I have four kids now.created at: 2012-09-04

It’s amazing to write that. It’s amazing to feel that. It’s amazing to have a new baby again, nine years after the first one was born. It’s equally amazing how rapidly the world has changed over those same nine years.

When my oldest was born, it was the Dark Ages. Microsoft Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo ruled the email market. It was so long ago that I had to make lots of phone calls and send emails to spread the news. This was before I even had a Gmail account.

When the second one was born, Facebook was still competing with MySpace, I was only on Friendster, and the first iPhone was a year and a half away. We even bought a new Dell desktop to celebrate (remember those?)! Back then we didn’t pay for cable, nor did we have wireless internet at home. We actually used dial-up. No kidding.

#3 was the first Facebook baby for us and created a huge ripple of celebration and sharing in the virtual universe. I still had a clamshell cell phone, went out and bought a Netbook a few months later, and adamantly stayed off the smartphone bandwagon. There was a GoogleDoc that went around that organized meals for us. Way cool.

And just last Thursday we welcomed our newest family member into the world with texts, Tweets, Facebook mobile, Instagram photos, and a whole lot of nearly real-time celebration and mazal tovs. She was definitely an App Store baby.

Obviously the world is changing.

But at the same time, other things are staying comfortably the same. And if there were ever a season to celebrate cycles, family, life, and creation, it’s Fall.

Fall, for us, is about going apple picking in the same smallish orchard (we went on Monday with all six of us). It’s about throwing dinner in the Crock Pot and letting it cook all day, making all kinds of squash recipes, and wearing fleece jackets. It’s about brisket or turkey on Rosh Hashanah, walking up the hill to the temple on windy and leafy high holiday mornings, and watching the Red Sox (well…. actually….not really).

According to the Talmud, Rosh Hashanah is not just the day that the world was created, but also marks the time when everything and everyone is magically created anew for the coming year.

For us, Rosh Hashana this year will truly be a celebration of creation, and re-creation of life, both old and new. We have been blessed with a new baby whose arrival has ushered in a new year and new fall of happiness in our home. What the next few years will hold is anyone’s guess, but I look forward to new toys and gadgets that will allow us to publicly kvell, laugh, smile, and cry about our kids, but also to the things that never change at all.

And hopefully by the next baby (if there is one) we’ll finally get an iPad.

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