I’m going to be hosting the Kosher Cooking Carnival in August, so please submit here: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_208.html
Recipes, restaurant reviews, cooking, food: as long as it’s kosher!
Both mention Soccer Dad, a fine blogger indeed, though he writes so much I only read some of what he posts! (update: and Soccer Dad responds with Meme Thanks).
There are other bloggers I read that haven’t gotten mentioned yet, so that will have to be a separate post. This one has too many links already. And I love SO many of the new photo bloggers that I’ve started “reading” (more looking than reading) that the task of posting a few would be impossible.
Regarding the photo, we went there yesterday. I took pictures, and we (my husband, my daughter and I) got to act in a play. If I can think of a good angle for a post, maybe I’ll write more later.
It’s time for me to start re-connecting with this side of the Atlantic Ocean. So, in order to do so, I present you with yet one more photo of Israel, this time a blue arrow on a small highway somewhere in between Modiin and Hashmonaim.
Have you ever driven down Rte 27 in Metuchen? Or have ever given anyone directions to drive to Highland Park from the Garden State? You need to take a weird left after Main Street in Metuchen into what appears to be–ongoing traffic? You can’t really tell if you are doing the right thing, can you? When you take that left, not like you really are turning into a different road. It’s all Route 27! One long road that starts–where does it start? But you can drive on that road all the way to Princeton. Google Maps tells me that little scary left is from Middlesex Avenue unto Lake Avenue. Well, my husband has proposed that one of these nice little blue arrows might do the trick. So your guest doesn’t keep going and up on Rt. 287 or some other miscellaneous road.
In other local news, Mason Resnick is trying to lure Trader Joe’s to Highland Park. And Jill Caporlingua was part of Random Acts of Fun last night, as she taught art on Raritan Avenue.
Regarding issues that effect all of us, mommies or not, Mother In Israel posted about nursing moms in malls and Frumhouse continued with her nursing experiences. Don’t you want to live a society that does the right thing?
My daughter wanted a picture of her standing in front of our favorite toy store in Highland Park: Over the Moon Toys. She told me not to put up the one with her squinting (which may have been a better shot of the store).
Do you have an old-fashioned, mom-and-pop style toy store in your area? Or just chain stores? We like Over the Moon Toys because it’s friendly(the store is owned by two sisters, and varying family members are behind the register), they have a nice selection of toys, and they wrap presents beautifully–yellow and pink tissue paper, blue and green tissue paper, multi-colored ribbons, colorful dotted paper, your choice. If your child walks into the store when you need to buy a gift for a friend and says:”I want this and that and this and that”, they have a gift registry. So you then tell your child to put the items she wants on the registry, so when it’s time for her party, she can tell her friends to check the registry.
My daughter is standing in front of the store with her brand-new Webkinz that she bought with the money her saba (grandfather) gave her before Pesach. Webkinz are a big craze among kids in America; you buy the little stuffed animal, then you go online to take care of it. What’s really funny is when my daughter plays on the computer at our house with the little boy across the street who’s on his computer at his house, and they go into the same room in the Webkinz game and make their Webkinzes jump and down together on a trampoline.
My husband wanted to go somewhere. My daughter wanted to go: first to the beach. Then to an amusement park. Then to a zoo. I liked the beach idea; I started thinking about Ocean Grove. Well, somehow we ended up at the zoo. Turtle Back Zoo in Essex County. I did suggest Popcorn Zoo, which saves animals. At least at that zoo there is a reason for the animals being behind cages. But my husband argued that it’s a longer drive. And Turtle Back does have the train and carousel.
Do you have mixed feelings about gawking at a bunch of animals in a cage?
First, we have to wait in line. So then my husband thinks out loud about how if we had gone to Popcorn Zoo, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wait in line?
Finally, we are in the zoo. After looking at a little fountain, finding the restrooms, buying my daughter a Chex mix snack in a vending machine, we then look at some animals.
Here’s one. I think it’s a bison (according to Victor, see comments, this is Highland Cattle):
We stop looking at animals for a bit, because we’ve come upon: the CAROUSEL! Much more fun to ride on a large plastic leopard that goes up and down:
As my husband and daughter examine a few more animals behind bars, I examine people:
Here are two Central New Jersey moms:
I spot a cute guy. He deserves his own photo:
Here’s how my daughter lets us know that she’s had enough looking at bears from the Ural Mountains and chickens and would like to go on the train:
We find the area for the train, and what do we need to do but wait. I people watch:
Finally, we are on the train. My husband figures if we had to pay for the train, like we did for the carousel (the carousel costs $2/ride), the line would have been shorter. The train takes us on a short ride through the woods, and we see: A lake. Some trees.
After our train ride we gawk at some orange fish:
After examining some endangered amphibians of New Jersey and enjoying the company of some otters, I spot a zoo person holding 2 dead rabbits. “Ew,” I say, “what are those for?” They’re going to feed them to the alligator, my husband tells me. And sure enough, there are all these people standing around the alligator cage watching the alligator chomping away. My husband and I agree this is a bit of a tacky activity.
At left is the baby alligator we saw moments later.
My daughter agreed to go on a pony ride, so that was the next activity. We also saw a cage that supposedly held a groundhog. I couldn’t see the groundhog, but the hole under the little hut in the cage looked suspiciously like the hole under our garage.
Oh, by the way, our neighbors down the block have now caught 11 groundhogs (some were babies) and let them go in Johnson Park.
The zoo has sculptures all around, mostly of animals, but this one is of a boy and a girl:
My daughter took that photo herself. Aren’t digital cameras great for teaching kids?
The best part was photographing the bear.
And this is by far the longest photo essay I’ve ever written.
In between working on intriguing posts for your enjoyment and taking care of my family, I do website work for a number of Central New Jersey businesses and organizations. Sometimes it takes a while before my work becomes public, but recently I edited a number of web pages that I can share with you:
Yesterday, I put the Rutgers Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life’s Fall 2008 Public Events. Note that in December Dara Horn, author of The World to Come, a book recommended by Mother in Israel, will be speaking at Rutgers.
The Highland Park Public Library has a bug poster to advertise summer programming for children. The bug poster, by children’s book illustrator Harry Bliss, is part of a national program called Collaborative Summer Library Program, so you may see a similar one on another library site. I just added some text to make it unique to our library.
New Jersey School of Dental Assisting had me add their newest schedule, information about tuition and financing, and a new field on their contact form.
I did some edits for Wilkin & Guttenplan, an accounting firm in East Brunswick, New Jersey, including an animated gif of Best Places to Work award logos that you can see on the bottom right of the Careers page.
I will soon be working on a new online course for the Rutgers Bildner Center. The courses are free; so if you have some time to do a course, go to the Jewish Studies Online Studies page to take the Bible & History or the Israeli Political System. Also, I’ve been working a site for a local firm that is not yet public.
We have this statue down the street from our house. It’s referred to as the “Doughboy.” That’s where the Memorial Day parade today ends.
American men who fought in World War I in France were called “doughboys.” It’s such a strange name, I decided to find out how the name came to be. The term goes back as far as the Mexican-American War of 1846-47, referring to the infantry.
Independently, in the former colonies, the term had come to be applied to baker’s young apprentices, i.e. dough-boys. Again, American soldiers probably were familiar with this usage. This version of doughboy was also something of a distant relative to “dough-head”, a colloquialism for stupidity in 19th Century America. When doughboy was finally to find a home with the U.S. Army it would have a disparaging connotation, used most often by cavalrymen looking down [quite literally] on the foot-bound infantry.
Drivers paying higher prices at pump for using credit cards instead of cash
CENTRAL JERSEY —While customers are still getting used to the sky-high price of gas, they are now being slapped with an additional fee for using a credit card.
A number of gas stations across the state have started to charge two separate prices: one for cash, and a higher one — about 10 cents more — for credit card users.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Central New Jersey. It would be nice to visit the Guggenheim, but it’s a bit far. We’ve been to the Metropolitan; that’s also a full day trip. I used to visit the MFA when I was a student. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is my favorite in Boston. I’ve been to the Louvre. Years ago I enjoyed wonderful art at the Tel Aviv Museum. But if you want an art trip that’s five minutes from Highland Park, you go to:
A few weeks ago my daughter, her friend and I went to Family Day at the Zimmerli.
The event was free; balloons floated in front of the stained glass window. There were guards stationed in every room of the museum. All the guards were nice to the children, explaining sweetly that the children should not touch the art (this was not our experience at the Princeton Art Museum, which seems much less interested in having children in their building, or the Newark Museum, in which a guard once told my son he could not sit and draw the paintings. Maybe if I write this on a blog post someone at one of those museums will read it and try to be more kid-friendly?).
Activities included face painting, a scavenger hunt, a dance performance, an art activity, and storytelling.
My daughter and her friend waited in the bus stop sculpture by George Segal to get their faces painted. George Segal, known for his life-size human figures, also did a sculpture called The Holocaust, which is in the Jewish Museum in New York and in a park in San Francisco.
We worked on the Family Day scavenger hunt, searching for details in paintings.
As our grand finale event, we listened to story told by Peninah Schram, who was introduced as a “world-reknowned storyteller.” Peninah enjoyed having her picture taken with the girls (a third friend joined us):
Peninah began her story with: “Shalom Aleichem.” We were then supposed to yell back: “Aleichem Shalom!” The audience was a mix of Orthodox Jews, Asian Americans, Caucasian Americans, and at least one Muslim family (one could tell by the head scarf and pants)–typical Central New Jersey audience.
The story was about three brothers and a magic pomegranate. Peninah encouraged audience participation; when she talked about a shuk, the children were asked, “And what do you think was being sold in the market?” When she asked how many seeds does a pomegranate have, I whispered to the girls: “613”, so they happily yelled out “613!”, and Peninah explained how a pomegranate is reported to have 613 seeds, like the number of mitzvot in the Torah. (Aside: years ago, my brother and I counted the seeds in a pomegranate, and we found way more than 613 seeds. When I told my teacher, he responded: “but was it a pomegranate grown in Israel?”)
We bought a copy of the book, The Magic Pomegranate. I see we got a good price; we only paid $15 for the book at the museum.
On the way out, the girls got prizes for their participation in the scavenger hunt. One prize was a kite, so we ended the afternoon with a bit of kite flying.
One of the best annual events in Highland Park, New Jersey is the street fair. Traffic is closed from 12-4 pm along Raritan Avenue, the main street in our borough. Booths line the avenue from 5th to 2nd Avenue.
Here’s what my son and his friend chose to do:
If you are in pain, pay a visit to my friend Diana Hakakian, chiropractor:
Kosher pizza for sale, too:
My friend Iola tried to get me to join Hadassah.
Politicians, potters, ponies and people selling various stuff also graced the avenue.
Unfortunately, the rain did come down on my husband, daughter, son and his friend. My other son and I managed to walk the fair without any drops falling.
Three kids. One day trip. Where do you want go?
Eldest: Nowhere.
Middle: NOT to a zoo.
Youngest: To a zoo! Someplace with animals.
In the end, we went to Sandy Hook, at the top of the Jersey Shore. Sandy Hook has beautiful beaches, dunes, rocks, waves. Eldest Son stayed home, as he preferred, and tended to the homestead (he’s a teenager, he’s allowed).
We took one of my son’s friends.
The sky was a lovely blue, and the weather warm enough, considering it was mid-April.
The kids had a great time, climbing the rocks and playing in the sand.
I tried to get a little artsy with my photos.
There’s a lighthouse at the end of Sandy Hook, and there’s another lighthouse called Twin Lights that’s on the road on the way home from Sandy Hook. My kids opted out of going to the lighthouses today, but in the past we’ve gone to both. The Twin Lights Historic Site is a good place to visit if you were planning to go to the beach, but it ends up raining.
What do you do when your kids disagree? Do you just take them where you want to go?
Haveil Havalim is up on Frume Sarah’s World.
My daughter wanted a picture of her standing in front of our favorite toy store in Highland Park: Over the Moon Toys. She told me not to put up the one with her squinting (which may have been a better shot of the store).
