Welcome Baby Yoda!

He's almost a month old, so I'd better get a move-on and introduce you to our latest model, Baby Yoda (BY)! Husbinator bestowed the nickname upon him for reasons made obvious by the below nearly-actual photo of our child:

I gave birth in the Rehovot hospital, which was incredibly convenient. Husbinator could drive ten minutes to the hospital, I read to the kids and said shema for them, and then he drove them ten minutes back home. Totally awesome.

Thank G-d, the existing models were and continue to be quite pleased with the newest edition. BSM is as happy as a normal, well-adjusted first-grader should be: says he likes the baby, wants to hold him occasionally, offers BY a pacifier when he cries, gets excited when he smiles. Very sweet. FF, on the other hand, is over the moon and totally obsessed. Which is awesome. Constantly wants to hold BY, gets really distressed when he cries, tells everyone he sees that this is our baby, and in the past few days even figured out how to include BY in his games (namely, by playing a question game and answering for BY where appropriate).

I am also incredibly pleased that we got a birth certificate for BY! Since Piano Toes is getting married in January (mazel tov!), on the day after BY's bris, I went to the Ministry of the Interior to register his name and get his birth certificate. This way, we'd be able to get the ball rolling for Israeli and American passports. Luckily, one does not need an appointment to register the given name of a newborn, and one can even be seen in the "express lane", which has an average wait-time of under 20 minutes.

The clerk was rather surprised to be visited by such a very new person, and he was very kind, and he looked wisely at the carbon-copy of a form given to me at the hospital by a lady who insisted she didn't work for the ministry of the interior, even though she was giving me a pre-birth certificate and everyone calls her "the ministry of the interior lady", and the clerk even called his manager over for advice, but the result was disappointing: BY was not yet "in the system".

Yes, BY had already been assigned a national ID number (by "the ministry of the interior lady" who does not work for the ministry of the interior, even though she has the high and mighty power of dispensing national ID numbers), and yes, all of the necessary information for a birth certificate was right there, but no, the clerk informed me with what seemed to genuine apology, he could not issue a birth certificate until BY was "in the system", and that usually takes 2 - 4 weeks from birth.

I explained that we kind of need a birth certificate ASAP, and clerk apologetically apologetically repeated what he just told me, and then helpfully told me that rather than schlepping out to the office every day with a brand-new baby, I could call this number and ask if BY was in the system yet. But there was really nothing more he could do. (Which I wonder about, because I have an American-Israeli friend who flew from Israel to the US with a documented, 12-day-old baby. One day, I should ask her how she managed that.)

So I called the number a few times, and at 15 days from birth, BY was in the system at last. This was lucky, since I had optimistically (desperately?) scheduled an American CRBA and passport appointment for BY in mid-December (I'd like earlier, but we told them our flight date and that's when they scheduled us for) and an Israeli passport appointment at 9:12 am on the day that BY finally made it into the system (because it was either that or wait another whole week).

So we hustled over to Misrad Hapnim, and got a birth certificate from the same helpful clerk in the express lane, who continued in his helpfulness by double-checking that all of the English spellings he entered matched my requested English spellings, even going so far as to check the spelling of my maiden name, which I hadn't thought would appear on the form in English.

(Israeli bureaucrats in general don't seem to understand why I get so uptight about specific English spellings, which is annoying on the one hand, but also useful; while they will issue documents with weirdly erratic, theoretically phonetic spellings of our names, they will also change English spellings with no fuss at all to match my random little requests even if previously issued government-documents use different English letters. Among my other prejudices, I don't care if the letter ק is rendered as a Q in academic circles, I want a K.)

I am almost as proud of BY's birth certificate as I am of my high school diploma. (Which is another piece of paper I wasn't sure I would get, issued by a government official upon the appropriate filling-out of forms.)

After receiving BY's birth certificate at 8:58 am, we proceeded to wait another hour-and-a-half to be called for our 9:12 passport appointment. Why I thought that making an appointment would be correlated with a minimal wait time is a mystery. The passport clerk was also very nice, which was cool, but it still kind of freaks me out that she didn't ask Husbinator for any form of ID at all. While it's annoying to make both parents show up to a passport appointment, I like the concept of needing consent from all legal guardians before giving someone the ability to transport children out of the country. Just saying.

So now we have his Israeli birth certificate, most of the forms for his American birth certificate and passport application, and his Israeli passport is in the mail. It's the "his Israeli passport is in the mail" part that's freaking me out. Our mailman seems to deliver the mail whenever he feels like it, which seems to be about bi-monthly... probably. I do not trust that person to get me this document.

At least the passport was sent by registered mail, and I'm getting text messages about its progress, but it's been stuck at the Rehovot mail-person pickup room for a week now, and and and... Deep breaths. It will be fine. We have a month left before we actually need BY's passport (though the US Department of State would like a copy of any foreign passports that have been issued), and I just realized that worst comes to worst, I can physically go to the main post-office branch with the registered mail number and our plane tickets and explain what's going on and have lots of frustrating conversations, but actually get this bit of mail without our stoopit mailperson's help, if that's what if comes to.

So yeah, it's been a whirlwind of appointments (I didn't even tell you about the figuring out which tipat chalav office to bring him to for his myriad of well-visits and how great his pediatrician is), but things are chugging along.

Welcome, Baby Yoda!

At Last!

For years, I've been failing to get a good answer to why kohanim (or their wives) take challah. After all, we take off a piece of dough when we bake as a gift for kohanim... So what gives? Both Husbinator and I have asked various rabbis, kohanim, and wives of kohanim in the U.S., but we've never gotten a solid answer.

Yesterday, Husbinator asked our shul rabbi, who immediately responded that the challah that must be separated from the dough is not just a gift for a kohen, it's also a requirement for the dough: unlike pidyon haben, there are two distinct requirements that are met when challah is taken. "Wait..." said Husbinator making the obvious analogy, "So kohanim also separate trumos and ma'asros from their produce?" To which the rabbi answered, "Of course!"

So I'm very glad to have a satisfying answer, but now I'm left with a new question. Did our rabbi know the answer due to his intense torah learning, or is this common knowledge among the religious Israeli population? After all, this is a mitzva that is closely tied to the land of Israel.

I mean, I never thought twice about Shavuos being chag habikkurim (the holiday at which we historically took the first fruits of our orchards to the Temple) until I moved to Israel and looked at my pomegranate trees one Shavuos and realized that something just didn't add up. Completely taken aback, I asked the ladies at shul how on earth people brought their first pomegranates to the Temple in late spring if pomegranates only ripen in the middle of the autumn.

My neighbor's teenage daughter told me that Shavuos marks the first date at which people can bring their first fruits, but bikkurim can be brought through Channukah. Now my former neighbor's daughter does happen to be a very well-educated young lady, but it turns out that isn't why she knew that piece of information. Eventually I got to the relevant Torah Portion in my pre-schooler's Hebrew parsha book. There, between the colorful illustrations on the tear-resistant pages, the book informs the little Israeli children that Jews took their first fruits to the Temple at some point between Shavuos and Channuka. Common knowledge around here.