Things we need to get used to

I meet Doppelgangers all the time. At my age, everyone you meet, fits into a category of  people that you already know. There are just not that many people in the world. This mother of two girls who I see at school is my Aunt Marla who has two boys. They are about 20 years apart from each other, but it's definitely her all over again.
I see Leah Post (a highschool/college student in Seattle) in almost every highschool girl.
My neighbor is my old friend Tova Cabessa (not really, just reminds me so much of her). I'm still waiting to meet all of you guys, I'll let you know when I do. It's great, when I meet someone new, I already feel like I know them. The problem is when I start treating them like the other person...
Someone came to my door with cookies on Erev Shabbos, and I thought "Numie Skaist, ok I know you." And then Menucha said, "You look like my old PreK teacher; Morah Numie." So I'm not the only one. Oh, the funny part was that she answered, "Believe it or not, I KNOW Numie Skaist."

Not sure if I mentioned this part yet, as my brain is still in Seattle. Did I mention how much I love the people here? I may be feeling extremely mental lately, but it has nothing to do with Seattle, it's probably the unsettledness of my house and my kids. Anyway, the people are so wonderful. Every family has at least 7 kids and most have more. This woman on my block who is skinny as anything (besides for her big pregnant belly) has 11 kids bH. Her kids are little teeny pishers and so cute. Her sister who lives under me as six and she's my age. Their other sister has only 5, but two of them are less than a year apart and another is only 16 months younger than that. They come from a family of 14. I've always wanted to see how big families work and now I'm right in the middle of things. I'm just in awe of these mothers. How DO they do it. On Shabbos I met a Bubby and a Zaidy walking with their new baby grandson. Later the bubby introduced herself, she's the mother, not bubby and she has ten others at home. My whole image of her relaxing with the Zaidy and enjoying their baby grandson flew away.

On the last day of Shavous, we heard a rumor that there was a brochos party at someone's house. All the girls all over the block started talking about it. I kept trying to find the source, is it true, how does everyone know? The girls said yeah, this is how you find out about things.
So I took my girls at 6pm and slowly we picked up girls all along the way. They were just walking and started walking with us. We had a humongous group by the time we got there. I just looked around at my shmoozing girls, surrounded by beautiful, frum girls and wanted to sing my praises to Hashem. I can't believe a place like this exists! And it does, and we live here! A place that has such a strong  bond between all the frum girls, they all know eachother and hang out and are really close.
Today, Thursday, we had 3 girls over doing homework with Menucha. Then 3 little kids came knocking at 3 separate times asking if it's a good time for them to come over. My downstairs 7 year old boy saw everyone coming in, so I invited him  in too and he hung out past dinner. The old joke is real here -- where we sit down at the table for dinner and say, "Hey, who's kid are you?"

It's overwhelming but it's something I've always wanted, so I need to work on it. I always had this image of being the home that everyone comes to. Having a swinging front door open to all the neighborhood kids. That was the image I had before I got married. Suddenly I'm thrown into it, my door really is always open, nobody remembers to close it. It's down a flight of stairs so I can't keep track of it being closed. So yes, I feel very stressed out most of the time - but it's because there's a lot we need to get used to.

My children need to get used to leaving the house 3 times a day and walk about ten minutes to school. Penina needs to learn that this happens often and she's going to have to sit still and enjoy the walk. Hubs need to learn that when he comes home from a long, hot day of work, the house will be full of children who are not his.
I need to learn that there'll be a mess that needs to be cleaned up every single day. And if I want people to continue to use my house as a hangout, I need to have more food that people can eat (they all keep cholov yisroel and some keep pas yisroel) and have more games geared towards a group.
Penina needs to learn how to be a person on her own, without living and breathing in Mommy all day long.
And the girls need to learn when homework is. They were super excited for the first two days, but I know burnout is coming because gosh, this a humongous amount of  homework! They have papers and reviews of every topic that they learned in school. Seattle totally spoils its' students. No homework and tests is not reality anywhere else in the world. This school has serious homework.

My eyes are closing as usual, since apparently Penina needs to learn that 5am is not an appropriate time to wake up.

2 weeks in

My lack of blogging is not due to being busy, for me that is a reason in itself to blog. It's because of a lack of computer. We have this small one that was given to me during my round robin days as an extra one to have. It is incredibly slow, so much that I realized when Moshe Leib wants to sit and watch, it is neither helpful to me or him to turn on this computer. It makes both of us feel like ripping our hair out. It's slow and has old fashioned pop-ups and all that olden day Internet interruptions.
The other computer is Hubby's surface, which is impossible to type an Email or blog on. (That is my apology for not answering my Emails.) Anyway, last night, Hubby took this ol' thing (the computer, not me) and deleted a lot of unnecessary programs. It helped, a little. Now there are only big pauses before every command, which is great in teaching patience. Remember when computers used to do that? Teach Patience? Now they only teach bad middos. We scream if anything takes less than one second to load, when it used to be normal to take up to five minutes.

"An error occurred while trying to save your post. Please try again." this is popping up every 50 seconds at the moment!

Now that I've been here in Providence for maybe two weeks, I can give you my real thoughts on it all. Update: the kids have started school! Last week (I've lost track of time, so I'm just guessing when I keep giving a specific time), we went to visit the school. The teachers and staff all sounded so nice and told us to think about sending our kids this year. The kids LOVED the place, who doesn't love a brand new school filled with friendly faces? Then they cried and begged to please, please send them to school. Why not? My life is infinitely calmer.

Penina is completely off of nursing still. Still pumping once in awhile when the pain hits, but it's getting more and more infrequent. She likes formula way better anyway. Such an interesting child. She's changed from sweet, happy, snuggly Penina to loud, demanding and always hungry Penina. I feed her about six meals a day and most of it has formula mixed into it. I feed it all to her through a baby spoon. Still no sign of any sucking reflex on a bottle or sippy cup. Yesterday when she was extremely thirsty from the hot weather, she chewed on a bottle nipple that had diluted apple juice in it. I think I'm going to Google, "baby lost sucking reflex".

Today was the first day that I didn't feel overwhelmed and panicked 90% of the day.

Getting used to moving...

On the bottom of my blog is a little button (at least on my old fashioned laptop) that says "complain". It made me smile because that is exactly what I am about to do. It's nice that the blog gives me permission.

Today was one of those days that'll go down in history along with some of my hardest days as a mom. Penina decided to wean herself (I think) and seems to be done with nursing. She's just about 8 months. Out of all of my children, I have never heard of this, but apparently it's big on Google. This is also the first baby that I have really, really enjoyed nursing. I also work all of her sleep schedules around her nursing. I nurse her to sleep for naps and in middle of the night. Starting yesterday around 12pm, she just balked whenever I tried to nurse. I tricked her and got one last time in at 6pm yesterday. That was it.

The middle of the night was torture as nursing is the reason she wakes up. If you take that out, there's no way to get her back to bed. I tried everything until I did my good ol' contoversial way of just letting her cry herself to sleep. Which worked, twice. BH.

Today I woke up engorged and in a lot of pain. Nothing worked, and hand pumping did nothing. Now, just a little background. I don't own a pump and have never done bottles before. This was freaking me out. I had my husband go out and buy me a pump this morning and BH had some relief after pumping a little bit.

I spent the rest of the day, anxious, tense, exhausted and with a huge headache. Husband had to go to work, so he was out, the kids were bored out of their mind, being on week 3 or something without  school, and the neighborhood kids were all over my house -which seems to be the thing here. I was focused on my pain, which was constant and my baby who was unable to go to sleep for her naps, and was unwilling to go near the boob. She was interested in yogurt, a lot of it, which was very strange for her. I need to get her some whole yogurt, as this was low-fat. She also liked water from my water bottle, so luckily I knew she was hydrated. But I was nervous about what to do long-term and what this meant. Did she have an ear infection? I ruled out teething as she already has six teeth and this never happened before. She was pretty happy when I wasn't around her and forcing her to nurse. Anyway, I was depressed and wiped.

I'm also still recovering from the social part of Providence. There are kids everywhere. BH this is what we wanted, but I just need to get used to it. No one knocks here! Everytime I turn around, there are strange kids in my house, just walking through. There's not much bounderies or privacy around here. Probably because every house has 2-3 families in it. I either need to set bounderies or get used to it. I also can't really watch what's going on outside, as my front door is down a flight of stairs. So my kids are running pretty "hefker" a lot of time. They seem to be enjoying it though and the kids they're playing with are all so "aidel" and have exemplary middos. It's beautiful to be around them!

The families are so inspiring, I'm sure Shaul and I can gain a lot from living here. Everyone has a lot of kids, between 7-12 seems to be normal. The parents just all seem so nice and the kids are so sweet. This is great for us to see as I have this thought that a lot of children=chaos. It doesn't seem like that here though. And what I did not like in Monsey, is what I love here. Everyone is so non-materialistic. They don't seem to care about clothes, houses... they just work on their organization, middos and raising beautiful, frum children. I think the Gallors could use some of this Providence-ness.

Anyway, back to Nini (Penina). When Husband came home, I Googled it and read all about nursing strikes. I felt so much better. Lots of babies wean themselves at a young age. Most of them do take bottles though. After trying to get Nini to take a bottle, i remembered how much she likes drinking from a plastic cup. And lo and behold, it worked. I put my pumped milk into a plastic cup and she drank some of it! I felt oh so much better. I realized that besides for her stopping to nurse forever, I was more afraid of her getting dehydrated or malnourished. After realizing that she IS eating, albeit just yogurt, and she CAN drink if she wants to, I felt so much happier. It was like a weight lifted off my shoulder.
so that is the story of why I'm weaning my almost 8 month old. It's such a shock:(

We're here

So now we've finally had one full day in Providence. It's one of those experiences where at the end of the day, you're not sure what exactly happened that day but you feel exhausted and also wonder whether this is all a dream or a reality.

It was just such a full day, with so much energy on my end that I'm amazed I am still me.

First, the positive. I am so grateful and feel so blessed with everything we have in our life. This is a real house, which we have not experienced ever. We are in a house with 4 floors (as are most of the houses in this area). The first floor is the cellar, which is huge, and has our washer and dryer and the other family's washer and dryer too. It's hefker-ville, where we share almost everything. Then the Karp family lives on the next floor - two parents and their six kids. Then the next two floors are our's. We have a living room, dining room and another room - a study of some sort and lots of bedrooms and like a million closets. Anyone who knows what we've lived in before, will understand. The top floor is a former humongous attic, made into a real live-in space with closets, a bathroom and bedrooms. When we got here last night, we were all completely overwhelmed. The house has twists and turns and windy staircases with stained glass windows all over. I kept losing the kitchen. It's just not where it should be and it's sort of tucked in a corner. It's just so different than the open kitchen I came from. Everything is just plain strange. After we finally got the nervous, discombobulated kids to bed, one of them barfed all over her room with a path to the bathroom, which helped initiate our family to the house.

Penina is a story all on her own. We finally got her to actually go to sleep in Monsey and here we are all over again! At least she didn't scream her brains out this time, but she did take an incredibly long time to feel comfortable and be able to fall asleep in her crib. It's nice that she has a crib again instead of a pack n play. Then she just needed to test if Mommy really does show up, once every hour last night. It really felt like that -- I'd walk into her room at night, and her cries would die down and she'd smile, like "Oh ok, you DO come in. Cool." At 3am, she let me have a little break until 5am. That must be why I was nodding off all day like an old person, even in middle of conversations. "Mommy, Mommy, MOMMY, I was in middle of talking to you!"  Sorry, just taking a little nap.

The people in Providence! Wow, it's amazing that a place like this exists! Everyone is so sweet, friendly and wonderful and so happy to have another frum family move in. They just seem soo happy to have us here and so willing to go out of their way to do anything. One father sent over a letter with his son saying he can't talk because he had his tonsils removed today, but he's looking forward to meeting us soon. That was after I kidnapped his son. I met this cute boy who saw me outside and asked why I was going into a house who's owner moved. I explained that I lived here now. I asked him how old he was and when he said 4 1/2, I knew I had to have him meet Mo, who also is very particular about his "half". The boy came into my home very willingly. When I saw the note from his dad, I got scared, but it was so friendly!

Ok, gotta go tackle those boxes and suitcases....

Happenings in our life...

After a huge setback, we are hoping G-d willing to get to Providence this week. The setback was my mom's fall. A few nights ago, while using the restroom in the middle of the night, she felt dizzy, blacked out and found herself on the floor surrounded by blood. I only heard about this the next morning when I heard my cellphone and the house phone ringing continuously once I turned off the kids' white noises. My dad told me that they were in the hospital. Turns out she had broken some bones on her face, got two sets of stitches near her eye and broke her bone in the back of her neck. She came home from the hospital on Saturday night with a big blown up bruised face and neck brace which she has to wear for six weeks.

We are slowly getting used to living here in Monsey, although not getting used to this homeschooling business at all. I am just not a teacher and don't have the time to do any lesson prep. The prep comes at lesson time, which is probably one of the problems. Penina is unaware of our schedule, so she's not good at scheduling her naps around when I need her to. (I was also not the best student in school... nobody ever told me that I should listen in class because later I'll need to teach my own children what is being taught...) However, sending them to a new school at this point is not going to happen. The only person it would benefit is me, and I'm not the selfish kind of mom! Only sometimes.

It was nice seeing my sister and her family this past Shabbos and Sunday. They came to visit all the way from Boro Park, Brooklyn. My favorite part was when we all hung out on the lawn on Shabbos. The 4 girls all took out pillows and laid down together, the moms sat with the babies and the 2 boys bothered everyone and tried to find their place in the mixture. (We have the same order and gender of children.) Here's a pic of when we went out to get frozen yogurt on Sunday.

She and I are six years apart and the rest of our family is brothers. We are very different and continue to be very different in our mothering and frumkeit. We still get along though;)

Which reminds me, I have turned out to be the tichel guru here in Monsey! I was such a drab tichel artist back in Seattle, but since no one wears tichels here, I am the expert. Two girls came over on Shabbos who were wearing pretty shawls and I suggested showing them how to wear it around their hair. I tied them both up beautifully and they were so proud and went to show off to the whole neighborhood. That Sara Gallor is starting a new trend here!

Update on the missing Gallors....

My apologies for ignoring a lot of you. I've reached the point when I hear the text noise, it is unwelcome background noise that I don't get to until hours later when the text doesn't apply anymore. This is not to say forget about me, I'm just going through a text slump.

Usually I jump at the sound of that text - my welcome outside communication. Maybe there's just so much outside communication in my life right now that I can't handle one more "How are you and the kids doing?" It's like, let me put that on my to-do list - tell so and so how I am doing. (Again, do not get discouraged, I want to hear from you. This is just an explanation to my ignoring people lately.)

I think things are beginning to settle down now. Those little ones are getting comfortable in their new skin, living among the chassidish world. (My mom's street in Monsey is full-fledged chassidish.) Penina finally went to sleep without crying tonight BORUCH HASHEM twenty times over. That has been a huge source of anxiety for me. Typical. (My mom is such a huge support of the crying it out system. It used to drive me crazy when I only had one kid. One complaint from me and she'd sing the praises of crying it out. I told her under no circumstances would I torture my child. Sleep was not important and I would NEVER even consider it. Along comes child #4 and I am Torture Commandant #1. My sleep is way more important. Well, not really. Really it all comes down to that I have 3 little other things who need me and I cannot give my entire day over to a baby who needs to be held while sleeping. Only because she goes to sleep three times a day plus bedtime.)

Monsey has changed. Boy has Monsey changed. I was shell-shocked for the first few days. To begin they have opened up an entire frum mall. It's modern and shiny and new and has everything you can possibly dream of. I went on Saturday night with Hubs and we had a choice of three delectable places to choose from at 11pm. This is me, coming from Seattle, where the closest kosher restaurant is a 15 minute drive and closes at 7pm. I was overwhelmed with the choice possibilities.  First I couldn't decide on the place, so I texted my brother who's worked in almost all of them and he gave me his top ten list. Then once we chose "Hava Java" and were blown away by the hugeness of it, we couldn't decide on a food. Once again I texted my brother who said, "Everything they make is delicious." I got a bagel stick with some extravagant white looking fish. I asked them to put whatever normally goes with it in a sandwich and it came with butter, cucumber and red peppers. It cost $10.50 but is a sandwich I will remember forever. Then I had two fat bulging cheese blintzes with a fancy chocolate design on top for dessert. I think it was really cheesecake in costume.

Then Husband left to Providence and I was left to my own devices, with the help of my parents of course. I made a schedule, since I noticed my kids had no sense of direction and were getting nowhere extremely slowly. We have reward stickers with huge presents coming on Friday. The present idea grew and grew and became larger by the amount of misbehavior that I just couldn't handle anymore. With the looming idea of LaLaLoopsie dolls and exciting toys with buttons and lights, behavior is getting a bit more hand-able. It's hard having no direction, no school and no sense of home. Every child is dealing with it in their own way and poor Mommy has to hold it all together and be the loving unchangeable solid permanence in their lives.