End of hibernation

What???

3 months have passed since the last post?

That pretty much covers the winter, through which we apparently hibernated.

Very little rain (unfortunately), and some chilly days scattered between nice springy days- the Israeli winter is beautiful. What once was a thorny sand hill is now covered with lush tall grass and wildflowers (and even more thorny thingies).

We tried to continue hiking as much as possible to take all that liveliness in, but since none of us is yet accustomed to the local viruses (or is it viri?), we ended up spending a lot of the last 3 months between dr visits and a box of Kleenex.
We actually had a lot of "exciting" times in our life, most of which we would have gladly skipped. We spent some time in the hospital with Lia (those damn viruses!). We had someone break into our house and steal whatever they could take+ our car... hey, we haven't been here for 11 years, I guess we had it coming.

Yet, the girls are growing up nicely. Lia's Hebrew is great and she is comfortable playing with the language. At her daycare she takes all the kids who don't want to nap, sits them in a circle and tells them a story. She is truly captivating. This is a clip summarizing some of Lia's bests in the last 3 months. Warning: its about 5 minutes long.

More from Lia here.

Lia continues to be a wonderful sister to Noya, surviving her many attacks of "love". Seriously, Noya can be quite dangerous when she decides she likes your face and wants to see what it feels like (when she bangs her tiny hand at an F-16 speed into your eye-socket). I think the "she just does it because she wants to play with you" excuse we use on Lia starts to get old when Noya's hand holds a toy-hammer or a drumstick, or whatever sharp object she can grab.

But other than that, Noya is also quite a character. This is a clip of her bests (6.5 min).

Noya is cute as a button, but the button is attached to a little laughing bunny who runs and climbs and touches everything. She is super active and blabbers non-stop from morning till nightfall. She is very determined and wicked quick, so most of the time she ends up bumping into whatever. Hence the various marks on her forehead throughout the clip.

She has many kinds of laughs, which crack us up (including a "mad scientist" laugh which I have yet to capture on video). Her favorite and most useful word is Aba, to my delight. She can have a complete conversation with you, using only that word, in various intonations and variations. Eventually, these talks always end up with her smacking you in the face. so just get used to it.