Enjoying a Jewish December

We had a wonderful family Chanukah.  For the first time we remembered to light the candles every night. Since we were each busy with kids and fire, there are no pictures but I did do a video of the one night Nahum missed.  It's such a sweet video. Elijah is excited, Shayna lights the candles and attempts a prayer, and I attempt the prayers too.

The kids really got into the evening ritual and miss it now.  Nahum would sing a couple songs after lighting candles and we would dance with the kids while he sang.  That had them both laughing (that's what Shayna asks to do at the end of the video).  We even did presents for the first time.  Since we have enough toys already, I only gave them stuff on two nights which they intensely played with for the following few days.  The highlight for Shayna is the Fisher Price doctor kit with the stethoscope replaced with a real one since the toys these days are such duds.  I'm thinking of adding the infant blood pressure cuff to it as well since I'm hopeful I won't be taking her blood pressure anymore.  (The steroids she was on post-transplant elevated her blood pressure dangerously so we had to give her medicine to keep it down.  However, if it happened to be down when we gave the medicine, we could kill her so I learned how to take a manual blood pressure reading from our awesome nanny-nurse Katie.)  It's fun to have extra medical supplies that I don't use anymore.  Shayna pulls out the kit everyday to happily administer shots and check vitals.  They also got a couple puzzle type toys each.  Elijah has amazed me with his easy shape and color matching abilities.

The last thing that got me was Elijah saying the prayer as I took him to bed on the last night.  He says very few intelligible words but is quite the yakker anyway so it wasn't the defined words but the flow and texture of his speech.  Beautiful.  When he starts speaking English, I swear he's going to start with full sentences.