November 20.
5. Mr. Rosen starts work December 1.
6. We are moving to Israel for real.
7. We need to pack everything and ship it to Israel.
8. We need a to do a lot of shit.
9. We panic.
10. We make a spreadsheet. Color coded.
11. We get the baby an American passport.
12. Our son turns seven. We skip the birthday party and camp out in his cousins backyard instead.
13. We hire a shipper.
14. Mr. Rosen gives notice.
15. I spend two weeks running around between IKEA, Cost Plus, Target, West Elm, Crate and Barrel, TJ Max, Bed Bath and Beyond, REI, Best Buy and Costco to fill up our container with America.
16. I lose my wallet (in one of the above places).
17. We starting sorting, shifting, purging, packing.
18. We start seeing friends to say goodbyes.
19. The shipper drops a 20 foot container in front of our house.
20. I cancel all my credit cards.
21. We think all of our stuff will fit in it.
22. Movers come to fill the container.
23. After it's half full we fear we have too much stuff. 
24. We realize the movers packed all the kids toys and a bunch of crap we don't need while our furniture is mostly still on the driveway. 
25. We buy more space in someone else's container to avoid getting a divorce.
26. Our stuff is gone.
27. Feeling guilty I organize a bowling party for my son on his Hebrew date birthday. 
28. More goodbye gatherings.
29. Someone emails to tell me he found my drivers license on Highway 85 north while he was taking pictures of garbage and mangled car plastic for an art installation he's working on.
30. I sleep train the baby.
31. I develop mastitis - the kind with vomiting, fever and a giant red boob. 
32. Mr. Rosen runs out at 2am to get me antibiotics and narcotics.
33. I cancel our magazines and forward our mail.
34. What's left of our stuff goes on Craigslist.
35. Mr. Rosen transfers half our money to Israel.
36. I pick up our medical and dental records.
37. We get the baby an Israeli passport.

That brings us to today. We are leaving the Bay Area on November 1st with our kids and whatever fits in two suitcases each. Before then we have to sell our car, get rid of remaining items and go trick or treating. And say goodbye to everyone we love. We'll be at Grandma's house for a week which may involve a trip to Disneyland and then we fly to New York where we'll be for another week. And then on November 15 we fly one way to the holy land. God help us.

Sold

We say goodbye to 607 Leksich Ave. The baby thinks parting is such sweet sorrow. 
He may also be taking a dump in this shot.

Did I ever mention how it came to be that we sold our house?

Remember in April, how we took it off the market after an offer was rescinded because of some confusion over the status of the house - whether it was technically a condo or a single family home? And remember how we were secretly relieved and planned on putting it back on the market in the fall. Plans are funny like that.

It turns out that right before the baby was born we got an offer on the house from a former colleague of mine and his wife. They came over when I was 39 weeks pregnant and said they loved it. They brought their agent the next day. They sent us an offer two days later with the exact price we wanted, a long escrow and two months or rent-back. We signed that offer the same day we signed our baby's birth certificate. Big day. In my birth story I made mention of downloading some forms between contractions. Those were for the house and needed to be signed by Wednesday and it was Monday and I was about to leave for the hospital and somehow I had the wherewithal, barely, to bring them with us, so that in a moment of post partum agony bliss, we could sign. So instead of signing as originally planned on the eve of Passover, the liberation from slavery, we signed on the eve of Shavuot, the day we received the ten commandments. I love when my life lines up with the Torah.

And while we were thrilled to have this lovely couple (half Israeli, half American - sound familiar?) buy our home, the next forty-five days were filled with untold stress as we tried to manage a mountain of paperwork and tend to a newborn. Oh and the other two kids. And there were major stumbling blocks. Like the one where it turns out because of a recording snafu in the seventies we actually owned our property but our neighbor's garage and vice versa. Nice. All that stuff had to be untangled and we didn't have an agent. We drove our agent to leave real estate altogether after the previous deal fell through so we were left high and dry. We ended up hiring a friend of ours who is real estate attorney saving us much money but causing us to run around scheduling inspections and unearthing old contracts. Many sleepless nights. But we were up anyway with our infant so who cared.

So all's well that ends well. And this epic tale ended beautifully on Saturday evening. After we closed on the house we were able to rent it back from the new owners for two months which meant that we could actually spend some time relaxing in what still felt like our home for the entire summer. Last week we moved into a three month sublet not too far away (the home of a professor who is teaching abroad this quarter) and Mr. Rosen moved all of our stuff over the course of the week. On Friday we lit Shabbat candles one last time in our empty little house and sang songs and shared some of our best memories from that special place. And on Saturday night we had a dance party in our empty house complete with glow bands and much alcohol while a sitter watched all three kids in our new place. Genius.

And now we have three months to figure out how we are moving ourselves and our stuff to Israel. The saga continues. Turns out moving to Israel is not as straight forward as it was when my two suitcases and I did it fifteen years ago.