A busy week with grandchildren

Barry headed back to New York while I stayed in Sharon and had three fun-filled days with the children, who were on winter vacation from school.

On Tuesday, Dina and I took the four children to see The Lego Movie. I wrote a bit about it the other day but I want to expand on that review. I have to admit that I went into this thinking it would largely be a commercial for Legos, and I suppose it was. But the story is ultimately about the conflict (perhaps too strong a word) between the increasingly popular Lego “kits,” which include specific instructions for building a particular item, and the use of Legos for creative building. I am sure that there are many grandparents like us who have invested small fortunes in Lego kits. Quite a few of these Lego kits are kept in our apartment, and we have bought plastic bins in which to store each set and its instruction manual for future rebuilding. Recently Ella has begun to take some apart and build them again. At home, Joshua has received many kits over the past few years, the pieces for which have all been stored together in one large tub (except for the few hundred that Dina discovered Joshua was “storing” under his bed). He often takes out the tub and builds his own designs. The movie was essentially about the tension between these two approaches to playing with Legos. You might think that the Lego folks would want to come down on the side of the kits, because they surely have developed quite a clever and successful marketing approach. But in fact, the ultimate message as I understood it was that both kinds of play are valuable, and that each child has to find his or her own way.

I am not sure the children quite understood the movie on that level, but they certainly seemed to enjoy it, and they ate enough popcorn and candy to make for a very sweet afternoon.

The highlight of Wednesday was baking hamantaschen, the triangular cookies eaten on the upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim, with Dina, Joshua, and Ella. We had a great time; so much fun that I completely forgot to take out the camera! Dina had put together the dough and fillings in the morning, and we spend a few hours making about 100 or so cookies. Most of these went into the freezer for the upcoming holiday, but we enjoyed tasting the “bloopers.”

Yesterday Simmie and I took Eliana and Maya to a relatively new place called “Launch.” What will they think of next? Basically, this is an enormous warehouse-type structure that is filled with trampolines of different sorts, and the children run around from one to the next jumping to their hearts content to the beat of incredibly loud disco music. And to top that off there is an arcade with all sorts of electronic games. We bought just one hour of jumping time which was more than sufficient; much longer and I think we would have all gone nuts. But they did have a great time. The lighting is not terrific but I tried to take some pictures which I have attached here. These give a feel for what the place looks like for those of you who have never seen one of these. Then there are a couple of pictures of Maya that will just bring a smile.

Eliana had plans with a friend in the afternoon so Maya came over and spent a few hours with me. We played a number of games, and she beat me at every one. While Barry tends to allow the children to win, I pretty much play to my ability. The children always cream me at matching (32 pairs of cards spread out face down and players take turns lifting two at a time to find pairs) and Maya quickly beat me three straight rounds of Goblet, a game involving nested cups that I do not believe she had ever played. Then we went looking at the other games we have and she wanted to play QBitz. This is a game that involves 16 dice with different two-color patterns on each side that are used to form pictures shown on cards. When I purchased the game a year or so ago, I accidentally bought the more advanced QBitz Extreme, intended for children over 8 years old. While she was not able to put the patterns together as quickly as I can, she not only did a very good job, but she stuck with it and kept wanting to do another round. We must have played at least half a dozen of the patterns.

Simmie and crew are driving down to New York today to spend the weekend with Ronen’s family. We are having dinner with Dina and family this evening, and then tomorrow Joshua and Eliana will join us for lunch while their parents enjoy an afternoon with friends. Then on Sunday we head back to New York.

It has been a good week. I wish I could get around a bit more easily, but I am so fortunate to have such a loving and patient family who, for reasons I cannot fathom, seem to like having me around with them and work hard to make it possible for me to join in the fun. I could not be more touched or proud.

Love,

Rebecca

No translation needed

Just had to share this hilarious video to start your day! Thanks for sending this along, Evy!

Love,

Rebecca

Nearing the 15,000 mark

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It has been a busy few days. On Sunday we went with Eliana and Maya to see the animated movie “The Nut Job.” The story is about a group of squirrels in search of food for the winter who are attempting a heist of a nut store, and a gang of human criminals trying to rob a bank. The voices are those of some well-known actors, including Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl, Liam Neeson, and Maya Rudolph. As the New York Times review noted, the movie has “more flatulence jokes than anyone deserves.” I doubt the children actually caught most of them. But we had a good time.

The mall where the theater is located has massage chairs that the girls really love. This is definitely in that category of “silly things only grandparents would do.”

On Monday, Simmie, Ronen, and their girls joined Barry, Joshua, Ella and me at the New England Aquarium. We arrived shortly after it opened and it was crowded but manageable. It was extremely cold so we skipped all the outdoor things but did see most of the museum. We took a break in the late morning for the children to have snacks and drinks. By the time we were ready to head back to the exhibits, it was insane! We stayed for another hour or so before deciding it was time to leave. Here are a couple of pictures.

Simmie and Ronen and the girls headed to Brookline for some shopping and dinner, while we went back to Sharon and made dinner for Dina and family.

Today, Barry had to return to New York for a few days. Dina and I took the four children to see The Lego Movie. A.O. Scott really hit the nail on the head in his New York Times review:

The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment. There are fiery chases and hectic brawls, and a crowd of famous voices simultaneously enacting and lampooning the standard cartoon-quest narrative of heroic self-discovery. Pop-culture jokes ricochet off the heads of younger viewers to tickle the world-weary adults in the audience, with just enough sentimental goo applied at the end to unite the generations. Parents will dab their eyes while the kids roll theirs.

Binding “The Lego Movie” together is a “Matrix”-like conceit that turns the whole thing into an allegory about the nature of creativity and the meaning of amusement. As such, it encounters an obvious contradiction, one that bothered the 10-year-old Lego maven who accompanied me to the press screening. The overt message is that you should throw out the manuals and follow the lead of your own ingenuity, improvising new combinations for the building blocks in front of you. But the movie itself follows a fairly strict and careful formula, thwarting its inventive potential in favor of the expected and familiar.

But of course that tension lurks in every box of Lego. Sometimes you want to execute a perfect copy of the thing depicted on the box; sometimes you want to challenge the laws of physics, aesthetics and common sense. Sometimes you want to pull it all apart and throw it on the floor. And sometimes you want to read a book.

It is snowing yet again. But the forecast looks hopeful, with temperatures as high as 50 predicted for Boston by the end of the week. I know I should not complain, having spent ten days in the warm sun of the Caribbean, but I still do. Spring will come none too soon.

Have a good week!

Love,

Rebecca

Toto, we are definitely not in St. John any more!

Snow, and then more snow. But Barry and a couple of neighborhood kids managed to clear our driveway enough to get our car out of the garage on Friday. It was not snowing Friday morning, so we decided to drive up to Sharon. That turned out to be a very good decision. After a lovely Sabbath with our whole family, we are now all back in our respective homes as the heavy snow accumulates around us. Had we waited until Sunday to leave New York, we would have been stuck there until Monday.

Just two more vignettes about St. John.

1.    A couple of weeks ago when we were packing for St. John, I filled the suitcase with pretty much the same things I had always packed: swimsuit, shorts, t-shirts, and a couple of pairs of Crocs. I used to practically live in Crocs, and over the years I had bought them in a wide variety of colors. I chose two pairs: the purple and the pink. I wore sneakers on the plane, and as soon as we got to the villa I changed into Crocs. And then I remembered why I wear them so seldom now: the peripheral neuropathy caused by the vincristine I received in my early cycles of chemotherapy has made them not only uncomfortable but actually a bit painful to wear. So I walked around for the first few days thinking that I really need to get some new shoes if we are going to do this again.

I started wondering why I could not recall complaining about the Crocs this past summer. And then suddenly, on about the third day, it dawned on me: I wasn’t wearing them this past summer! Last spring, remembering how I felt in the Crocs during the summer of 2012, I bought two terrific and very comfortable pairs of leather sandals for the summer, one blue and one red. In the fall, I wrapped them up so they would not get all dusty during the winter, and put them back in their boxes. And that is exactly where they were when we returned to New York.

2.   We both have vivid memories of our first trip to St. John, which I believe was in 2001. We arrived after dark, picked up the rental car, and followed the manager of the villa we were renting along the dark and curvy roads that connect the western part of the island to the east side. It was raining that evening, and the drive was quite stressful. So in all the years we have vacationed on St. John, we have always taken flights that arrive during the day and have never gone back over to the west side of the island at night, although there is far more nightlife in that area than on the east side. Our last night this trip was Tuesday, and there was no music at any of the places on the east side, so we decided to give it another try.

There are two roads that traverse St. John. The one that goes along the northern coast is extremely curvy and hilly, with no lights whatsoever. This is the scenic route that we always take during the day. The other road cuts across the middle of the island. It turns out that this road has lights along the way, and far fewer difficult curves. It was in fact a perfectly reasonable evening drive. We went to a lovely place and heard music. 

So now we have two reasons to go back to St. John: to wear the right sandals and hear even more good music. Not that we needed any excuse….

Meanwhile, we have returned to winter for now. Maybe I should just put on those red sandals and click my heels together three times and say “there’s no place like St. John, there’s no place like St. John….”

Love,

Rebecca

Home again

I must say we have been very fortunate from a timing perspective: we left New York just before a major winter storm, and returned literally hours before the start of another, having missed two similar storms in between. But on the bright side, my tan looks really terrific against that white background!

Our arrival on St. Thomas (there is no airport on St. John) was quite emotional for me. As we began the descent and that familiar island came into view, it was difficult not to cry. In those moments I realized just how much I had feared that St. John was a place to which I could never return.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed making up lyrics to familiar songs. One of my personal favorites was written with a dear Dallas friend about politics in the local Jewish community, to the familiar show business tune. (Note that “shul” is the Yiddish word for synagogue, “gabbai” is a person who assists in running synagogue services, and Yankel is a Yiddish name that I’ve used in place of the actual name of a particular individual in the community at that time.)

It’s fool business, this shul business,

A cruel business, I know.

Everything about it is appalling,

Everything the Gabbai lets them do,

Yankel makes excuses why he’s stalling,

His plans are crawling, my flesh is, too.

They’ll fool people, those shul people,

They’ll smile and say they are cool.

Yankel makes excuses why he can’t behave,

Tonight they’ll come in and rant and rave,

Surely they will drive us to an early grave

Before they build a shul.

The fact that I remember these lyrics thirty years after they were first written (and never to my knowledge committed to paper) is testimony to a combination of factors, including the fact that I was a whole lot younger then, and that I have chuckled about this quite a few times over the years while watching similar arguments in a variety of communities in which we have lived.

You are probably wondering at this point why in the world I was thinking about this and why I wrote about it here. If you know me or have been reading this blog you must have noticed by now that I seldom tell a short story.

We have rented the same villa on our trips to St. John for some years now. There is a guest book at the villa, and early on I started penning songs that I would share in that guest book. This year I had actually written the song before we even went down there, to Carole King’s “Home Again.”

Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever make it back again,

Seemed so far and out of sight.

I really needed a place to come to

Away from the freeze,

Somewhere the sun is warm and bright.

Snow is cold, rain is wet,

Chills my soul right to the marrow.

I won’t be happy ‘til my toes are in the sand again,

‘Til I’m on St. John and feelin’right.

Back at Bella Villa and feelin’ right.

I want to be on St. John and feelin’ right.

We are back in hibernation mode. But I just look at my well-tanned hands and I simply cannot complain. I did use sunscreen, with an SPF of 50+; the sun is that strong!

I hope soon to stop ending with “stay warm and dry!”

Love,

Rebecca

Last full day in paradise

When we first arrived here, I was afraid we had planned too long a stay. Now, as I sit here on this final evening in paradise, I am feeling as if it was not nearly long enough. Such is life!

We had a very nice day at Maho, where we saw two stingrays and a big group of flying fish. I tried to take a video of the fish but it is pretty hard to see. To be honest, I did not know what they were called so I put “jumping fish Caribbean” into Google and was able to read about them. We live and we learn.

A funny thought occurred to us today. On a number of occasions, Barry has run out to the car to retrieve oxygen cylinders for me. Carrying that oxygen around on a Caribbean island may give the impression that he is on his way to a dive (although divers usually have much larger tanks). This got us to thinking that maybe I should be walking around in a wet suit looking like I am about to go on a dive: what better way make supplemental oxygen look cool?

We are not especially looking forward to returning to the cold. We left our coats and boots behind so leaving the airport to get into a taxi will not be fun. But I cannot complain. It really has been a fabulous, warm, fun, and relaxing ten days.  We are grateful that we were able to return to this breathtaking place.

We have long been planning to drive up to Sharon this Friday, but the weather does not look like it will be cooperating with those plans. If not on Friday, we are hoping to drive up on Sunday morning. Barry will need to return to New York for Tuesday through Thursday but I may just stay the entire week, since the children have February vacation.

Keep the warm and sunny thoughts coming!

Love,

Rebecca

Day 8 in paradise

We stayed at the beach all day yesterday, then went out to hear more music in the evening, so I never had a chance to post.

But here are a few pictures. And now, we head off for our last day in paradise.

Is it a pool or is it the ocean? Believe it or not, it’s the ocean!

Sky over St. John

 

Enjoying a baby at the beach – how cool is this?

Here are a couple of pictures taken along the road. It is a single lane road and there is no place to pull over, and they just don’t do it justice.

Love,

Rebecca