Passover week

I can't figure out what to do this week. I just feel like doing a whole bunch o' nothin' really. My daughter laughed when she heard me say this. I'm always doing something. But when there's just too much something, I back off and end up doing nothing.

I wrote a list of a bunch of things I needed to do during the week off work. Organize the storage room, which looks as if a garbage dump arrived there with a year's worth of junkyard heap, organize the cabinet with all the photos strewn all over the place with no photo album they can call home, homework, self-inflicted pedicure, haircut, clean doors, and finish one of Sayed Kashua's books that I began in February but found no time to read.

Then there are the holiday options to do outside the home during Passover. Visit mini-Israel in Latrun which is having a special Red Sea parting thing happening there, Jerusalem Zoo, Segway ride on the Haas Promenade, archeaological dig, hiking in Bar Giora, hiking with the Pathway Circle through the West Bank Arab village of Battir, work on Abed's land just outside Jerusalem in Ein Haniyeh where they're going to build some structure or something for guests....Boombamelah festival on Nitzanim Beach, two Dead Sea music festivals and street festivals in Tel Aviv. How does one choose from all of this???

On Saturday morning I read that there was a tour from Beit Shmuel on that same Saturday to the Samaritan community living in Nablus, who were doing their ancient custom of sacrificing a lamb on Har Gerizim. Now THAT would have been something I would have really have liked to see, had I known this in time.

But today was a lazy day, taking my 9-month-old grandson to a local park with my daughter and 2nd oldest daughter. I put him on the baby slide.

"MOM! The slide is filthy. He'll get filthy!"

"Kids are meant to be filthy." said I.

"But he just had a bath!"

"So he'll have another one" said the unsympathetic grannie.

I put him on the baby swing. He began to bite on the bar in front of him.

My daughter shrieked "Oh my God, that has GERMS!"

How did I raise this kid??? I remember letting them loose in all different kinds of Canadian playgrounds where they were smudged with dirt from head to toe and happy to boot.

We ended up watching the rest of the mothers with their kids in the playground, which was just as amusing for the grandson.

One of the mothers bent down to get her baby on the slide.

My daughter clucked. "You think I want to see her crack?? You can see everything."

I hate those low-cut jeans too. Meanwhile, walking back to her house, my daughter related stories of her neighbors, which made the apartment building sound like Wisteria lane, from neighbors pretending to be religious to someone working for the government doing some unscrupulous things, to a neighbor she walked in on who was smooching with someone who she said looked like a tomatoe with eyes.

I guess I am happy with our 31-tenant apartment building. It's much more private and people are much less in each other's lives than with her building of 10 families.

Now let me get back to the Sayed Kashua book, "Let It Be Morning."