Stealth Jew

So I got myself Bright Sided by Ehrenreich. We shall see if she indeed agrees with my premise that it's silly to expect life, parenting, or anything else to be fun. Roller coaster rides are fun. Mothering is work. Of course, compared to most work, it's pretty good work. I wouldn't call paper pushing "joyful and fun" either. On the other hand, none of the papers I pushed ever pooped in the bathtub.

Speaking of work, a much better blog than this one called Hyperbole and a Half has an entry that I think describes an awful melt-down tantrum frmo the child's point of view. The child wants to eat an entire cake. Her mother, cruelly, prevents her from doing so. The child behaves in such a way as to interrupt the grandfather's party. The child thinks about how the mother will be sorry if she's dead, and so on.

I had no idea my children read blogs.

My children do not eat entire cakes. They eat raw bread dough. They absolutely adore raw bread dough.

When an Orthodox Jew has one of the many millions of little Orthodox Issues that arises in the average life, she calls her rabbi and asks a shaila, question. I suspect (but do not know) that my rabbi has a little asterisk next to my name to remind him that this isn't your average problem. A number of years ago, I was baking the challah and, as is the practice, I set apart an offering of dough with a blessing. Confusingly, the offering is also called challah. We are supposed to burn it. I did not burn it. Munchkin (I assume, it may have been Genome) ate it. I did not know what the practice is when your child eats your challah. Take more and burn that? Burning the child wouldn't work.

The answer, should you be waiting with bated breath, was "don't do anything. But be careful with the child and raw dough when it has eggs in it."

So my children like their baked goods, but they like them unbaked. You wouldn't know it given that they sabotaged my mixer, but there you are. Remind me to come back to the end of the mixer story soon.