What My Son is Thinking About in the Middle of the Night

This past Sunday my son told his rebbe in cheder that it was his sixth birthday. His rebbe then taught him that it's a special zechus for someone to get a bracha from someone who's having his birthday that day, so he asked my son for a bracha! Then all of the other rebbeim in that section of the cheder also got brachos from my son shortly afterwards.

Please note that my oldest daughter is becoming a bas mitzvah very soon and her gettogether at her school is on Sunday.

Fast-forward to yesterday (Thursday) morning. I was getting ready to leave for Shul in the morning well before anyone else in the house had gotten up and my son had relocated to our bedroom. As I'm getting various things from the room ready in the dark, my son, still half asleep, suddenly sits up and says, "Daddy, when you pick me up at carpool on Sunday, we need to bring the Rebbe with us to the house so [my sister] can give him a bracha on her Bas mitzvah!" He then promptly went back to sleep.

I heard in the name of one of the Chabad rebbeim that you can really tell what is internalized within a person by waking him up in the middle of the night and asking him a question. Whatever he answers before he has a chance to think about what he *should* answer reflects what and who he truly is.

I love this cheder!

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Snow Day Masmidim - Video

This is a very nice video. This Rebbe apparantly convened his class on a conference call to learn Chumash on a snow day.

Our son's school has an amazing program that is announced on the snow hotline whenever there's a snow day. It's called something like "Snow Day Masmidim." All boys grades 1-8 have the opportunity to earn one raffle ticket for a big prize the next day. For every fifteen minutes that the yingel learns, he will get one entry into a major raffle. He just has to bring in a note from his parents about how many fifteen minute blocks he learned for. It's so beautiful. And then afterward, they post a huge poster showing a graph of how many hours each class collectively learned to encourage the boys for the next time. It's awesome!

HT Gruntig's "Inspiration of the Week." Click here to get Dixie Yid in your e-mail Inbox or here to subscribe in Google Reader.