Yet Another Gilbert Update

Hi everyone - I hope you all had a good week.

Our week started with the Yankees baseball game on Sunday, as I mentioned. As expected the game was shockingly dull - they almost never manage to actually hit the ball, so you are basically just sitting there watching two people play catch for hours on end. It is quite incredible that the sport is so popular. On the other hand the atmosphere at the stadium was great and we felt very authentically American. We purchased two huge foam fingers and everyone had a kosher hotdog, so it was a positive experience, but not necessarily one that needs to be repeated.

The rest of the week was fairly straightforward. Yom Kippur in Teaneck was uneventful - it turns out that not eating is pretty much the same wherever you do it. Shul was much the same as BKOA, only with a few more Israelis. We fondly reminisced about Yom Kippur in Raanana. In particular we greatly missed  the liberating feeling of roaming up and down the middle of Shwartz Street, dodging crazed cyclists.

As this is a time of stock-taking, we have been giving some thought as to how things are going here in general. The kids are all very upbeat and are still enjoying school. Their British accents are still intact, though I shuddered last night when Eitan commented dismissively about an extra-curricular course in school for which "you don't get any extra credit" - a worrying step on the slippery slope towards American-ness. Tzofia is delighting in winding me up by pronouncing Hebrew words with a thick American accent, like "Rosh Hashana" and "shofar" and "etrog" with an "o" as in "pope" rather than in "pop", and the dreaded "loooolav".

In contrast, Leora is conducting a one-woman campaign against using American terminology in the house. She is particularly adamant that "maths" is plural, and I for one applaud her for that. Maya is embracing the American capitalist experience and appreciated the higher rates paid by the US tooth fairy this week. She's also learning all about the upcoming elections, the 50 US states and she has a weekly lesson on the stock market! There is something a bit disconcerting about hearing your eight-year old talk about share prices, ticker symbols and dividends.

In an uncharacteristic display of organization and forethought, we put up our sukkah on Sunday, a full week before it was strictly necessary. Well done Gilberts! Tomorrow we will decorate it and put up the s'chach. But we are sad to be missing our annual tradition of terrorizing the BKOA kids in our sukkah as part of the shul Sukkah Hop. However, Leora has invited a bunch of her friends here on Monday as part of their own unofficial sukkah hop, but she has made Avrom swear that he will not try to engage them in any of his games, and preferably not actually try to interact with them at all. Parents can be very embarrassing, you know.

Today marked a mini-breakthrough in our absorption here, as we hosted guests for a Shabbat meal for the first time. We were pleased to have two of Avrom's old school-friends and their families over, so we could all have a good whinge about America together. Unfortunately, one of them is married to an American so we had to tone it down a bit. It was a great thrill to use our fancy dining room for the first time, and I was relieved there weren't any hotplate-related disasters.

That's all our "news". Be in touch and tell us some news from your neck of the woods. Or write a comment down below. Meanwhile, we wish you all a fun Sukkot, with much palm branch waving and booth dwelling! חג שמח!