Reflections regarding Friday October 25, 2024 to Saturday October 26, 2024 in Caesarea, Israel
We spent the day after Simchat Torah learning and then helping around the house. The boys took down the sukkah decorations, washed the windows, folded chairs and brought them inside to put away, vacuumed the sukkah area and then the roof deck which was full of green dust from the fake grass that had been pulled up. The boys all worked extraordinarily hard. While the twins helped vacuum up the dust, Amichai and Eitan helped by scraping off the remaining glue. No small feat. When they finally had a chance to rest, Eitan and Amichai played a family card game with Grandma called Contract Gin.
The next morning an alert blared on my phone at 6:45AM. However, this was for an earthquake! I had no idea what to do, but the phone alert gave clear instructions to go outside. The problem with going outside is that we are near the water and an earthquake can cause a tsunami. My parents are in the flood zone and have signs near their street with tsunami evacuation routes all over. We decided to wake the boys and head outside. My parents remained asleep and could not have cared less about this particular alert. We felt kind of silly sitting outside wondering what was happening. A few minutes later we went back inside. I had hoped all the boys would go back to sleep, but Matanel and Shai were wide awake and wanted to play with me. I did that tired parenting thing where I lay in bed with my eyes closed while they played near or on me and I responded with grunts and one word answers. The rest of Shabbat was spent lazily recuperating from the abrupt wake up call.
After Shabbat ended we found out the earthquake was not an earthquake. The IDF had set off a series of explosions in the north that were strong enough to register on a seismograph.
