Hey – that last post I wrote (put it up late last night – be sure not to miss it, as it contains important theological arguments) was my 100th post! Woohoo!! Who knew? This calls for celebration! Break out the trumpets and pass the diet Coke!
Speaking of celebrations, guess what? I’ve been invited to a ball. This is a first for me. A “Winter Ball,” honoring a member of my shul. I totally want to go, of course, but I’m missing a crucial ingredient: the fairy godmother. I mean, I suppose we can do without the horses and coach, but what exactly am I supposed to wear?? Or are they just saying it’s a ball, because they want to sound fancy, and really it’s just a dinner, in which case I can wear the same black suit with pink satiny trim and fancy-ish buttons that I’ve worn to every single wedding/dinner/bat/r mitzvah/etc. that I can think of for the last 8+ years? Except when I was pregnant, of course. But that suit is definitely not appropriate for a ball. I need to make some calls and get the lowdown on this.
So apparently one of R’s teachers (as near as I can tell from what she says, and from the fact that YS doesn’t know her, this teacher is someone who gives R some of her much-needed one-on-one help at school) is going to Israel tonight, and she invited R to write a note to put in the Kotel, and she also said R could bring notes from her family as well. You should have seen R go crazy over this last night. It was sheer beauty. I don’t remember seeing her get this animatedly excited and engaged in anything for quite some time. She was running around encouraging each of us to write one – I think she called it “a special tefillah for Morah A (that’s what she calls this teacher) to put in the Kotel” – and she and YS (this is so adorable) both decided they would write down the שמע. Heehee. Or at least, as YS said, “The first part of it, because that’s a very important tefillah for the Jewish people.” It was so cute and sweet that I didn’t know if I should tell them that they could write whatever they wanted, and they didn’t have to limit themselves to tefillot that already exist.
So YS wrote hers, and R sat down at the coffee table with her siddur open to שמע and attempted to copy it out… and after several minutes and several erased letters, asked me in frustration if I would do it for her. 
I don’t even really know why. As near as I could tell from the erased markings, she’d been doing a fine job, but writing isn’t all that natural for her, and it was late already and she had to go to bed. I hope my doing it for her didn’t dampen her excitement. I don’t think it did.
So I wrote out the first paragraph of שמע, and I told her to sign her own name in Hebrew, which she did. RS wasn’t really interested in writing one, which upsets me slightly for a number of reasons – until she was playing with the Boy and expressed to me that she wants me to have another baby boy (heh). So I said “Do you want to write that in your note for the Kotel?” At which point her face lit up and she ran off to get notepaper, and without any help from G or me, she wrote out in only slightly imperfect Hebrew that she wants her mother to have another son (I’d quote the whole thing but I no longer have it). Before she signed her name, she wrote “!’בבקשה, ה”, which means “Please, Hashem!”, which I’m sure you’ll agree is adorable. (I have my own opinions regarding the subject of this particular tefillah, but that’s another matter.)
We have reason to fear RS’s davening capabilities, by the way. As it happens, approximately six weeks before I discovered, on a farm in Kentucky (though G says he thinks it might have been Indiana, but I want it to have been Kentucky), that I was pregnant with the Boy, RS had told me that she wanted there to be a baby in my belly, and she asked me if I would please daven to Hashem so I could have one. I thought this was quite sweet, of course, and I suggested to her that she could also daven to Hashem for a new baby if that’s what she wanted. So she went to find G, and she asked him how to say in Hebrew “Please can there be a new baby in my Ima’s belly,” or something like that, and then she repeated it after him. I found this whole thing to be so touching, and apparently Hashem did too, because lo and behold, less than a year later, there was the Boy – and he did in fact originate in the vicinity of my belly. When we told the girls I was pregnant (one of the most amazing parenting moments I have ever experienced 
), I reminded RS about her tefillah, and her face lit up all enchanted-like and she said “That’s the first time Hashem really answered my tefillah!” I’m getting all misty-eyed just thinking back on it.
So, perhaps we should all watch out after that note is delivered to the Kotel. 
So – RS wrote her note, YS wrote hers, I wrote mine as well as R’s, and G wrote his. I told R that RS had decided to write one after all because she thought of something she wanted to ask Hashem, and R, dancing around like she does when she’s excited, asked what it was, and when RS told her it was private, R said “I wonder what she’s asking. Maybe for mashiach to come!” And when R had all five notes, she decided to Scotch-tape them around a gift that she had spontaneously created for Morah A. Want to see it?
You can’t really see the whole thing. What she did was, she broke off a little stem of flowers from the potted plant G inflicted upon me in lieu of Shabbos flowers last week (oddly, it isn’t dead yet), and she took the bottom half of an unpainted wooden nesting doll and made it into a vase. When she discovered the water leaking out through the wood (oops), I suggested she put a plastic shot glass inside it, which she did, and then I suggested she pour out the water and let Morah A put water in it when she gets it. So she poured out the water, and then asked me if we could Krazy Glue the flower inside the shot glass to make it stay up. So I crumpled up a napkin and wedged it inside, and it held the flower up splendidly. Then she got all excited and decided to tape the notes around the vase. I put the whole thing into a paper bag for her to bring to school today, and I gently advised her that the notes might fall off, and that she could always re-tape them if they do.
Now, hear this. If Morah A did anything other than respond to this gift with overflowing and unbridled wonder, amazement, gratitude, and praise, thereby making my child glow with the strength of a thousand suns, she will be sorry. Very sorry. Very, very, VERY sorry. Sort of like you are for deciding to drag your eyes through this whole description. But for reasons that may or may not be obvious, this incident is embedded inside me so strongly that I’d say at the moment it’s comprising about 65% of my bloodstream. I just wrote out a few sentences trying to explain why and how, and I promptly erased them all. Maybe that speaks for itself?
Wow, awesome. Also, it was entirely Kentucky.