Saturday, January 13, 2018

Skyping with my parents

It recently occurred to me that I never updated this blog (that I hope some people still read) about whatever happened with my parents after I sent that email to my dad about being too mad to talk to him.

So here's what happened. We didn't talk for a couple of months.  A few days after Thanksgiving my dad emailed again asking if I wanted to skype sometime with C and I agreed. So we set up a time to talk like a week later.  Unbeknownst to me, he set it up for a time that he was visiting my Brother and his new wife at their home.  So of course I couldn't chew them out for not going to my brother's wedding- since my parent's were sitting right next to my brother and sister in law, and that would be weird. Sneaky.

The good news though is that my parents were at my brother and sister in law's house about 2 months after the wedding!  They didn't even meet B until a year after we married.  So that's good.  My brother seems unwilling to fight with them and just wants to stay in their good graces, which kinda annoys me a little- like I seem more upset about this whole thing that he does, but since he's not too upset, I feel like I don't have as much of a right to be upset.

Meanwhile I haven't seen my parents in person and they haven't seen C since August 2016, and we have no plans to meet up in the future as of yet.  I will be in Philly in August for a conference so I may ask them to meet up with us down there (about a 2 hour drive from them).

While on skype I asked my parents to send me a real menorah so I could light candles with C (the only one I had was a fake light up one for the mantel and a travel one where the candles constantly fell over and doesn't have the classic menorah shape).  She has been talking about being jewish lately and when we saw the Frozen holiday short (during her first movie at a theater!) she was super excited to see there was a family with a dreidal and menorah.  But I don't want to pay for one, so I figured I could ask my parents for one. But they sent me a huge oil menorah without the oil cups and with a bunch of tiny candles?

We ended up crumpling up some tin foil to make little candle holders to put in the oil cup, and we lit it once with all 8 candles- two nights after Chankuah actually ended.  But during chanukah we did a thing where each day we added an additional candle to the big menorah (but didn't light it).  I've decided I don't mind doing some traditional things as long as we aren't too religious about it.  I also made latkes for the first time in 10 years and C had like half of one. Learned how to use a new function on my food processor though, so that was cool. :)   We also played dreidel a few times but instead of pennies we used some of the fancy rocks we have from going gem mining last year.

Meanwhile I've emailed with my dad a couple of time about random things over the past month, but only had that one skype session about 6 weeks ago.  That is about the level of contact I want right now.