A new year, a new project

The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, has been one of the only guaranteed "Jewish" days in my life the past few years. Despite a general lack of religion in my day-to-day existence, I have always put things on hold during the high holy days and headed up to my parents' house for my annual dose of Judaism. Usually, those few hours spent in synagogue cause me to feel both guilty that I neglect this portion of my identity the rest of the year and hypocritical that I'm suddenly acting the part of a dutiful Jew. I always promise myself that I'll do more with my spiritual side in the coming year. I never do.

This year, however, the logistics of schlepping 2 young children an hour and a half away and finding child care for them while I went to synagogue turned out to be too daunting, or maybe the hypocrisy of it all just won out over the Jewish guilt, I'm not sure. Either way, I'm taking a pass on Rosh Hashanah this year and planning to fill my annual quota of Judaism on Yom Kippur, which conveniently falls on a weekend when my (non-Jewish) husband can watch the kids. I bought some apples today to dip in honey for a sweet new year, knowing full well that my finicky 2 1/2 year old will refuse to try the honey and my 7 month old is too young to have it. I figure I'll have some myself and at least it will taste like the holiday. And I promised my mom that I'd light candles at sunset with the kids, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure I have any that aren't purple and I wonder if that's sacrilegious. So much for Rosh Hashanah.

The one thing I am doing, however, is making a New Year's resolution. For months, I've been thinking about starting a blog, partially because I want to regain a little piece of the joy the old pre-Mommy me took in writing and partially because I've been a lousy archiver of my children's lives to date. I need to mark the new year in some symbolic way, so I'm starting that blog today and making it my resolution to publish regularly. I'm calling this ministones because that's what I want to write about -- the minutiae of our daily lives, rather than the big milestone-type events that one would normally record for posterity (not that I've really been so good at keeping track of those either). Hopefully, a year from now, I'll be able to fulfill the Rosh Hashanah tradition of taking stock of the year by re-reading what I've published here. With a little luck, my kids will even be sharing my apples and honey by then.