Our Botched Attempt At Passover

This year I really wanted to do a Passover family dinner and have it be a tradition. I pretty much bombed but hey - I gave it my best shot with 3 little kids. While I may not be great at making a kosher Jewish meal, we gentiles did have lots of family fun!

I cant wait to get it right next year because the boys loved it!

I wasn't raised to do any sort of Passover dinner. Growing up my family was Christian but we were more Baptist about it (also catholic, Lutheran, and almost Amish but that's another story). One year my mom did go all out and do a serious Passover meal - like we even ate on the floor in sandals with middle eastern music.  In typical unstable-fashion of my chaotic family - this never happened again. Although I always wanted it to.

That's the cool thing about being a grown-up and having your own family right? You get to re-invent family.

Lately I've been pouring over Jewish blogs. Both orthodox and messianic. I just love the Jewish culture and am fascinated by it. What gets me is the family-life and the meaningful rituals. I'm super attracted to the stability and unity of these families, even (and often) in the midst of political and societal unrest.

Their faith is woven into every detail of their lives. There children are not a by-product but are instead everything to these people.  Motherhood is prized and very valued and women are very respected. I'm gonna be blunt here: The modern American culture around me is quite purposeless, boring, and meaningless. It's almost culture-less. I could go on about how I feel about that but that's a whole 'nother post so lets just say - I'm attracted to the Jewish culture a lot for these reasons.

Wanna know how our Passover went? I limped through it so pathetically and am now looking back laughing at myself.

First off - for so many reasons, I had bathed each kid about twice that day. lets just say the day had been way more intense than I'd planned. So then before I knew it the dinner hour was upon me and Brandon was on his way home.

"Let's get this party started" I thought. "Boys! We're eating dinner with our shoes on! I'll tell you why later. Stop hitting him!"

A pause in fighting downstairs to cry "yay!" in exited unison. Fighting resumed.

I sautéed the fish while wondering how to explain to them the Passover story to a 3 and 5 year old without too much weirdness, before concluding that - no - it would just have to be weird. You can't get around that when you're telling them about lambs blood on the doorposts, the angel of death, and a sea split open. 

Once we were all seated I realized how odd the table looked....

 I did get some things right, but most was hilariously wrong. The kosher aspect? Botched.  I had shrimp to use up and wouldn't that be delectable in a lemon cream sauce atop the fish? That one escaped me until it was on the table.

For bread without leaven I just cut up tortillas and had humus out for dippage - which they LOVED.  Thier little eyes were bulging at the part about lambs blood... which might come back to bite me at preschool. Then I put out canned green beans. totally forgot the bitters. And the egg thing. Sigh.
We did get eat with our shoes on though while Brandon read them the Passover story from their illustrated bible.



In summery, the Passover story was told and family-time was had. :) Perfection will wait till next year.
Easter went better. I'm way better at Easter. Below is a pic of my cuties on the day of our Lord's resurrection: