Swirling Thoughts #28 - will gallon jugs of petal replace 12-oz. cans of coke? stay tuned!

Tepeche Mode
In our family the S-word is Stupid and the F-word is Fat. I was so hyper-vigilant about keeping these words out of my kids’ collective vocabulary, I would catch them as the sss sound was forming in their mouth and scare the rest of the word back down their throat with a big-eyed scary mommy look. They started to police each other and I would get tattle reports, Rosie said the S-word! Barbara said the F-word. So did you ever have a word you said in another language which would sound so offensive in your native tongue but in the different language is somehow less offensive? We (Bob and I) have some words for the real S- word which we always say in Hebrew and Arabic and we never think twice. But you’d never catch us saying the real S-word in our native English. Hypocritical? I never thought about it until now. My kids picked up the word “tepeche” somewhere in my absence. They taught it to Rosie. They are calling it to each other. My ears are oblivious. Until they can take it no longer and burst with the news: “Mommy!!!! Rosie is saying the S-word in Hebrew!!!!”

How close is too close?
Rosie’s gan is across the street from my house. Exactly across. Yesterday when I was returning from the pharmacy she happened to be in the play yard. Before I even saw her, she noticed me. She started screaming at the top of her lungs. “MOMMY!!! I CAN SEE YOU MOMMY!!! IT’S TIME TO COME PICK ME UP MOMMY!! MOMMY!! WHEN ARE YOU COMING TO GET ME ALREADY!!!” This went on until play time was finished, about 15 straight minutes. I could hear her from inside my house. When I did pick her up she was laughing and laughing. She said “You know why I was calling you, mommy? Because I had to make so I wanted you to come take me to make!”

For the record, I used to shop in a health food store.
Bob’s been begging me to find cans of Coke. Or as Rosie would call it, Cola Cola. For some reason it’s really not so readily available. You can buy one can at a time for 6.50 NIS (more than $1.50) but who wants to buy 12 cokes for $18??? No, we’re drinking lots of Mai Eden water – from the machine and from the bottles I keep getting when I spend a certain amount at the makolet. 300 NIS, remember? I do that a lot so the bottles have started to accumulate. The dairy kitchen nee frying kitchen has become, effectively, a water storage kitchen. Today Bob took notice. The stack of water bottles is taller than him. So the water’s pretty cheap and the fruity drinks started getting expensive. (The Coke never even made it into the equation – poor Bob.) So we started with a very Israeli thing called Petal. It’s a sugary syrup in different flavors. You add it to the water to make a fruity flavored (sugar) water. There’s, of course, Grape Tylenol flavor and then there’s Raspberry flavor and Apple flavor. That’s all we’ve tried so far but when I noticed gallon jugs of Petal in the makolet today, I feel like I was glimpsing my future.

In pursuit of oot.
It’s like last summer all over again. I found the prune juice, the cranberry juice, I substituted plum jelly for prune butter – how different could they be? Apricot jam for apricot butter, lemon juice and apple sauce were no problem. Two hours on the fire and as it was cooling the butcher showed up. Guess who else carries a gun? He unpacked my order with me and gave me his father’s phone number and suggested I call his father in the morning to get a very good recipe to use with the brisket I ordered. I’m sitting here on the couch playing “bus” with Becky and she keeps reminding me I’m supposed to be cooking for Shabbat. She got a little excited when I told her there would be lahamagine. I’ll have to end here.