New Beginnings

Dear family and friends,


Writing infrequently doesn't leave much room for sharing fine-grained thoughts and impressions. So I'll try to sustain more frequent updates.


Raising our magnificent daughters renders our days eventful. There's never a dull moment. Beyond the daily routine, however, I'd like to share two new beginnings I am particularly excited about.


Hadas started first grade this year. I didn't think I'd be as excited as I was when Noga did, but I was completely wrong. Experiencing the transition to school with her was (and is) fascinating. There are some difficulties of migrating from playing all day to studying, but for the most part she's very happy with her new environment. Most notably, watching her learning to read is unbelievable. I spend a lot of time reading books with her. Hadas reads aloud, and observing her rapid progress is simply astounding. A bright kid, she's already familiar with all the Hebrew letters, as well as the pronunciation marks ("nikud"). All of a sudden, letters combine into syllables, which then turn into words, which in turn are formed into full sentences. A brave new world is being opened for her and you can literally see and feel the wheels in her brain. You can almost touch her sense of accomplishment and joy in light of the new capability she is acquiring. Fantastic!


Noga, as I previously wrote, is going to attend a gifted program this year. Once a week, instead of school, she'll be going to "Oranim College", not too far from Haifa, for a full day where she will take several interesting classes with other gifted kids. A few months ago I went with her to an introduction day. The program, fully supported and partially funded by the Ministry of Education, looks very promising. The classes are very small in Israeli standards (at most 20 pupils per class), the teachers seem to be proficient and caring, and the subjects are diverse and intriguing, including art, juggling, aeronautics, zoology and more. It's no news that Noga is an extremely smart girl, but still, listening to the program director explaining that they accept only the top 1% of kids made me proud. Even more rewarding is seeing how excited Noga is towards the program, which is likely to alleviate the fact that at school, how to gently say, she's not being constantly challenged.


As the famous Israeli song goes: ילדים (ילדות, אצלנו...) זה שמחה

(translation: kids are happiness :-)



Giora