Pandemic Purchases

The pandemic has led to all sorts of changes in our day-to-day lives. Overall, we’ve been buying less—we go out less and need fewer things. But there have been some new needs as we spend more time at home. Here are some of the things my family has enjoyed—or regretted buying—during the past 8 months. As we embark on what will be a long winter, maybe this will help you, too. (I selected all these items, but I do get a bonus if you buy it from a link here.)

Grocery delivery

I think we tried them all, and there’s been some entertainment when our neighbors got 9 bags of carrots instead of 9 carrots, or when we got 1 banana instead of 1 bunch. Less fun was when what we wanted just didn’t show up. What has been particularly fun are the weird shaped veggies you can get delivered—most of which aren’t that weirdly shaped—as a kind of CSA that you can select items for. Our favorite so far has been Imperfect Foods, which also has grains and dairy (and meat, if you’re into that).

Outdoor play

By far our best pandemic purchase was a ninja line and slackline, which hangs between trees in our back yard. It’s been used more than anything else we purchased in the past year. We even see the neighbor kids climbing on it when our kids aren’t home. Since they can’t hang out inside, the gang is out there all day, bouncing and swinging and chatting. It’s customizable and can fit in any yard that has two trees—no installation or cement stabilizing or anything necessary.

We also got an inflatable yard pool. Served its purpose fine though it was hard to clean.

And then, after a summer of buying outdoor toys, we read that Americans were moving on to porch heaters. We did, too, just in time as the supply was running short. We ended up with this heater when the one sitting in our cart disappeared before the order went through. True to the reviews, it works just great if you are sitting within 5 feet of it. So during the pandemic, with everyone seated 6 feet apart, this doesn’t help a lot of folks. We did not buy more and instead place it near the coldest or oldest group. I don’t see this taking us through a Boston winter, unfortunately.

Kid fun

Sticker books. So many sticker books. The Melissa & Doug Puffy Sticker Play Sets are loved by the four-year-old, who by the fourth or fifth one has learned not to put the stickers on the ground where they get dirty and hairy and don’t stick any more. The Usborne Dolly Dressing books have stickers that are not reusable, whatever they say, but they do get you a good 30-60 minutes of quiet for an important Zoom call!

Rollerblades: an inspired purchase that got us through April and May when playgrounds were closed and we just needed to be outside doing something. Easier to pack into the car than bikes: big kid and medium kid and for the little one. Make sure you get kneepads, too!

Art supplies: too many to list over the course of home summer camp, but one favorite was a hot glue gun, which we never had before but use all the time now. 

Technology and home organizing

More and more devices are in use at our house, with kids getting a hand-me-down laptop and bringing iPads home from school. Bluetooth headphones need to be charged more often, too, with all the video meetings. I have a work laptop and a home one, both frequently in use, and my husband has a work one, in addition to the kids’ one. These charging stations means that charging cords aren’t all tangled all over our dresser and iPads aren’t found with dead batteries in tangled bedsheets and the desk isn’t covered with laptops. First world problems, but definitely helps when at 8 am everyone has a meeting to get to. And they look nice: one for the laptops and one for the phones.

We also got the kid in the top of the bunk bed this bedside organizer, which holds her books and water—and iPad that she uses to listen to podcasts and music at bedtime—right next to her bed.

She also is using these Bluetooth headphones until she falls asleep. They help her not fight with her sister, who doesn’t want to listen to the same thing. They also address the concern of cords and cables in bed. Then, after the kids fall asleep, we take the iPad and headphones back to the charging station.

Back to school

We were one of the early families going back, with kids in school in person starting in early September. Some back-to-school items were new because of the pandemic.

Hand sanitizer holders: silly, break easily, made kids happy to have something new to clip on their backpacks. Hope these don’t stay on the back-to-school shopping list, especially since they weren’t worth it.

Little plastic toothpick eyes to decorate food helped a lot with engagement with lunch preparations once we went back to school. It’s kind of nuts how a little plastic pointy thing gets kids to eat plums, but I’m here to tell you it works.

One kid came home crying on the first day of school because her ears hurt from her mask. We tried this silicone mask holder thing. It just made it worse by pulling at her hair. A better solution was a different kind of mask. So I don’t recommend these. But 5 stars for these Bloch masks, randomly added during a purchase from Zappos and then bought again and again because the kids find them the most comfortable. They come in white, navy, pink, and black, so you can even color-code by kid.

Baking

I hopped on the sourdough bandwagon in the spring, and then hopped off when I could find yeast again and realized how much easier yeast bread was, but bread-baking has been a big part of this pandemic for us. I already had a Dutch oven, but I bought this one for a friend who didn’t, so she could bake bread, too, and I got myself a few new tools to help with the baking, including a plastic scraper and a food scale. I don’t think the scale is all that accurate so might be worth going up a level in terms of quality if you’re doing a lot of baking. 

Athleisure

All clothing purchases made this spring and summer were comfortable—no real pants. Instead, yoga pants and pajamas and comfy tops were the rule for kids and adults alike. We had success finding deals at Old Navy and Lands End for these kinds of things, which I always shop via Rakuten, which earns us a percent cash back on each purchase. This money adds up over time and is on top of any other discounts you can get.

The small things

Camera covers are key for all the devices around the house. The kids sometimes ask, “Can they see us?” when we’re watching recorded videos, but it’s indeed not always clear when it’s a Zoom meeting and when not. To make sure the camera doesn’t go on and surprise us, we have put physical covers on all the devices. 

Sock holders are critical in this house to keep socks paired before they go into the laundry. Every kind I’ve found so far has a kind of planned obsolescence and need to be replaced, but I’ll happily buy more rather than have to pair socks.

Stick-on mustaches—one of my most inspired purchases ever. I’ve now bought more than once. Bring joy and laughs to almost any situation, from back-yard camp to daycare to family gatherings. Highly recommend.

In short, I’ve bought more on Amazon than I wanted to this year. Any books we buy are bought through Brookline Booksmith, our local bookstore which orders whatever you need—and it arrives almost as quickly as Amazon. I’ve also cut back on Amazon slowly as I’ve identified replacement sites, and anything that can be bought locally is. But these items got us through the pandemic so far—hope they help you, too!

Resources in Hebrew for kids

I’ve been working for a while to find resources for my kids to be exposed to more Hebrew. I’ve found a number of things that I’m sharing here – hopefully making your life easier and letting you get your kids more Hebrew as well!!

Obviously there is plenty on Youtube
· Parpar Nechmad (they watch at school)
· Rinat and Yoyo – great for Jewish holidays (they watch at school)
· Hop Yaldut Yisraelit – songs
· Specific books – you can find them being read and acted out

But it’s hard to keep track of and much is old, and I wanted to have some only audio options. So here are a few recent finds:

Finally found some podcasts for kids:

https://www.kan.org.il/podcast/

Kan also has TV programming for kids in Hebrew from Israeli public television, so current:
https://www.kan.org.il/page.aspx?landingpageid=1083

Books on tape in Hebrew:
https://books.icast.co.il

Can buy one at a time or subscribe for a month or 3 to all the books. Can also play at .9 or .8 speed which is helpful for non-native speakers

Also, the Minuteman library network has lots of books and DVDs in Hebrew, though I couldn’t find ebooks or audio books in Hebrew:
http://library.minlib.net/search/

So when we do get to that point, I’m hoping to try this Hebrew ebook site:
https://indiebook.co.il/
(though we bring lots of books back on each trip so we have plenty for now)

בהצלחה – Good luck!

Rosh hashana d'var Torah

I gave the d'var torah at Washington Square Minyan this past week. I'm sharing it on Medium since that seems to be the thing to do these days!

Bike to Work Day

I biked to work today and it was amazing. Kudos to Boston & Hubway. #biketowork #Boston @bikeboston @RandCorporation

Today was bike to work day, so that motivated me to check out Hubway, the not-so-new bike sharing program here in Boston. I was worried the bikes would be clunky or the signup complicated, but the interface at the station was a cinch and I was off on a bike in no time. My first bike was a little clanky, and with only 3 low gears, it sometimes felt pointless to pedal downhill, but the seat was adjustable and comfortable and I felt great riding it.

I had to make a stop in the morning for an appointment. There were Hubway stations two blocks from my house, two blocks from my appointment, and one block from my office. All super convenient. I hear that sometimes the stations are full so you can’t return your bike--that would be a bummer if you were in a rush--but all I experienced was ease and convenience.

As for Boston, I enjoyed seeing the number of bike lanes and the number of bikers. Where there weren’t designated lanes, the bike symbol in the lane was more than symbolic: it reassured me as a biker that there was space for me and maybe even made the other drivers more courteous, if you can use that word and Boston drivers in the same sentence. A little planning kept me mostly off main roads, but even when I was on Huntington Ave, it was smooth sailing. And when I made a wrong turn in the South End, I just ended up getting a closer look at some of the great side streets there.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that it was a gorgeous, sunny, cool spring day, and I wasn’t in a rush. There are plenty of reasons not to ride--if it’s too hot, too wet, or too cold, or I’m carrying too much stuff, or I need to dress a certain way (and not get sweaty!). But now, some of my many reasons are gone--having to make sure my bike’s tires are full, shlepping it out of the basement, worrying about locking it somewhere during the day, and most importantly, having to bike home every time I bike in. It was so freeing to be able to bike to work and enjoy it--and to be able to decide NOT to bike home, since I had to pick up my kids. Now I can take them in in the morning and bike home if my husband is getting them, or vice versa. That is amazing!

I can’t say every day will be bike to work day for me, but I hope a lot more of them will. Thanks, bike to work day!

I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything

Excited to share my first blog post on Kveller.com:

I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything
By Shira Fischer 

My 3-year-old daughter already knows the difference between dairy and meat.She saw our delight the first time she asked us if a meal was chalavi (dairy) or besari (meat) and now she can even choose the right silverware. She doesn’t yet understand all the details–but she knows there’s a difference. Yesterday we even went to the next level and discussed pareve (neither dairy nor meat), too.
Through these recent conversations, I’ve realized how much about our world must seem completely arbitrary to her, with names and categories she has to just accept–and she’s slowly learning to do so. No pajamas during the day–but no dresses at night. Why? 

Read the rest here:
http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/i-hope-my-daughter-questions-everything/

My new Inbox

I got my Inbox invite today (Gmail’s new format for email, for those who haven’t been waiting for their chance to check it out).

First of all, no, sorry, I can’t see how to issue an invite. But the good news for those who want in is that I just requested an invite on the site, and it came quickly, so sign up yourself!

In the meantime, my brief review: I was excited to try it, and the interface is pretty, but feature-wise, I’m underwhelmed. It basically pre-labels your email into its own categories (Promos, Forums, Updates, Social, Finance), which are not necessarily the categories I’d use (what’s Forums? And why are AMA and JAMA in updates, but Dana-Farber and AMIA in Forums?), so that’s just filters. It then groups them together so that you can view similar messages and handle them together. That is nice and probably more efficient (even more efficient would be to just check email less often each day), but it’s not revolutionary.

A message can be pinned, meaning it will stay in the inbox and not be archived when you sweep everything away. Thus the mindset is to help you clear out your inbox each day, just saving pinned things, rather than most people’s default of just leaving everything in the inbox. Still, it’s a cosmetic difference: some people use read/unread for this, or starred/unstarred. Of course, changing the default is likely to make more people archive the messages they don’t need, but I’m quite good about archiving messages I’m done with, so everything in my Gmail inbox is new or a to-do (“pinned,” in the new lingo), so this doesn’t add much for me.

There’s also the option to add to-do items to the inbox. This makes sense as many people use their email as a todo list. Still, without the fancy features of a real todo program, most people will still need something else for lists that need priorities and tags and other kinds of organization.

Lastly, there is the new option to swipe a message to have it return later to your inbox. This is the greatest and only really new feature. For those who haven’t used it before, the idea is that it keeps you from rereading and reconsidering messages you can’t manage yet, while ensuring they don’t get lost before you need them. But many have used such a feature before: Boomerang does this nicely, though it doesn’t work well on the mobile format, and they limit you to a certain number of deferred messages unless you subscribe. Mailbox does this exceptionally well on mobile, and I’ve been using it as my main iPhone mail program for a while. They recently came out with a desktop version which I haven’t fully adoption since it doesn’t quite integrate with Gmail enough. But now Gmail seems to be stealing their main feature, and I feel guilty whenever the big guy takes the creative idea from the smaller one. I guess Mailbox isn’t suffering—Dropbox bought them, so they’re okay—but there’s a pride in not being purely inside a single provider camp, a la Farhad Manjoo’s advice to “Buy Apple’s hardware, use Google’s services, and buy Amazon’s media,” which is what I already do. I’m not ready to give up Mailbox yet (I’m still nervous about managing my mail in Inbox, since an X in Inbox just closes the message, while on Mailbox the X deletes it), but Inbox might manage to convince those people who use their inbox as a todo list and who have a lot of mail from going elsewhere to manage it; it might keep them in a pure Google world.

Away from home

When you’re away for two and a half months from home, you learn a lot of things about yourself and your family. Some are quite meaningful and/or disturbing: how much time do you actually want to spend with your toddler every day, or the best time of day to have a real conversation with your spouse. Others may seem mundane but are also revelatory: how much laundry detergent do you use in two and half months? How much shampoo? (Answers: a lot more than I thought, and less than I expected). I know which parts of the kitchen I never touched and which clothes I never wore.

Memory is also relative to place and context. My knowledge of this operation is of course better than the last two Gaza ones because I was here, but I may also remember other things better because I’m not at home. For example, I’ll probably remember the date of the Malaysian airplane crash or remember Robin Williams’ death better than some other celebrity because it happened this summer. I’ll remember that the time D first wore nail polish or H first went swimming were summer 2014. Going away divides life up into units that don’t exist at home, for good or bad. This has been studied, of course, to maximize test preparation, with some studies recommending taking practice exams in the room where the real test will be held. But I think it’s an argument for variation in life: change your location and change not just your luck but what you remember, which is really how you perceive the world.