New Year's Wishes

To all Shalvah fans who have been celebrating Rosh Hashanah, best wishes for a sweet and happy new year from our new family! (We also wish meaningful fasts--and especially meaningful break-fasts--to everybody who will be observing Ramadan and/or Yom Kippur in the coming days, and beautiful autumn weather universally to everyone...) We tried to get Shalvah involved even before the holiday started, New England-style:

We haven't seen a tooth yet, but that hasn't stopped her from chomping down on everything she can get her hands on (which includes more and more things every day), and the holiday apples were no exception:

...nor were her grandma's fingers.

(don't worry, those concerned with infant safety regulations--no infants were fed honey in the making of this holiday)
Apples aside, Shalvah showed she has her grandfather's genes by sleeping peacefully through much of the synagogue service, and she rang in the New Year with amazing new tricks, such as sitting up straight as if she'd been doing it since the day she was born, blowing rasperries, and even doing both simultaneously:

In fact, she sat up straight to consult in the preparation of this blog entry.

So as for her parents, we have one fervent New Year's wish, and we hope she shares this aspiration with us. It actually works as a pun in Hebrew: with a slight change in vowel intonation, the New Year's greeting--Shanah Tovah--becomes "Sheynah Tovah," or in English, "Good sleep." Insh'allah...

poems for daughters

A few days after Shalvah was born, our friend Leora asked if we had named her after a book of poetry by (one of our favorite poets) Yehuda Amichai. We didn't know which book she meant. She told us it's called "Shalvah Gedolah: She'elot v'Teshuvot," which translates as "Great Calm: Questions and Answers," or for us, just "Great Shalvah." When we opened the book, we found poems Amichai wrote for the birth of his daughter, and we read them to celebrate the birth of ours (see the "Rites of Spring" post below):

On the day my daughter was born not a single person died...
The longest day of the year.
Overjoyed,
I drove with my friend to the hills of Sha'ar Ha-Gai.

We saw a pine tree sick and bare, covered with countless pine cones. Tzvi said that trees about to die grow more cones than the living ones. And I told him: that was a poem and you didn't know it. Even though you are a man of the exact sciences, you made a poem. And he replied: and even though you are a dreamer, you made an exact little girl, with all the exact instruments for her life.



In the mountains of Jerusalem

Here where a ruin wants to be
A new house again, its wish joins ours.
Even the thorns are weary of stinging, want to console.
A tombstone, torn from a desecrated grave,
Was set in the new wall with its name and dates,
Happy not to be forgotten.
And the children (only they could change it all)
Play between the rocks and the ruins.
They don't want to change a thing.



(we were living between the mountains of Jerusalem and the hills of Sha'ar Ha-Gai when Shalvah's nine-month countdown began)