This month my kids have been more interesting than world events.
We traveled to Nassau and the Atlantis water park during the February school break. Jeremy was running through the whole park looking for the kids Splash Zone and then he saw it, and then you could imagine his chagrined face when he arrived to see a big yellow barrier around the whole pool because it was under renovation the previous several weeks. The Bahamas being what it is, the pool was still closed by Presidents Day Weekend. Jeremy and I went on the Lazy River tube ride and capsized twice the first time around, but then we got the hang of it. After 3 days in the Bahamas and doing things such as eating pop corn while walking around in a zero entry pool, we headed to the Homestead resort in Virginia for some winter sports including skiing. The hotel is a 90 minute drive from Roanoke, Virginia airport. We didn’t know if we would like it but it turned out that Elizabeth said it was “better than Disney World.”
It is a place of southern charm – after 6pm it seemed that every boy above the age of 3 was wearing a jacket and tie. They have dinner and ballroom dancing with a band in the main dining room; there was activities going on all the time, and our kids went skiing and snow tubing. The goal was to be out and about with above-freezing weather and it is probably the top ski resort with a ski school in the South; except for one really unusual cold day in the teens fahrenheit, it was pretty pleasant there with temperatures in the 40’s. There are also big water slides and the promise of fun summer activities so we are going to return there in August. The hotel is 20 miles from the Greenbrier in West Virginia, but the Greenbrier got rid of a lot of what made it special to us when it switched over to its focus on the casino. The hotel offers good value for money and it is a great place to enjoy winter sports in the South as long as you are not so particular about the mostly machine-made snow and the lack of advanced ski runs. The place was full of kids during the school holiday and adults can look forward to a beautiful spa and a bunch of new facilities which are supposed to open soon.
Jeremy and Elizabeth went to the ski school. After an hour, Jeremy thought it was too easy and boring. So he went and jumped the fence in his ski boots; the ski school had never seen that done before. So they sent an instructor to bum around with him for the next 3 hours and he basically had a very long private lesson. The next day we booked him a private lesson and he got the same guy who thought Jeremy was “totally awesome” – Jeremy will happily tell you that “I’m not scared of anything” (except that taking some liquid Tylenol scares him). He said “the kid doesn’t stop for anything. He just keeps going no matter what’s in the way.” Later that day on the snowtube ride, his cable became detached from the tube at the top of the rope tow and he started barrelling down the mountain in his tube. I thought it was rather scary but Jeremy thought he was flying and thought the whole thing was great. Ah, to be 5 years old and completely oblivious to all danger. Elizabeth also liked skiing; on the second day she was going up the mountain on the lift with a ski instructor and basically skiing down by herself.
Meanwhile, back at home, 35 pound Jeremy was lifting 10 pound weights and cycling in my home gym and refused to go to a play date, saying “I have to Train.” For What, I said? I’m training for the big race. When is it, I asked? Next week, he said, and then wanted to start doing pushups. Life in a Manhattan apartment is tough for a 5 year old boy, and so we have him and Elizabeth enrolled in karate and gymnastics classes during the week to let them get it all out.
Earlier last month Jeremy was in a gift shop in Australia and said to me “All Elizabeth wants is jewelry. That’s all she wants.” I guess she’ll have a place in my mum’s jewelry store someday. But he’s got that part all figured out about women. Jeremy took some psychological tests from the New York City Board of Education which showed him pictures of things such as can openers from 30 years ago and a dog house and expected him to know what they were (there are no dog houses in Manhattan). They expected him to answer that a vacuum cleaner is something his mother plugs into a wall to use to clean the house, except that we live in a world of working mothers and housekeepers who clean homes. Here are good answers from Jeremy to dumb or misdirected questions from the NYC Board of Ed: Where does the sun go when it sets? Australia. What is a letter? Part of a word. (They expected the postal kind.) Where does milk come from? God. (Well you know, milk comes from cows that come from God.) What do you plug into a wall? An iPad. What is a holiday? A vacation. (OK, so we speak with some Britishisms.) Anyway, they asked him if he could count to 10 and he proceeded to count to 100 and gave the correct answers when asked to read bar graphs which is what 4th or 5th graders are supposed to do. So he’s in good scholastic shape to enter kindergarten next year. Just in case we were worried…
Moving onto the world at large:
Here’s a Prediction: Egypt’s Morsi will not last the year. The army will get rid of him. The Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt is just not ready for prime time. They’ve been puttering around so long that they haven’t been able to put together an aid package from the IMF for months. Too many power grabs and not enough coalition building for a country that needs less beards and burkas, and more tourists and investment.
In Israel, the only question in my mind is will Lapid keep his word that he won’t sit in a government with Shas? If he sits with Shas, he will lose a lot of face. But if he stays outside the government, he will be powerless and fade away. Notice Livni was the first person to join the coalition; she can tell him all about how it feels to croak from exile on the sidelines.
The US economy continues to show hopeful growth signs. The fact that health care expenses have been going down may be an aberration or might be real – nobody knows yet. But if it is real, it will help solve the deficit problem. Nice thing about this country is that often the market solves problems that the politicians don’t.
I suppose it will take a few years but we will eventually find out why the current Pope resigned. Several cardinals have a report coming out soon about sexual abuse in the church and I don’t think he looks good in it. Same supposing for what that Australian did that got the Mossad so angry at him and if he really killed himself in his prison cell. Perhaps Yossi Mellman or Ronen Bergman will probably write a book about it.
One of the things China has to really decide about is what it wants to do about North Korea. I’m not sure that coddling North Korea is providing a real buffer to China; instead, I think it is creating more instability in the region than would otherwise exist and is forcing its neighbors to rely on the US even more to have more assets in place. I have felt for several years that the US and China should make a deal; the US and China will remove the North Korean dictatorship, but the US will view North Korea as under the Chinese sphere of influence. South Korea doesn’t really want to take it over anyway and it will probably work better in the long run for South Korea and China to cooperate over that territory. The US and Japan would be happy to stay away.
Two thoughts about food: There are stories about how fish is mislabeled and you don’t really know what you are eating. That’s been true for 50 years. These scandals keep coming and going and nobody ever fixes it. Also, an interesting article this week in the Financial Times about calories notes that the way we label foods to measure calories is based on a system developed in 1900 that bears no relation to reality. Not every calorie is equal and how it is absorbed in the body matters. Based on this old system, Coca Cola appears more healthy than nuts. Until the authorities come around to fixing this, people should be aware that a lot of what they are making their caloric judgments about is based on a false reality.
We are hopefully enjoying the last weeks of deep winter and looking forward to signs of spring.
