A Day in the Life (of a house husband)

Now that I am fully ensconced as the house husband, with Michelle, her Mom and the kids off to Ulpan and school every morning, I am gaining a much deeper appreciation of the work that stay-at-home Moms do.  (And I still have Michelle helping me every step).

Off to Ulpan

Leave at 0740 to drive the kids to school, derive enormous pleasure from finding a back roads route to avoid the horrendous Jerusalem traffic (with Toby as my trusty navigator).  Parallel park with two wheels on the curb like the Israelis, hit the markets with my market wagon for some necessities, including olives, dried fruits and nuts.  Then back to the house. Yesterday I trimmed hedges and cleaned the kitchen.  Today I am going to head over to the city center to look for an oud teacher.

Last night Michelle and I went to a combination Hasidic rock concert/midrash lecture.  The son-in-law of a friend was the bass player. That was a bizarre experience - smoke machine, light show, insipid pop music with a string quartet, bass, drums, electric guitar and keyboard interspersed with unintelligible (at least to us) commentary about life, the approach of the new year, the importance of August for reflection and Alaska.

As far as all the war talk, it is amazing that in Jerusalem at least, life goes on without much attention being paid to the notion of chemical weapons being used a mere 40 kilometers away from the Golan border.  We got our gas masks, but many people we talked to are convinced that Jerusalem will not be attacked - it would just trigger too much international condemnation.  As racist as it sounds, some people say that Assad would not dare lob any chemical weapons at Jerusalem because they are not accurate enough to ensure that the Arab areas would not be impacted.