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