Dinner @ Daniel

Hey Mom, do you like my dress?

Yes, I like the dress. But what shoes?

Remy, Sky & Mikki

Have you ever gone out for dinner and come back from an experience?

Seth celebrated 27 birthdays before we met. On Saturday, the two of us, with our three children (21 years worth, but I digress), put on our grown up clothes and headed into Manhattan to celebrate his 27th birthday together since we met 10,000 days ago. OK, it is his 54th birthday but it is so much more fun to look at it in numbers.

Mikki, who will be 8,000 days old in a few days, and Pierre, her ami, planned a dinner party for us at Daniel that was extraordinary and wonderful. Here we are in the kitchen with the magical people who create these culinary works of art everyday. I realized that my days of planning birthday parties for my children are coming quietly to an end. Two are voting, the youngest now has a deep voice that squeaks only when the other two pin him down to be tickled. They don’t believe in Santa Claus, or Hanukah Harry. But I know they believe that some things are worth suspending your world for to celebrate, like love in its achingly precious beginnings. And love that is 10,000 days old.

dans la cuisine

Year of the Poodle: Mildred, my Jewish mother-in-law

Wisdom comes from many places.

A certain kind of wisdom born of a sense of the sublime and the ridiculous came from Mildred, my quintessential Jewish mother-in-law.  She was a change agent from an earlier time.  A nonprofit nana who believed in making the world a better place, one pot roast at a time.  “Do good and eat, kindeleh (Yiddish for child)!   Oy! God forbid you get sick.  So, don’t be such a big shot.  Wear a sweater.”

While I come from a family marinated in Confucianism and other kinds of Chinese ways at looking at life, marrying Seth and catapulting myself into a casually Jewish family made my life wonderfully and forever meshuganah (Yiddish for crazy),  filled with moments that make me scramble for my sketchbook.

Like this zinger.

And that, dear readers, is how I became a nonprofit knitter in the Year of the Poodle, my life in pictures.

I miss Mildred everyday.  If you have a Jewish mother-in-law story, I would love to hear it!