When our oldest child (Jonah) entered the Gan, it was just days after our youngest was born. As you can imagine, our lives were upside-down. Part of what this meant was that we were not doing a particularly good job of keeping tabs on how things were going for our oldest at school. We of course got the weekly newsletter from his teachers, but I think we were just too tired and frazzled to really absorb much information.

So one evening, a few weeks into the school year, Debra and I sat exhausted in our living room and she said to me “Do you feel like you have a sense of how Jonah’s doing in school? Like what’s going on over there?” I was about to reply with something along the lines of: “No. Not really. Who has the time or energy to figure anything out right now?” But just then, Jonah walked into the living room and said: “Mommy, arbah v’od arbah shaveh shmoneh!” [four plus four equals eight].

I looked at Debra and grinned and said “Our kid is doing math in a foreign language… Guess things are going just fine!”