Lettuce my people go

We're having a great Passover. We have spent two nights out at other friends' houses; I failed to take any pictures at either of these, but if they send me some I'll update this post with evidence of how much fun we had. The other two nights so far have been home. We are keeping up our unique family tradition of doing just a little bit of the seder each night. This way things are less hectic and nobody's patience runs out. For example, Saturday night we did just the candles, wine, karpas, and matzah/maror/charoset. Ten minutes! We conducted the ceremonies in the tent, like last year, but this year the weather has been glorious so we put the tent outside.

As you can see, Dad is here visiting, which is great. Our holiday is a an entertaining change of pace for him. He's been attending the same seder for forty years, and while that seder is a treasured tradition, ours has the advantage of featuring multiple grandchildren as central participants. It makes for quite a different scene than the mostly adult seder back in San Francisco. For example, Baby Moses Salad was such a hit last year that we reprised it for 2012 and I have to say the creations are equally inspired. The lettuce leaf is the basket of reeds.

Jordan: 

Dad:

 

Dale:

 

Rachel (with artichoke blanket):

Aaron (sort of a Baby Centipede Moses):

As we rolled up our lettuce leaves and crunched away on our respective Baby Moseses, we talked about Moses. We remembered the details of his story: What does the name Moses mean? Who named him that? Did he have siblings? We discussed things we admired about Moses, and recalled some big mistakes he made. We mused on details: Did Moses have another name before he was called Moses? Why wasn't Moses's older brother put in a basket too? How old did he live to be? And what was so bad about the rock-striking incident?