Yay Yom Tov And A Ten-Month Old Baby

It was a nice last three-day Yom Tov. I almost can't believe that tomorrow is a regular day again. After havdalah I checked my email and found a detailed one from my assistant. It was all good stuff, but I felt myself tense up about the transition back into work. I acknowledged the tension, took a step back, let myself process, and now I feel better. In the past I might have just gotten very very grumpty. Good processing, Evenewra!

Some highlights over the past three days.

1. ND may very well have taken her first steps today on her ten month birthday. In the past two or three days she's been working really hard at standing as long as she can unsupported. It's so cute to see her "climb" up something, steady herself, and then throw her arms up to balance for as long as she can. Today U. was lying on the floor and acting as a baby gate for her play area. She steadied herself against his knee, let go, and then side stepped several times. I couldn't see if she was leaning against him somehow as she did it. She looked completely unsupported to me.

2. She was also HYSTERICAL to watch last night. She had so much fun on Simchat Torah with all the dancing and singing that she didn't want to nap very much and was totally wired by evening. She was crawling all over the apartment as fast as she could (and faster than we, the exhausted parents, could keep up). At one point she sat in the middle of the living room floor and started jumping and spinning herself around as fast she could while yelling her head off. It's hard to describe exactly what it looked like. It's as though she's trying to stand up from sitting cross-legged on the ground, but of course she can't. So she just kind of wobbles around into a new position like she's filled with heavily-charged batteries. If she were on a mattress, she would be jumping up and down on it. I finally got down on the floor and imitated her and she laughed her head off. Eventually it was all too much and I swooped her up, put her to my breast and held her very tightly to slow her down. She relaxed and fell asleep very fast. I was proud that I could read her signs and take control.

3. Yesterday I said to U. "I like Simchat Torah."

"You didn't use to feel that way," he said. And he was right. (See the link to understand why.)

But this year was very different. It just gets better and better. To begin, I got to leyn Torah again. How it works is that a bunch of women, from other shuls as well as ours, go to the house of a woman who lives behind our shul. Those who asked in advance to leyn Torah get a chance to do one aliyah from Vezos Habrachah. And all the women and girls bat mitvah age and up who want an aliyah can have one. (It's done according to our Rabbi's direction with only the appropriate brachot for that situation.)

As a result, because so many women want to leyn, and so many want to have an aliyah, that we cycle through again and again. I got to read hamishi, and I was the third of three to do it. I read it twice. Do the math. That means over 30 women and girls had aliyot.

I've discovered that there are very different styles for leyning. As I listened to the two women who read my aliyah ahead of me, I got scared that I was going to do it wrong. And the truth is, I'm not sure how terribly well I did it. (As a matter of fact, I discovered after the first reading that I made a subtle error that no one corrected, and I messed up the trope on the second reading.) I really had to talk myself through it saying, "I'm good at a lot of things, but not at everything. This is not something I do often and certainly not something I spend a great deal of time on. It is not necessary to do it perfectly or the same as other people." It was scary. Good scary. The kind that reminds you that G-d made all of us human and that none of us has the right to try to be perfect. The kind that helps you accept other people too for not being exactly the way you (or I) want them to be. It was the kind of scary that is necessary to build real community.

4. The night before when we did Hakafot, we, as always, got to have a Torah on the women's side. There are many shuls that don't go for this, but ours does and that's all I want to say about that. I didn't get to hold the Torah last year because I was seven months pregnant. But this year I shifted the Ergo Baby Carrier to my back and took the Torah on my front. I danced in the middle of a circle. Several people commented on how cool it looked.

"Isn't this the way it should be?" I asked in return.

I feel proud of where I am in my observance and in where I'm headed with Torah study right now. I'd like to think I respect, appreciate and even love the Torah as much as any other person in that room, and I want to hand that love down to my daughter. Even the fact that she was so happy the night after Simchat Torah before she's even a year old seems to me proof that we're on the right track.

5. One final image to secure that last point. During the women's Torah reading, ND got hungry. We were in an all-women setting, and since there was limited space in the room, I was sitting on the floor with her in the back behind a bunch of others. So I nursed her. One friend of mine saw and smiled very broadly. It was nice to have a witness to my filling ND with nourishment and love just as the Torah experience was doing for everyone of us there.