Israel Trip Memories and Potty Talk

It's more than a week since I've been back from Israel. I was just talking with my mum, who will also be leaving Israel in another week, about the strangeness of having so many ties in more than one place. It can be hard to leave. Or, glass half full, I'm so glad I went--my family in Israel is a big part of who I am and it had been way too long since I'd last been.

So it's a good time to post a retrospective of my trip. I want to share a little of the treasure of visiting, and some thoughts about potty talk in different cultures.

In the six years since I was last in Israel, many of my cousins have had kids. I didn't get to meet all of them, but I got to spend time with some of them. It's incredible how six years can produce all these beautiful beings.

Here's one of my cousins with her dad (my mom's brother--can you see the resemblance?) and her two adorable daughters.

 My cousin (on the left) and her husband had twins! I can't believe how big those boys are already. The one on the left has the curly hair that shows up in the family sometimes; the one on the right looks so very much like my cousin herself looked at that sort of age.

 And those boys have a big brother too! Who was a smart guy with the sweater over the face.

Meeting kids who have no idea who I am and to whom it means nothing that I'm their mom or dad's cousin can sometimes feel like an intrusion on their lives. Bringing a camera along has the dual advantage of getting photos and of breaking the ice. The shirt over the face trick is a common one, but my cousin El-ad's beautiful daughter had a different response to the camera--she put on a gymnastic performance!

 And her little brother was all ready to play guitar, although he really wanted daddy's full-sized guitar.

 At their bedtime, one of the stories we read is one I remembered from when my youngest brother was little--"Sir haSirim," or "The Pot of Pots," where the title parodies "Shir haShirim"--"The Song of Songs."

It's a potty-training story, which goes into every detail of a little boy's anatomy and the clunky metamorphosis from diapers to pee-pee and ca-ci in the pot, graphically illustrated! And now there's a little girl's version too--the boy is Naphtali; the girl is Tziona, and my cousin's kids each have a copy. The girl is past that stage now, but still enjoys looking through, apparently.

We have a copy of "Everybody Poops" in our outhouse, but it doesn't come close to the explicitness and 'naturalness' of "Sir haSirim." I was just refreshed by the frankness of it, by the depiction in print of a child celebrating and exalting the full potty. 

My cousin's little son is in the phase of having the "That's mine" mantra, and tried to appropriate the "girl's" version of the book. And I had the delight of witnessing my cousin, whom I have known since we were that age and who is now a lovely man and a sweet dad, explaining to his son that no, that wasn't his book, because look: in the boy's book he has a "bulbul" here between his legs (in the anatomy picture) and look: in this book it's a little girl and she doesn't have a "bulbul" there.

Imagine that?