In case you’re wondering, I’m the deer.

How’s your summer going?

Leave it to a M.I.A. contributor to resurface only when she needs something!

Fourty-eight hours after turning over my last PTA file and binder to my incoming successor, I was called into our newly reorganized ward’s Relief Society Presidency.  Really?  Can’t a girl catch a break?

I’m now the 2^nd counselor over the meeting formerly known as Enrichment.

What do I need from you? Ideas!  Anyone willing to share your thoughts and experiences?  Especially, what have been your most successful and enjoyable “enrichment” meetings?

I promise to resurface in the near future.

Have I mentioned I’ve been playing a lot of TENNIS?!  I am a testament to a very “old dog learning a new trick.”

‘Cause crab grass? Yeah, could, like, totally rule the world. (more…)

While studying in Germany, I took a trip to Italy. It was a 2 week long trip with a friend, and it was, without question, some of the most fun I ever had in college. Until we got to Florence. (more…)

I’ve mentioned before that we are renting an apartment here in Jerusalem. For the most part, we have been completely ignored, both by our immediate and not immediate neighbors. The kids at the playground, with one exception, have been obnoxious and borderline cruel to my kids, and I can hardly get a single person to make eye contact with me on the street, let alone have a conversation. That’s all fine and good, though. We know we’re not like everybody else in this neighborhood. It’s cool.

Except for our door obsessed neighbor. Who shall remain nameless. Mostly because I don’t know his (or her) name. (more…)

In the bath last night, Abby was playing with her Polly Pocket mermaids, and called to me as I was buried in homework at the kitchen table (the kitchen table is five feet from the bathroom- that’s how we roll in Little House).

“Mom! I want pink hair like my Polly mermaid and like Marissa…”

Looking up from my paper on leitmotifs in musical theater and film, I can see her in the tub, bubbles piled to her shoulders and her prized Polly in her hand hanging over the edge of the tub and dripping into a pool on the floor. Tread carefully… (more…)

On Sunday, J was invited to a impromptu birthday party, which was pretty perfect, as we had no plans and DH was teaching that day. (Remember, the Sabbath is on Saturday over here.) So after I packed him off to have glorious thumb wars and wrestling fights with other 9 year olds and their siblings, Little Sister and I had a little mommy/daughter date in the Old City. (more…)

This trip has been a little hard on Little Sister.  She’s not the greatest sleeper at home, and given that she has had to sleep in lots of various places at various times over the past 4 weeks, she has basically been functioning with low levels of sleep deprivation since we got here.

This means that sometimes she gets, um, insane.

(more…)

One of the things on my bucket list is swimming with dolphins. Like, in the water, able to pet them, really swimming with them.

We are in Eilat today. It’s a city at the very southern tip of Israel, on the Gulf of Aqaba, which is the northern tip of the Red Sea. J and DH took off to Jordan, to have their Indiana Jones moment in Petra. We decided the trip would be hard for Little Sister to make, and that everybody would have more fun if Little Sister and I stayed at the beach. I mean, I’d like to see Petra too, but Dh really, really, REALLY wants to see it, so I was fine with staying behind.

So she and I went to the beach. A beach called Dolphin Reef. Where, as it turns out, you can swim/snorkel/dive with dolphins. (more…)