<div dir="ltr">Music and dancing are pretty central for bat mitzvah celebrations in our community, and since one of my daughters was born in the nine days and the other during the omer, we did not/ will not have the celebrations bo bayom.<br>
<br>We celebrated my older daughter's bat mitzvah last month - she made a siyum on sefer Shmuel, which I think made it something of a seudat mitzvah even though it was several weeks after her birthday. This was particularly significant because her father z"l had a custom to make a siyum each year in honour of each girl's birthday. So when she became bat mitzvah, she was able to make her own siyum.<br>
<br>In practice, she had of course been keeping mitzvot for chinuch for some time already, and I will confess to not being much of a challah baker. So the main practical change that happened davka on her bat mitzvah was counting for a zimun. My parents came in for the occasion, and we had a mother-daughter-granddaughter zimun at Shabbat meals, which really was nice and marked her change of status in a concrete way.<br>
<br>- Ilana<br></div>