Belated Happy Hannuka

Haven't posted for a while. It's the last day of the Hannuka holiday here and we had a busy week with the kids at home, meeting friends and family. Not complaining, all is well, and we enjoyed our social activities, but I didn't have too much computer time.

The kids had a blast lighting candles every night. Here's a picture from the candle lighting of the fourth night. You can see only 4 candles in the Menorah, along with the Shamash (the candle which we use to light the other candles with - you don't count that one, but you leave it, higher up than the others, in the Menorah). We spent the evening with friends, and Ron and Dan has a special guest too! The sweet little girl next to Ron there is my niece Sheeran who stayed over with us that weekend. Note that bawl of Hannuka donuts - wasn't a single one left by the end of the evening (I didn't even have a bite, honestly!)


The next day we took the kids to the movies, all three of them. The car ride was a bit crowded but lots of fun, as we were singing Hanuka songs along the way.


We then went to visit my brother's family, to get little Sheeran back home. I absolutely loved this picture of Ron and Sheeran's little sister, Noah. Yes, Noah is a girl's name in Hebrew (spelled and pronounced differently than the biblical Noah).


A couple of days later, IsraeliDad, Dan and myself went on a day trip with some friends. Ron stayed at home because he wasn't feeling too well (he was fine later on, no worries). We visited an organic goat farm near Jerusalem where they produce local cheeses. They have their own website, it anyone's interested: http://harharuach.com/ There's a page in English there, but unfortunately it doesn't have a link to their nice picture gallery.

Here are Dan and ID right before our tour of the farm -


We absolutely loved the little baby goats -


The next destination was the caves of Beit Govrin
where we toured the special bell caves and spent a nice time crawling through the caves. Some of them are fairly large, actually, as you can see here, but they form an intricate network of caves with some nice passages where you squeeze from one cave to another.


These are all manmade caves, dug approximately three thousand years ago and include some neat features like the authentic oil presser within the caves -


Dan had a nice time being quite the tourist there, and there were a couple of times when we had to chase him through the caves to find out where he went to -


We did lots of other stuff during Hanuka too. I have a bunch of pics and movies to download from my camera and will post them soon, I hope.