Today I went to services; the synagogue was mobbed, not by devoted members praying during the High Holidays but by noisy swarms of families in attendance of a baby naming. Between all of these families there must have been twenty children age three or under-- and I’d never seen any of them before. Not the children, not the parents-- I didn’t even recognize the set of parents there for the naming of their baby. I didn’t even remember their being there during Rosh Hashana. They were all yakking away, yak yak yak yak. You couldn’t even hear the Torah service. I’ve been to a lot of synagogues and have seen some fairly irreverent crowds, but this was probably the worst. There were a few sub-crowds that didn’t bother going in, they just hung around the steps and blabbed on cell phones or to each other. Look, it’s a free country, but this isn’t a Reform synagogue, it’s not even a Conservative one-- it actually belongs to an organization that’s in between Conservatism and Orthodoxy. I kept having to direct people to the bathroom, or even back to the sanctuary because they got lost, meaning, they’d never been there before. And amongst this crowd were the few regulars who are there every Shabbat, week in and week out, and we all looked a bit dazed by this onslaught. I keep asking myself when I’m going to cave in and go to the Orthodox synagogue, but there are so many reasons not to do that, one of which is that I feel an allegiance to this shul and its eccentric rabbi, and his wonderful wife.

Mr. Crazy was demolished at chess by an older kid at shul. Glamor Girl had fun for a while but eventually crawled under a chair and just lay there, face down, and wouldn't move. Wild Girl has been crying all day, and I suspect another tooth is lurking in our future!