In Her Shoes

So my photojournaling continues with this image from Saturday that really speaks for itself. Here, Lexie – never one to bore her parents by always taking the expected route – examines the eternal question, “Is there really a good reason why shoes should only be worn on feet?”

This silly little action captures a signature trait that I love in Lexie and really, most kids. They’re just so new to the world that the answer “because we’ve always done it that way” just isn’t enough for them. They want to learn for themselves.

Sure, it would be better if she would take our word on questions like, “Why can’t babies run into the street to get a closer look at the car?” But for the most part, I get a huge kick out of watching her make her own sense of her surroundings – even if her answers don’t always make sense to me.

Kodak Moments

So I had this idea that it would be fun to take a photo of Lexie every day doing something funny, something cute, something quintessentially her … or just something unremarkable yet adorable all the same. Here are a few from the last few days:

Sunday, 9/12: Watching football with Daddy. Andy put the barrette in (not surprisingly, I’ve had a bit of trouble with it) – we were trying to get it far back enough so that she didn’t notice it and pull it out. At any rate, the child is transfixed by football, probably at least partially because it’s pretty much the only time the TV is ever on when she’s around. But we have had baseball and other shows on occasionally, and football is definitely her favorite. The girl is hard core, and destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps as two-time fantasy football champion (and counting!).

B’Rosh Hashanah (or, Chicken Soup for the Soul)

Last night after Lexie went to bed, Shelly and I made a couple of gallons of chicken soup (yup, overdid it again) for the pre-Yom Kippur dinner this weekend. Tonight, as I scrubbed one of the stockpots, the scent of the soup wafted up to my nose and for a second, I was back in my grandmother’s kitchen.

I don’t know why it didn’t happen yesterday, when the air in the kitchen (and most of the house) was thick with the aroma of soup, but whatever the reason, the memory struck me hard tonight, and it was bittersweet. It’s been several years since both my grandmother and grandfather – my mom’s parents, who we always celebrated the Jewish holidays with – passed away, and it feels like so long ago that I stood in their white-tiled kitchen, inhaling that same comforting scent.

It’s not just that I always miss them around the holidays, as people always tend to do with loved ones who’ve passed away. It’s that the holidays just aren’t what they used to be in our family, and I know that I – and Shelly, and probably everyone else – miss all the old rituals, the traditions that were so ingrained  in me growing up that I can still picture the scenes in my mind like it was yesterday.

It always started with the walk to temple, on mornings I always remember as cool, gray and damp. We’d meet at my grandparents’ house, the same one where my mom grew up, and parade the few blocks over in small groups. Some of us carried the well-worn, maroon prayer books with our families’ last names penned across the edges of the pages; others brought the blue velvet bags embossed with silver Hebrew writing and decorations that held the tallis (prayer shawls) that belonged to my dad, uncles and grandfather.

Bonus Time

Since I’ve become a mom, I look forward to non-weekend days off from work even more. Every extra hour of daytime that I’m not working means the chance for bonus time with Lexie. It’s amazing how much a few more hours with her makes a difference to my happiness and sanity, even in the scheme of a whole week.

Today was one of those days. It’s Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year, for all the unaware goyim out there), and I took the day off to go to temple and spend time with the family. Of course, we weren’t planning to actually bring Lexie to services. Sure, some people certainly do bring young children and even babies, but a) I’m not that hard core and b) I wouldn’t punish myself, or the rest of the congregation, in that manner.

There are some one-year-olds who could sit quietly through most or at least some fraction of a two-hour temple service, but Lexie is most certainly not one of them. I’d give her three, maybe five minutes tops of sitting angelically on someone’s lap before she either crawled down to go tearing through the aisles, started loudly calling out “ball” upon spotting anything remotely resembling a circle in the near vicinity,  launched into a tantrum because she wanted to tear out the pages of the prayer book and we wouldn’t let her, and/or started hungrily chewing on a stranger’s yamulke or  the fringes of someone’s tallis.

So you can see why the plan was, instead, to have Jennifer spend the morning with all three of the girls as usual and then bring them to meet us for lunch after services. But since we didn’t need to leave for temple until 9:30, for the early part of the morning Lexie was all mine.

Hail to the Queen

Lexie is nothing if not an original.

Last Saturday, she spent a splendid morning romping around the park with her little neighborhood friends. Grace, Parker and Payton were all well turned out, adorable as can be in their coordinated summer outfits and shoes.

Then there was Lexie. She did her climbing, running and sliding clad in a most unusual getup:

1) pajamas (the typically loud baby kind, this particular incarnation consisting of white pants dotted with multicolored hearts and a blue shirt that spells out “LOVE” in colored letters),

2) hot-pink sandals, and (of course)

3) her crown.

OK, so the first two selections say more about me than they do about her (why change her from her pajamas just to walk down to the farmer’s market – our original plan – and why buy a second pair of summer shoes when she loves the sandals so and will grow out of them soon enough?). But the crown is all Lexie.