Thanks for All the Good Wishes

My burns are recovering very well, thank G-d (and the dermatologist).

I no longer look like a freak from a monster movie.
There are a few pink spots, but very little pain. Just a bit of itching...

t.c.

Supporting My Habit!

I've been told that it's very mercenary of me to have Amazon links on my blog...
You have to understand. This country I live in lacks decent book stores, so I belong to a book club.
All proceeds from Amazon purchases made through this blog go to supporting the book club. So far, after close to a year, I've had two readers make purchases, for a total of $7 in my Amazon account... They won't even let me use the money until it gets up to $15.

Please support our book club. It doesn't cost you any extra to order through me!

Thank you,
t.c.

Update

For those who are wondering about my burns...

The burn sites aren't hurting so much, but my body is reacting to the trauma or something. I can't seem to stay awake very long, and when I am, I'm not particularly alert.

There are about 6 smallish blisters (size of a dime or smaller). Yaakov says they don't look so bad, but to me, they look horrible. I'm probably just taking it really badly.

Do me a favor, and please don't give me pancake making tips. I think I'd rather not hear them right now.

thanks,
t.c.

The Pancakes of Doom.

Since right after Passover, I've been craving pancakes or waffles. So yesterday, I finally bought syrup (let's face it, pancakes without syrup aren't even worth it)...

This morning, I woke up, got Yaakov to sift some flour (I really don't like sifting flour), and mixed up a batch of pancake batter.

Somehow, on the third pancake, I put in too much oil, and when I was flipping it, the oil sprayed up into my face! I got my face into cold water immediately, but hot oil is powerful stuff.

I kept my face in a wet towel (Yaakov asked why I didn't use a bucket of cold water... I think that my increasing girth has finally convinced him that I am a whale, complete with blow-hole on the top of my head...) and then I went to the doctor. Turned out that there was a dermatologist in the office who saw me right away and told me to take whatever painkillers I can take when I'm pregnant, keep the cold compress on, and put a cream on the burns (he gave me the prescription for the cream.)

I put cream on, went home, took painkillers, and slept with the towel on my face. I woke up feeling a good bit better, but I'm still feeling kind of out of it, and I have several blisters/craters on my face from the burn.

So remember folks, not too much oil in your pancakes.

howwwwwwwwwwwwwwwllllllllllls
t.c.

Weird Dream

I had a dream last night that my parents were trying to sell a house, so I came up with this great idea - we'd have a raffle.

I decided tickets would be $10 each, and we'd sell loads and we'd offload the house without having to deal with real estate agents or anything.

So the first person came and bought 10 tickets right away, and I was like "cool, see it's working"
and then no one else came.
no one
I freaked out completely. I was like "oh my g-d what have I done, I'm forcing my parents to sell a whole house worth at least $180K for $100." So I sat there and cried, and woke up Y and told him to help me. Finally we decided that the best thing to do was to tell the lady who'd bought the tickets that someone else won, but she'd gotten the second prize - $100.

I woke up kinda freaked. I mean, what kind of stupid person would raffle off a house?! You'd have to realize that you'd have to sell some 20,000 tickets to make it a good deal. (though I suppose you could make the tickets $100 apiece and then you'd only need to sell 2000...)

Anyway, Yaakov always tells me to write down my dreams... so now you've all heard it... If you want to raffle off a house, you need to sell a LOT of tickets.

Thought for the day... (#2)

I didn't bite off more than I can chew. I just didn't realize how quickly my jaws would get tired.

TV Asthma

I've noticed that a lot of people think that asthma is what you see on tv. People think that asthma is basically hyper-ventilating and that if you just breathe slowly and deeply, the attacks will go away.

Well, here's the thing. The people having asthma attacks on TV are ACTORS. They're not having real asthma attacks. If they were, the camera man would come running and help them rather than continuing to film.

Next, there appear to be several different ways that real asthma presents. For me, it's a weird wheeze at the end of my exhales coupled with coughing fits, complete with choking.

As such, no amount of deep breathing is going to solve it, especially since I can't even build lung capacity right now. The baby is taking up too much space in the chest/abdominal cavity.

Oh and another thing... yesterday I asked for a recommendation for an asthma specialist. I received recommendations for a chiropractor and a homeopathic "healer." Additionally, someone called claiming that he could use hypnosis to cure my asthma. By the way, I don't generally discount claims that people make. In the case of homeopathy, however, the research and science is overwhelming. It just isn't real.

Remind me to specify that I want someone with an MD from a reputable medical school!

Lack of Anonymity

A lot of blogs are anonymous or close to it.
Mine isn't. Not only mine isn't, but people including my husband's manager, my mother, my neighbors, and my father-in-law read it.

Which is mostly really cool. It gives me an easy way to keep up with people, share experiences, etc.

On the other hand, when I really want to rag on someone, I can't. When I want to share some juicy gossip, I have to be aware that even if I don't share the person's name, someone will recognize the situation and know exactly who I'm talking about...

All of this is why I haven't shared a lot of the details of my pregnancy. In an anonymous blog, you can tell people all about the messy stuff - the internal exams, the kegels, the works. But here, I really don't want all my friends and neighbors to know that the Dr. did X or that I'm having Y problem... And it's kinda hard when all I want to do is whine!

That said, I'm now going to indulge in a little bit of whining. Those of you who don't know me very well can assume that I'm censoring myself somewhat because of my aforementioned audience. Aforementioned audience: feel free to skip this part...

I have asthma and I feel like it's killing me. I keep coughing and coughing and well, if you've been pregnant, you know that coughing can have yucky side effects. And I don't mean just the incredibly painful tearing sensation in my abdomen.

A few weeks ago, when the wheezing was very bad, my doctor gave me a prescription for a nebulizer and some medication that goes into it. The stuff pretty much works. Not perfect, but it helps a lot. I ran out, and asked him to prescribe more, and he didn't renew the prescription. (I have to ask him to call me tomorrow to tell him that I'm wheezing again). I went to the other dr in the clinic, and he said a regular inhaler is plenty. However, the regular inhaler seems to do zero. As in, I feel absolutely no difference at all.

So now, I'm coughing and coughing, and I'm out of medication that sorta works and all I have is stuff that doesn't work, but I'm still taking it in case maybe it has a cumulative effect or maybe I would actually be worse without it.

But I'm thinking jeez. I have another 9 weeks to go before the due date, and my mom and sister pretty much consistently went over, so I could have as much as 11 weeks to go. How am I supposed to live with coughing, difficulty breathing, wheezing, and that tearing sensation in my side for the next 9-11 weeks?!

And let's just say, for argument's sake, that I somehow live through this (not like I have much choice, unless I choke to death)... How am I supposed to get pregnant ever again, knowing that pretty much as soon as the nausea ends, the asthma begins?? I don't know if I could handle this again?! I'm just crying my eyes out with frustration and pain, and Yaakov asked if I wanted to go to the ER, but ... I can't go to the ER every time I have an asthma attack - I'd have to take up residence there. I just can't stay like this. I don't know what to do!

There, whine over... thanks for listening.

t.c.

Random Thing I Love About Israel

That it's considered normal to play a song on the radio about the elf who goes and bends the bananas...

And that the video I found when I went to look for the song is sooooo cute and SO Israeli...

(warning, it contains a woman dancing and wearing pants at the same time...)

* Just realized that many of my readers will be horrified that I listen to music during Sfira. I actually did a whole lot of soul-searching and heard a shiur from a Rav at Bar Ilan which claimed that listening to music in private is not a problem during sfira. Since I am prone to depression and music helps, I'll take just about any heter I can get on this...

Thought for the day...

Having diagnosed asthma is way better than having undiagnosed asthma...
few things feel better than the way that lungs clear up with an inhalation.

Optimism and Realism.

Last night, for the first time, I dreamed about my baby. It probably had to do with an email correspondence with Mom In Israel who gave me some information about nursing. I was nursing my baby (a girl, in the dream), and I saw that she was drinking, but she wasn't getting much, so I had to keep feeding her and feeding her. I was surprised, in the dream, to see that it was already milk and not colostrum.

Suddenly, I was filled with love for this baby who I haven't even seen except on an ultrasound (and the ultrasounds become less and less clear as the baby gets bigger - at this point, you see parts of a hand or head, and it's all kinda mushy... When it was only 14 weeks along, you could see the whole face at once.)

Some people who mean very well keep telling me "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" and "don't get so attached" and other things of that nature.

So I was thinking about it. There is, of course, a chance that things can go bad. It's possible that the baby won't survive the birth. It's possible that I'll deliver early, although at this point, the baby weighs over 3 lbs (1.5 kilos) and has an excellent chance of survival with relatively little trouble outside of the womb. - I know of babies born at half that weight who did fine.

It's also possible that while I'm walking to the supermarket, an airplane will fall on my head. Will it help me to worry about it? I think about all the things that can happen, and there are things we can protect against. We can make sure that our brakes are in good condition. We can fasten our seat belt every time we get into the car. We can't, however, do anything to prevent the driver in the next lane from talking on the phone, being stung by a bee, or just falling asleep.

In life, there are no guarantees.

On the other hand, if we sit and worry about what could happen, then we can't enjoy what does happen.

I could worry and be hesitant to connect to this baby now because it might not be born ok. After it's born, I could worry and be hesitant because there's always a risk of crib death. After the baby is past that age, I could worry and not connect because the child might get hit by a car on his/her way to school, because the child might be killed in army service, in a bus bombing, in a car accident... or of meningitis or rheumatic fever from untreated strep...

On the one hand, we should never take a moment for granted, because we have no guarantee of how many more moments we get. On the other hand, if we spend our whole lives protecting ourselves from potential pain, how can we enjoy the moments we have?

So dream, and enjoy this Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom.
t.c. Goodman

Abigail Rebecca!

This is Abigail Rebecca, my sister's 4th child. This video is of her when she was 21 months old. It's pretty amazing!

Where Do triLcats Come From?

After the post on modesty, I realized that a lot of my readers probably wonder what my background is. Well, okay, probably most of them either assume that I'm a b.t. or they don't care...
If you don't care, you don't have to read the rest of this. If you do, go ahead.

I was always Shomer Shabbat/Kashrut/Chagim and a whole plethora of other things that religious people do. My father was raised religious - his father was a rabbi ordained by JTS. My father is also a JTS-ordained rabbi. My mother was raised in a conservative congregation in Philadelphia, and was sent to Camp Ramah, along with Hebrew School. When she was in high school, she went to Gratz College's high school program. During that time, her commitment to Judaism strengthened. Her parents moved when she was 16, and she asked that her mother keep the new house kosher. From that point onwards, my mother kept kosher.

When she was 20, she married my father. The first Shabbat after their wedding was the first Shabbat that she was a committed Sabbath observer. (she had kept Shabbat before at camp and such).

My father was raised in schools like Ramaz and Yeshiva of Central Queens, and his choice to study at JTS was more based on religious philosophy than on observance level. Those of you who have photo albums from the 1960's will notice that many "Modern Orthodox" women didn't cover their hair back then, and wore pants. In fact, in my parents generation, everyone they knew had mixed dancing at their weddings, including those who were considered Orthodox. Back then, religious schools had school dances.

After he finished his rabbinical degree, my father went to the US Army. At the time, there was a draft, and clergy were expected to serve as chaplains after getting their degrees. My father became career army, which isolated him (and later, us) from the community to a large degree.

Over the next twenty or so years, my family lived in an interesting religious island. We had few Jewish friends growing up, and no Jewish community. From 1966, when my parents got married, until 1980, my parents never lived in a place that had Jewish dayschools. For 6 months in 1980, my parents sent my siblings to school at Hillel, near Deal, NJ.

When we moved from there, my oldest brother was high school aged. We moved to Fort Benning, GA, and my brother boarded with a family in Atlanta, while he attended school at Yeshiva High School of Atlanta. A year later, my sister followed suit.

The next year, my father was sent for Post-Doc studies (don't even ask how he had managed an MA and a doctorate while working full-time in the army...) at Harvard, and my siblings and I went to Maimonides. I was in Kindergarten, and my oldest brother was in 12th grade.

The next year, we moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I remember my family going into a form of mourning when we found out where our next assignment was. My father called the Pentagon and begged for a change of station. Sadly, we were not granted this.

There was no nearby school for my sister (who was going into 11th grade), and my oldest brother moved to Eretz Yisrael to attend Hebrew University. My second brother (9th grade) went to a very small Yeshiva in Dallas, Texas. My sister, my youngest brother (7th grade), and I (1st grade) went to local public schools. My sister, always a bright one, called her previous high school, and asked them to make some changes to her transcript before sending it on to her new school. Because of some careful work, she managed to get the public school to give her credit for all of her Jewish studies courses, so she finished high school in one more year (and she'd started first grade early, so she graduated high school at age 16.)

The next year, my youngest brother skipped 8th grade and joined the second one in Dallas. My sister, who had finished high school, went to college in Israel. (How my parents let their 16-year-old go to Israel back in the days when students didn't have phones in their rooms and there was no email is another story, perhaps for another day.)

At the end of that school year, my parents transferred my brothers from the school in Dallas to the Block Yeshiva High School in St. Louis. (There's also a story here, but I'll only say that the school closed a year or two later, and the indications that it should close were already there, so my parents chose to move their sons.)

The next year, we moved to Fort Dix, NJ, and I went to the Kellman Academy in Cherry Hill, NJ. My second brother went early admissions to Yeshiva University rather than change schools yet again. My youngest brother (11th grade) was supposed to go to a Jewish, but not religious, school in Philadelphia. When my parents asked when and where my brother could daven Shacharit and put on tfillin, they were told he could use a broom closet. My parents decided that they would prefer to send him to live in dorms and the week after they dropped the older one off at Yeshiva University, they took the next one to the high school there.

The school I was in was a conservative (Soloman Schechter) school, and I was the most religious child there. As such, I felt very uncomfortable much of the time. For a variety of reasons, the school and I were a poor match. I spent 6th and 7th grade in public school, which was surprisingly a better experience.

Before I started 8th grade, my father retired from the army, and I attended ASHAR in Monsey. That was the first year I found out that some religious women wear only skirts. It was also the first time that I saw women who covered their hair daily and not only in shul. The school only went up to 8th grade.

For high school, I went to The Frisch School. The school is an Orthodox school, but is fully co-ed (except gym class and some sections of the "kedushat hamishpacha" course). Most of my friends, like me, wore pants outside of school (the dress code for school was knee-length skirts & shirts with sleeves) and I certainly felt more tzanua jumping rope and babysitting in pants.

(if you're still wondering where my youngest brother went to college....) When I finished high school, I joined my youngest brother at Bar Ilan University. (Well, he was mostly finished, and was in the army, but he lived near campus.) I was younger than almost anyone, and had a hard time making friends, so peer pressure couldn't get me back into skirts - I never felt comfortable in skirts... By the end of my first year, I was dating a non-religious guy, and I wore pants wherever I could get away with it. Basically, I'd put on a skirt for shul and simchas.

When I was about 25, I realized that if I wanted to date religious men, I might do well to try acting more openly religious, and I wore only skirts for about 6 months. Then I met someone who was religious enough for me and was a very good guy. When we'd been dating for a while, we discussed it and he said that skirts/pants wasn't an issue for him, so I went back to wearing pants. His parents didn't approve of the match (Not because of religious reasons. They felt that we were a poor match culturally.), and we broke it off.

My "rebound guy" was not particularly religiously oriented... so I didn't feel any need to go back to skirts. By the time I'd been with him a few weeks, I was entirely sick of men, so I didn't really care what they thought of me. I didn't date anyone for about 7 months. When I did, I went out with Scott, who wasn't so religious, but realized that I was more religious than he was... so he set me up with his "charedi" friend, Yaakov.

And now we get to the fun part. Of course, for the first date with a religious guy, I put on a skirt. About 2 hours into the date, I asked him how he felt about skirts, and he (forgive the pun) skirted the question and asked me if I thought a girl should be tzanua, which, of course I did. I think pants shouldn't be very tight, and that shoulders should be covered... I never wore short skirts...etc... I mean, jeez, I have standards...

It took a few weeks before I realized what he meant, and by then, it was too late. I was already in love, and I realized it was so crucial to him that I couldn't expect him to change his mind.

You should have heard the fight we had when he told me that I couldn't have bangs out of my head-covering. I cried - a lot.

In the house, I dress "like a normal person," but outside, I basically live up to his standards. Sometimes I find it a real hardship, and I don't find it meaningful, so it's still kind of an issue, but such is life.

And that is where triLcats come from...