Eliana returns to Blogger

Hi everybody! You might remember me, Eliana, from a post a year ago. AND I’M BACK! (In New York, I mean) Today is day 2 in Camp Nana-Sabba. Today I wasn’t feeling so good, so instead of going on the Bronx zoo zipline, we stayed at home. (Mostly) First, I ate some yogurt and then we assembled my Drone, which I got at the Liberty Science Center after my plane ride. (yes, plane ride!) It was so cool! Check out this pic and vid of me flying it! 

Then my Sabba and I went to Key Food and Target. There, we bought a lot of foods (Including the new Oreo O’s cereal) At Target, we bought two art kits: A marker maker (I made 8 markers for my cousins, Julia, Noah, and Ella (and Josh can have too, but I bet he’d want to play basketball instead) and A Rock Set, for the Kindness Rock Project. It literally said to hide the painted rocks on the box! I am going to use half the rocks to hide, and half to give to family in person. My Nana snapped some great pics:

Now we are ordering Carlos and Gabby’s (Steak and spicy fries for me!) and then I’ll take a jacuzzi bath, then watch the new Andi Mack!

Peace out!

Eliana

Four fun-filled days redux

This past week we had a sort of déjà vu experience: Julia and Noah visited us in New York for four days. It was not precisely a repeat of visits from their two older siblings ten years ago, but it still felt a lot like something we had done before.

Not all six of us were together the entire time. Barry was away at a meeting in the UK until late Wednesday evening, so only joined us on Thursday. Aaron was with the children and me only for Monday, while Dina attended a meeting for educators in Cedarhurst. Then Dina and I were with the children for Tuesday through Thursday.

On Monday, Aaron and I did a few local activities with the Julia and Noah.

On Tuesday, Dina and I took them to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. There was quite a bit for them to do and they really enjoyed it.

On Wednesday, Dina and I took Julie and Noah to the Westchester Children’s Museum. It is a relatively small, modest place but was actually perfect for these little ones, and they had a great time. To Julia’s right you will see a pink fish on which she wrote her name, a “prize” for successfully creating a small object that was able to fly in a wind current.

Then on Thursday, with Barry back, we headed over to the Bronx Zoo. The weather could not have been more perfect, but the downside was that the zoo was incredibly crowded with scores of large camp groups. It was only towards the end of our day, when we needed to get moving along, that we discovered something we had never visited while there: The Children’s Zoo. By the time we started having grandchildren spending time in New York, they had outgrown this. But it turned out to be more much extensive and delightful than we had ever imagined…a long and winding tour through an entire section devoted to young animals.

  

And no such outing with Sabba is complete without a stop at the Gift Shop!

I even found a video featuring the children's section on the zoo’s web site.

They say that all good things must come to an end. We hope this was only a beginning of many more fun times in New York with these two little grandchildren!

Love,

Rebecca

Eighth grade

You might think that a film focusing on the lives of a group of eight grade students would be of particular interest to the grandparents of a recent graduate of eighth grade. While it is at the same time both a charming and a painful portrayal of the lives of a group of 14 year olds, the children in this film are living in a rather different environment from our grandchildren. Still, the main character, a girl named Kayla (played by the young actress Elsie Fisher) faces many of the same trials and tribulations faced by young teenagers everywhere.

One thing that watching this film made me realize is the extent to which the easy availability of the internet via small hand-held devices has made the lives of teenagers more challenging than ever. While in some ways these tools help them to maintain connections to a broader universe, they can also become quite overwhelming. Kayla spends much of her time either creating her own internet videos in which she shares her thoughts on a variety of topics or watching those of others. It is not clear who if anyone is watching the material she is posting, but creating these posts at least gives her the feeling that she is communicating important and deep insights.

The story takes place during the final week of middle school classes. To prepare for the transition to high school, each of the students is paired and spends a day with a high school senior. Kayla and the charming Olivia become fast friends, but Kayla soon has to acknowledge to herself that she may not be quite as ready to deal with more mature relationships in her future than she might have thought.

All in all, it is quite an endearing film, particularly if you have any junior high schoolers in your life.

Camp Ramah posted some great pictures of Joshua playing frisbee.

And here are a couple of the July 11^th visit to Six Flags.

Have an enjoyable weekend.

Love,

Rebecca

A quick update

It has been a quiet week, and I suddenly realized that I have not posted during the past seven days, so thought I would just check in today.

Last Sunday was a magnificent day with moderate temperatures and low humidity so we headed off to Governor’s Island. It is a ten minute ferry ride from lower Manhattan to the island, but most of the activities are only open on the weekends and in any case the drive down to lower Manhattan would be no fun on a weekday. We caught the first ferry over and spent a few hours walking around (technically, Barry walked and I rode). Here are some of the views from the island. There were a lot of people visiting that day but it is fairly large so did not feel terribly crowded. There is a paved walk around the entire perimeter that is about two miles long.

Almost every day, the camps where our grandchildren are spending this first month of vacation post pictures on their web pages. There are literally hundreds of pictures and I try to keep up with going through all of them to find good ones of our grandchildren. Here are some nice ones I have found over the past week or so since I last shared pictures on the blog.

It comes as no surprise that almost all of the pictures of Joshua feature some sort of ball in his hands or in mid-air!

Here are a couple of Maya; the first one is with one of her Sharon friends.

Ella seems to be spending a lot of time honing her artistic skills, but she’s also having fun with the camp-wide activities.

Hope everyone is having a nice summer!

Love,

Rebecca

Happy July 4th

I hope everyone had a nice July 4^th holiday.

It’s been quite hot and humid in New York for the past few days so the best thing we could find to do was to see a couple of movies.

First, we saw “Three Identical Strangers.” This documentary tells quite an incredible story about a set of triplets who were born to an unmarried woman in 1961 and given up for adoption to three separate families. In 1980, when one of the three started college, he was puzzled to find that many people on campus seemed to know him but were calling him by a different name. It turned that they knew his twin brother, and after that they found out that these two were the result of the birth of identical triplets. The documentary includes many clips of interviews with the three young men and traces their lives both before and after they discovered each other. While they were initially thrilled to have found each other, unfortunately, the ending is not entirely happy. All of them had emotional problems and one of the three took his own life. The documentary talks about the efforts to gain more information about the circumstances of these adoptions but many of the records are to remain sealed for years to come, so we may never know all of the sad details, or even just how many children were involved in the “experiments” that involved other children placed with families by the Louise Wise adoption agency.  

The second film we saw was called “Leave No Trace.” This film received a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It tells the story of a man named Will (played by Ben Foster) and his daughter who goes by the nickname Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie). Will’s wife/Tom’s mother had apparently died when Tom was quite young, and Will, a veteran whose experiences left him deeply troubled, and Tom lived in relative isolation for many years, moving from one temporary abode to another. The acting, particularly 18-year-old McKenzie, is quite impressive. But it is quite a sad film to watch.

I have been trying to look through camp pictures every day and have been able to catch many pictures of our grandchildren having lots of fun. I am a bit reluctant to post a lot of pictures here because they include other campers whose families probably want their privacy. But here are a few.

I have another treatment scheduled this Friday. We have not yet been able to see the actual report but Dr. Iyer (oncologist) wrote

I took a look at the scan and it looks like the lymph nodes that the cancer had gone to have shrunk down to normal size, which is great news.

Sounds like pretty good news to us!

Love,

Rebecca

If you enjoy eating meat

Full disclosure first: I have not eaten any meat or chicken for almost 30 years. We were living in Sharon at the time I finally stopped. Although I had never been a big meat eater and perhaps toyed with the idea before then, we had a number of friends in the Sharon community who were vegetarians, and that convinced us that it was possible. Although Dina and Barry both continued to eat meat, Simmie has stuck with it, even with a husband who is a devoted meat eater. I do eat fish occasionally but otherwise have never had any desire to turn back.  

If you enjoy eating meat and chicken and want to continue to do so, you will probably not want to see the new documentary “Eating Animals.” The film, directed by Christopher Dillon Quinn, is based on the 2009 Jonathan Safran Foer book of the same name and is narrated by the actress Natalie Portman.

Even if you only consume meat and chicken infrequently, you probably do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about the details of how the animal goes from the field or the cage to your local butcher or grocery store. The truth is that there is no way to completely avoid the realization that eating meat and chicken means taking of life, and economic considerations mean that the animals’ lives are far from idyllic. But providing safe food at a cost most families can manage is no easy feat, and the suffering of the animals is generally accepted as part of the way we humans have lived since the beginning of time.

So, while I do recommend this documentary, I can certainly understand that, in my case, they are preaching to the choir. And I imagine that the vast majority of folks who will see it have a similar outlook.

Meanwhile, I was able to find a couple of pictures of some great-looking kids on the Camp Ramah website. I am waiting to get the login information for Camp Yavneh to see if I can find pictures there as well.

Have a great weekend!

   

Love,

Rebecca

26 June 2018

Red letter date

It was a very busy few days and I am only now (mid-day Tuesday) sitting down to post about this past weekend. My usual routine is to start a new document with the date at the top. When I found myself typing “26 June” I realized that today is a sort of red-letter day in my personal history. It was on this date in 1969 that my family (parents and four siblings) left our home in St. Louis to relocate in West Hartford, CT. Ten years later, on the 26^th of June in 1979, I was hospitalized with pre-eclampsia during my second pregnancy. Fast forward to 1989 when I had my first bout of pneumonia that eventually led to the realization that I had a rare form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Despite the traditional Jewish belief in the permanence of something that has happened three times, I am glad to say that the last two occurrences of the 26^th of June in a year ending in 9 were more or less uneventful.

Meanwhile, we had a lovely day with Maya on Friday the 22^nd. We took her to “Rock On Adventures” where she had a lot of fun climbing. 

Then we went to “Monster Mini Golf.” We then returned to our apartment where we made her some macaroni and cheese and ate while watching the movie Coco. When the movie ended we headed over to Friendly’s for some ice cream. It was a busy and fun day.

On Sunday morning Barry and I took Julia to the Providence Children’s Museum. She is just the right age for this now so it was great fun. 

We headed back to her house for lunch and all ate sandwiches on fresh bagels Dina had picked up that morning. Then Barry and I took Joshua and Ella to a local movie theater where Barry and Joshua saw “Solo” while Ella and I saw “Incredibles 2.” To be honest, I think the movie could have been much better with a lot less violence, but when I shared that thought with Ella I could see she did not see the movie as having been particularly violent. Is it just a matter of what we become accustomed to seeing?

Our four older grandchildren are now all at summer camps for a month. We are hoping to have some time with Julia and Noah while their older siblings are away. We have plans for the four older ones to come to New York in late July and August for what they call “Camp Nana/Sabba.” With all four going to camp we could not schedule four separate weeks this year, so Maya and Ella are coming to New York together. They share a lot of interests in food and activities and their relationship as cousins is far less intense than sisters tend to be. It should be a lot of fun.

Enjoy the nice weather!

Love,

Rebecca