ABC's, Israeli-Style

ABC's has been on FF's Top Ten list for a while, which is nice. Non-irritating, short, educational songs are always welcome.

FF has liked ABC's long enough to have a few riffs on it, the previous of which was a version I sang once and immediately rocketed to the top of the charts:

"A B C D E F FROG / H I J K L M N O TURTLE"

Because FF is a goofball that way.

A few days ago, FF came up with a new riff, one that I'm reasonably sure he invented himself:

"A B C D E F G / AHP-CHEE / LIVRIYOOT / HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

In English, that would be:

"A B C D E F G / AH-CHOO / BLESS YOU / HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

Why yes, child. The letters F-G do sound like the Hebrew word for the noise that a sneeze makes. I never noticed that before. 

Waiter, Taste the Soup!

In honor of my father-in-law making aliyah yesterday (mazel tov!), we went out to eat at Chummus Eliyahu, which serves all sorts of fresh (warm!) chummus and Israeli salad and yummy pita. (All of which sound like they should just be appetizers, but we leave that restaurant stuffed every time.)

I prefer dipping my pita into the various salads, but BSM decided (quite reasonably, really), to turn his pita into a sandwich. So he tore off the top, then asked us how he should get the chummus and salad into the pita. All I could think was, "Seriously???" especially when BSM repeated his question multiple times. Luckily, Husbinator had the patience to outline the steps of How To Insert Food Into A Perfectly-Opened Pita multiple times, and I did not have to get involved.

The final (successful!) round of instructuions went as follows:

Husbinator: Use your fork to scoop up your chummus and salad and put them into your pita.
BSM: Where's my fork?

No, we have never told him that joke.

Elections

Ema asked if I have anything to say about elections, so here's my response:

People sure do talk about them a lot!

What's interesting is that on the one hand, there's zero-expectation of voter privacy ("So who did you vote for?" is just as socially acceptable as, "So how much do you pay in rent?"), but on the other hand, no (media) polls are allowed to be published starting three days before the elections until the (actual voting) polls close on election day.

Backfired

BSM told me the other day that he knows what he wants to be when he grows up: a paramedic. (He called the job an "איש הצלה", but I know what he means.) We discussed oh-so-briefly (me: "that's nice, you have a bit of time to decide, if you change your mind that's fine, if you don't change your mind that's fine;" BSM: "actually, I have a lot of time to decide, because I'm only 5 1/2") and then he followed up with, "And I also know what I don't want to be."
"Oh? What?"
"A soldier or a policeman."
"Why not?"
"Because a soldier has to eat everything on the table, and I don't like techina or carrots, and that's what they give soldiers to eat."

Friends, I did not laugh.
Turns out his teacher told the kids something along those lines to encourage them to eat... Oops.

And if you're curious, the reason he doesn't want to be a policeman is, "They have to carry the gun, and the handcuffs, and the vest, and the radio... It's too much stuff. It's a balegan. It's just too much."

Progress

Go Fish is better than War. Much, much better. But you know what's better than Go Fish? Rummikub.

BSM and I both enjoyed our first game of Rummikub, and I even think he'll be able to play his own tiles without that much help soon.

FF enjoyed putting tiles on his rack and playing the role of Discretionary Dealer (a.k.a., thusting said tiles at either me or BSM whenever he felt like it). FF did not enjoy the tiles toppling off of his rack, but BSM enjoyed helping FF put them back up.

So all-in-all, a successful milestone acheived.

Ah, Technology

I took FF to a well-visit recently. I don't think I've explained properly about how well-visits work in this country, so here it is in a nutshell.

Children aged 0 - 6 do not go to their pediatricians for well-visits. Instead, they go to "Tipat Chalav" (lit. "drop of milk") where a nurse tracks their development and gives them their childhood vaccinations. (Yes, "vaccinations" and not just "shots": we get the oral live polio vaccine in this neck of the woods.)

Until now, we've been lived in places so small that Tipat Chalav was rolled into the medical clinic that we went to for all standard doctor appointments, so things were pretty straightforward. Now that we've moved to Rehovot, however, we've entered the standard system wherein Tipat Chalav has standalone clinics run by the municipality.

This meant we got the chance to transfer medical records. I'm not entirely sure what it entailed, other than many phone calls and follow-ups from both me and Tipat Chalav, but I'm reasonably certain that BSM and FF has their Tipat Chalav records printed out by the medical clinic they had been going to and mailed to the Tipat Chalav clinic in Rehovot. Or hand-transcribed and delivered by courier. Whatever happened, it took about two months to get the records transferred, but luckily our previous Tipat Chalav nurse had warned me before I moved that the process would be ridiculous, so I wasn't too concerned.

Anyway. So there I was with FF at his first Tipat Chalav appointment here in Rehovot, secure in the knowledge that records had been transferred, when the nurse asked me if I happened to know if FF had had his blood count tested last year, and what were the results? You see, she said with a smile and a sigh, the records came through all right... But the records sent don't include bloodwork. Naturally. Because just why.

Why no, I emphatically do not remember who had what blood test run when and what the results thereof may or may not have been. Luckily, I realized that whenever I get tests done at the doctor's office, instead of waiting for the doctor's office not to call (not entirely fair: I did get a phone call from my doctor once when the results said I needed antibiotics), I look up the results with the handy-dandy app on my phone, which I initially installed so I could easily schedule appointments for me and the kids.

So I logged in, and sure enough, within a minute I located the list of lab tests FF has had, found one called "hematology" from around the right time, and boom! The nurse found what she wanted.

Ah, technology.