I love that, 17 years later, there are still things that surprise me about our Aliyah; things that still give me goose bumps. I run a lot of errands on Friday mornings, getting our delicious baked goods from Pat Ba’Melach (and chatting with friends and staff), checking the mail (often the only time all week!), and grabbing something for Friday lunch. I run to the grocery store in our yishuv, too, and most weeks I don’t think anything of it. But this past Friday, as I grabbed the weekend edition of the newspapers, I stopped to reflect.

Each Friday I grab two newspapers – one for Josh and me and one for the kids. And they are in two different languages.

We speak English in the house and the kids are completely fluent, but they always gravitate towards Hebrew. Yes, I know this is totally normal. We are, after all, raising children in a different country from the one where we were raised and the children, of course, speak another language.

But it’s pretty heady stuff to think about it. Most people see their children as an extension of themselves; of course, as parents, we always hope those extensions will develop their own nuances and become their own people.

And ours are fluent Hebrew speakers who prefer to read the Hebrew paper, rather than the English one.

It’s one of those tiny moments that you certainly don’t think about when you pack up and move around the world. Our children are fully integrated Israelis, reading and speaking in the language of their people; in the language of their heritage.

And while it’s no big deal that I buy the Hebrew newspaper each Friday for them – it’s another example of the miracle that is the modern State of Israel; the miracle that is our Aliyah; and the miracle of my children, living their regular, everyday lives in the language of thousands of years of our people.