A moment for nostalgia

Preparing for a bat mitzvah under the best of circumstances can be an overwhelming endeavor. We launched into our preparations for an event this year with a considerable time disadvantage, causing the normal planning process to be rather telescoped. This leaves me little time for much of anything else this summer—but somehow the need to work efficiently does not protect me from the necessity of engaging in a little bit of nostalgia.

How can you possibly prepare for the sensations that are aroused when reviewing old family photos and old family videos! The girls and I have been just entranced by the images of their younger selves and they insist that we watch the whole thing, rather than fast forward, because they have not seen the older footage of themselves before! It is amusing to see how funny they find themselves as little kids and we are laughing at nearly everything.

They are so different and yet the same! Infinitely familiar and yet at a stage virtually unrecognizable. Impossibly cute and yet possibly just as cute as we are today. Videos bring it all back in a tantalizing way, so close and also, so clearly far away. Still, Amelia is on the cusp of 12 years old. Just 12. I can tell myself that this is still very young and I've got a little more time to adjust to the notion of her becoming an adult. And then we remember the purpose of all of this reviewing of old videos and I must gulp and recollect that this is her bat mitzvah! (Sigh!)

Invitation, web site and video are done!

Hello everyone!

We are delighted to be sending you our graphical and video invitations. We hope you followed the link to the web site and got to see Amelia's invitation film! We wanted to create it all ourselves—without using any trees! The important part for us was to allow Amelia to express who she is in the process. It really isn't all her mom doing this (despite the film credits)! We want to go beyond mere gestures towards Amelia's impending adulthood to actually provide her a variety of platforms for the application of her creativity, her amazing aesthetic and her extremely rare sense of humor. Some of these "platforms" are quite challenging to master! Our last few weeks (working on this project) have been filled with what seems like an exploration of our creative and technological limits. But totally worth it, frustrations, hard work, setbacks and victories alike, since the effort allows us to provide a cascade of impressions for our guests about Amelia, one richly varied and hugely cool child!

We welcome you to share your thoughts about this occasion!

Hello dear friends and family!

Amelia, Jonathan and I wish to welcome you to this open forum for greetings, well-wishing, catching up, and conversation within this group of our friends and extended family members. Jonathan and I are really thrilled that Amelia is reaching this milestone and she could not be more excited about it!

As some of you know, while we had originally been considering having her Bat Mitzvah in August of 2010, we made the decision to do it this year at Passover time, when Amelia declared that she did not want to be the last kid in her class to have her Bat Mitzvah. Given that she is one of the youngest in her class, that was likely to have happened, if we scheduled this event for her 13th birthday. As it is, we agreed to move the event to coincide with her 12th birthday, which also simplifies the problem that we might have had as a family scheduling two Bar and Bat Mitzvah events each year, close together in time but one each on the west and east coasts. This would have happened, given that our cousins, Robbie and Jake, were born very close to Amelia and Sarah and would necessarily have their Bar Mitzvahs at the same time! So, we moved the event up by a whole year!

We are devoting our summer to putting together this event for you all! From time to time, we may post some juicy tidbits so you can follow the progress of our preparations, especially as we encounter some cool technological innovations that make our planning more exciting. I have to say, we are really thrilled to be finally sending out our formal invitations which, though electronic, are very much the product of a lot of creative effort. I am happy to report that, in the effort to reduce our dependence on paper, we are all learning an awful lot about technologies that we haven't used before! We are learning on the go and creating something in the process! Hey, it's better than Tech ID Camp! We certainly hope you like the results!

Please feel free to comment on any post of ours. (You may need to sign in to Blogger to do that but you can do this using either an existing Google account or any email address that you use, plus a password that you select, when you sign up.) These will be published for all to see, so we can share and enjoy a little virtual community, before we gather later in August!

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you soon!

With love,

—Valerie