Summer Vacation is No Picnic for a Child with Autism

By Dana Meijler for Kveller

Summer vacation is upon us.

All over Facebook I see statuses of parents dealing with school being out. Grateful posts about not having to pack lunches quickly turn into posts about the hassles of shlepping kids to baseball practice or kids being underfoot saying, “I’m bored” 600 times a day and in between happy vacation photos and day trips and amusements parks.

In other words, the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of life when you are a parent.

As the parent of a special needs child, I recognize these irritations but honestly, I also do my share of eye rolling when I read stuff like this. It’s tough not to shake my head when some parents’ biggest problems are that they cannot decide how many pairs of flowered underpants their kids need to pack to go to Jewish sleep-away camp for two weeks. It sometimes makes me cringe when I read stuff like this, not just because I think of friends who struggle financially and aren’t in the position to be able to pay to send their child to be cared for by others for two weeks. Or those, like me, whose kids just can’t participate in things like summer camp, because their needs are so specialized and they just need more attention and care than they can get in most summer programs.

Look, it would be great if I could be a bigger person. I don’t begrudge anyone anything but when I read that someone’s biggest challenge is whether to buy the BMW SUV or the Escalade and this is presented like Sophie’s Choice in the blogosphere, without one word of gratitude for the position they’re in, it’s hard to take what they have to say seriously.

I suppose this means I am not a bigger person, okay. Well, I can live with that.

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Surviving the Alien Apocalypse—and a 26-Hour Road Trip with Four Kids

By Michelle Tauber for Raising Kvell

It happened two miles from our house, six minutes into our drive, moments before we’d even merged onto the highway.

“Are we there yet?”

Oh, but I was ready. A decade and four children into my parenting career, I’d honed my car-trip tactics with exacting preparedness: individually packed snack tubs; new markers with ready-to-be-filled blank journals; puzzle books; a bribe bag of marshmallows; kid-sized neck pillows for comfortable napping. (No movies. Our one old-school road rule.)

“Are we there yet?”

The puzzles were boring, the markers lost their caps, the marshmallows underwhelmed and no one felt like napping. The minivan was restless, and we had 13 more hours to go.

I looked at my Kindle, desperately wishing I could disappear into the buzzy new YA bestseller I’d downloaded just before we left.

“Who wants to hear a story about aliens taking over the earth?”

It turns out, everyone did. I started reading aloud Rick Yancey’s The Fifth Wave, and before I’d finished the first page, the car had fallen silent. Even the 4-year-old was rapt. In the driver’s seat, so was my husband.

I’m a dedicated read-alouder, having attempted a British accent through all 4,100 pages of all seven Harry Potter books—twice, to my two oldest sons. I’ve read Charlotte’s Web in Starbucks, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 in line at the post office and Percy Jackson at the dentist’s office. But my favorite place to read aloud is in the car. Everyone’s captive.

Still, I hadn’t planned on reading this book. On page 10, the teenage heroine, Cassie, encounters a dying man and refuses to save him. “Blood dribbled over his bottom lip and hung quivering from his stubbly chin,” Yancey writes. “His teeth shone with blood.” I winced as I read it, watching my 5-year-old son’s eyes grow wide in the rearview mirror.

“Guys, this is creepy. Why don’t we stop?”

“Nooooooooooooooooooo!”

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I Cheated My Sons Out of a Jewish Education

By Alina Adams

My oldest son graduated from the 8th grade last week. His father and I picked this particular school for its academic rigor. By the time his nine years there were up, my son had visited England, passed Algebra 2, read Virgil (in Latin), played Katherine in a full staging of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and drawn a map of Europe freehand, including mountain ranges and bodies of water, with only the latitude and longitude as guidelines.

We were ecstatic about his education and how well it prepared him for the future.

Though the school is ostensibly non-denominational, their crest does feature a cross. When my son inquired about it, he was informed that the cross represents all religions. (He thus proceeded to refer to it as The Cross of All Religions for the past several years. It was funny the first time. Not so much the 74th.)

Up through 6th grade, in addition to regular school, I also sent my son to Hebrew School twice a week for two hours each. It made for a long day–almost 12 hours in total, but I felt it was necessary. By the 7th grade, however, his schedule became so full with secular academics that we ended up dropping Hebrew School, trying to make up for it with weekly Shabbat services at our temple, instead.

Because we were so happy with the school for our older son, we sent our younger one there, as well. However, as it’s an all-boy school, that wasn’t an option for our daughter. Based on my experience with the cross-town rush from one site to another, I insisted to my husband that we send her to a Jewish Day School, so she could get everything in one place. (Of course, this being New York City, my wanting her to attend a Jewish Day School did not necessarily mean we’d be accepted to one; so we did look broadly, just in case.)

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How Many Shabbat Candles Does a Divorced Woman Light?

 By Mayim Bialik for Kveller

This post is the last entry in Mayim’s month-long series about the Jewish aspects of divorce.

As a child, I lit two Shabbat candles with my mother every time she lit Shabbat candles. I felt like a little Ima (mother), like they make you pretend in preschool or kindergarten Hebrew school. It’s practice, you know. For when you are a “real” Ima. Imas light two candles.

When I got married, I had not been consistently lighting Shabbat candles for years. After leaving my parents’ home and going to college, I stopped, but I would light them with the other girls at Hillel when I attended services there and looked forward to a day when I would light them as a married woman.

I bought antique Victorian candlesticks for my wedding. I was not the typical Jewish girl so I didn’t buy the typical expensive silver kind that many religious girls dream of.

Lighting candles as a married woman was very nice and gratifying. I felt I was creating light for me and my partner in a sacred space. When my first son was born two years after I was married, I added a small candle for him, as is the custom; one for each additional child. That first time I lit that little candle for my son was a very special Shabbat. My husband and I blessed him so that he be like “Menasseh and Ephraim,” and we stumbled over the Hebrew, so new to both of our lips.

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How to Vacation Without Your Kids Without Missing Them the Whole Time

 By Ronnie Koenig for Kveller

“I want to hug that couple’s baby. Is that weird?”

I asked my husband this as we are sat poolside at our condo last year in the Turks & Caicos. Little Man and Bun Bun were 9 months old at the time and were staying with Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie while we took some much needed R&R. I was thrilled to be away, but suddenly, here was this little blonde Austrian baby-man, a doppelganger for my Little Man, and all I wanted to do was scoop him up in my arms, give him belly kisses, and maybe even wipe his cute little nose boogies.

Yeah, that wouldn’t be weird.

Luke and I were lucky in that we got to do a good deal of traveling before we became parents to the twins. We slurped over-sized gelatos in Sorrento, walked on a glacier in Alaska, and lounged on a black sand beach in Hawaii. The concept of a getaway BT (before twins) meant taking a break from our jobs and the stress of city life. Nowadays, the thought of vacationing sans Little Man and Bun Bun seems like a blissful relief from our duties as servants.

Sure, I enjoyed the requisite pina coladas and the post card-perfect sunsets in Turks & Caicos. But I also spent a good deal of time missing Bun Bun and Little Man. Austrian Little Man was on vacation with his parents, and they had brought grandma along to help. Brilliant! Why hadn’t we thought of that? These good Austrian parents were making blissful memories by the pool while I was on my laptop with a weak internet connection, Skypeing a grainy outline of my son and daughter who by then had probably learned how to make themselves a bowl of Cheerios and forgotten all about me.

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Jews for Hearth and Home

 Old men with sidelocks and stethoscopes, violinists in black suits and hats, humpbacks with big noses and prayer shawls. Such is the population not of Kazimierz, Krakow's historically Jewish district, but of the knickknack and souvenir shops lining its cobblestone streets.

For years, these "lucky" Jewish figurines have been objects of fascination and revulsion for Jewish tourists to Krakow. As part of this year's Jewish Culture Festival, an event which has been drawing Poles and foreigners to the city for 23 years, the Ethnographic Museum will host "Souvenir Talisman Toy," an interactive exhibit exploring the many meanings of these figurines, opening a dialogue inspired by the confluence of tourism, superstition, nostalgia, and craft.

"Souvenir Talisman Toy" includes an utterly absorbing trilingual (English, Polish, and Hebrew) website that asks visitors to upload their photographs of Jewish figurines and respond to others', posing questions like: "Are they religious figures?" and "How are they similar to antisemitic imagery?"

Now that Krakow is experiencing a "Jewish Jewish Revival," with the deepening involvement of Jewish Poles (and Poles with Jewish backgrounds) in contemporary Jewish life, we're starting to wonder: Will the flesh-and-blood and the wooden move out of nostalgia to create something new?

- Sarah Zarrow

I Need to Stop Yelling at My Kids

By Yael Armstrong

Occasionally I like to think about the kind of mom I want to be and the kind of mother I actually am.  Am I calm and compassionate? Overprotective?  Who do my boys see?

Last week when I asked myself this question it was at the end of a very long day. I was tired from spending hours at the park, then coming home to a house that needed cleaning and followed around by two little boys who wanted me to entertain them but were soon content to entertain themselves by messing up whatever I’d just cleaned. The day ended with both boys refusing to eat what I’d made them for dinner. A momentary food fight ensued and I yelled at them to stop it. At bath time they splashed and shrieked and the headache that had been holding itself at bay throughout the day burst into my temples around the time that the oldest pushed the youngest down and they both started to cry. At bedtime they wanted to read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The irony was not lost on me. I put them to bed and they got up six times until standing over dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, I yelled for them to lay down and go to sleep.

Somewhere between the last dish and cleaning up the living room for the fourth time that day I realized what it was that I needed to change. I have become a mother who yells to get her point across. Throughout the day, at the park when someone wouldn’t come when it was time to go, or at home when someone didn’t want to eat, I asked them nicely to stop, to listen, then I inevitably hit my limit and was finished. I no longer cared why they didn’t want to do something, I wanted them to do it my way and stop whining about it. End of story. I stopped seeing the 4-year-old who was trying to figure life out and needed a little guidance, and only saw that I was tired and annoyed.

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