Day of Remembrance

April 1, Kristallnacht

With apologies to Aunt Genocide (my sister the Holocaust scholar), who will probably want to correct every single historical detail in this post.  And then some.

Today is Yom Ha'Shoah.

"Shoah" is the Hebrew word for "disaster," or "calamity."  It is also the word that Jews the world over have been using since the 1940s (and probably earlier) to describe what happened in Germany, Poland, and throughout the spread of the Nazi movement, to the Jewish people.

Here in the United States as in many places, we call it, "The Holocaust."

But "holocaust" means "burnt offering."  It's a title that I, personally, find... distasteful.

Because a burnt offering is a sacrifice.  And because the burnt offerings of those years were corpses at the alter of the ideal of Aryan superiority.  And to call that a sacrifice is not accurate- it was different from a sacrifice.  It was not a choice, or an obligation, or even an inevitability.

But it was a disaster.  And a calamity.  And a horror.

As my mother helps her parents prepare to leave their house after decades, she has come across some interesting objects.  One of these is a doll.

My great-great-uncle Hy found that doll in a concentration camp.  He was looking for his family.  He was looking for the people that he knew and loved, that helped define him and shape him, and connect him with his past, his future, and his history.

I can't imagine what was running through his mind while he searched that camp.  What he found was a doll.  A small, homemade doll.  He picked it up, and he mailed it to the only little girl he had any connection to anymore.  My nine year old grandmother.  Sending her that doll must have felt like the closest thing he would ever get to reuniting his family.

The Shoah began before what we think of as the Holocaust- it began decades before.  Centuries.  Millennia.  When my family fled Spain- when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue, Jews were packing their bags and leaving after Ferdinand and Isabella's edict- there was already a precedent in place.

Many of them went to Poland, where they were given religious freedom by King Boleslav.

They felt safe in Poland, and there they remained.  Spreading their roots, building their communities.  Not just in Poland, but around Poland.

It was over two hundred years that they lived, somewhat peacefully, with the Polish people.  And then the pogroms began- systematic killing and violence of Jews.  Over the next few centuries, this violence drove the Jews into Germany and Prussia.

It was 100 years later that the rise of sentiments and policies that lead to the Nazis would begin.

And that's where my family was.  In Poland, in Lithuania, in Germany.  My great-great-grandparents.  My great-grandparents.  My ancestors.

The people who's names and likenesses I and my parents and my children bear.

My great-great grandfather (on my mother's mother's mother's side) fled Poland and established himself in the United States.

My great-great-grandparents (on my mother's father's father's side) managed the same feat.

I know nothing of my father's lineage this far back, but the names I've seen printed and etched at Ellis Island.  I do know that all who remained are now gone.  Whole swathes of my family, of my history, of the story of how I came to be and who I am... they are gone.

The name we have chosen for Baby X is my great-great-aunt's name.  I never knew her.  She was my great-grandpa Abe's youngest sister.

I grew up with her story, though.  When the family was fleeing, they hid in the false bottom of a hay cart in the wee hours of the morning while a friend smuggled them to the docks, to board a boat to America.

Soldiers with pitchforks stabbed at the hay.  They were looking for people just like my family, Jews, trying to escape.  Through the ordeal, the children (and there were many of them) all miraculously remained silent.  Including Baby X's namesake.  She slept peacefully through the ordeal, only a baby, never waking or crying.

She grew up, fell in love, and married before dying young and tragically.

It was a fate she never would have enjoyed if she had remained in Europe.  She would have died young and tragically, but not in the freedom of the road and the company of her husband.  She would have died almost anonymously, one of millions crowded into camps and systematically annihilated.  Her name replaced by a number on her arm.  The name my daughter will carry on.

Today is Yom Ha'Shoah, the day of Remembrance.

I might have had many more cousins.

I might have had a family so large and and so close, the sort of family that my husband has.  I might have had a community in my mind of names and faces and laughs and idiosyncrasies of the people connected to me through blood.

Instead, I have memories of museums.  Of empty shoes and coarse, striped fabric.  I have memories of my great-grandfather's silences, of stories he would write down but not discuss with me.  I have memories of dates and of events that occurred before I was born, but which are etched into my soul.

I remember.

As we say each Passover... in each generation there are some who would rise and try to destroy us.

The Assyrians.  The Egyptians.  The Persians.  The Greeks.  The Romans.  The Christian Crusaders.  The Inquisitorial Catholics.  The Cossacks.  The Nazis.

I have no doubt there will be another some day, and I will probably live to see it.  It will probably take the form of military action against Israel.

I'm not a Zionist, I don't believe that Jews are entitled to that land or that it's even necessarily a good idea to have a "Jewish State."  But regardless of what I believe when it comes to Israel and war and genocide, I believe that it is my job not only as a Jew but as a human being to remember the lesson of the Holocaust.

Never again.

Never again can we stand idly by as a people are willfully destroyed.  Religions, cultures, races, sexualities, these are not only abstract concepts by which we can divide masses into categories- these are people.  Aunts and uncles and grandparents and sons and daughters.  Jews and Gypsies and Catholics and homosexuals.  Hutus and Cham and Armenians and Kurds.

Piles of corpses that survivors sift through, hoping and fearing to find a familiar face.

A face that looks like it could belong to them.

Today is Yom Ha'Shoah.

Bruised but Impressed

Today has been a bad day.

M has had to work late every night for the last week.  As in, coming home barely before midnight.  And I?  I stay up and wait, because it makes me nervous to have him walking around our neighborhood that late at night.  (I know, he's a six and a half foot high, nearly 300lb behemoth of a man, and NOBODY is going to mess with him.  Probably.  But I'm pregnant, and I freak out easily in this condition.)  Thanks to the sun coming up earlier, my children wake up earlier.

And to top it all off, I seem to be having anemia problems.  So I am effing exhausted.

Which brings me to today.  Saturday.  Today, M had to go in to work, just like every day this week.  And again, I probably won't see him until midnight.

...which meant missing my friend's bridal shower.  Which is a bummer.

But believe it or not, that wasn't the worst part of the day.

I was ushering the girls from the potty to their nap, and I realized there were little bloody footprints all over the bathroom floor.

I ascertained pretty quickly that it was DD who was bleeding, and I attempted to clean her up and clean up the cut, and figure out how in the world she managed to get so bloody while just sitting on the potty, but she would have none of it.

And as I held her on my lap and tried and tried to explain that I needed  to see it and clean it so I could make it better, I began bargaining.  Would it be okay if you lay on Mommy and Daddy's bed for me to inspect your foot?  It would?  Perfect.

So, clutching my freaked out toddler in my arms, I attempted to rise from the stool on which I had been sitting, and waddle across the six feet to my bed.

And that was when I started to fall.

Now, I generally have a very good sense of spacial reasoning.  I could tell that, based on how I was holding DD, I was poised to smash her into the wall.  I had to make a choice- drop the kid on the tile floor, or fall to the left and avoid the wall.

I fell to the right to avoid the wall.  Only now, the door was in my way.  I was going to smash her head between myself and the door.  New choice- drop the kid, or fall farther to the left and do it faster and harder.

I would also have to twist my torso bizarrely in order not to land on my stomach.  After all, I didn't want to hurt Baby X.

Poor DD, she still got a knock on the noggin,

And poor Baby X, she certainly went for a wild ride.

But me?

I twisted my ankle.  I landed hard- really really really hard- on my knee.  And then my hip.  And then my elbow.

I am jacked up.  Ankle, knee, hip, back, elbow, shoulders, and neck... they're all killing me.

DD's foot?  Totally fine.  She picked a scab.  No idea why it bled so much.

I was literally stuck on the floor for about five minutes while DD wailed.

The moral of the story?

When people tell big ol' pregnant ladies not to lift anything heavy...

They mean it.

Lesson learned, gravity.  Lesson learned.


...

On a totally unrelated note, my mom is helping her parents clean out their house.  They're in the process of moving after about thirty five years, which is a long time to pack every single corner of a large house with stuff.  And today, my mom hit the jackpot when it comes to finding really cool stuff that you had no idea was there.

My mom found an old check that my Granddaddy had written to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963.  And Dr. King endorsed it!  How cool is that?

So, that's the cool silver lining of my day.  I might be a bit banged up, but I am super proud of my family of progressives and activists.

Hopefully I haven't banged those qualities out my children by the time they're ready to take up the family cause.  :)

Wealth, The Mommy Wars, Some Family History, and the Nature of Parental Stress

My granny is the little girl on the right

Part of the Mom Pledge reads, "I want to see moms work together to build one another up, not tear each other down. Words can be used as weapons. I will not engage in that behavior."

Words like "Mommy Wars," words combined into 140 characters that set whole presidential campaigns against each other.

I'd like to address this, if I may.

The thing about life is that no matter what you're doing, you want to have somebody tell you how impressed they are with what you do.

You want to have somebody who made a different choice than you say, "Wow, I could not do what you do.  You work so hard.  You impress me so much.  You must be exhausted.  You must feel amazing about yourself."

Or, you know, some sort of paraphrased version of that.

So today it's been hard for me to get away from the back and forth over the comments that Hilary Rosen made about Ann Romney.

What she said was, “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.  She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why we worry about their future.”

Now, these are two entirely different statements.  If Hilary Rosen had left off that first sentence, this wouldn't have ever turned into an issue.  Of course the left believes that the Romneys are out of touch with the majority of Americans.  Let's face it, they are.  But that isn't what the argument is about.

This has been made into yet another occasion for people to accuse each other of accusing each other of being lazy.

I know that sounds like nonsense.  That's because it is nonsense.

Do stay at home moms think that working moms are worse parents?  Do working moms think that stay at home parents are worse parents?

No.  Nobody actually cares.  This only matters when somebody feels that they are being accused of being less than the best parent they can be for their children.

Being a working mom is hard.  But a lot of women in this country don't see it as a choice.  They see it as a necessity.  If they're the only parent, or if their spouse is in a low wage job, they may not have an option.  And then they see stay-at-home parents as having the luxury not to "work."

But they know that staying at home with kids is work.  It's just work that our society doesn't seem to value very much.  The United States is one of only a tiny handful of countries in the world that doesn't require employers to pay maternity leave.  In many countries, that pay can go to either parent.  In either case, a parent can stay home, if they choose, with their child.

Not so here.

So now in this country, we have a situation where some women CAN choose to go to work, or to stay home.  You have many families, like mine, where the choice comes down to whether or not the cost of childcare exceeds the benefits of a second income.

So the so-called Mommy Wars have grown around the ability women have to work, the frustration of being torn in one's desire to both contribute financially and their desire to contribute in the many intangible ways of being a constant and positive figure in their children's lives, and the frustration of people who make different choices being happy.

Because, you see, their happiness is an affront to anyone who has made a different choice.  If your life is willfully different than mine, and you are happier than I am at this moment, your happiness is an indictment of my choices.

...this is crazy talk.  But we all do this.  We all see somebody else being happy and we think that because we're exhausted or sick or overworked or somebody three feet tall has peed on our favorite chair twice that morning, they must have made a better choice.

And we can't stand that.  But we've made it up ourselves.

I was talking to my mother the other day about how tired I was.  How I couldn't imagine how she did it when she was in labor (for a month) with my younger sister.  How I had no idea how single mothers could do this.

And then she told me about my great-grandmother's diaries.

You see, my great-grandparents were wealthy.  Mansion in Chicago, vacation house in Aspen, property across several other states...  My great-grandparents were patrons of the arts (the Dadaists in particular), had the sort of living room that has a full grand piano "in the corner," and built a bowling alley in their basement.  My great-grandfather refused a request to invest in Henry Ford's early plants- although whether that was a poor business decision or a good choice based on Ford's anti-semitic sentiments is up for debate.

My great-grandfather was independently wealthy, despite the wealth of his father, who was also a construction magnate.

My great-grandmother and her son

My grandmother was in many ways closer with the house manager than her own mother.

But my great-grandmother, the wealthy socialite weathering the Depression in mansion, hosting her benefits and having chamber orchestras over to play parties with centerpieces made of gilded lilies...

(Yes, she actually gilded lilies.)

She agonized over her work.

Her journals were full of worry, worry that her baby was sick, that her household help couldn't do things as well for her children as she knew they needed to be done, that she was terrified that she was incapable of caring for her three children alone, that her son wouldn't speak after learning to speak Spanish during their years in Mexico.  She had so much to do and that she was pulled in so many different directions.

She was terrified and exhausted.  She was overworked and miserable.

She was, in short, a mom.

Then there's my grandmother- her daughter.  In her stories of her early motherhood, she and my grandfather are living in a rapidly collapsing house in backwater Florida in the late 50's, subsisting on food stamps and around $3,000 a year.  My grandfather turned down an opportunity to compete in the Olympics because back then, that meant forgoing any sort of income.  And besides, he was focusing on his Ph.D.  In these stories, my grandmother mastered the art of stretching her food stamp allotment into real meals for her family, every day.  She made pasta out of her flour rations, she made sauces and soups from every last scrap of meat.  And of course, her children were mischievous or dangerously ill in turns.  She had truant officers stopping by her house to discover that her children weren't in school because they had scarlet fever, mumps, and measles.

My grandparents

She was frustrated and exhausted.  She was worried and overworked.

In short, she was a mom.

I have no idea how either of those women did it.  And honestly, I don't know how I do it.

The problem with wealth is that it does nothing- nothing- to make you happier.  The more you have, the more you come up with to do with your time and money.

You have the money to hire a nanny to watch your children?  You will commit to all sorts of other activities or causes that will depend on you, and you will be pulled in more directions.

You have four houses?

You have four times as many rooms to clean, four times as many lawns to care for, four times as many cobwebs to combat.

You have committees and causes and charities.

You are working.  And you have your kids.

You have less money?

Well, you have fewer rooms to clean, fewer cars to keep up.  Fewer bills to pay.

There is no world where this is easy.

But your bills take up more of your income.  You have to "work" harder to stay on top of them.  You have to make choices between phone or gas, food or car, rent or a medical bill.  Even if you're subsisting entirely on government aid.

You are working.  And  you have your kids.

And kids?  Kids are a lot of work.  Kids are hard.  Kids are exhausting.

And they will always have more energy than you.  They will always have a leg up on you.  They will always have a million things that they need you to do.  That they simply cannot do for themselves.  That nobody but you can do for them.

Being poor is hard.  I've done it- it sucks.  I've been on public aid and literally lived off of leftovers from going on as many blind dates as I could squeeze into a week.  The closest I've been since I've had children involved food stamps and WIC, and I know the difference between relying on the public safety net and being totally without one.  As millions of single mothers in this country are.

Being rich is not hard in pretty much any of the same ways, but it's not as much fun as you probably think.  My family has been rich.  It didn't solve our problems.

There is no world where this is easy.

Even when my family was rolling in it, my mother was still dealing with four teenagers who, while independent and intelligent, were just as crazy and disaster prone (and in some cases, much much much more so) than any other teenager.  There were car crashes, bad boyfriends and robberies.  There were brushes with the law and curfew violations and plenty of standard rivalries.

My mother?  She must have been exhausted.

And when we were all little, and she was working as a secretary while my father worked on his Ph.D., she must have been exhausted.

Because all of us, all parents, everywhere... we are all exhausted.  We are all stressed.  We are all paranoid and concerned and determined to be better.

But we are what we are- human beings.  Human beings trying to raise other human beings.

And honestly?  None of us know how we do it.

You know what it's like to be 32 weeks
pregnant, working on your degree, fighting
off skin cancer and gall bladder disease, and
raising two toddlers?  It's exhausting.  This
is how I look most days.  It's not a failure.

Somebody else having a good day doesn't mean they made a better choice than you.  It doesn't mean they're happier than you.  It doesn't mean that they are judging you in any way.  It just means that they're having a good day.

Ann Romney?  She raised five boys, she's fought cancer and MS.  Yes, she is out of touch with the majority of Americans.  The majority of Americans can't afford to buy horses to help them through their MS, or furnish half a dozen homes.

But all of those things?  Those things are hard.  Those things are more things that Ann Romney has to do.  And she must be exhausted.

There are no Mommy Wars.  There is no battlefield where women are attacking each other for their parenting choices, or lack thereof.

There is only the horrible, self-critical part of our own minds that insists that we are being judged by everyone.  All the time.

And we are all working our asses off to do the best job that we can.

There's Room for One More

I apologize that the video embedded in this post automatically plays.  I have no idea how to make it stop.  Just know that the noise you're hearing is a video that is automatically playing at the end of this post- so go and pause or stop accordingly.  And again, I'm sorry.

Not from this year, but to give you an idea of what a seder at Casa SuperMommy can look like...

You might not be aware of this, but condos in Chicago are not known for their spacious nature.

Listings are, to say the least, deceptive.  There was one very spacious place that fit the description to a T.  High ceilings, lots of storage space, nice kitchen... but that was only the top floor.  All the bedrooms were in the garden level.  And those bedrooms... well...

This was the Master Suite.  And that's my husband with his head in a convenient hole in the ceiling.  Convenient because otherwise, he couldn't stand up in that room.  Or the bathroom.  Or any other bedroom, for that matter.

Then there's our condo.  We lucked out with this place.  We managed to snap up a place with probably 1500 square feet, with two bathrooms, and with a very useful three season porch.

All of this is relevant information when you find yourself hosting a seder for 27 people.

Allow me to introduce you to my dining room.  When we moved in, it looked like this:

It always looks worse before you unpack.

You wouldn't know it, but this dining room has space for my dining room table to fully expand- which it does spectacularly.

Just how spectacularly?  Enough so that I genuinely believed that I could squeeze the bulk of 27 people around it comfortably to celebrate Passover.

When I announced this guest count to Grandmommy and Aunt Genocide, they were... skeptical.  After all, they've been in my house.  They know exactly how much space I have.  Me?  I have a can-do attitude and an encyclopedic knowledge of the furniture in my house.

I was determined that I could make it work.

Ordinarily, my dining room looks something like this:

...littered with toy food, crayons, bibs, and other assorted grubling related garbage, of course.

Now, the big bookcases and the desk certainly couldn't go anywhere, but I figured we could relocate the unneeded furniture into our guest room/sewing room/soon-to-be-nursery for the time being and make a little more space.  Aunt Genocide offered to bring some folding tables that she *said* were 3'x5', and so I made a seating chart.

Not included- the seating arrangements.  More heavily planned than my wedding.

The explodey looking thing denotes the seat where Moses* (in this case Aunt Genocide) would sit.  Seats with stars (there will be more later) are high chairs.  The bench is the sewing bench from my sewing table, and I knew I could use an old couch cushion from the chaise lounge we got rid of a few years ago as its back (I keep it as a back support for times, like now, that I'm working from bed).  That whole wall, essentially, is windowed, so the window frame would serve to hold up the cushion just fine.

Yes, there would be no circling the table.  But at least there was a bathroom in either direction, so anybody *could* get up and use it if need be.

It's not just a matter of squeezing people in though.  There's also the seating arrangements to take into account.  There's family tradition to uphold.  The most important of these is that children and those who have never been to a seder ought to be as close to Moses as possible.  The next most important seating tradition is that husbands and wives do not sit together.  This applies to other coupled couples as well.  You have to enjoy your freedom by meeting new people, not by giggling under your breath about the unintentional sexual innuendo in our family haggadahs.

I put a lot of work into that seating chart.  I agonized over it.  I made sure the skinniest people were squeezed into the back, farthest from Moses.  I figured out which children would sit where, which parents were required to attend their children, which children could be counted upon to share the bench without complaint.  I mentally measured each of my guests to determine which of my largest attendees should sit where in order to get the most room in the cramped quarters.

But oh, the hubris of planning a dinner party.

On the day of the seder, when we were setting up for the first time, it became clear that this simply wouldn't work.  Why?  You can only fit five chairs along each side of my fully extended table.  That, and Aunt Genocide's folding tables are actually more like 2'x4".  Good thing she brought three.  What we actually had looked like this.

This meant moving Moses.

If you count the chairs, you'll find that we're at least four seats short.  Four.  That's a problem.

We squeezed.  We argued a little.  We scratched our heads.  I came up with a brilliant idea.  Every single piece of furniture needed to be moved- except the immobile desk and bookshelves, of course.  During naptime.  Mere hours before the seder.

This fits everybody!

It didn't work.  There was absolutely no way that people were squeezing into ANY of the chairs on the ends- including Moses.  We'd have to try again.

We added Aunt Genocide's last folding table to the mix, brought the side table back into the dining room, and tried again.  This time, we got a little more creative.

Start counting those chairs...

That's right.  We only managed to add two seats.  Just two.  We were still two short, but at least the people who *could* sit down were going to be marginally more comfortable.  At this point, my children were awake.  The seder was to begin in less than three hours.

This is when Aunt K, I believe, came up with the genius addition of our TV trays.  M and I happen to have a set of four, and this is where it all came together.  How can a TV tray make such a huge difference, you ask?

Boo-yah.  27 seats.

That's how.  Now, the TV trays are about four inches shorter than the tables, which posed its own problem.  But with the OED Concise Edition (two volumes) across one, my 1987 World Atlas on the other, and both protected under the table cloth by the girls' place mats... it actually worked.  The two TV trays in the middle just had to be recessed.  Which didn't make too much difference, since the side table is four inches TALLER than the other tables anyway.  In any case, it would work.

I started the seating chart over again from scratch.  I squeezed children into the end with Moses, which was good because not only do they take up less space than adults, they can't be counted on to stay seated through our family's typical 3-4 hour seder.  I removed and then put back my father's spot over and over again, unsure as whether he would make it (Poppa had spent the whole day at the hospital- nothing serious, but we had no clue when he'd return).

That was when people started cancelling.  From the time we finally had the tables set up until they were all set, we first lost one guest, then gained another, then lost another two, and then lost another one.  By the time we were counting out plates for the four courses (and one for everybody already on the table), our final count would actually be 24.  It was a huge relief.  I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the seating arrangement, desperately trying to maintain all the family traditions.  I almost succeeded.  And this is what it looked like:

Those blue shapes represent ceremonial objects.  Sadly, I didn't manage to squeeze in a real chair for Elijah.  He got his plate, though.  So if he had showed up, he could have eaten.

The rectangles are our family haggadahs.  Yes, they are that big.  The blue shapes are seder plates.  The squares are matzah plates.  I'm pretty sure I missed one or two on this diagram.

I managed to get most of our largest guests on the hallway side- good, because getting around them from the kitchen with hot food was going to be impossible.  My great-aunt Judy, a tiny woman, was squeezed between the two largest people there.  I'm sure by the end of the night she had a crick in her neck.

But of course, that's not all that went on the table.  By the time it was set, it looked a lot more like this:

The ovals are place settings (minus the wine and water glasses), the red clusters are charoseth, parsley, and salt water, the ovals are relish dishes, the tiny circles are bowls of nuts, and the larger circles are bottles of wine.  Which yes, we ran out of.

And if that doesn't seem crowded enough, keep in mind that there are 23 sets of elbows on this table, that there are pitchers of water, an additional three sets of candlesticks, that there are two ADULTS sitting on that sewing bench, and that the chairs all take up more space than usual because they all have pillows on them.  The seder requires that you recline- and that means pillows.  And that means chairs take up more space.  Or that people pull their pillows off their chairs, thus cluttering the area around the table further.

Then there's the food.

We served the first course- a hard boiled egg in salt water- in tea cups.  We had plenty of those.

Then there was the matzah ball soup.

Then there was the main course- black currant lamb (or not lamb for me and the other vegetarians), brown rice pilaf with cranberries, a green salad, Greek lemon potatoes, and roasted asparagus, onions, and sweet potatoes.

And then there was dessert- plates of candies, plates of Aunt Genocide's ingberlech, a tray of my friend Chris's amazing macaroons, my grandmother's pecan cake, fruit salad...

And then there was tea and coffee.

Everybody was stuffed.  And most were more than a little drunk- after all, the seder requires that you drink at least four glasses of wine.  At least.

It was chaos.

It was fun.

And now, thank God, it's over.

Coming up- recipes for a few of those amazing foods I just mentioned!

Today, here.  Next year... anywhere but my house.  :)



*Some say that the leader of the seder is acting as Moses- teaching the assembled people and leading them out of Egypt.  I like this idea.

Next Year In Jerusalem, or Everything I Need To Know About Passover I Learned From The Ten Commandments

Thanks, Google!

Aunt Genocide and I are standing in the kitchen, watching Moses return to his adoptive father after a successful military campaign in Ethiopia.

Aunt Genocide looks over her shoulder, sweating slightly as she stirs a hot pot of molten orange honey and ginger.

"This movie is full of eye candy," she says.

"Oh yeah," I reply.  "Charleton Heston was so hot."

"Yul Brynner was hotter."

I grin.  "Oh, yeah."

I have been washing and chopping apples for what feels like an eternity.  I move on to grating nuts into the bowl, and add liberal amounts of cinnamon.

"Who plays Nefertiri, anyway?" Aunt Genocide asks.

I would Google it if the laptop weren't in use.  By us.  Watching this DVD.

Grandmommy points out that Baka the Master Builder is played by Vincent Price, casually glancing over her shoulder from her bowl of goo that will shortly become delicious matzah balls.  The pot of broth is waiting and simmering on the stove, full of onions that my mother cleverly spikes with whole cloves.

Aunt Genocide and I are stunned by this piece of information.

This DVD is one of my prized possessions.  M burned it to disc for me from the old VHS tape the year we got married- cementing my belief that he was the perfect choice of life-mate.  It is at least five hours long, heavily edited, and filled with commercials.  My great-grandfather Abe taped it off a local network back in 1988 or so.  When he lived in Chicago.  The commercials are so dated- it's amazing what you forget about the marketing of decades past.  Everything had a jingle.  Everything.  The Mets were doing well at the beginning of their season.  There was a different Pope, offering different Easter blessings in the same scenery and the same costume.  The cars were boxy gas guzzlers.  There was war in the Middle East.

All of that is background noise.  In fact, The Ten Commandments itself if background noise.

The Ten Commandments has been the background noise of Passover for as long as I can remember.  Certainly since around 1988, when I was four years old.  When the family seder moved out of Chicago and my great-grandfather Ezra's house, and into my granny's instead.

It's full of cheesy, dated nonsense.  Not cheesy in that 80's commercial way, cheesy in that Classic Hollywood kind of way.  With nameless Egyptian guards grumbling and warning, "That'll teach you, Stone Cutter!" as they tie Joshua to the curtains in Baka the Master Builder's tent so that he can be whipped to death.

His hands are caught in gently wound velvet ropes.  We, my sister and I, we know that really- he could just pull his arms down any time.  But honestly... he looks so pretty all tied up, waiting for Moses to come and save him.

Zipporah, responding to her husband's compliment that her eyes are as sharp as they are beautiful by looking directly and pointedly into the camera for a solid four seconds.

Nefertiri (played by Anne Baxter, in case you were still wondering), absentmindedly dragging a garland of flowers off the parapet to illustrate how careless and beautiful she is in her obsessive love of Moses.

This movie is full of eye candy.  Cecil B. DeMille really knew his stuff.

And Aunt Genocide, Grandmommy, and I are on auto-pilot.  We know this movie by heart.  We know this television broadcast by heart.  We can't replay the scenes in our minds without the same commercial breaks, the same Bartles and James commercials, the same constant reminders that Cadbury Eggs only come once a year, or that Max Hedron was on the cover of Time.

This is the background noise to Passover in my family.

I am making the charoseth.  Aunt Genocide is making the ingberlech.  My mother is making matzah ball soup.

Somebody is preparing the pecan sunshine cake- unleavened, of course.  Somebody is prepping parsley and mixing a caraffe of salt water.  Somebody is peeling an army's worth of hard boiled eggs.  Somebody is collecting pillows.  Somebody is setting the table. Somebody is arranging the seating chart.  Somebody is making place cards.  Somebody is putting candlesticks and haggadahs on the table, filling seder plates and arranging candies on trays for dessert.  Somebody is opening up cans of palm hearts for the relish dishes.  Somebody is saying, "Dayenu!" when somebody else mentions that we only seem to have one bottle of Manichewitz.

And great-grandpa Abe's copy of The Ten Commandments is playing.

This year, it's at my house.  Last year, Aunt Genocide's.  As my grandparents are selling their house next month, it will never be at my granny's house again.

But that doesn't matter.

It's not about where you celebrate your seder.  It's not about what you're having for dinner.  It's not about how comfortable you all are when you're crammed around the table.

It's Passover.  It's about celebrating our freedom.

We're free to watch a topless Yul Brynner dust off the sand from his chest with an ostrich feather.

We're free to make batch after batch of candies and cakes and eat them up in a night with the excuse that they aren't perfect.

We're free to joke endlessly about our antique and awkwardly translated haggadahs.

We were slaves in Mizrayim, but today we are free.

It doesn't matter who's house we are in for Passover.  It is always the same.  This year, Aunt Genocide determined that she will pass the ingberlech torch to DD.  I am reserving judgement, I think SI will be the better candidate.  I expect DD will pick up the name card decoration slack when I have moved on to more important tasks.

It is always our family.  Always filled with love, always filled with the same jokes, the same smells, the same foods, the same story.

Once upon a time, we were slaves.

This year, my house.

Next year, in Jerusalem.

What's in a Name?

Future namesakes

Naming Baby X is proving... a little complicated.

When it comes to cultural differences, my husband and I do very well.  We don't have arguments that are fundamentally based on a world view and experience that are different from each other.  Rather, we talk things through and find our common ground.

But baby names?  This is a much trickier area.

You see, M is white.

And I?  Am not.

Our first two babies were much easier to name.

Jewish and "white" are just not the same thing.  I have no frame of reference for "white."  I have a lifetime of experiences of otherness, of being an anomaly among "white" people.  Of being a "token Jew," or of being told by the group of white people around me about every other Jew they've ever known.  Of having my OWN cultural identity and needs completely ignored and marginalized in the face of the culture of the majority... white American culture.  Of "white" people having no idea what on earth I'm talking about when I reference the same basic experiences that all Jewish people share.

I wrote about this extensively once upon a time, for the blog of a Muslim mother I used to correspond with online.  I'm not going to rehash all the same issues, but I'll refer you to a perfect example.

Baby names.

For M, a lot of the names I come up with are strange; they are names he is completely unfamiliar with.  Whereas I have actual people that I know (or have known) and can associate with names like these:

Girls:
Aviva, Talia, Mara, Nava, Simcha, Zohara, Chani, Revital, Hadassah, Freyda, Noa...

Boys:
Dov, Ari, Tzvitka, Chaniel, Naftali, Lev, Yona, Chaim, Misha, Eitan

This is what a Rifka looks like

I can see the wheels spinning sometimes in M's head when I suggest naming a girl "Noa."  His thoughts, although he has the sensitivity never to say such a thing, are along the lines of, "What kind of a weird name for a girl is THAT?"  Keep in mind, M has met a Noa.  She's a regular feature at my family's seders.

Whereas when he suggests a perfectly white-American name- like, Kaylee- my internal response is, "But that's so... white."

There are other baby naming traditions that don't carry between Jews and goyim.  For example, who you can and cannot name a baby after.

In Jewish culture, it's a pretty big insult to name a baby after a living relative.  You name babies for dead relatives, as an honorific and sort of in the hope of passing along some of the beloved departed's traits.  You don't see a lot of Jewish Juniors.  Of course, in M's culture, you name babies after living people all the time.  M's middle name is his own father's name.  Nothing unusual for him, for me it would be inviting the worst of all possible outcomes- replacing the father with the son.  I could never name a child for my husband.

My great-grandma- big Bubbe

This means that, what with both of us having pretty big families, a LOT of names of just plain off the table.

The tradition of passing along family names made coming up with SI and DD remarkably easy.  We had both lost loved ones throughout our lives, and nobody had yet been named for our departed grandmothers and family friends.

SI is named, first, for my great-grandmother.  She died when I was about fourteen, and she was one of my favorite people in the whole world.

SI's middle name comes from my mother's best friend, who was murdered by her boyfriend when I was a child.  I have no real memories of the woman, but my memories of my mother grieving will stay with me for my whole life.  As important to me as my great-grandmother was, I have no doubt that Irene was more important to my mother.  And as I have a lifelong best friend of my own, I know how utterly devastated I would be if I found out something so horrific had happened to her.  In honor of the woman who had been my mother's best friend for most of her life, we gave her name to our daughter.

DD is named for both my grandmother and M's grandmother.  They actually died within the same year, my grandmother from colon cancer and M's grandmother from pulmonary fibrosis.  They were both wonderful women who were much loved, and M and I each remember our grandmother well.  As an added bonus, it was M's grandma's idea to give all of her children the initials "DD," so naming DD... well... DD, was an added honorific to her.

My grandma

Right now, we're operating under the impression that Baby X is a girl.  If Baby X is a boy, it simplifies matters somewhat.  M and I have both lost a grandfather, so we have a few names to work with.  But as for girls' names?

The debate is endless.

I suggest Hadassah, he counters with Scarlett.  I suggest Aviva, he counters with Angela.  I suggest Naama, he says... what?

It is, without a doubt, his least favorite recurring conversation.  He would rather talk about life insurance, or scheduling his next prostate exam.  He hates having this conversation with me.  I, likewise, hate having it with him.  But I can't stop.  Not until we're absolutely sure we can agree on a name.  It's a compulsion I can't shake.

For the time being, we're agreed on something.  Tentatively.  I'm not going to give it away, but it does include an old name from each of our families.  One of M's great-great-aunts (or was it great-great-great grandmother?), and one of my great-great-aunts.

My mother's best friend

I'm not sure it's right, but I'm not sure ANY name is right.  SI and DD had their names presented to us.  I had hoped to have daughters to name after three of those four women since I was fifteen.  I had never considered that I might find myself in need of other girls' names... but I like Jewish names.  I like names that feel to me as though they are connected with my heritage, my history, my culture, and my identity.

M has said that, when we were first dating seriously, he had considered me "white."  Now, he says he knows better.

And we're still learning to get through these cultural differences.  While I'm learning to take things in stride that would be utterly bizarre to my Jewish community, M is learning to take things in stride that are completely foreign to him.

I am a very Americanized Jew.  I am not a terribly religious Jew.  I have blue eyes and pale skin, I speak English extremely well and barely any Hebrew, I cook meat and dairy together for my husband and I am a kosher-by-default vegetarian.  But I am still a Jew.  And, as far as I and my community is concerned, any child of mine will also be- essentially- Jewish.  At least, they will have the opportunity to identify as Jewish, the implications of which are something that almost nobody who isn't born to a Jewish family can fully understand.  They will have the option of being accepted by the community at large as being Jewish.

So if Baby X is a Chani, or a Dov, that won't raise many eyebrows with the Yelenas and Avramis.  But it will for the Lindsays and Williams... which is to say, for M's family.

Baby X, last we saw probably-her

And if Baby X is a Brian, or a Valerie, it won't cause a stir with the Dereks and the Beths.  But it will make the Renas and the Bentzis shake their heads with the understanding that I have abandoned my own community a little more- that I have stepped even farther away from my heritage.  And I confess, I'd be shaking my head with them.

I love M.  And I believe with 100% of my soul that these are not irreconcilable differences.

But holy cow...

Naming a baby is hard.

Pie and Utter Geekery

About a month ago, I participated in an event that, frankly, was a very very VERY bad idea.

This requires a little explanation.  It will all make sense in the end, I promise.

I am a gigantic nerd.  I sometimes wonder how close to the line of true geekdom I fall, because honestly a great deal of my geek cred has been acquired purely by osmosis.

How?  Well, this is my dad.  When I first started "dating," sometime in my mid-teens, I quickly determined my own litmus test for whether or not a guy was too geeky or nerdy for me to spend my time with- if he knew who my dad was, he was out.

So, when it comes to carrying on a conversation about some fine details of geekery, from the history of PayPal to the problems facing any anti-spam effort, I really can hold my own.

That said, my personal computer geekiness only extends to my basic knowledge of HTML and extremely long history with socializing via the internet.

My first comic love.

Of course, being vaguely geeky, even by association, I gravitated towards *real* geeks.  People who build their own server farms, battle robots, or pornography empires.

And there are some elements of nerd/geek culture that are just plain inescapably awesome.

Like comic books.

It wasn't my father who interested me in comic books in the beginning.  No, it was my uncle, who is less of a geek extraordinaire in his own right than he is an expert in something that geeks almost universally consider really really cool.  His area of expertise?  Sexual deviancy is post-Soviet Russian literature.

He despises Jonathan Safran Foer, or at least did after "Everything is Illuminated" was first published.

At any rate, HE was the big comic book geek. And when I was a kid, he decided he had "outgrown" his comic collection.  A decision I expect part of him regrets to this day.  Being the only relatives of "appropriate" comic reading age, my sisters and I inherited the bulk of his collection.  Everything valuable he kept, but our home became refuge to more comic books- almost all in their protective sleeves- than I could have ever hoped to count.  We could have opened a really crappy comic book shop.

At first, I had little interest in the comics.  My closest experience with them was watching some of my younger cousins (on my mother's side) playing with X-Men action figures, and it held absolutely no interest for me.  Until I discovered on one sleepless night, the Mars series.  Scientist Morgana Trace, paralyzed, builds a super exoskeleton with which she is able to explore the strange and dangerous landscape of Mars.

It's really a very cheesy book.  But I loved it.  And I learned that comics might have something to offer me.

One of my first boyfriends later introduced me to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.  A few years later, my uncle bought me my first Love and Rockets book.

There was no turning back.  I still think that the Palomar collection by Los Brothers Hernandez is one of the best books I've ever read.

So, I became a comic book... fan.  Not quite a geek, really.  I never got too into superhero stories.  But I am utterly addicted to Walking Dead- the books, not the show.

Which brings me to my very very VERY bad idea.

A local comic book shop held a pie baking contest.  To the winner?

You guessed it.  Comic books.

I absolutely couldn't resist.  Despite not being able to eat pretty much anything that goes into a pie, I decided to enter.

I started off by shooting myself in the foot.  How?  I spent an entire day emailing the owner of the comic book shop with questions- mostly about my ideas for awesome comic-themed pies.  From what I could tell, this hadn't actually been part of the competition up to that point, but after being bombarded by emails he sent a notice to all of the contestants- the pies must be comic themed.

There went my comic-themed edge.

So I spent the whole afternoon coming up with awesome ideas for comic themed pies.  A collection of Comedian Creme Mini Lemon Pies (with a drizzle of raspberry blood), a Hulk ice-cream pie (mint, of course), a Thing pie (sweet potato and covered in crushed Boston Baked Beans)...  in the end, I settled on two.

The first was my Snow White and Rose Red Charming Cheesecake, inspired by the sisters of both fable and Fables.  This was a real cheesecake- no cream cheese here.  Just mascarpone and ricotta cheeses, with raspberries on one half and white chocolate shavings on the other.

The second was actually M's idea- Rorschach Creme Pie.

The Rorschach Creme Pie was something I had considered, recipe wise, but I hadn't thought of the theme.  I was going to use it to make a Georgia Mud Pie, which is like a Mississippi Mud Pie except that there are dead people coming out of it (because the Walking Dead mostly takes place in Georgia, get it?).  But M's idea was better.

So I made my Rorschach Creme Pie, and my Charming Cheesecake.

They were both amazing.

And, out of about twenty pies, my Rorschach Creme Pie took first prize.  The Charming Cheesecake pulled in at a prizeless #5, but only because meat pies were allowed.  If it had been a sweet pie only kind of contest, I would have taken first and third.  I feel pretty awesome about that.

What makes me feel the awesomest though?

The winning pie- judged barely better than a pie made out of spiced meat (but only then because half of the judges didn't get a chance to taste my pie at all- it had been completely devoured)- was nearly fat free.  And vegan.

...that's right.  My vegan pie beat out spiced turkey pie.  It beat out "Spider Jerusalem Bacon and Swiss" pie. It beat out a "Gotham Night" pecan and bacon pie.

It beat both "Captain American Apple Pie" and "Fantastic Four Apples" pie.

It even beat "Banana: The Last Pie."

So, for those of you who don't believe that a vegan dessert can be just as freakin' delicious as any meaty, fruity, or otherwise creamy pie, eat your hearts out.

...so, why was this such a bad idea?

You might remember that I'm pregnant, and that for me that means I have a gall bladder that can't process fats.  This was a contest of open judging- everyone who paid to enter the event (a paltry $7 that was waived if you brought a pie) was a judge.  That meant that you had to taste as many as twenty different pies.

Oh yeah, this was a bad idea for me.

Even worse?  After making friends of sorts with the owner, he's now having ANOTHER baking contest.  For cakes.

The day after my birthday.

...who thinks they might be in the mood for some Bifrost Cake with Rainbow Bridge Frosting?

Rorschach Creme Pie

2 packages firm silken tofu

10oz semi-sweet chocolate chips (vegan)

10oz white chocolate chips (vegan)

1 3/4 c graham crumbs

1/2 c margarine (vegan)

Chocolate syrup

1. Melt margarine in a bowl.  Mix with graham cracker crumbs.  Press into sides of two pie pans (or one GIGANTIC pie pan, as the case may be).  Set aside.

2. In a blender, blend one package of tofu until mostly creamy.  Add 1tsp-1tbsp water if needed.

3. In a double boiler, melt the semi-sweet chocolate.  Add to blender, and quickly blend with tofu until homogeneous.  Pour into pie crusts until about half full.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 with white chocolate, topping off pie pans.  Only this time, add just a little bit more water.  Just a bit- so that the white chocolate is ever so slightly creamier than the brown.

5. Carefully drizzle chocolate syrup onto the surface of the pie.  Using a toothpick, marble the top of the pie to recreate a Rorschach test.

6. Set pie in fridge to set overnight.

Done.

Easy as award winning vegan pie, right?

Family Train Trip (I think I can I think I can I think I can...)

Train rides are FUN!

Last weekend, my little family found itself in a bit of a pickle.  How to get from Chicago to the Twin Cities and back as quickly as possible for M's grandpa's funeral.

What is normally an eight hour drive would undoubtedly last MUCH longer with the inclusion of one pregnant lady and two potty training toddlers, and taking an airplane would have been SOOOOOOOOO expensive!  Add to that our travel curse, and you get one family that is very reluctant to jump in the car and drive for a whole day without much warning.  Whilst complaining about this lack of options to Poppa, he threw out a suggestion that simply had not occurred to me.

My vision for our entire trip.

"Why don't you take the train?"

...I thought it over.

I used to take the train a LOT.  There is a train that goes pretty much straight from Chicago to my old hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and each time I returned from college for some event or other, that was my method.  I learned that the train can be very... unreliable.  Either it goes perfectly, or it does NOT.  I had days that I would pull into the station before my parents had even left their house to collect me, but then there were other days...  Like when my grandfather was dying, and 20 minutes outside of Ann Arbor we hit a person.  Yes, a person.  Our train was immediately labeled "crime scene," and nobody was allowed off.  For six hours.  It was unbearable.

Sadly, M's only experience with the train had been with me, taking it to Passover with my family in upstate New York.  That is *supposed* to be about 13 hours on the train.  Sadly, it took us more like 19 or 20.  Our return trip from that event wasn't a whole lot better.

Never underestimate the soporific power of "Milo and Otis"

He was skeptical, naturally, about taking such an unreliable mode of transportation to such an important event.  That was when Poppa's quick and able research paid off- for a little more than the cost for one person to fly the round trip, our whole family could get a private four bunk room on the train- including meals- both ways.

We were sold.

We threw together our suitcases, and in a mad rush we boarded a train.

There are some complications when a family with two toddlers attempts to travel without a car.  First of all, car seats.  While they aren't a requirement ON the train, in order to GET to the train, or to get around once disembarking the train, you sort of need them with you.

That, and the train ride was supposed to last about eight and a half hours.  About the same as driving.  Only without the children strapped to their seats.  We grabbed an entire suitcase worth of distractions.  We also naively brought both of our backpacks in order to do homework (HA!), two diaper bags that turn into booster seats, a suitcase full of grown-up clothes, a suitcase full of toddler clothes, a bag of food and drink for the train (Who knew what options would be available for my CRAZY limited gall-bladder diet?  And would the children cooperate and eat it?), our winter coats, and some bedding- in case it was possible to actually put our children to sleep on the train.

It's easier to forgive somebody when you have champagne.

So picture, if you will, my husband lugging three suitcases, a gigantic red canvas bag, two diaper bags, a backpack, and two car seats as I trudge along behind, with a second backpack and two toddlers in tow (each wearing their own backpacks) the mere half a block from our car to Union Station.

I think, in that moment, M may have actually considered divorcing me for having dared to suggest a train ride in the first place.

His bad mood naturally lasted until we had checked two suitcases and the car seats, and was almost completely soothed by a peaceful wait in the special sleeping car waiting area while our girls colored with crayons and I collected him chocolate pastries.

They carried those train schedules with them all day!

The train was, in a word, amazing.  Really.  When things go well on the train, they go really well.  Our trip began, unexpectedly, with complementary champagne.  It was kind of fun the way that every single nook and cranny of the tiny compartment were usable.  It wasn't easy to get us settled into the space, but once we were in?  It was great.  And dinner was surprisingly really good- and totally edible in my current dietary state.  There was also virtually unlimited coffee for M and juice for me and the girls.  That was nice.

The girls loved the train- they kept exclaiming in joy that it was MOVING!  They loved watching the scenery go by out the window.  They even slept for a few hours!  When not sleeping, we read books, watched cartoons on the laptop, and M performed his Yo Gabba Gabba Dancey Dance act (he called it "The Chicken") with the girls' Christmas presents.  Something that certainly can't be accomplished on car trips!



We even took a break in the lounge car, to try to watch "Finding Nemo" where we could plug the laptop in to recharge.  Oddly, none of the outlets in the lounge car worked, but it turned out the outlet labeled "Razors Only!" in our compartment did the trick just fine.  While we were there, another family sent their daughter over to watch with our kids.  It was a little odd- the parents never so much as said "Hello," to us, but they sent their kid to our table and just went about their business.  I think I would have at least... you know... acknowledged the lone mom sitting with two toddlers and a laptop and obviously pregnant before adding another kid into the mix (M was off getting beverages- it took him probably half an hour).  But, as they were probably utterly exhausted as well AND had an infant in tow, I figured I'd just ignore them right back and make small talk with the little girl.

DD, Grandpa, and SI

That little girl?  SI decided she was her new BEST FRIEND.  She inched up to her, practically wrapped her arms around the bigger girl's shoulders (it looked like a, "How YOU doin'?" moment for sure!), and proceeded to show her the train schedule over and over again, pointing at the picture on the front and exclaiming, "We on this train RIGHT NOW!"  It was pretty darn cute.  Although the little girl DEFINITELY didn't appreciate having her name abbreviated to "Ape."

We arrived only forty five minutes late, and Grandpa was there to collect us.  An added perk- it is SO much easier to get to the train station (almost anywhere) than to the airport.  So it was a very quick trip- with car seats!- from the station to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

When I say M's family is huge, I'm not kidding.

We had a chaotic day in the Twin Cities, filled with family and love and much happiness, despite the sad occasion.  It would have made DeLloyd very happy to see all his family together, laughing, eating, and talking over every subject under the sun.

At the crack of dawn, we awoke, and began rushing through breakfast in order to have a repeat of our very peaceful ride from Chicago to St. Paul.  Unfortunately, our train home was a slightly different story than the original.

Before arriving in St. Paul to pick us up, our train got trapped behind a disabled freight train.  So despite our mad rush to get out of the house in order to catch our 7:50am train, we didn't actually board the thing until after 11am.

Playing with Grandma in the *fancy* waiting room

I have to say, waiting around OUTSIDE the train while it goes through a miserable delay is MUCH better than being actually ON the train during the delay.  No comparison.

Our return was in many ways much worse, and in some MUCH better.  On the worse side, the compartment was MUCH OLDER!  Almost everything was *slightly* broken, from the tray table we set the laptop on for movies, to the closet holding our coats, to the bed the girls could sleep/sit on while looking out the window.  We found solutions for just about everything, but it really drove home how important little things are on a trip like that.  Our car attendant on our return trip obviously didn't give a crap about what kind of job he was doing- he tried to get out of bringing us our meal!  I actually had to have a fight with the dining car manager in order to get our food- and a good thing I did!  He was forcing our attendant to bring us our meal, but he had refused to take our order!  He was going to bring me, a vegetarian Jew, a bacon cheeeseburger, and he was going to bring my vegetarian toddlers chicken fingers.  I was pretty freakin' livid.

M's sleeping feet, the sleeping girls, and the
place in which I was to shortly pass out.

He also tried to kick us out of our compartment an hour outside of Chicago so he wouldn't have to stay on after we disembarked to clean it up.  (Yes, he told us that.)  M was much more polite than I was ready to be. He just lied and told him we didn't use any of the bedding, and he could forget about having to change things.

As far as things that were better, the scenery was GORGEOUS, and as it was daytime we could actually enjoy it.  The girls just lay down and slept for almost the entire first half of the journey.  M and I ALSO got to sleep for a few hours!  It was WONDERFUL.  The food was, quite possibly, better- as it turned out my veggie burger and the girls' grilled cheese were just fine, and M thoroughly enjoyed that bacon cheeseburger I wouldn't have had any interest in.  Lastly, it seems that older train cars have more spacious bathrooms.  Believe me, when one of you is pregnant, one of you is a giant, and the other two require assistance... that matters.

Best of all?  The train conductor was trying to make up for lost time from before they picked us up, so we actually spent about an hour less on the train that we otherwise would have.

Me and my girls on the train

Or... maybe.. the REAL best thing was the Red Cap guy back at Union Station who piled us into a cargo carrier, drove us almost all the way to the parking garage, and then waited with me and the girls while M got the car, installed the car seats, and then came to pick us up.

Things will change, of course, once Baby X is in the picture.  But for the time being, I am totally converted.  The train is the only way I want to travel to the Twin Cities and back again.

Even if it means M lugging our entire lives for half a block.