The good news
I really don’t see how I could possibly leave the girls and Bish for more than a week at a time. Sigh.

One of my friends in my Tuesday evening art class is going to India in August. Her daughter is there, you know the ritual Israeli after-the-army trip, and she’s going over to visit her (To make sure she’s not overdoing the mushrooms and so on and so forth). In our last lesson, she was telling us about her plans. I suddenly realized I wanted to go too. I hadn’t been aware of this before.

And then yesterday there was an article in Yediot Aharonot about these two girls who organize spiritual trips for women to India. It sounds a bit too fluffy for me, but maybe I’ll give them a ring, get more details. Don’t hold your breath though.

Back to real life, the good news is that they’re not canceling Youngest’s special bus to school, next school year, after all, but we’ll have to participate in paying for it. Phew! Youngest was very nervous about this, because if the bus had been canceled she would have had to start taking the public transport. This in itself is no tragedy, I was getting the bus to school when I was her age, but then I didn’t live in the busy, hectic center of Tel Aviv. My bus line served a quiet neighborhood.

I can’t complain about having to pay, we can afford it. But it does seem unfair for those who are less fortunate than us. One of the mothers suggested that the canceling-the-bus exercise was a “Door in Face” manipulation, so we wouldn’t kick up a fuss about having to pay. If so it worked beautifully, but someone else reckons the real reason was that the parents managed to get an article about it in a local newspaper, so the powers that be backed down to avoid more fuss.

For those of you who have just switched on, Youngest doesn’t go to our neighborhood school, but to a school a bit further away with a class for what I call ‘Budding Matildas’. Youngest wasn’t very happy in her previous class and she’s really having a good time now. She has far more friends, and the teachers seem better equipped to deal with her temperament (which tends to be on the stormy side, bless her).

From today she joins Eldest on vacation. A whole two months to go. Summer vacation tends to be a strain on working mothers, although far less for me now that they are both quite big (Eldest is nearly 13 and Youngest is 9). (Aren’t I the cool collected one? Don’t believe it for a minute, it’s an act. By the end of August I promise you I’ll be a nervous wreck, even more than usual).