SHMOT

BABIES, BURNING BUSH & BRICKS

While we were on vacation in LA, Maya asked "Ima, what happens when we are on vacation. How will we do parsha project?" Whoops. I was kind of hoping that she wouldn't notice that in fact, we missed two parshiot while we were away. But, of course, she did. So, I promised her that we would make them up (and we will). But, in the meantime, we were ready to dive into a new book, Sefer Shmot. At the beginning of the week, I told Maya that we would be making a Baby Moses and she immediately asked "is it Pesach?" I realized that this would continue to be a confusing issue for her. It is difficult to explain why we are doing all of what she considers to be Pesach stories now. But, she was happy to have a chance to revisit these familiar narratives. I knew that I wanted to do a Baby Moses project with them because they loved making a Baby Moses centerpiece (using an Easter basket at Passover time!) for the Seder last year. I found lots of versions online but chose to follow this one that I liked the best. The girls loved playing with the little tiny cake decorator babies and taking them in and out of the egg carton basket.

Maybe because of my guilt for falling behind in parsha projects, I felt compelled to do three different projects this week! Truthfully, there were a number of striking visual images in the parsha that had easy project potential. So, in addition to Baby Moses, we made a burning bush poster. The girls just cut and paste pieces of red, orange, and yellow cellophane and tissue paper.

Finally, I wanted to do something edible. My first thought was to make charoset, to symbolize the mortar. Every year on Pesach, someone says about the charoset, "this is so good, we should eat it during the year." So, this could be the other time of the year that we eat Charoset. But, Andy came up with an idea that was much more fun (and fattening). We made Pithom and Ramses using Hershey's nuggets as the bricks and peanut butter as the mortar. It was fun, messy, and delicious.