Stories of an expat mama
This evening the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana started. It is the Jewish New Year. It lasts for 3 days and is followed by Yom Kippur 10 days later, which is much more serious.
My family is not religious but I love holidays because I love special themed holiday food and family gatherings. Rosh Hashana is no exception. There are delicious foods full of symbolism. Here are my three favourite symbolic Rosh Hashana foods:
One of the things I like doing as a mom is making up songs. Luckily for me, even though I have no musical talent, my kids love to listen to me sing. Making up songs and rhymes is fun and puts a funny and entertaining spin on every day parenting tasks. I usually just sing new words for existing songs to describe what’s going on at that moment. It can be as simple as “dinner time, dinner time, dinner all the way” to the tune of Jingle Bells. Often Lulu asks me to “sing it again!” and I can’t because I forget the words as soon as I’ve sung them. Over the years there have been a few gems that have stuck and today I’m going to share them with you.
I have some exciting news. Go Wander, Bee Happy was nominated for a Liebster award, which is really cool. The Liebster Award is a great way to promote and discover new blogs. Thank you Christina, the amazing mom behind the 3plusMe blog for nominating me. I really try to make content that would be relatable and fun to read – with a few serious topics thrown in. You should also check out 3plusMe for fun mom-life posts.
About six months postpartum I started becoming very short tempered. Call it postpartum depression or postpartum rage. There were days when I woke up just annoyed. At everything. There were days when every little thing made me angry. Things that are usually a mild annoyance became enraging. Sometimes I could tell I’m overreacting as it is happening. Almost like an out of body experience where I saw myself yelling and freaking out, somewhere I thought “why are you getting so mad? This isn’t a big deal” and yet I was still yelling, I couldn’t seem to stop being angry. I didn’t think I had PPD, I didn’t have the “normal” symptoms of not being able to stop crying or feeling unhappy or depressed all the time. I just had this rage seething just below the surface ready to explode at any provocation. A little while ago, I posted about the first steps I took to recognize and deal with all that rage and PPD. In this post I go into much more detail regarding how PPD manifested in me. Hopefully this story about my postpartum depression and postpartum rage will resonate with you.
I felt like a Supermom in not-so-kid-friendly Seattle. For a city that boasts being very kid friendly I didn’t see many kids around the downtown area (this is based on my googling “what to do in Seattle with kids” and seeing results about how great Seattle is for kids. In hindsight I guess it was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy. What city wouldn’t tell parents looking for suggestions that they are kid friendly).
Of course there were kids in the areas that were meant for children, like the parks, and a few kid specific destinations. But just walking though the city I saw very few parents with kids. I barely saw any families in the couple of grocery stores near where we stayed and the baby sections were pathetic and practically non-existent. I needed the baby section because I made the mistake of only bringing two pacifiers with me, naively thinking “there’s nothing that I can’t buy there if I need it”. Well I lost one of them the very first day and I couldn’t find another one in any of the stores around Seattle Center. The pet sections on the other hand were gigantic and I did see at least 3 dogs in strollers.
It’s 2:30pm. I’m lying on a hotel bed in my jeans with my eyes closed while 4 little legs and 4 little arms are climbing all over me. I hear laughter and loud squeals. Every so often it’s hard to tell if the sounds are those of happiness or distress so I half open one eye to make sure everyone is still alive. I see them smiling and I smile back. My kids take this gesture to mean I want to play and double down on the climbing and jabbing me while I try to get some rest.
