Eli has more toys than he knows what to do with, but of course that doesn’t stop any of us from showering him with more, especially during the clumped together  trifecta of Hanukkah, Christmas, and his birthday.
But gift giving isn’t always easy.
And two of Eli’s birthday presents have been HUGE headaches.  Not for him mind [...]

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…that was attended almost exclusively by married men.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Alan, are you supposed to be blogging about what happened at a bachelor party?
Well, technically no. But I feel justified in doing so for two reasons. First, I won’t say anything incriminating. Secondly, I feel that [...]

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Today, Eli turns two.  And I really can’t get over it.
Judging from the picture above, neither can he.  (That’s him sitting on his first present, a new chair, while opening another present, an Elmo book he can read in said chair.)
A year ago, I marveled at all of Eli’s changes on his first birthday.  He [...]

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Happy New Year, loyal readers!  I haven’t written anything all year (ba dum bum), so I’ve got a handful of random thoughts to share with y’all from the past week plus.  Here goes:
So Eli is really into Thomas the Tank Engine, and I don’t get it.  The train cars themselves are sentient and conscious, but [...]

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Christmas is tough.
Being Jewish, and having grown up in a household where Christmas passed each year with varying degrees of indifference and hostility, I never really had to do anything to mark the occasion. But thanks to Courtney’s influence, I’ve become more into the holiday over the years; more so now that Eli is [...]

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I just walked past a burnt-out school bus on Seventh Avenue.
Thank G-d, there were apparently no injuries in the fire.
What freaked me out, other than the obvious, was that at first, I didn’t even notice the bus.  There looked to be a large crowd ahead of me on the west side of Seventh Avenue, so [...]

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You may not have known it, but today is a very special day:
It’s my mom’s 60th birthday!
Happy Birthday, Mom!
To mark the occasion, Chuck, Sam, Courtney and myself threw a surprise party for the (now officially) old lady (just kidding!) this past Saturday. Keeping the affair a secret was a big enough challenge, but things [...]

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Another long Columbus Day weekend, and another fun trip to Ithaca is behind us.  We were pretty much looking forward to this since we were leaving Ithaca last year, and although it was a short trip, we all had a blast.
This was Eli’s second trip with us (not counting the time he was in utero [...]

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Today is the 32nd anniversary of my birth.  It is also the fourth anniversary of my wedding.  But this post isn’t about those things – it’s about what happened five years ago today, on October 6, 2006.
But to tell that (very long) story, I need to properly set the scene.  I proposed to Courtney in [...]

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Tonight marks the beginning of a new year in the Jewish calendar, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with the latest video from Weird Al, Polka Face! This marks the first time that there has been an official video for one of Weird Al’s polka medleys, and while a [...]

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