by alichava | Aug 30, 2026 | Children
My husband and I agreed early on that we wanted our children to take a gap year before college. For me, that year was an incredibly enriching experience after working so hard throughout high school. I explored multiple countries in the Middle East, learned to navigate another country in a language I did not speak fluently and had the freedom to figure out what interested me outside the structure of high school.
It was during that year that I discovered my love of Talmud. I eventually made it one of my majors in college. My gap year did not simply give me a break before college. It helped shape what I chose to study and, in many ways, who I became.
So the idea of our children taking a gap year has never felt particularly unusual to us. It was something we believed in long before we had a child old enough to apply for one.
Actually navigating the process with our oldest was another matter entirely.
The process was very different from what I had experienced, and I had no clue what to expect. Our school does not have the same resources for navigating gap-year applications and acceptances that some other religious schools have. The entire process was intense.
I am incredibly grateful for the friends who shared the insider scoop and for the Facebook group dedicated to these questions. There were so many things I would not have known to ask and parts of the process I would not have understood without parents who had already been through it.
That experience probably deserves its own post, once I have enough distance to explain what happened and what I wish I had known. Tonight, though, the applications, acceptances and decisions are behind us. Tomorrow she actually leaves.
We have spent the last several months preparing her in ways both large and extremely mundane. We have worked on managing finances, making sure she has the apps she will need in another country and talking about what it means to be responsible for things that have largely been handled within the structure of our household.
There is always one more thing you suddenly realize you may not have taught.
I have been thinking a lot about adulting and the difference between knowing how to do something and being the person responsible for remembering that it needs to be done. It is one thing to understand how money works. It is another to manage your own spending. It is one thing to have the right app. It is another to figure out what to do when the app does not work and your parents are in another country.
I know we have not covered every possible situation. We could not. Part of the reason for taking this year is for her to learn how to navigate some of those situations herself, just as I did.
Her departure will also change the dynamics of our household in very practical ways. I have relied on my oldest to do a significant amount of the driving, and all of that is about to fall back to me.
Only six and a half more months until Child #2 can get her license. Not that I am counting.
But the larger change is not really about the driving.
Until now, the relationships among the four siblings have largely existed within the shared structure of our family. They live in the same house. They see one another without having to arrange it. Even when they communicate through technology, everyone is still part of the same daily orbit.
Now my oldest will need to build and maintain an individual relationship with each of her siblings from a distance. That relationship will look different with each one because their access to phones and other technology is different, but also because their personalities are different. What helps one sibling feel connected may not work for another.
I think that is one of the parts of leaving home that we talk about less. The child who leaves does not only develop a different relationship with her parents. She has to figure out what it means to be a sister when being a sister is no longer built into every day.
And the younger three will each have to figure out what it means for them, too.
Tomorrow, we will take her where she needs to go, make sure she has what she needs and say goodbye. Then we will come home to a household that is almost the same as it was before, but not quite.
This is a transition we chose. It is one we have encouraged for years because we believe in the growth, independence and opportunity that can come from it. I am excited for what she will learn and who she will become during this year.
I also know that believing your child should leave home for a year does not make it easy when tomorrow finally arrives.
by alichava | Aug 30, 2026 | Travel
I have never been someone who arrives in a new city with no idea what we are going to do. Before we leave, I have usually researched enough activities to fill approximately three vacations and attempted to fit most of them into one.
Years ago, my vacation-planning system started with a Groupon membership to the Maryland Science Center. The reciprocal museum benefits gave us a starting point in almost any city we visited. I would create a TripTik, add every museum, historic site and possible stop I could find, and then turn the whole thing into an itinerary.
We rarely followed it exactly.
I still overplan vacations, although the tools I use have changed. I also understand the purpose of all that planning differently now. The itinerary gives us structure, but the larger collection of research gives us room to change it. When something is unexpectedly closed, the weather refuses to cooperate or the people on the vacation turn out to have opinions, I already know what else is nearby.
The plan starts with too many possibilities
When I begin researching a trip, I am not particularly restrained. I want to know about the major attractions, but I also want to find the smaller museums, historic sites, unusual stops and places we might only visit if we happen to be nearby.
I put everything on the map.
Some of those places become anchors for the trip. Others are possibilities that may never make it onto the actual itinerary. But mapping them all helps me understand the geography of a city. Two attractions that sound as though they belong together may actually be on opposite sides of town. Something that seemed too minor to plan a day around may be directly next to another place we already want to visit.
I can also begin to see which activities naturally fit together and how much time we will lose moving from one part of a city to another. That matters when traveling with children, but it also matters when traveling with any group of human beings who eventually want to eat, sit down or stop looking at historic plaques.
Then I build the itinerary
Once I have the oversized collection of possibilities, I begin turning it into actual days.
I look at locations, opening hours and anything that needs to be reserved in advance. I think about which places are most important to us and which ones would be nice if the timing works. I try to avoid traveling back and forth across the same city unnecessarily.
Then I inevitably put too much into each day.
I have become somewhat better at recognizing that looking at a map is not the same as moving several people through an unfamiliar city. There is travel time, parking time, waiting time and the mysterious stretch of time that disappears whenever everyone has to leave a hotel room.
Still, I would rather begin with more options than we need. The plan might say we can visit four places. That does not mean we must visit all four. It means that when we finish the second activity, we already know what else is nearby and can decide what makes sense.
The itinerary is not a binding contract
Our actual trips rarely look exactly like the original plans.
A museum is unexpectedly closed. It rains. Something takes twice as long as I expected. We discover a place that was not part of the plan at all. Someone is tired, hungry or simply finished participating in my carefully constructed educational experience.
Sometimes we move an entire day around. Sometimes we skip something I really wanted to see. Sometimes an attraction I researched extensively loses out to something we noticed from the car.
The planning is still useful because we are not starting from scratch every time something changes. I already know which options are nearby, which ones require reservations and which activities could work better on another day.
Overplanning is what allows us to be flexible.
My planning system has changed
The Maryland Science Center membership was once the beginning of the process. I could look at the reciprocal benefits available in a city and build outward from there. The TripTik helped me see the route, add stops and begin organizing the trip geographically.
I still use TripTik, but now it is one piece of a larger planning process. I gather information from different places, map the options and gradually turn all that research into a day-by-day plan.
The technology makes it much easier to move things around, check current information and find alternatives. It also makes it possible to collect far more possibilities than any family could reasonably visit.
I am not entirely sure that last part is an improvement.
What has changed more than the tools is how I think about the finished plan. I used to see the itinerary as the trip we were supposed to take. Now I see it as one possible version of the trip.
There are things we definitely want to do, things we would really like to do and things that are useful to know about if we have time. There are also activities that work as backups when the weather changes or when the original plan turns out to be unrealistic.
Not every researched attraction needs to become part of the vacation for the research to have been worthwhile.
Planning for the trip we are actually taking
The same itinerary will not work for every family, or even for my own family at every stage.
The ages of the children matter. The length of the trip matters. The reason we are traveling matters. A short pre-camp trip has different constraints from a longer family vacation. A city we have visited repeatedly requires a different kind of plan from a place none of us has seen before.
Our interests and energy levels also change. Something that worked beautifully on an earlier trip may no longer make sense. Something we skipped years ago may suddenly be exactly what one of the children wants to do.
That is part of why I keep planning rather than simply reusing an old itinerary. I can begin with what I already know, but I still have to think about the particular trip and the people taking it.
What I am going to share
Over the years, I have accumulated a lot of travel plans. Some were followed more closely than others. I want to begin sharing them here, including the research that went into them, what we actually did and what I would change if we took the trip again.
These will not be definitive guides to everything a family should do in each destination. They will be the plans I created for my family, with the parts that worked, the parts that did not and the options we researched but never reached.
I still enjoy building a very detailed itinerary. I also know that the itinerary will change once the trip encounters weather, opening hours, traffic and my actual family.
That does not make the plan a failure. It means it did its job.
by alichava | Aug 13, 2026 | Simcha
We are now preparing for our third b’nai mitzvah, with one more still a couple of years away.
There are plenty of logistical things that come with that. Invitations. Food. Guests. Clothing. Schedules. All the things that somehow need to come together for one weekend.
But those aren’t really where we start.
For each of our children, we have come back to three things:
Leyn. Limmud. Hesed.
Leyn: reading a piece of Jewish text publicly.
Limmud: learning.
Hesed: contributing through an act of loving kindness.
The framework has stayed the same.
What I’ve learned is that the way each child moves through it shouldn’t.
A Framework Is Just a Guide
I love learning.
I continued with LA Hebrew High School long after regular Hebrew school. I spent a gap year in Israel. I studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where I double majored in Talmud and Midrash. And I kept seeking out opportunities for advanced Jewish learning afterward.
Learning is something I have always wanted to do.
But raising four children has been a very good reminder that the things I love are not necessarily the things they love, and even when we share an interest, we may approach it completely differently.
A framework gives us somewhere to begin. It doesn’t tell us exactly where each child needs to go.
For one child, halacha may be fascinating. Another may connect much more deeply with aggadah, stories and ideas. One may want to read a tremendous amount. Another may be much more interested in sitting with someone and asking questions.
The goal isn’t to create four versions of the same b’nai mitzvah experience.
It’s to give each child enough structure to find something within it that belongs to them.
Child #1: Megillah
Our oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah was during the pandemic.
She studied Mishna Megillah and then moved into the Gemara. Teaching her the Mishna and then the Gemara was special because this was really the first text I learned fully.
For her hesed project, she made mishloah manot for Bikkur Cholim of Greater Washington.
And then she read all 10 chapters of Megillat Esther.
During COVID.
There were plenty of things about that bat mitzvah that weren’t what we originally imagined. But when I think back on it, what I remember most isn’t what we couldn’t do.
I remember what she did. And she was fantastic.
Child #2: Finding a Different Kind of Learning
Our second daughter’s bat mitzvah came toward the tail end of the pandemic and was connected to Sukkot.
She read Kohelet.
We started by learning Mishna Sukkah. But she wasn’t particularly interested in continuing into the Gemara.
So we didn’t.
Instead, she studied Pirkei Avot and then Avot D’Rabbi Natan.
That change was important for me.
The point wasn’t to recreate her sister’s learning program with a different tractate. The point was for her to learn soemthing that would resonate with her. Sukkah wasn’t going to have enough philosophy or aggadah. So I pivoted with her to something that many kids would not study, but something I loved. I also taught bits of Avot D’Rabbi Natan when I was a 7th grade Talmud teacher while I was in grad school. So many fascinating stories.
And that meant paying attention to what kind of learning actually interested her.
Her hesed project was also very much hers.
Her bat mitzvah fell during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She loves baking and is very good at it, so she made apple butter and pink challot and sold them to raise money for Sharsheret.
I’m not generally drawn to hesed projects that are primarily fundraising or collection drives. I usually want the kids to have some kind of tangible experience of doing something.
But this was different.
The baking itself was tangible. She was using something she was good at, developing a skill and turning it into something she could contribute.
And Sharsheret was personal for our family.
During my cancer treatment, Sharsheret was incredibly helpful in connecting me with other people going through similar experiences. My cancer was HER2-positive and ER/PR-negative, which is less common, and when you’re trying to make decisions about treatment and what comes next, having people who understand the particular questions you’re asking matters.
So her project connected something she loved doing with an organization that had mattered to our family.
That made sense for her.
Child #3: Learning From Everyone
Now we’re preparing for our son’s bar mitzvah.
And once again, the framework looks different.
He’s doing less reading than his sisters did. The learning is what has really captured him.
And his limmud has become something I didn’t anticipate when we first started doing this with our oldest.
He’s learning with lots of different people.
Ari is finishing Daf Yomi in January for his 50th birthday, and he began learning Berakhot with him.
Our son has learned with one of our rabbis. He has learned with close family friends. He has learned with other kids in the community. He has learned with his oldest sister.
He’s working toward completing Seder Moed, but I’m increasingly interested in how he’s learning it.
Jewish learning doesn’t only happen between a child and an assigned teacher.
It can happen with parents and grandparents. Rabbis and teachers. Friends. Teenagers. Other children. People who know a tremendous amount and people who simply have something they are excited to learn together.
There is something beautiful about entering Jewish adulthood having already experienced Torah as something you learn with a community.
His hesed project is taking a similar path.
He decided that he wanted to contribute to ASIRT, and part of what drew him to the organization was the opportunity to connect the project with a beloved teacher.
Our hope is that this becomes something meaningful enough that it doesn’t end when the bar mitzvah does.
And Then There Is the Date
His bar mitzvah weekend also carries a connection that he couldn’t possibly have planned.
It falls on the weekend my father would have turned 85.
My father died 18 years ago.
He never had a bar mitzvah.
The first time he was called to the Torah was at my brother’s bar mitzvah in May 1996, when my father was 54 years old.
Thirty years later, our son will be called to the Torah for the same parsha.
Naso.
It also happens to be the parsha I read at my own bat mitzvah. The one my brother read at his bar mitzvah. And the one I read during the weekend of our aufruf.
Naso is also the longest single parsha in the Torah, because apparently our family doesn’t do anything simply.
There are traditions we intentionally create.
And then there are connections that reveal themselves along the way.
This one feels particularly special.
Four Kids, One Framework, Four Different Experiences
We still have one more bat mitzvah ahead of us in about two and a half years.
I have no idea yet what hers will end up looking like.
And that’s really the point.
I don’t think there is one right way to do any of this.
Even within our own family, I’m not interested in saying, “This worked for Child #1, so this is our system.”
The system isn’t the experience.
The framework gives us somewhere to start.
Leyn. Limmud. Hesed.
What those words mean in practice depends on the child standing in front of us.
Over the next few months, I’m going to share more about how we’re approaching this third b’nai mitzvah, including some of the planning systems I’ve been building, the things we’ve learned from the first two, the things we’re doing differently and probably some things we’ll discover we got completely wrong.
Because after doing this a few times, I have plenty of ideas.
I definitely don’t have all the answers. I am learning from my community, from my friends, and from the people in the active bnai mitzvah facebook groups that share so many great ideas.
