So, I'm nowhere near a sports fan - I'm only looking forward to this week's Stupid Super Bowl because I hear the commercials are going to be funny and my mom is serving good food - but I saw this article this morning that I thought was cool and thought I'd share.

From Sportsillustratred.com MIAMI (AP) -- Shaquille O'Neal put his police skills to use early Sunday. O'Neal, the Miami Heat's All-Star center and a reserve officer with the Miami Beach Police Department, followed a driver who allegedly crashed into his Cadillac Escalade and tried to flee... more

A great gift for someone with a new baby, new home, bar/ bat mitzvah or for a wedding/ engagement is a mezuzah. A mezuzah is something you will generally see on the door frame of a Jewish home. They are usually thin and rectangular in shape, though they do not have to be. Some are simple, others colorful and ornate. The important thing is really the scroll that's inside the mezuzah case.

Here's some background information from my friends at wikipedia.com:

refers... more

In the first part of this look at conversion, I started talking about an individual who was raised Jewish, but either born to a Jewish father and not a Jewish mother, or was adopted and raised Jewish, but not converted to Judaism officially. (The following scenario may even be valid if the individual undergoes a Reform or Reconstructionist conversion.) Say he grows up, becomes more involved in his religion and becomes more traditional in college. He meets a nice Jewish girl and they decide to get married. Problem is, they want to be married by a Conservative rabbi who won't officiate because according... more

I started talking about the subject of conversion the other day. Many religions have some sort of an "initiation" ritual or conversion - Judaism is no different. When a couple adopts a child who is not born to Jewish birth parents, the topic of converison comes up. So why is this an issue at all? Why do people feel so strongly one way or another? And at what point does this sticky subject get, well, sticky?

It comes down to the question of "Who's a Jew?" and the fact that we Jews can't seem to get to a universal agreement that every movement is okay with. The more traditional movements - the Orthodox... more

So you're Jewish and adopting. Great! Now what about the sometimes sticky topic of converting? To some of you out there, whether or not you will convert your child to Judaism (assuming you are not already adopting a Jewish child) is a no-brainer. To others, it's something you may have considered or are on the fence about, and to others still the topic of conversion has not yet come up. So, I'm bringing it up.

To answer the question of "why convert?" we must first tackle the question of "who is a Jew?" In the Orthodox and Conservative movements, a Jew is someone who is born to a Jewish mother (or where both parents are Jewish) or someone who has converted under the... more

A random list of things my mother forgot to tell me about being a parent has been running through my head lately, so I decided to share some of my thoughts with you.

- Baby spit-up shows up more on darker clothing. And wearing nice clothing is generally just plain stupid.

- Babies smell. Even after the offending diaper has been attended to.

- You smell (or me at least). After cleaning up messes and realizing you can't remember when you last changed your clothes or showered, you certainly smell.

- It is very hard to rationalize with a child - at least one who is almost four.

- You end up saying "because I said so" even if you swore you'd never use... more

Is infertility a bad thing?

Many, if not most of us, came to consider adoption after a long and arduous journey down infertility lane. I think it's best described as a roller coaster in both the physical and emotional sense, and by the time we get to the end of our journey, we are exhausted. We are grieving. We are relieved to be moving on to happier things.

Is infertility a bad thing? While I know it will never be a "good thing," as Martha Stewart would say, I still struggle to figure out where in my identity "infertility" fits. Adoption changed my life dramatically, but it did not make me any less infertile than I was before. I still read infertility blogs now and then,... more

I have these posts, and others, placed under the category I call "Funny, she doesn't look Jewish." Although it's a bit tongue and cheek-ish, it's certainly something that is on our collective mind in general when we - adoptive parents - look into the adoption process. At some point during the journey, one discusses the issue of appearance. Some parents specifically look for a child with similar features - blond hair, blue eyes - not just similar coloring. When couples decide to look into international adoption, country of origin is a factor - brochures and web sites describe what the typical child from that country looks like. How dark is their skin? How round are their faces? How likely are... more

When does color matter?

Anna became aware of the fact that her skin color is different than ours early on. For a while, she was into pointing out everything and everyone who was "brown like me" as she would say. I think that every transracial family has the requisite book or two that talks about race. But what I found most helpful in our home is having books where the characters are of different races where the story doesn't focus on the subject of skin color at all.

Anna's skin color being different than ours is still something we talk about,... more

As I sit here typing, I'm looking out the window next to me at a pine tree in my backyard - one that's a bit taller than my house. We have tons of squirrels in this part of the country (my grandma calls them rodents) and it's not unusual at all for the trees to shake when there is no wind, as they are busy jumping from one branch to another. We have grey squirrels here, and have had only grey ones for as long as I can remember. In the past year or so, I started noticing a few families of black squirrels in a woody section of town, and they have since... more