the seder

chumash is on break because of the holiday. not that it would necessarily be on break. chana as a rule doesn't take "vacation" on vacation; she happily does 'school' through the summer and on weekends. but she did make a point of saying that she did not want to do chumash over pesach. (this is a testament to how i started chumash too intensely and she has negative associations with it...)

but the seder is part of chinuch (or shall we say more than "part") so i thought i'd post. ari and i, in past years, switched off kids to focus on (a 'benefit' of galus and 2 sedarim--each girl gets a turn each night with each parent). this year was going to be trickier because i was juggling the boys, so i didn't know if i'd be able to do anything. so the first night ari had sarah and i had chana. chana kind of knows the story, and is at the age where suspecting that she is being told a story she didn't request and also remembers feels kind of patronizing. i gave her the children's artscroll hagada, and we opened to the makos and started talking a bit about that. she was interested in the pictures and was imagining if she were there and what it would have felt like. i think that discussion was about 5 minutes, and she did ask what all the plagues were and noticed that the later ones were much more severe and life-threatening than the earlier ones. then she flipped to the 4 sons and asked about that, and i was trying to explain to her that there are different types of people and i have to tell the story depending on what kind of person there is. she was intrigued that there is a type of person who doesn't know how to ask questions. and she found it interesting that we teach the rasha. that was about 2 minutes. then she ran off and didn't want any more to do with the seder.

although this is about chana's chumash experience, i just have to say that the second night, where i learned with sarah, i had one of the most enjoyable sedarim i ever had. in a sense, it was a culmination of homeschooling. sarah and i have had years of learning torah together from when she was homeschooled. she had definite and specific ideas about what she wanted from the seder, which parts she wanted to focus on, how much and what she wanted to learn, how quickly she wanted to go, what she wanted to delve into and what she wanted to get through. and because of all our years of communicating together about her learning, we fell right into our rhythm of learning together, and it was beautiful.