another pleasant day

i'm feeling a bit frazzled as pesach is coming. but i already learned my lesson: if i'm feeling pressed for time, don't do chumash. my body language and my lack of patience is conveyed straight to the student. so i entered chumash with full attention, calm mindset, and committment. (never mind that jack needs to eat right now and i'm standing and nursing him and holding him out of elazar's reach as he tries to kick him and poke him and squeeze him). so chana and i are doing chumash standing. not a great atmosphere.

we did some oral review in the car on the way home from gymnastics. i told her today i was going to introduce her to her first rashi. since she can't read rashi script yet, i would read it to her and tell her what it says.

also, in a shocking bit of advance prep this morning (i usually don't prep), i saw that chana wouldn't understand the hebrew of the main phrase of rashi so i decided i would paraphrase it in simpler language.

i asked chana if she wanted to do chumash before or after gymnastics, and she chose after (of course). i prefer to do it first (get it over with. hmm, is that attitude being conveyed to my children?) but have learned that doing it later usually involves less or even no arguing. plus chana was very busy making small pictures of cherries and cutting them out this morning.

so chana dove into chumash. the word "asher" i prompted with "th..." and she remembered it's "that." the word "nefesh" she forgot and looked it up in her dictionary. she had plenty of trouble putting the phrase together "asher bo nefesh chaya." that in him/his (in it) part that's alive alive. after a couple of tries i just said that it means "anything alive."

chana noted that she didn't think adam and his wife would like to eat things while they were still alive. i told her rashi would address that.

i summarized that rashi says they can eat animals when they died, but not to kill them.