7 Days of Holiday Vacation in a Warzone with Kids - Part 1

The Countdown to Routine: 02/04/2026  -  Day One

My wife and I aren’t working during the Passover holiday. After finishing our "Lel HaSeder" evening with the family - navigating between the sirens - we had to start planning what we would do with our time at home this week. (By the way, you can read all about my Seder day in my previous post, Passover Under Fire).

Since we just returned from Thailand , we aren’t going on another big vacation. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't; there are barely any planes leaving the country right now after most airlines, except for El Al, canceled their flights until the war is over. Many of the things we usually do during our vacation time simply aren't an option right now.

Temporary Sanity

This article series will be about how to maintain your sanity with kids during wartime on holiday. I will keep you updated day by day on what we are doing and what we did the day before. I know it’s not going to be an easy task. There will likely be moments where I - and all of us - might lose our temporary sanity, but I’ll keep writing about our activities and what the kids do when they have nothing else to occupy them.

First, I want to apologize. I’m sorry for all the complaining you’re about to read here! But this is the place where I can write it all down and get the frustrations out, so I hope you’ll forgive me.

8:48AM

Everyone is still asleep because it’s a day off, and especially because none of us slept well last night. There were alarms at 1:30 AM and again at 3:30 AM. We don’t have a safe room inside our apartment, so we have to go down to our building's public shelter. It’s a hard routine - jumping out of bed in the middle of the night and heading five floors down the stairs to the shelter.

The kids hate it, and we hate it. But we don't compromise on our safety when one-ton missiles are flying over our heads.

1:05 PM - It’s all about the food

We started cleaning the house from yesterday’s holiday Seder night, and then I was informed that we were invited to a holiday lunch today by my mother-in-law. From one meal to another - this is just how Jewish holidays are.
So after we finished eating, I went home alone and stayed there. I needed to sleep. The kids wanted to get outside and play by themself I didn’t like that too much but I was not saying anything. 

The kids got Pesach money from my mother-in-law; I don't like the kids waiting to get money from them. It doesn't feel good; I don’t think kids should care about money all that much. And what is the added value of it?

16:30 PM I was waking up to another alarm; my daughter was home too, apparently. We went to the shelter and waited there until it was over. There was one more alarm this time it was a missile from the Houthis. It was not in our area, so we didn't go down.

22:26 The kids are still eating “dinner” at this time; they decided to eat “Maza Pitzza.” I don’t know where they got this idea.

I think it is a good time to stop writing and close this day. I took a picture of the Maza Pitzza in the microwave; it looks disgusting.