Aaron in the snow

We had a fun day in the blowing winds on Monday morning. Aaron was a little annoyed at Mindy for making it so windy though.

New Pilots, Future Pilots

From New Pilots, Future Pilots

No volcanoes or rain forests here, but from the Negev Desert, an only-in-Israel experience today for Keren, Talya, Isak, their Daddy and Dodi. We went to the rank-giving ceremony and airshow for the newest pilots in the air force, graduates of the most demanding and prestigious course in Tzahal. We got to see Israel's current combat aircraft close up and talk with current pilots. Lots of fun. Then at the ceremony for the few pilots who successfully make it through the three-year course, we heard a little about each new pilot, and then watched an incredible airshow of acrobatic planes doing loops, flying sideways and upside-down, and performing precision stunts. All thanks to Nefesh b'Nefesh. We'll be back when the Agus kids graduate.

Update from Costa Rica!

Hi all! We are all having a splendid time in Costa Rica, even though we've had enough rainfall to last a lifetime. We are currently in Arenal, which is famous for its volcano. Here's a taste of some of what we've done so far (in backwards chronological order):

Here we are at the Hanging Bridges walk in Arenal, which we did yesterday. We crossed a series of 16 suspension bridges, each increasingly higher, to get a great, unique perspective of the rainforest. Here we are at the very top of the canopy. We loved this.
Photo below is us at an ecological reserve outside Arenal. Pa is quite the hiker! We all loved the walk through the rainforest. We saw many birds, frogs and a two-toed sloth.

Next photo is Pa with the volcano after we landed in Arenal. Pretty incredible sight. It's still active, though we haven't had a chance to see any ash or lava (sometimes you can see this at night). This next photo is us after landing in Arenal. We were very happy to be in a place with no rain (though it didn't last long...just one day without rain so far).

Here I am ziplining through the rainforest in Tortuguero, our first destination. Eric and I did the canopy tour, which took us on various ziplines between different trees. We loved it. Mom and I are going ziplining / canopying again before our Backroads trip begins on Thursday.

Me and Eric before our canopy tour:

Mom, Eric and me on a jungle walk in Tortuguero. You can see that we're wearing big rubber boots so we could walk through the muddy path.

That's it for now. We obviously have many more photos but will probably wait till we get home to post them all. In the meantime, you can browse Eric's facebook photos.
We love and miss you all!

Aaron at the Train Show

Joe & Aaron braved the rain this morning and went to the train show at the botanical garden. Sorry, we couldn't figure out how to rotate the video

Chanukah & Rockefeller Center

We had a fun day in NYC yesterday. Mindy, Sarah and Talya got to skate under the tree at Rockefeller Center, and Sarah danced with Alvin Ailey.

Chanukah & Rockefeller Center

Pregnancy is a difficult thing to stomach

Ilana at 3.5 months in her first maternity shirt, 3 Tevet 5771. Where were you all 3 Tevet 5770?

Thanks, Estie and Baba, for getting the blog restarted!

Looking forward to more posts from the end of Agus girls week in NY, Costa Rica, and beyond!

From Feldman Family Blog

Our star dancer!

It won't be long before we see Sarah Agus on stage at City Center. Here is Sarah performing Revelations with other professional Ailey dancers. More photos to come

Enjoying Chanukah in Tel Aviv

Today we (Eitan, Isak, Elizur and I) had a great outing to the port of Tel Aviv and the beach! Who could believe it is December? Love to all...

Chag Chanuka Sameach/Isak's b-day

Isak loves his new bike from Baba and Saba:"Thank you! I love you!" He is very proud to be five. He also loved his 5 year old album/photo card from Grammy and Grandpa (gift is waiting for Dec. 26th-part II of birthday gifts)
We also had a great Shabbat Chanuka with Dodi and Ilana. Thanks to everyone for the gifts.
Happy Chanukah to everyone!

Happy birthdays...

Most recent birthday wishes for Baba and Grandma on November 7th. Also a quick pic from Talya's b-day back in October...and finally a short clip from Sarah's "Tasim" night at Bnai Akiva. Every Dati 9th grader in the country participates in this display of flags and orchestrated celebration.

Our sweet trip to Haifa

To get the year off to a sweet start, we took a trip last weekend (the Thursday before Rosh Hashana) to our friends' family in Haifa. Our lovely friend Chen's parents run a small, old-fashioned pastry shop that has a national reputation and loyal clientele. Her dad wakes every morning at 4 to get things started at the bakery. They hosted us for a delicious breakfast and behind-the-scenes tour of the industrial-sized mixer, sufganiya maker, and other pastry shop equipment. We then walked around the beautiful Bahai gardens and coast with Chen and her husband Eitan. A fun and delicious end-of-year / end-of-summer tiyul.



More:

http://picasaweb.google.com/chen8an/JbvBdB#

Eco-tashlich

There are no natural bodies of water in Jerusalem, so tashlich is really tough. But we came up with a great solution. By the afternoon of Rosh Hashana, we found ourselves with three bags of composting -- apple skins, carrot peels, egg shells, pomegranate skins, etc. So we took all our composing to our local community garden, where we usually bring it, and recited the Tashlich verses as we cast our organic waste onto the compost heap. I think it was quite effective. Instead of the ducks eating our sins, the worms feasted on them. It might have worked a little better if we were able to compost our chocolate wrappers and leftover cake, since of course I have no guilt about our fruit and vegetable waste, but unfortunately the worms can't digest that.

--guest blogger INK. More to come on D'yo Ilu Yamey

Happy Birthday Saba Dad!

Yom Huledet Sameach! Hugs from near and far and best wishes from all of us for a happy and sweet year.

Sarah's 14th b-day

Sarah was "surprised" by her friends who all came over dressed in dance outfits. They spent a few hours eating, chatting and dancing. Very cute!

Aaron davening

We're ready to send him to Torah Vodaat for summer camp

Don't mess with this tough girl!

Talya enjoys her new activities:
Karate and Horse-riding

Sarah's new teeth! Before...and...After

Eitan is walking!!!

We are proud to say that Eitan is officially walking. He spent most of the day walking instead of crawling from toy to toy. Now Aaron will finally have someone to run around with next month!

Run for the Match -- and Wisteria!

Everything here is in bloom and Pesach is in the air. Ilana and Dodi ran the Jerusalem half-marathon over the weekend with respectable times for both. See you all soon! Keren -- and the spring -- is waiting!

It promises to be...a summer of wisteria.

From Feldman Family Blog

From Feldman Family Blog

From Feldman Family Blog

Inside Misrad Hapnim

Ever wonder how to have fun in Jerusalem? First,set yourself at least four simple bureaucratic tasks. Be creative! For example, try to open a bank account; register your marriage; pay municipal tax; and get your Teudat Oleh? Then clear your schedule for an afternoon out of the office and get to work. Sounds tediously boring? Not in Israel, where every bureaucratic experience is a joy and anthropological study! (Note: rate of anticipated success will be 5-10%.)

Ilana and Dodi had to open a joint bank account to register us as married in the eyes of Israel to allow Dodi to receive his Teudat Oleh to receive our tax discount to pay taxes and avoid prison. Rate of success in this instance: 0%.

Breakdown of folly

Misrad Hapnim: (wait time one hour) refuses to recognize that we are married, even with our official NY State marriage license in hand, because it does not contain a raised seal. (They don't even know about Spitzer and Patterson.) Back to the apostille to have the license certified! Note: when you google apostille, ostensibly an international English-language term, the first sponsored result that comes up is in Tel Aviv. That tells you enough.

Misrad Haklita: clerk not in until Monday. They can't help you. Foolish to think they could, since their budget so low the signs in the lobby are magic-marker on construction paper (shoulda photographed it; sorry).

Bank: this one should be easy -- they're a business, right! Bank on strike. Closed for one day only.

Fun stuff: we went to the City Hall to get a special Jerusalem resident card for discounts on Jerusalem city events. At least we were able to get that and now have awesome discounts on things like the "Time Elevator" and Bible Lands Museum!!! We bought the cards for the discounts they offer on the Jerusalem Half-Marathon in two weeks only to discover that even though today is the last day to register for the race, the discount card does not take effect until tomorrow! Server refresh at midnight. Oh well. So, in fact we lost money instead of saving.

We considered capping off our fun day with a bonus visit to the jolly folks at the Rabbanut or helpful people at the local kupat cholim, but decided to go home instead and revel in all we'd accomplished.

Interested in a similar fun-filled tour over Pesach? Please fax your application in triplicate and we will get back to you in at least six weeks. Make sure you have all your documents in order or we will look at you as if you're the dumbest person in history. Sorry, we don't have email...

A flood of Purim

Purim came raining down on us today in honor of the reign of Achashverosh. It's been pouring for three days straight. Check out some of the highlights in our photo stream here (click on the pic for more). I also included photos from Nicki and Avi's wedding last week. I still have to post the priceless videos of Estie's unforgettable dance. I'm waiting for her to name her price :)

From Feldman Family Blog

More on the storm from YNet

סופת פורים

Article about Putti!

Beruria and I have been hard at work on an article about our trip to Uganda this past summer. It was finally published in PresenTense magazine, though in a digital format that most of you won't be able to access (Google Wave). Here is the Google Wave link, if you have access to it. I'm also posting the full text for those of you who are not as technologically savvy :). The article was posted with 2 accompanying videos, too: one of the kids and Beruria "jubilating," and a (slightly embarrassing) video bio of me and Bru (filmed at 2250 Broadway!). Enjoy the article!

We pulled up to Putti village, Uganda, on a Wednesday morning in late June. We had barely arrived when children surrounded us, kneeling down to shake our hands. "You are most welcome" was one of the first things we were told, and told again and again. We were taken by their warm hospitality, and began to embrace their behavior. It was only later on in our trip, as deeper philosophical issues arose, that we began to question our adoption of their values and behavior, and what role our own values should play in our interactions with the community.

We began to settle into the three-room mud building that soon became our home. We unpacked our bags: mosquito nets, Malarone pills, and heavy duty water filter bottles for our protection; Heschel, Jack Kerouac, and Junot Diaz for familiarity and enjoyment; and donated siddurim (prayer books), benchers we had snagged from a friend's wedding, a set of Mishna Berura and the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (books of Jewish law), dry erase markers, and roll-up whiteboard sheets for the teaching we would do and that we would leave with the community when we left.

In our final meeting with the community, a Putti friend named Moshe, usually very quiet, shared a Ugandan saying that in order to really know a person, you have to eat with him, live with him and work with him. “That’s what you’ve come here to do, and we are truly grateful for that.” Through eating, living, and working with the Putti community, we indeed got to know a lot. When we first arrived, we would share quizzical looks when someone used a maize leaf as a potholder, or when boys held hands as a sign of affection, or when a particularly reckless driver turned to us in the back seat to announce, "Don't worry, I'm a reckless driver."

A few weeks in, we became accustomed to many of these day-to-day differences and even began to adopt some of their practices. We found ourselves wiping our own hands on maize leaves when they were sticky with the juice of freshly cut mangoes or using them to hold the roasted duma (maize) we'd just pulled out of the burning coals. It no longer seemed strange that a baby might sit swaddled in blankets in a basin while we sat around shelling beans. In ways we hadn't been before, we were attentive to small details--the way eyelashes curled differently, or the sound of a lizard crawling on the dried maize plants.

Though the villagers initially kept their distance during more private moments like meals, by the end of our trip, the youth ate in our living room with us, sharing the nicer food the community continued giving us as a sign of honor. They even let us help with laundry, ironing, and cooking challah on the charcoal stove-top, though we never equalled them at hoeing, wood chopping, and searching for lost goats. It seemed fitting that on our last day in Putti, a hen laid an egg on Aryeh's bedding—and it didn't surprise us. By then we could recognize the hen's squawking and burrowing as signs, one of the facts of the life we had since gotten used to in our home away from home.

Our day-to-day life took on a serenity once we got used to the relaxed pace of Ugandan life. But another category of differences was tougher to reconcile. Two of us—both women—had arrived early in Putti; our third counterpart—a man—joined us just over a week later. Our dynamic within the community shifted dramatically upon his arrival. Despite our attempts to explain that the three of us had comparable backgrounds in Jewish education, "Rabbi Ariel," as he was respectfully called, was given the more prestigious of the roles we had held in our first week, and our roles more limited.

Though Aryeh worked hard to help us keep our previously held roles, we were still faced with the philosophical choices behind the community rabbi's assumptions and our responses. We struggled with our role as women and whether we should behave as local women or work to expand the participation of women in communal and ritual life.

Traditional Ugandan women kneel down to the ground when greeting men—the village elder-woman even kneeled to greet teenage boys. Our friends in the village reassured us that we didn't need to follow these norms as visitors. We assured them that we would never bow down to men. But we wondered whether we could truly be a part of Ugandan life, and still not kneel, or was our refusal just another sign of our visitor status?

There is such a shleimut (completeness) to life in Putti. Back home, we contemplate the possibility of integrating some of the values of Putti—the commitment to community, the lack of materialism, and being present to what unfolds, among others—without giving up our commitments to many of our own values and the pros of our lifestyle, from running water to the privilege of being able to pursue our careers of choice.

In Putti, we came to realize that these questions were present within the fibers of the community itself. On our final shabbat in Putti, the chairman of the community got up to deliver a thank you speech. To our surprise and delight, he announced, “When you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” He thanked us for showing the women and girls of Putti that Jewish women can be knowledgeable and practice Judaism in as serious a way as men, and he told the girls to see us as role models of how women could be educated. Perhaps in some ways, this moment served as a model of integration between our values from home and the traditional values of the Ugandan village.

To read more about our trip and to follow up ways in which you can get involved with the Putti Jewish community, visit our blog: www.shalomuganda.wordpress.com

Isak sings at Yom Mishpacha

Enjoy this clip from Isak's gan on "Yom Mishpacha". He was adorable!

Funny clip of my co-workers doing "The Twist"

The Social Security Administration awarded The Medicare Rights Center a Public Service Award last Friday for our work enrolling people in low-income programs. The award was presented at a press event at BB King to highlight new changes in the law that will make it easier for people to qualify for Extra Help, the program that helps low-income people with high drug costs. The program featured "rock and roll legend" Chubby Checker (famous for "The Twist") because the theme was the new “twists” in the law. Here is a hilarious video clip from the event. Three of my co-workers are standing to the right of Chubby (the guy in the suit and the girl in front of him and guy behind him with the scarf) The woman with the hat who gets up to do the twist toward the end is 99 years old!

Aaroni really walking!!

Happy 11-month b-day, Aaron!! The little guy is walking already. Here's a hilarious video from Joe: