Photo by Christina House for The Los Angeles Times

Day 3 of the Book Tour was another 6 am to 6 pm whirlwind. VH1, and 5 back-to-back interviews with Sirius radio people including the awesome Jane Pratt were the highlights.

It seems people love the book and we already went back for a second printing. The book was #2 in parenting on Amazon on Tuesday and I feel like my job is somewhat “done” in many respects! Today is the final day and I go home tomorrow with my husband and boys back to our normal crazy life, some book signings in LA, and back to The Big Bang Theory next Wednesday.

Highlights from yesterday:

1. Heels. The 4 1/2″ heels are taking their toll. My feet look like I have been walking around the streets of Manhattan barefoot in a snowstorm.

2. Spanx. I couldn’t figure out why my inner thighs felt like I had bruises on them. It’s the SPANX digging into my legs. Who said being seamless was painless?

3. Autographs. At each appearance I have made, I have been greeted by a few people waiting for me when I get out of the car asking for autographs and pictures. I am fascinated by all of these nice quiet people and think someone needs to make a documentary detailing where they are from, how they get these photos, and what they do with the photos they take with all of the celebrities they encounter.

4. TheMoms.com moderated my Barnes and Noble talk and also hosted a 30 person blogger conference yesterday at my publisher’s office. When I originally heard about them, I was worried they were anti-attachment parenting people out to get me…We have had some really neat conversations on and off camera and I am so impressed by what three women with different parenting philosophies and open minds can accomplish. We have broken down a lot of the judgmentalness and cattiness women are expected to have in discussing controversial differences in parenting, and it’s been a real enlightening experience for us all.

5. Purim and fasting. The New York leg of the book tour coincided with Purim, and I did not eat or drink anything all day yesterday for Ta’anit Esther. I was a little low energy, a tad cranky by 2 pm, and sort of flying high by 3 pm. I did suck on a lozenge for 30 seconds twice when my voice was no longer coming out of my mouth (I am just getting over a cold and laryngitis), but I was really happy that although being on this tour changed the way I would have typically celebrated Purim, I was able, once again, to use fasting as a concrete reminder of the power of the mind the body. We attended schul as a family in Manhattan and my boys dressed up both as Spiderman and Fred was freaked out by the noise and all the people but sat nicely on my husband’s lap, and Miles loved seeing the Purim spiel and screaming “Boo Haman!!” over and over during the Megillah reading.

6. Maccabeats. I may or may not have gone to Washington Heights to hang out with some of the Maccabeats. We may or may not have had some amazing discussions about the purpose of creation, the deeper meaning of Purim, and the unbelievable presence of God in our everyday lives.

I may be exhausted this morning, but the human mind and body can handle a lot. And the presence of Something bigger than me reveals Itself in myriad small and grand ways.

Chag Sameach, and may we all find what is hidden to be revealed for us today and all year.

Catch up on what you missed on Day 1 and Day 2 of the crazy Beyond the Sling tour.

Here are the top 5 things I learned from this book tour based on the variety of questions I had never thought about answering until now.
1. My husband. I hadn’t quite thought of it this way before, but it was our choice of parenting style (attachment parenting) that helped my husband decide to stay home with our boys. The guidelines of babywearing, bed-sharing, and establishing a deep and powerful emotional relationship through gentle discipline really helped my husband feel empowered and capable in a way I don’t know he would have had we not embraced these “unifying” principles which are for dads and moms alike.
2. I’m Not Judging! I really do believe in being non-judgmental and not espousing the “only” way to raise kids; it’s not just lip service. Meeting the ladies of TheMoms.com really solidified this for me in a powerful way.

3. I Feel Pretty. Much as I don’t fit the traditional mold of Hollywood beauty, having my fantastic hair/make-up artist along for this trip made me not worry and obsess over how I looked. I know she knows how to play up my features and make me feel relaxed and confident.

4. Bling. I love wearing a Magen David, and I don’t really care if it doesn’t “match” the look of the outfit. I like being seen in it and it makes me feel really protected and “myself” in situations that can challenge even the most confident of people.

5. Support. I am thrilled I wrote this book even though it’s hard being attacked and questioned and judged about being an attachment parenting mama. I love that AP moms and dads feel supported and justified to make their own decisions, and I love that non-AP people are learning about it in new ways.

What a crazy busy week. What a crazy busy life. Thank you, Kveller, for helping me learn to write the way I do and for supporting this part of my life. Kvell on!

Read up on the rest of the book tour:

Day 1-Nightline

Day 2–Check out Mayim on The View (spoiler alert: Barbara Walter asks lots of questions about s-e-x).

Day 3–What happens when you wear Spanx too many days in a row?

My grandmother.

I’ve started cleaning for Passover, have you? I started with some small things: setting aside what needs to be consumed before April 6 (how many challahs can I make with 20 lbs of flour?), making a dent in the scrubbing…just getting in the mood for purging my entire house of hametz before going to work on the next episode of The Big Bang Theory. Standard stuff, you know how it is.

I miss my grandmother today. She was a woman who really knew how to clean. Give that 5- foot-tall, 5-foot-wide Hungarian balabusta a sponge in a kitchen and by nigthfall, the sink would take on a luster unseen before her thick hands set to it. My grandmother lived a life of cleaning and cooking and sewing and caretaking in an apartment in the Bronx with my grandfather, his father (who had active Tuberculosis, by the way), and three daughters, the middle of whom was my mother. My mother learned to cook and clean from her mother, and passed on those skills to me. We spent many pleasant and productive Type-A Personality hours cleaning and organizing and washing my dolls’ clothes and darning socks (any other 36-year-old out there have a memory of darning socks on a wooden darning egg!? Didn’t think so!). It was a special time for us, and when I watched my grandmother clean our house when she visited, I saw myself and my mother as part of a long line of cleaning and cooking women who were destined to greatness in our own way.

From left to right: My grandpa, Aunt, Grandma, Mom & Dad

My grandmother was frum (orthodox) and she kept a kosher home. She rarely ate out at all during her entire life, and Pesach (Passover) was a time for great stringency for her, as it is for many women. I am frum now; far more observant than I was when she died over 10 years ago. I wish she could see me frum. I’m sad she didn’t get to see me make a challah and take challah and make the blessing or bentsch licht (light the Shabbat candles) like she did. I’m sad she didn’t get to see my sons say the blessings over washing their thick hands before the Hamotzi. It means a lot to me to be observant, and I also know it connects me to my grandparents’ generation and every generation before that. It’s not the only way to honor our families, but I absolutely see my observance as a love for them and their choices and lives through my own passion for this life.

At Pesach, the cleaning of a home is a challenge unlike any other time of the year. Every crumb must be unearthed, every bit of hametz eliminated and purged. Why the apparent obsessive-compulsiveness of halakhic Judaism at Pesach? We are not only searching for oats, rye, spelt, barley, and wheat and other non-Kosher-for-Passover ingredients and foods. We are searching for the parts of ourselves that may also be hiding and in need of purging.

How often do I claim to be pure of intention when I am in actuality, not pure at all? How often do I know I should apologize to someone but my haughtiness stops me? How often do I say I won’t entertain fantasies that only bring me sadness but get lost in my head anyway, cursing the Universe for my misery?

More often that I would like to admit. (How often am I in denial about bad habits? Well, three seconds ago for a start). It’s during Pesach that I am looking for those parts of me that are not pure, not humble, not productive, and not honest, and I shoo them away and bid them farewell. Sometimes those parts of me are hard to unearth and it takes time to find them and get them out. And sometimes they are deep in crevices and I call in a special set of tools to remove them, just as I dragged a toothpick along the lines of the drawers where I keep my baking spoons this morning.

Being a person of Torah values is not easy and it’s not something that ever leaves me. The notion is not that God is watching over me to find fault in me, but the tremendous sense of responsibility to honor my grandmother, for example, is with me all of the time. And the memories of my mother teaching me to clean is always with me, too.

And how grateful I am that my Judaism can take my blessed grandmother’s dignity, and my mother’s skills, and my desire to be a person worthy of happiness and blessing in this world and the Next One and that same Judaism shows me every single day and every single Pesach that the world is not perfect until each person finds a way to make it so.

Here’s a challenge: in the next few weeks, take on some spring cleaning you might not normally have thought to do. Dig deep, and work hard. And may the spring cleaning of thousands of women over thousands of years bring us all closer to our collective destiny.

Note that we never use the word “Blossom” at all and there is no direct reference to it. Ah, licensing.

Here’s 10 other fun things about that commercial and the experience of filming it:

1. Uncertainty. I was not at all sure if I should do it. I debated it heavily and had many sleepless nights about the script and the contract and if I wanted to be in a commercial for a large corporation with God-only-knows what policies and labor laws at all. I was super trepidatious. (And please don’t post all over Facebook if you have a problem with Old Navy. Email my publicist instead and I will look into it!)

2. Previous experience. I have only been in one other commercial, a McDonald’s commercial in 1987 where I supplied the “bass” for a musical rendition of the McDonald’s theme song. No, I didn’t have to eat any McDonald’s food for that commercial. And no, the fact that my favorite Yeshiva University Maccabeat sings bass is not lost on me. Kismet? Perhaps! Women who are born with a voice like Bea Arthur are automatically drawn to both singing bass and liking guys who do the same.

3. The bangs. The “bangs” I wear under my sunflower hat in the commercial are clip-ons. I am sort of obsessed with Zooey Deschanel and think I look more like her in this commercial than my alter-ego Blossom. What–am I wrong!? Okay, wishful thinking.

4. The costume. Originally the costume designer had me in pants and emailed me sketches showing her initial designs. I gently informed her I observe the laws of tznius (modesty) and don’t wear pants and she barely batted an eyelash. The sketches were tossed and she designed a skirt to convey the same look.

5. Handmade. The outfit was all handmade for me, including rain boots spray-painted the perfect shade of pink to match the details on the skirt and my lipstick. These things are important for Old Navy’s fresh, clean, kitschy look!

6. The sound stage. We filmed in a sound stage an hour south of Los Angeles. It was rainy outside and freezing in the sound stage and I had on thick socks pulled up to my knees under the skirt. The models wore coats and parkas over their cute spring dresses in between takes to keep warm.

7. Filming. The footage you see took two 12-hour days of filming to obtain. We filmed every single line I said a million ways a bunch of times from several angles. Apparently, that’s just how commercials work. It was very tiring to repeat the same line over and over and over and over, especially when they only used a few snippets of the footage!

8. Joey. Joey Lawrence and I only overlapped in filming for a few minutes. He filmed his part and then jet-setted back to Vancouver where he was filming a movie. I think he looked great and there was adorable footage of him bopping along with his pesticide-spraying pack on his back that I wish they could have used. It was so cute.

9. The bee-bot. There was an actual hovering remote controlled bee-bot (think toy helicopter) to fly onto the set and buzz around. On the first rehearsal with the bee-bot, it crashed into the flowers on the set, the propellor splintered and the mechanic who spent hours building it literally looked like he might recite “Baruch Dayan HaEmet” (traditional phrase uttered upon hearing news of a death) over this thing. I almost wanted to join him. (They used computerized graphics for the actual commercial.)

10. My boys. The commercial is only going to run for two weeks, so the only downside I see to this whole thing is that for two weeks my husband has been forbidden from taking our boys shopping at Old Navy (something they actually do frequently). My kids barely have any idea who I am to the public or what I do as an actor. I do NOT want them seeing mama on every TV screen at Old Navy and freaking out. My 6-year-old would likely act cool, as he is wont to do these days, but sweet 3.5-year-old Fred might not make it past the screens before having a freak-out as to why I am on the TV at Old Navy when I’m supposed to be “at work.”

Crazy life, son, I know. Mama’s on the TV screens at Old Navy. But when you get home, she’ll be in fuzzy slippers and a robe cleaning under the oven for Pesach and asking why no one seems to know how to pick up a toy or a dirty sock and insisting that she’s not anyone’s maid.

Maybe my boys would like Old Navy Mama better. Tough. That big flowered hat is impossible to clean under an oven in. Plus, it just looks silly when you wear it with a robe and fuzzy slippers.

Just for old time’s sake:

Talking about Big Bang, and diagnosing Dana Carvey’s kids:

And talking about my parents: