as mention in the last post, i started to make high quality juggling balls, probably the best know to mankind (they are really excellent - believe me).
i want to try and make a site dedicated for the juggling things i make and see it i can sell some of it online to all the jugglers across the globe.
Yesterday, I had a small performance in Akko, a beautiful ancient town in the northern part of Israel, about an hour and a half drive from our home.
So we all got up pretty early for a saturday and at 07:00 we were already heading north. we went to the knights hall in akko, where the knights of the past (crusaders) used to roam. there I made a show for workers of a big food chain.
as the guide talked about the old times she mentioned the fact that there were performers to lighten up the hearts of the knight so far from home. and that was me. You can see me and the costume and Lia on the left.
after the first of two shows we had a break of almost three hours during which we went out of the knight halls area to eat Jachnun.
So we spent another beautiful hours bathing in the warm winter sun(not really winter here in Israel, can't remember the last time it rained. I think we had about a week of winter).
After the second performance we got back into the car and headed further up north all the way to Rosh Hanikra, which is a kibbutz next to the border of Lebanon.
Next to the border there are amazing caves the the see has carved into the stone. you descend to the caved in a small steep cable-car. after a couple of hours in the caves we went back up to the car and headed home along with all the other Israelis that went north that day.
and some more news worthy of mentioning:
a lot of new things happened in the last three weeks, and i have been meaning to write about them every Sunday, i mean it...
So, finally i am sitting and writing and i wasn't sure what to start with. there were a lot of things that happened that i thought, wow, this is something to write about, and now i am not totally sure i remember them all.
first of all Sarit had her 29th birthday (5 years in a row already!). I made her a little surprise by painting our living room to match the nice set of new sofas that we just got a few days before that. as Chanuka was just happening at that time we made a party for the close family. at the end of the evening her parents stayed a bit longer and as you can see in the video that will show you how nice those new sofas of ours are... (please note that we do not living in a neighborhood with a lot of motorcycles driving by in the night, the soundtrack is something different)
Sarit has also been to the doctor recently to see how the progress with the little one is coming. at the time the following picture was taken (5th of December) that s/he was just about 2.27 centimeters big (or small). We have another check-up on Tuesday, might even find out if its a he or she...
for all of you vitisim out there, my latest project is building a website for shaul to showcase his pictures so that he can start doing a bit more photography and a little less hard work stuff. so here is a temporary link to where the work in progress is hosted currently. I will post a link to the site once it is made hopefully next week.
enjoy.
click here to see it
yesterday, when Lia and mom got up in the morning, dear mami decided to give lia a little treat for the hairs. so she bundled it up into neat little "kukiot". it started with 2, one on each side, and moved on to become 4 bundles, 3 in front and one in the back. then she modeled the whole thing with expressions on her face that she learns from papi. we practice a bit of strange facial expressions sometimes before she enters the bathtub in the evening in front of the big mirror there.
here's another one of the picture we took yesterday morning just before heading out to the kindergarten. She really is getting cuter and cuter as the days are passing by! in the last couple of weeks now she is also making a huge jump ahead with her social skills, she plays in such a lovely way with her friends in the kindergarten. whenever i go to pick her up we usually stay in the playground next to the kindergarten a bit and there she teams up with a friend or two and they head off laughing and shouting each others name: "Noa, Noa" and "Lia, Lia".
this is also a good moment to congratulate Enet Gil and Yoav, great set of friends they are. we went to visit them 2 days ago for jachnun breakfast and the very same evening they got a little baby girl named Tamar! (Enet was pregnant, so it wasn't really such a great surprise).
Lia is jumping, that is, when she isn't singing, shich she does most of the time. she will always jump from the last step of the stairs. well, actually anything that has even a minimal height difference is jumpable! so here a small video which is already 2 months old, which shows her biggest jump i think she ever tried on her own.
it has been a long month and a half since i last opened the blog and wrote something about our life. So what is new you ask?
Lia became a talking person, her communication skills have improved soooo much in the last couple of months! She enjoys going to her kindergarten every day, even though she was heard saying a couple of times in the morning when she was woken up: "I don't want to go to the kindergarten today". which sounds a little like: "let me sleep a little bit longer please". her daily and weekly routine are usually the same, kindergarten till 16:00 and then papi or momi time. mondays she goes to yoga taking momi along too. she picked it up from grandpa shaul and is very happy when monday comes along.
Wow, two posts in two days. must be a record AND a good reason for it!
look at what lia learned to do today, throwing balls with both hands into a little basket. here see for yourself.
Vacation is over, everyone back to work please... Lia had two weeks vacation time from the kindergarten, she spent some of it with grandpa Shaul, some of it with papi and momi. We had a great weekend at kfar yehoshua up north at the 3 day juggling convention. the picture on the left is from the swimming pool there. Papi made a decision to learn to walk on a slack-rope in the coming year there, we'll let you all know how that goes! One more great news item is the fact that Lia for the first time in her life spent the night without mami and papi. she slept together with her cousins at granpa Arik and grandma Ella. It was also the first time for mami!
Lia went to a new kindergarten today, it is just next to her old one, but still something new to get used to. she will spend two half days there at first, and then if all goes well we will go back to whole days. She got a wonderful new "backpack" from a friend of grandpa Arik, Britta from germany. have a look:
what else is new you ask? Papi is going into the juggling teaching "industry". i am opening 3 juggling courses here in the area, so 3 times a week i will teach children to juggle.
till next time...
It's vacation time, and Lia will be spending the time remaining till the 1st of september at home, mostly with papi. today however, granpa Shaul is here for the day and he will be the main caretaker of the little angel. so what is it that grandpa shaul is doing and teaching his little grand-daughter you ask yourself?
here it is, enjoy.
looking outside of the window, i can see the little fountain of the fish pond, a nice little black bird is flying around the yard and the sun is shining. seems like a nice day, but why does it have to be that HOT? for 3 days now we have been living inside a furnace. you actually feel it lees during the day, as i try to get as little out of the house as I can, but at night the house, who got hot from the sun during the day i emitting all that heat inside. HOT.
starting with the weather means everything is ok here. we have been to a weekend vacation last weekend in the Golan heights. we went to visit friends we haven't seen for 2 years and 8 months. they have never seen Lia and we have seen their youngest son when he was 7 days old. but good friends are good friends and it is as if we just saw them the day before. we also went to pick berries from a "berry picking field" where you can pick and eat berries and other fruits. we took some berries home and they made for a wonderful cake that we ate at the dinner for sarits sisters 14th wedding anniversary.
what else is new?
Lia has started to express herself and is speaking in real sentences now. and she sings. all the time. she has like 3-4 songs that she repeats throughout the day. she can even sing a bit in switzerduutch, which is very funny.
i have work here and there in juggling, today i drive 3 hours due south to the desert to make a little fire show. going to warm up the desert a bit...
hello dear readers,
i imagine only a few of you have survived the long wait for a new post, a month has gone by since i last sat down and wrote something here, and a lot has happened since then.
first of all we celebrated Lia's second birthday. We did it twice already, once at home with a close group of friends, which was mostly a friendly reunion for us with friends we don't get to meet that much. It was a wonderful afternoon, the pictures here will probably better describe it than any words i will write.
you can see the birthday for most of the kids was about spending time in the water, the more the better.
and sometimes they came out of the water, after seeing that life outside of the water is not wet enough they went back in
water
and water again
and of course, it wouldn't be a real party without a cake. so we lit some candles and blew them all out again.
and the pond again
another party we had was in the kindergarten, we brought some food and a cake to the kids and danced and played with them.
again, here are some pictures:
yesterday, grandpa Shaul took us to the safari in Ramat Gan. for 3 hours we saw a lot of animals, from all over the world, some of them in small cages, and some of them free to roam the "vast" spaces of the open zoo area.
pictures, i know you want pictures. here you go:
beside that, all is more or less the same for us. Sarit works in the same place, no big changes there. I have a little more juggling work now in the summer with 2-3 shows every week for the coming 2 months. i also have a little group of children that come to our house once a week to juggle.
we are back, after a while of no posting. and we have all been keeping ourself a little busy. Mami s doing great at work and seems to be enjoying it. we have settled into a routine in we which we each pick up Lia 3 times a week from the kindergarden. this gives us quality time with the little angel and aloowing us each to have a little longer days working, if you call what papi does working. Lia's second B-day is coming up at the end of the month, we don't know yet what we want to do, it will not be a big festival like last year, but rather a smaller celebration. as you might have read in the previous posts we have been working at changing the appearance of the backyard over the last month. there were plans to make a water pond with fish and a sand box. and two days ago we have indeed finished the pond and filled it with water. yesterday we got the fish for the pond and a waterlily. the flowers of the lily will open in a few days and we almost cant wait. so here are a few pictures, fist to remind you how it was before...
about a month ago, wood for the sandbox in place and the temporary pool can also be seen.
here a close up up how the "pool" used to look like (for 3 days...)
the sandbox is almost finished, only the sand is missing, but Lia still finds it fun to play in it.
a general view of the yard with the unfinished sand box.
and the sand box with the sand in it...
current view of the backyard with the fish pond finished.
Lia with the fishes before we have put them into their new home
Lia showing off her new fish pond.
As some of you readers may already know, papi is speaking with me in schwitzerduutsch, which is what people speak in the northern part of switzerland. since he is the only one I know who speaks this language i don't speak it as well as I do hebrew but i understand most of what papi says to me. i can already use some words in that language and i like to say sentences that have words from both languages in them. to show off a little here is me singing along with papi out of my favorite evening book, which i like to look at and sing from in the evening. enjoy!
so, now that Lia got her wooden horse and s riding it almost daily papi got a little jealous and wanted one as well. or maybe the story is that papi got a job to design a little show for a firm that wanted a 6 minute show in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night. Papi (that would be me) did the design for the clothing of the 5 actors and the staging of the whole thing. i told teh client that one of the actors would be sitting hanging from one of the trees. to make things more interesting i made this wooden dragon, which i colored with UV sensitive colors. the people who where performing had has that where made from bottles, which is what the firm we did it for produces. the movie below gives a nice idea of the dragon in comparison to Lia's horse. I hope i will get pictures from the show itself so that you can see how it looked at night.
and here's another little video that will show you Lia with one of the hat that were used in the event.
Michal, Lia's aunt came with her boyfriend Stefan from switzerland today. Lia and papi went to the airport to greet them and also to see airplanes. Lia was very shy at first and it took her quite a long time to open up a little and smile to the two of them. we got presents and once we got home we went and opened them immediately. you can see in the video below lia's wonderful present from grandma Margaret, she obviously loves it and didn't want to go down. in the background you can hear another present, a Mani Maetter CD, and those of you who are swiss will know him.
in our back yard there is a nice little garden. it has a few trees living peacefully one next to the other, and depending on the season we might be drinking orange juice from the orange tree or eating a fijoya from the fijoya tree. in the back of the back yard there once was a big tree. after moving over here 2 years ago the tree fell and died. and so the back of the back yard was neglected and left on it's own. we didn't bother him, and didn't bother all of us (he did bother a bit my lovely wife).
so a few days ago we decided it was time for a change. since the summer is coming and lia is getting older we are planning to build her a sand box. and after i saw the neighbor's little and cute fountain (which you can see on the previous post) i went and bought the equipment necessary for it and made a small one. as you can see in the pictures the work is in progress. i have big plans for the fountain and it will become a little pond hopefully in the next couple of weeks. as if I really needed another project... 
yesterday, lia was visiting our neighbors two houses down the road. watch what she learned to do from their little boy, two months younger then her he is (and may the force be with us).
Here is another movie that was taken about a month ago. it show lia and her cousin alon in lia's bed playing with dogs. you can see what stage lia is going through, copying everything that anybody else around her does, especially if it is one of her favorite friends in the world, her cousins guy and alon. enjoy. if you like lia's "movies" you can see ALL 23 (and counting) of them HERE
As promised earlier this week I have uploaded some nice photos from the recent israeli juggling convention that took place in the Sachne early april.most of the pictures were taken at the various shows the convention had to offer.
click here to see them all.
if you happen to see yourself in one of the pictures, and you would like to have it or them in the best resolution possible please contact me at raffi-dot-vitis-at-gmail-dot-com.
while going over files in my computer i came across pictures from last years juggling convention. I was totally amazed at how much Lia has changed since then. see for yourself...
as you can see we just finished papi's little birthday party. we had wonderful candles that lia liked to hold in her hand and blow them out and a great chocolate cake that mami just made and we got to feast on it straight from the oven.
we came back from a little vacation a few days ago. 4 days were spent in a wonderful location in the northern part of Israel in the Israeli juggling convention. we had a big tent, in which lia had even a room for herself in the night and we had fun juggling and swimming and meeting old and new friends. We got to see amazing shows every night and lia had the best of times, she clapped her hands along with everybody in the audience and even said "bravo!" after some of the shows.
here you can see lia with Yoav, the son of our good friends Anat (Enet) and Gil who stayed with us for one night at the camping site. Grosspapi Shaul was there with us as well, along with his camera and a lot of pictures were taken during those 4 days. I will post some of them once i get my hands on the disc with all the pictures in the days to come.
Michal (lia's Aunt - papi's sister) called to say happy birthday a few hours ago, she told me the my aunt Rosemarie comes by to visit us here on the Blog sometimes, so hi there and regards from all of us here in Israel (and happy birthday to Adrian...)
taken about two weeks ago, the following movie generally shows the phase the lia is going through - the AIM (all is mine) phase. it doesn't really matter if it is a bit too big for her at the moment, she wants to have it and to hold it on her own.
see for yourself!
it's holiday (almost) again. Pesach is around the corner, lia has just gone to bed and fallen asleep and a long tim has past since i posted an update on our updated life.
so here is what happened recently and what is about to come.
After a few weeks of inactivity the miniature car racing project is back under way. i have moved the whole table to sarit's parents cellar where i can leave it in one piece while i build the race track.
here you can see 2 pictures of the table (it still needs legs) and the little car. i am guessing i have about a month of work (with a day or two a week) before the prototype can be tested. after that I will begin marketing it for events, such as bar mitsvas and grownup company events.
Iris came to Israel for a couple of weeks last week and she, along with the youngest adittion to our family, little Elinor will come to Sarit's parents for the passover feast. to make the house more fit for the holiday i helped Sarit's parents a bit with a small makeover of their house. here are two pictures of the work in progress. yu can see that we have made a major change to some walls in the living room, giving it a textured color. there were also some other major changes like changing the door of all the cupboards in the kitchen. after the passover feast i will post some pictures so you can see the finished product.
And Lia, she is growing daily, most of the time she has a beautiful smile on her face, her vocabulary is rising all the time and she has started to form 3 word sentences on a regular basis like :"eifo od sus?" (where is another horse?)
a few weeks ago Sarit went into her room before we went to bed and found her fast a sleep in this most bizarre state.
Here's a sure hit, this time in english. Sarit loves this song, as do the rest of the inhabitants of this house, i will post this song as well as the others by Omri for all to download here in the next few days.
if you do not see an mp3 player above, you don't have the flash player installed. click here to get it
a few days ago i posted about the new record that lia made when speaking 4 words in a row. here is a video, shot just moments after the record was made, you will see the excited parents pushing their little daughter to success yet again, but to no avail.
lia is sick after a very long time of being at top shape. so she is sitting in my laps, watching me type."tt7hge" and typing herself. soon she will be the 1 to write the blog!
hello everyone,
after a while with short posts it's time to let you know what we are all up to.
as you readers might already know papi was in Austria skiing with mami's dad and brother, along with tobias kumpfe who came to support us all the way from hamburg in germany. we had a truly fantastic week of skiing. we landed in munich, where we managed to leave one of our suitcases in the airport (we got it back after a series of phone calls and friends at the right places). the beginning was not very promising as i waited all the way to St. Anton to see the snow waiting for us. there was little snow at the small town and little at the slopes. but the weather was great for the first couple of days. then it snowed for 3 days and the slopes were filled with joy. and for our last day we got it all, great snow and great weather and a great final day to it all.
Mami is still hard at work at her new workplace and she seems to be settling in and enjoying it.
Lia is growing every day, what is most apparent is her speaking abilities. she had a small record for the longest sentence just yesterday when she said 4 words in a row, doubling her older record. "kuku aha glida tova". what a joyous moment that was for the proud parents!
Purim was here, and papi was hard a t work all around Israel juggling and performing. Lia dressed up for kindergarten as a butterfly and mami made the necessary pictures to go along with it.
there are more pictures out there, you will find them here:
Lia pictures
Uncle Omri was here yesterday, he played for us a new song he recorded about a week ago in London and i thought you might all want to listen in to it as well. It has a certain old israeli flavour to it.
if you do not see an mp3 player above, you don't have the flash player installed. click here to get it
During grandpa Yehoshua's (Lia's grand-grandfather) 70th birthday a recording was taken place on which he tells a little about the last 70 years of his life. At that time he was already well into the final part of his journey on this earth and not too long after this recording was made he died of cancer. The tape was well preserved with his wife at that time and a few years ago i found it and decided to keep a digital record of it. For a long time I have been planning to make it available to everyone and my sister, Michal also asked if i could send her a copy for her birthday, which was about 2 months ago. so today i finally made it possible and here are the 2 parts of that recording.
The first part
The second part
Papi is back from his vacation in Austria and so i asked him to upload 2 movies i'd like to show you all. the first is me after having a bath just before putting on my pijama.the second one is of me watching the first one. both are dedicated to my uncle Amir who said that he comes to visit me here every once in a while.
it's us again, the two of us, lia and papi are sitting and watching the computer screen while papi is typing. I am flying tonight to Austria till the 18th of february to ski with sarit's father and brother and my very good friend Tobias from hamburg. it's a vacation i have been looking for almost 6 years and i still can not believe it is about to happen. Adi, sarit's brother will take his laptop and i will have my camera, so i might post while i'm there. If not, be sure to come back here around the 20th for updates...
and here is another video of Lia, this time on astronaut practice.
This weekend we went on a trip to Ramat Menashe together with the sair family and the feldman family. the weather was wonderful and the sun was shining. we walked for a couple of hours after eating a "jachnun" breakfast. we crossed a little river with running water on the way. the water was VERY VERY cold, and it took Lia some time to get used to it and then she didn't really want to come out. here's a little glimpse of how it all looked like, a movie and some pictures.
new day, new post.
another movie of Lia, this time you can see how she is feeding our cat, Tuli.
and here is a link to a nice little web-page that lets you upload pictures and turn them into what you see here:
and here the link:
www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic
if you are really bored (as i was very late last night) you can try it yorself, the only "problem is that the size of the picture you upload needs to be 50*60 pixels, so you need a program to do that. if you want, you can send me a picture and i will do that for you...
with over a week of no new messages it is time again.
there are no big news, lia has not been sick the whole week and we hope the sick days are over for a while. she started trying to make sentences, and by trying I mean that when the cat had a little fight with her last week she told us the following story: "Tuli (the name of our cat), Lia".
Mami is having a good time at work, Papi is having a good time at home. I am working on the plans for the house on the land we bought, i will post a few pictures soon i hope so you can see what it is all about.
and here is another movie of lia, it was taken about a month ago:
hello again,
since I will use the pipi chair for pipi in the coming summer, i have decided that it would be a shame not to use it for other things.
I am well again and back to kindergarten this week, mami is off to work as everyday and papi is at home working (and typing).
and what is it that papi is working on?
we have recently bought a little piece of land here is zoran an papi is making plans to build a house there. and he is also talking with people who want him to juggle.
Hi everyone,
as you see, i am a litle sick.
i have a low fever and i am coughing a little.
this happens to me every second friday and i get to stay home with Mami and Papi for a few days. Now that Mami is off to work i get to spend more time with papi, and he gets to spend less time on the computer.
I am watching my favorite (and only) DVD, featuring a little fish. every time i want to watch it i go to the TV and say "dag" which is fish in hebrew.
this is me today, I feel a little better now, thanks for asking.
