I wake up with a start, and I know something is different.

The clock glows: 6:08 a.m. I scramble over to the window, push away the shades, and gasp. There’s a hover-truck floating noisily right under my bedroom window!

We’ve been here six month already, but still, I wasn’t expecting that!

“Deliveries with Care,” I whisper, reading the words on the side of the hover-truck.

I blink.

My tefillin?

“MY TEFILLIN ARE HERE!” I bellow, thundering down the stairs.

I fling open the door, panting, to see a tired planet-deliveryman transport to the door, holding a lumpy package. All the way from Earth.

“Wow,” I breathe. “Thank you.”

I’ve been waiting so long for this moment.

He nods and leaves and I tear off the wrapping. A small velvet bag, embossed with my name, encases leather binding and hand-scripted klaf. It’s hard to believe that these tefillin are mine, that I will be using them in just a few weeks…

The peaceful moment is broken by a wail, and then another. “Zalmi?” Mommy calls down to me. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry I woke you, Ma — my tefillin!” I run upstairs to show her and I know I’m glowing.

Her face splits, shining, and she squeezes me in a hug. “This is so exciting!” she says, whispering (as if the twins will go back to sleep). “It’s really happening… your bar mitzvah!”

Breakfast is hectic as usual.

I join the twins at the table, who are eating cereal and banging the table with their cups. “Dink! Dink!” they yell together.

“I can’t believe it came,” calls Mommy as she brings the girls drinks.

“I know, Ma. I thought it wouldn’t ever come.” We’d ordered them ages ago, before we left Earth. Then, when they were finally ready, they’d missed the spaceship headed here.

“It came! Just in time!” Ta bursts in, grinning, his own tefillin under his arm. Immediately he sits down to look at the tefillin together with me.

By now the kitchen’s hustling, and it’s time for me to get moving to Shacharis. I pull on my jacket and then clip my Planet-Jumper on top of it.

“Soon you’ll be taking these with you!” Shana calls out from behind her smoothie.

I smile.

“And a hat!” I reply.

Everyone stops and looks at me.

“Your hat!” Mommy says, looking at Ta, worried. “Wasn’t that supposed to come on the spaceship, too?”

Ta looks puzzled.

“Yes, it was! Calling Nachi,” he says, pulling out his phone to call my brother, who arranges everything that we need from Earth.

Oh no.

Here we go again…

Ta finds me at recess (perks of a daddy principal!).

Turns out my hat was left on the spaceship. The courier left it there mistakenly, and the ship is already en route to Earth.

“And,” Ta says, “the next ship…”

“Is coming right before Pesach,” we finish off together.

Pesach is in five months. My bar mitzvah is next week. I look at Ta.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr., Issue 747)