A Little Off-Topic, But Stick With Me

I know, I know. This is a kosher travel blog, not a "watch me discover myself" blog. But I've been wanting to write this post for a while, so here we are.

I still love traveling, that's not going anywhere. But becoming a mom kind of cracked something open in me, and now I have all these other random creative outlets I didn't have before. Some of them are small (hi, sourdough). Some of them are a lot bigger than I expected (hi, Jewish Women Series).

So today's post is just me sharing some of the other things I'm into right now, because apparently I'm one of those people now who has "interests."

Sourdough baking

I started this mostly out of boredom and it turned into a whole thing. There's something weirdly calming about feeding a jar of flour and water every day and somehow getting bread out of it. I am not a professional, my loaves are not Instagram-perfect, but I like makign fun scores and even painting on them occasionally!

Watercolor

I've always been artsy, but watercolor specifically intimidated me for years. So I started doing a little watercolor night with friends, wine, popcorn, YouTube tutorials, and zero pressure about how anything turns out. It's become one of my favorite nights of the week, less about the actual painting and more about the excuse to slow down and not worry about getting it "right."

Basketball

I will be honest with you: I hate cardio. Running for the sake of running? No thank you. But put a basketball hoop and some healthy competition in front of me and suddenly I'm sprinting like my life depends on it. Apparently that's all it takes, I just need a reason to care about the running part. I'm also trying to learn how to do the splits!

Chess

I started off not even knowing how the pieces move, like fully clueless. Now I'm playing a little every day, still not good, but getting better, and somewhere along the way I started actually appreciating how beautiful the game is. There are endless possible moves, which means there's always something new to learn, you never run out of ways to be surprised (or humbled).

Spanish on Duolingo

I'm doing the whole Duolingo thing, a few minutes a day, mostly so the owl stops guilt tripping me. I don't know if I'm anywhere close to fluent, but I can at least order food and ask where the bathroom is, which honestly might be the most useful skill on this entire list.

Wellness, sort of

I'm also into somatic stuff, breath-work, dancing, self reflection, whatever. I'm not becoming a coach or anything, I just like doing it.

Jewish Women Series

This is the big one. My sister Lieba and I started this because I was reading my daughter Serafina a book about Amelia Earhart and thought, why don't Jewish women get books like this? So we made our own.

Each book tells the true story of a remarkable Jewish woman most people have never heard of, women like Vera Rubin, the astronomer who helped prove dark matter exists, or Sara Fortis, a teenager who led an all female partisan unit against the Nazis in Greece. We've got four books out right now (Vera Rubin, Emma Lazarus, Judy Feld Carr, Sara Fortis) and we're already deep into the next ones. It's been the most meaningful creative project I've ever worked on, and it didn't come from a five year plan, it came from a random Tuesday night reading session.

If you want to check it out, it's at jewishwomenseries.com. You can also find it on Amazon.

Anyway. Back to our regularly scheduled kosher travel content soon, like, this summer. But I wanted you to know there's more going on behind the scenes than just figuring out where to find kosher food in all corners of the world. This account, as Menahem and I like to say... is our very expensive hobby ;).