Yeh yi doh

As someone old enough to remember when she first got a computer with The Internet on it (dial-up, naturally), it can be really freaky to watch my kids - who were all born in the past decade - in action.

It's most disconcerting watching S. All the girls know how to work the iPad like champs, but there's something weird about seeing a child who still hasn't quite mastered the concept of "poop goes in the toilet" grab the iPad and have her favorite movie up and running in a matter of seconds.

Her favorite movie, by the way, is the video footage Viggy got at D's channukah party last year. I have heard the songs they sang at that party SO MANY TIMES.

Anyway. So S can do nearly anything on the iPad. But then she's totally stymied by the youtube search the kids prefer, which uses vocal input, and it's really sad and cute.

The other day I found her staring at the screen with great concentration, saying, "Yeh yi doh."

*youtube fails to yield video results*

"Yeh Yi Doh!!"

*nothing*

"YEH YI DOH!!!"

*nothing*

What she was trying to make it show her was her second-favorite video of all time: the clip from Frozen with the song Let It Go.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time until someone invents a voice search that can be used by toddlers. Maybe something that lets you choose between the various real pronunciations you might have been going for (with pictures, naturally).

Heck, it's probably been invented already, but S has a technologically ignorant mother who won't learn about its existence, let alone spend the time figuring out how the ipad app store works in order to actually buy it. And she can't buy it herself, because the ipad doesn't recognize "ahpah appsh." Poor S.

A sweet potato on your head

For whatever reason - superb luck? accidental good parenting? - my kids don't seem to have picked up any curse words.

They have, however, picked up the idea of curse words.

Tonight D did some Very Bad things, and was unceremoniously dumped into time-out. A couple of minutes later I decided we were probably both ready to talk.

As I approached a glowering D, she looked up at me and hissed, "Watermelon."

"D, why are you acting like this? I know you're a good girl and can be so nice, why do mean things to your sisters and Mommy and Daddy?" I began.

(Note: this was a mistake, for a couple reasons - number 1 mistake being that I asked "why." Never ask why. You don't want to know.)

"Because. Everyone was ANNOYING me," she explained.

"But when you hit N and took her things, maybe you were annoying her."

*Glare.* "Sweet potato. Sweet potato."

"What could you do instead of hitting?"

"Sweet potato."

****

Two minutes later, D has stopped hissing vegetable names at me and is ready to talk.

Me (attempting a This is a Teaching Moment voice): "So what do you think would help you remember not to hit?"

D (instantly): "If I went to Jerusalem for two days."

".... "

"We could stay in the same hotel where we stayed last time."

"Who would go to Jerusalem? Just you?"

"No, me, and you and everybody who lives in this house... And then I would remember not to hit."

"But honey, we were in Jerusalem before, and it's still hard for you to remember not to hit."

".... I don't remember being in Jerusalem before."

"You remembered the hotel just now."

".... No! I don't remember the hotel at all."

****

Would you believe that N, of all people, is a very stubborn child?

N loves to learn. But N loves to learn her way.

Right now, she's learning to write. OK, great. I suggested maybe she wanted to learn to read first, but no. She wants writing. So maybe she wanted me to sit with her and work on letters? No. Should I help her figure out how to spell words? No! She will write letters, and then I will tell her what she wrote. And that is how she will learn.

So we have dozens of scenes like this (translation by me):

N: Mommy, what did I write? Did I write "good girl"?

Me: No, honey, it says "Gomshpal."

But she perseveres. For what it's worth, N's way generally seems to work pretty well for her - she's somehow picked up a grade-level-and-beyond knowledge of letters, math, and English - so for now, I try to just nod, smile, and be grateful yet again that I don't homeschool. 

Well that got dark fast

This morning I decided it was time to change the water in the fish tank. The sales guy said to change the water once a week, which I've interpreted to mean once every nine days.

Here is our fish tank, pre-water change:

Do you notice anything strange about that picture? Like, say, only one of the fishes having fins or a tail?

That's not just because I got lazy halfway through drawing.

In real life, I didn't notice the change right away. "Mommy, that fish looks dead," N noticed.

"No, honey, he's just holding still so I don't catch him," I told her (while trying to transfer the fish out to a bowl so I could empty their tank). Dead fish float, right?

But a minute later I had to admit that she was right. Also, EEEEEWWWWWWW. Gah. Why did I have to joke about survival of the fittest????? Why???

This whole "pets" thing was bad enough when I thought all I'd have to do would be to remember to give them food and clean water once every few days. I am SO not prepared to deal with gruesome fish murder.

The other fish, henceforth to be known as Murderfish, kept swimming frantically away as I tried to catch him so I could change the tank water. I think he realizes I know what he did. In the end I gave up, and am waiting for Viggy to come home and dispose of the dead fish, and figure out a smart way to catch the living fish.

Fortunately, the girls do not realize that Murderfish was involved in Otherfish's death. They think Otherfish got sick and stopped eating (and then his fins fell off, leaving only bloody stumps? I'm not sure what they think happened there).

RIP, Otherfish.

Now the kids are out playing or sleeping, it's just me and Baby E (who is now known as "[E] fat-face," but in a loving way). So I have to go do math. In the living room. Alone. With Murderfish.

Gah.

Maybe it's time for a softer, cuddlier pet. Like, say, a hamster. (warning - link not safe for sanity) 

Chapter 402: In Which we Get Pets

As the title indicates, we are now the proud owners of two real, live (for now) pets!

By "proud," I mean "extremely reluctant."

It began with S's end-of-year party at daycare a couple weeks ago, where for whatever reason, they decided to give each child a going-away present of a real live fish.

WHO DOES THAT???? Who thinks of parents bringing their toddlers home for a month with no daycare, and thinks, "you know what those people probably want? Another fragile, needy living being to care for!"

Maybe you all don't think of goldfish as being particularly needy. OK, maybe to you they aren't. But we're a family that managed to kill cactus. More than one cactus. 

Of course, you could always choose to give the fish away or something. If you don't mind breaking your kid's heart.

So we brought our fish home, and Adi instantly fell in love with it and gave it a name that I've already forgotten. Adi has already named each and every one of the several dozen street cats living in this area, and my brain is out of room to remember these things.

She also started petting it. Yes, petting the fish. At least she didn't take it out of the water to hold it, like a friend's child did (more on that later).

In the meantime, N and D are asking questions like, "Can we feed him cereal?... Why not?... Can he go swimming in the bath?" and I'm mentally giving the fish 20% odds of living to see the weekend.

Later that day, we went to E's house, where we learned that their fish (given to E's little sister S, who is in daycare with our S) had returned its soul to its Maker a rather short time after arriving in their home (remember the child who took the fish out of the water to hold it? That was E's little brother).

While I tried to quell my feelings of guilty relief that someone else had managed to kill their fish before we killed ours, Adi was busy realizing that her fish could die, too. So then I told her that, yeah, goldfish sometimes don't live very long.

At first she was teary at the thought of her goldfish not living for long. But within 2 minutes, I overheard her and E debating over what they would do with its dead body - bury it? or feed it to Mitsy?

I had to remind her that her fish could very well still be alive. I think they were almost disappointed.

Anyway, our fish couldn't live in a bowl forever, and E's mom needed replacement fish for her broken-hearted toddler. So we went to the pet store and ended up with one little plastic fish tank each, two fish for her, and one more fish for us (I figured that if I had remembered the breed of fish right, they could be friends. If not - a valuable lesson for the kids on survival of the fittest).

Our two fish are still alive, for now, and not in Mitsy's stomach. So - yay us. Now let's just hope they are sufficient as family pets, and don't turn out to have been gateway pets that only encouraged Adi in her dreams of hamsters and cats that are allowed in the house.

(I shouldn't mock Adi's dreams. At least she just wants a hamster. Dani wants a pet lion.)

Tummy

Child (grabs my tummy fat and squishes it): Your tummy is almost fat!

Me: :(

Child: But it isn't fat.

Me: :)

Child: It isn't really fat, because Baby E isn't in there anymore. It just looks fat.

******

Remember a few posts ago when I said the problem with Hamas is that it still views Israel as a colony?

It turns out someone smart totally thinks the same thing.

I thought the same thing as a news analyst. That means I could be a news analyst! If I were able to turn my one-paragraph ideas into three-page essays. And also to have said ideas 10 days earlier.

Wait, what?

So last Friday Hamas announced that we don't have a ceasefire anymore, and there's been not infrequent rocket fire ever since.

I think I speak for most Israelis when I say - wait, what? Are we still doing this? I totally thought the summer war was over.

I mean really. Viggy is back home, the emergency supplies are in the process of being eaten, I even got the kids pool passes (non-refundable pool passes! Good thing the pool is just out of range). What gives? And Hamas - weren't you, like, just complaining about how Israel keeps bombing you two minutes ago??

Have you not noticed a pattern over the past few years of firing rockets at Israel not creating happy results in Gaza?

I seriously think Hamas suffers from some kind of mental disorder. Like really bad OCD, but with "bombing things" as the sole repetitive behavior.

******

Viggy was busy "playing snakes and ladders," as his commander put it. "We find the ladders, and make sure the snakes can't climb up them." (in American, that would be "chutes and ladders," but then the joke doesn't work.)

So it was all very stressful, and we're glad he's home. S in particular spent a while insisting on being with "ABBA SHEL ANI" ("Mine daddy") at every possible moment.

Viggy's brother (one of them) is still in reserves. While reserves anywhere outside the Gaza area has been considered "safe" in recent weeks, he actually has some pretty crazy stories. Like, there was one riot where soldiers were hurt and a Palestinian guy was killed.

Specifically, the soldiers were hit by tear gas fired by some overenthusiastic Border Police officers, and a Palestinian protester died after warning fire led him to drop his Molotov cocktail (you're supposed to throw them... ). But still. Scary stuff.

******

An update on my earlier remarks on the civilian casualty rate in Gaza:

The death figures have been updated. Assuming the new ones are accurate, the revised civilian casualty rate would be significantly higher than my initial estimate (over 40%, instead of under 30%), which was based on the first several hundred deaths.

I don't actually assume the latest figures are accurate. On the one hand, it's true that heavy fighting in Seijaya (only some of which was accounted for in the mid-war death toll) and (briefly) Rafiah probably meant more civilian casualties. On the other hand, the more serious ceasefire talks are, the more Hamas tries to bring pressure to bear on Israel, and it's lied about civilian deaths in the past.

My method was simple, and also obviously flawed: I just looked at the differences between how heavily represented various population groups are in Gaza as a whole, vs. in the list of dead (eg. children ages 0-14, men ages 45+, etc), and calculated how likely it would be to get that degree over overrepresentation/underrepresentation in a random sample (or a 50% random sample, or 30%, etc).

To be clear, I wasn't assuming that any particular group is more likely to be involved in terrorism, only checking how random vs. non-random the deaths seemed to be.

The main flaw is that there are reasons that certain groups of non-combatants might be overrepresented. For example, there was a fairly clear trend toward a higher death rate among 10-14 year old boys than among other children aged 14 or younger. I doubt that's due to actual involvement in armed combat; more likely, it indicates a certain approach to safety (that is, boys that age proving they're brave by being deliberately uncautious). Similarly, the disproportionately high death rate among women in their 20s (compared to other girls/women) could be due to the fact that wives and sisters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders are in that age range, and are dying with their relatives in airstrikes.

So my method is flawed. OTOH, all the other methods I've heard of are equally flawed if not more so. (The worst: trusting Hamas to say whether a given person was a "militant" or not, because they tend not to lie about that sort of thing (remember after Operation Cast Lead, when they claimed for the better part of a year that only 50 Hamas members were killed in fighting? Only to later admit that it was around 600?... No? Only I remember these things, because I am the nerdiest of news nerds? Fine, be that way)).

I was glad to see the New York Times begin to somewhat address the issue. Albeit a couple weeks after everyone learned from the American media that Israel is killing Gazans at random, but still. It's something.

******

And now the chunky baby is asleep again, and my rant must end. After all, I might be taking the kids to the pool tomorrow.

Does anyone else find it concerning that a band called "Megadeath" is cancelling a performance in Israel due to the security situation?

We're too dangerous for MegaDeath. That can't be good.

*****

And in the latest "uhhh.... what?" media moment - CNN talking about why there have been "so many civilians" dying in Gaza.

Beyond the fact that it's a little weird that they say "so many" about what is - sadly - a very standard civilian death toll during wartime (by my unprofessional (but disturbingly thoroughly researched) estimate, about 25% - if all Hamas data are accurate, and not taking into account whether civilian deaths were caused by Israel or Hamas), it was really strange that they spent several paragraphs talking about the reason that Palestinian civilians might not leave their homes despite warnings. When the fact is that civilians did leave their homes after being warned.

Maybe there wasn't 100% evacuation, but from everything I've heard from people who were actually there, nearly everybody did leave. Most civilian deaths were in airstrikes, misfired Hamas rocket, etc - not from being anywhere near the scene when soldiers arrived.

A bit odd, then, to see the media explaining why it was that people stayed.

*****

Less "odd" and more "infuriating" to see what CNN had to say about the tunnels.

For one thing, because the bit about how the IDF destroys tunnels was complete and utter BS. Just - zero relationship between CNN's version of events and the truth.

"The main way to obliterate the tunnels is by airstrikes and artillery bombardment" - no, neither of those things work against the larger tunnels, which is why soldiers were there in the first place. Does CNN really think that Israel sent tens of thousands of soldiers in on foot to do something that could have been done from the air?

Do they not have interns who could check this stuff?

And then: "The tunnels have, for some time, also been used as vital supply lines to Gaza, through which food and other necessities have been transported."

The tunnels that Israel was busy destroying in central and northern Gaza? Those tunnels?

CNN. For real. You're a big news station, surely you can afford at least one intern whose job it can be to look at maps for you.

*****

Also funny that CNN feels the need to explain to its American audience why a difference in available technology might mean one side has more casualties than the other. How many American civilians died in the Iraq war, again? I mean, do we really think that Americans need that concept explained to them at this point?

"You see, guys, it turns out that it's safer to kill someone by bombing them from within a tank with its own missile defense system than it is to charge out blindly from a hole in the ground with a rifle. Who knew?"

Of course, the main reason for the uneven casualty rate* here - as in the Iraq war - is that the war is taking place on Hamas' turf, in Gaza, and not within Israel.

(* or if you're CNN, the "disproportionate" casualty rate. Not that I'm bitter, or anything.)

*****

I'm trying to avoid criticism on whether media is "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian." That's all controversial, and subjective, etc.

But this is just getting the facts wrong.

Years ago, I was somewhat disturbed to find myself working at a news station with little, if any, actual news experience.

Later, I was highly disturbed to realize that the largely amateur, openly politically oriented news outlet I worked for was at least as professional as most of the "big name" media outlets. At least we had actual first-hand sources, and didn't claim to be reporting from sites we had no access to. 

Years ago, I focused on local activism because I didn't have the resources to get involved with problems overseas.

Now, I focus on local activism because I realize that I don't know what's really going on overseas. Every media report boils down to two things: what local parties with a strong interest in promoting their narrative have to say (the PLO says Hamas is a "political party"? You don't say!), and what a handful of reporters on the ground who can't afford to anger the powers-that-be feel safe saying.

*****

(For the record, the sense I get is that most reporters feel like they morally have to support Israel's right to self-defense, but morally can't support anything that kills innocent people. Which leaves them in an awkward position, given that there's never been a war in which innocent people haven't been killed.

In an ideal world, this would perhaps lead to a real debate on the morality of self-defense, or to an in-depth look at how Gaza turned into a hellhole stuffed full of bombs and ruled by would-be-genocidal fascists, and how the world can turn that whole situation around.

In our world, it leads to reporters bouncing back and forth between "rockets" "but dead children!" "rockets" "dead children!" like ping-pong balls in a game being played by two people on speed.

IOW - less "anti-Israel" or "anti-Hamas," and more just plain "uhh... guys... how can we present this decades-long conflict in a way that won't require anyone to think too hard?")

And now we're done

Pop quiz: What's the one thing no Israel-Gaza conflict is complete without?

If you guessed "ironic music videos," you're totally right! (Partial credit for "pointless deaths," "weapons in a UN facility," "that one horrific bombing that each side denies involvement in," and "at least three broken ceasefires").

The video in this latest round of summer violence was provided courtesy of Hamas.

The lyrics are essentially, "Attack... attack... obliterate the Zionists... Zionists are scaredy-cats who hide from rockets" (the fact that Hamas apparently sees hiding from rockets as weakness explains a lot, actually).

The music is disturbingly catchy. Listen to this more than once, and you'll find yourself in the very awkward position of trying to explain to a coworker what it is you were just humming and why.

Israelis couldn't sit by and let Hamas mock them with a catchy "attack Israel" music video. So in a response that I guess might sort of make sense, on some other plane of reality, with the help of enough quality drugs, they decided to create their own "attack Israel" videos.

So here you have it - Hamas' "Arise and Attack" video:

The Lion King version:

The "dancing soldiers" version:

Tel Aviv style:

And re-worded to express angst over a breakup:

There's also a trance version, and some seriously "what the hell is that" versions.

"But Ali," some of you may be saying. "I'm an orthodox Jew. How could I listen to Hamas music videos at a time like this??"

Don't worry, I've got you covered. There's also an a-cappella version for the nine days:

****

Not quite a version of this meme, but I got a kick out of Wile E Coyote, the Hamas version:

****

And an "ironic music videos" retrospective:

Nothing will ever beat "Fall on you Til"