I just realized today that Auntie Flo has not been to visit this month. 🤔 Looked at the calendar and realized I'm at least 12 days late. 😲 Go to the store, sheepishly ask for assistance to get them to open the locked cabinet that they now keep all ummm, tea related items in so I can get two sticks to pee on. You know, in case the first one is faulty. 🤪 A faint line showed up almost instantly. At the 3 minute time limit, it was undeniable. The problem? I am about to turn 44 in March and dh turns 37 tomorrow. My oldest is 25 this May, my youngest just turned 10. My last pregnancy, in 2015, ended in a second trimester loss (16 weeks). 😪 My overall health is not what it once was. That's dh's biggest worry about all this. Dh and I have talked about it and we will just cross each bridge as we get there but all the "things" are just swimming in my mind right now. Certain family members who cannot be avoided are not going to be very supportive. They are on an information diet about this for as long as humanly possible. With our youngest being 10, we are really starting over here completely. On the one hand, what's done is done and I'm not unhappy about it at all but I am having a hard time being actually happy about it. Does that even make sense? I think I'm still just a little dumbfounded that we are in this situation. I mean, I'm getting my first set dentures next week and I have an eye appointment where we are probably going to be discussing bifocals! I think I just need to hear some happy ending stories where people had a baby in their mid-40s and it all worked out. Pretty please?

Ivy by Katherine Coville and Ivy and the Goblins by the same are great stories. Little bit of magic and magical creatures and not too heavy. The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White was a favorite of ds10 when he was a little younger. My Father's Dragon has a lovely audiobook versions on Youtube and Librivox in case your voice needs a break lol.

I shared my winter sowing plan with dh and he is thrilled to help out with gathering milk jugs for me lol! I just hope we can afford his milk intake for this. 😛 He could easily drink a gallon of milk a day if I let him. We got our snow today. Six inches so far and it's not done yet. It wasn't even cold enough to frost the windshield this morning but here we are half a foot deep in snow. It's suppose to stay in the 30's and 40's for a week and a half before going back to 60s and near 70 again in the first weeks of February. I'm ready for spring to just be here already lol.

If you have Aldis there, I would probably start there and stock up on canned veggies and the like. Rice, dried pasta of your preference, instant potatoes, bullion or stock, whatever fits your dietary restrictions. Since you said you have some freezer space I'd get as much chicken and pork as I could for the freezer since you already have beef. If it was possible diet wise, I might get a few treats and convenience foods that I don't usually splurge on just for funsies since this is extra groceries for you. Amazon accepts EBT cards, I get bulk spices from there. Much cheaper than the little jars they sell local to us. I don't know for sure about Costco but Sam's Club accepts EBT so I would imagine Costco does too.

Your recipe is definitely Indian curry so I don't know the exact procedure they would use but your method of cooking things separate and then pouring the curry sauce over everything is exactly how you make Japanese curry! British curry, at least the way my ex-MIL makes it, is more like a curry flavored stew with meat and veggies in it that is served over a bed of rice or potatoes. My favorite "bed" for curry is yellow saffron rice. Yummy! I looked up your garam marsala and it is definitely Indian curry seasoning as well. The curry powder I use most is Madras curry powder. It doesn't have the cinnamon in it. I used to have a large stash of Japanese curry powder from Coco's but sadly I finally used it all and can't bear to pay the shipping to buy a case or so. Lol! If you like the Indian curry flavor though, you could add garam marsala and crushed tomatoes to Golden Curry sauce for a close facsimile.

That is what intrigues me about winter sowing. I hate the whole hardening off process. Such a pain. We really do have wild spring weather here in the mountains. It can be lovely and spring like one day and then snow the next. And it goes on like that from January to May. It's crazy. I think I'll try some winter sowing though. At least with some cold hardy seeds. If nothing else it's an excellent reason to let my husband drink all the milk he wants for a while, lol!

I love curry! My ex-MIL taught me how to make British curry as she is British. It was a staple dinner when I was married to her son. She sometimes serves it over chips (french fries)! My current husband doesn't like it though. So it's a special treat just for me when I do make it. When we lived in Japan I big puffy heart LOVED Japanese curry from Coco-Ichibanya, a curry restaurant chain over there. Chicken cutlet curry with Naan bread is to die for lol! I prefer my curry mild too so don't worry about not making it spicy. 😉 ETA: A quick and easy curry sauce from most grocery stores is Golden Curry. You just put the 'blocks' in boiling water and it makes a very decent curry gravy. Then just add your meat and/or veggies. It does come in mild. 😉

I get most of my seeds from Dollar Tree! lol This year I had to restock my seed box as it got left out in the rain last summer and got ruined 😞 I've spent almost $20 on seeds at Dollar Tree trying to restock my stash. lol I'm going to place an order with Baker Creek on pay day and then I promised DH I'm done buying seeds.... for now! 😛

I'm interested in this winter sowing thing. I live on the zone 7b/8a line in the Ouachita Mountains. We have such wild fluctuations in weather in late winter/early spring. For example, last week we had highs near 70. Trees are starting to bud and everything. Tomorrow, we are expecting several inches of snow. 🤪 And this pattern of spring like weather followed by winter weather will continue through the end of March, sometimes into April. Our last frost date is between April 12 and April 30 depending on who you ask. Early May frosts aren't that unusual around here either. Anyways, have you ever had something sprout in the plastic jugs only to be killed by a spring snow? That's my biggest worry with winter sowing.

I actually didn’t do anything to get his IEP going. I was getting my ducks in a row for after Christmas to submit a formal request (something I never had to do with any of my other kids who had IEPs in the past) and the adaptive learning teacher came to me after the speech evaluation conference to talk about the IEP. We went into another conference room and had the IEP meeting right then and there. They already had all my concerns addressed in the IEP so I had nothing to add. We just all signed on the dotted line and decided we’d revisit in early February. The only thing I would have like to have done differently is to know that they were working on getting the IEP going sooner but that’s water under the bridge now. I know a lot of people have to fight tooth and nail to get IEPs and 504s for their kids but that has honestly never been my experience both for my kids who needed extra help and my gifted kiddo. Advocating for my kids has never been a struggle with the schools my kids have gone to in different districts and even different states. They have always come to me with the IEP, I’ve never had to request one. I just didn’t realize this time that the teachers were relaying my concerns to the IEP team without my knowing. I did address that at the IEP meeting that I’d like to be more “in the loop” and they were quite happy that I wanted to be more involved. Apparently most of their parents are more ‘hands off’ and ‘just tell me where to sign’.

We have Netflix free and a free year of Paramount + also through our cellphone provider. We have a free year of Apple TV from when we bought our iPad earlier this year. We watch a lot of YouTube but no subscription. We pay for Disney+ and Amazon Prime. We technically don’t have a tv though ds’s desktop computer has a smart TV as the monitor. He sometimes watches one of the streaming plans we have on the smart TV since he is restricted to what sites he can access on the computer. We’ve lived happily without cable since 2008.

We are waiting on snow this afternoon. Ds(almost 10) decided to build a blanket fort. I am thrilled that he decided to do something that didn’t involve a screen on his own. Now he wants to know if Door Dash will deliver to his blanket fort. 🤣 What makes it even funnier is that we’ve never ordered anything from Door Dash. We don’t even have Door Dash here as far as I know lol. In case you are curious, Mom’s Door Dash delivered him lunch in his blanket fort of course because Snow Day. 😆 ETA: Now he wants to know if Mom’s Door Dash accepts PayPal. This kid cracks me up.

Even a guy with kids won't know what it is like to parent with you. Nothing is a guarantee of anything in this world but things can and will work themselves out when you find the right person.

I think limited contact when he has the kids when you are in the bf/gf stage is perfectly reasonable but you obviously don't. A guy can be a great guy and still not be the one for you. If you want someone who has more time to give you for quality time, you might want to look for guys who don't already have kids. My current marriage is to a guy who had no biological children when we met. I had 5 kids from my previous marriage. He was more than good with sharing me with the kids so it worked for us. Not only do our personalities fit perfectly together but they also work with our situation as it is. I guess what I'm saying is, if something isn't working for you, don't settle and just hope it will work out or that you will get used to it. If he is the type of parent to hyperfocus on the kids when they are around, don't expect that to change or for your feelings about it to change. Dating after a divorce requires much more than just an attraction to each other to work.

He's doing as well as can be expected for someone who had to stop cold turkey on antidepressants. 😞 It's not the first time we've had shortages around here so at least we know what to expect withdrawl-wise. I was going to call the doctor to see if we can put him on something different for a while until they have Lexapro again but she is out of the office this week. Sigh.

The pharmacy in our small town hasn't had dh's antidepressant for a month now. They also have random backorders on other meds we need. We haven't needed oral antibiotics, thank goodness, but we were able to pick up antibiotic eyedrops for pinkeye yesterday without issue.

I prefer self-checkout. One less human interaction for me to deal with when I'm out in public. Plus I'm particular about how my groceries are bagged so at the grocery store so I don't have to worry about someone else messing up my system lol 😛 (I used to be a cashier when I was younger so doing it myself really doesn't bother me at all) I've never been anywhere, Walmart included, that didn't have a cashier checkout in addition to self checkout.

This. It certainly isn't practical for us either in our small town. Our mom and pop store isn't a UPS store which is why you can use it for either FedEx or UPS. We call it the "Package Store" (which I know has a completely different meaning in other places lol) and all it is is a little store that sells boxes and tape and such and serves as the pickup point for FedEx AND UPS. They will also hold packages from either carrier for you to pick up. It also happens to be the drop off point locally for Amazon returns. The next nearest Amazon return point is 2 hours away. 😕 When we lived overseas, we didn't get mail delivered to our house at all. All mail was handled only at the U.S. post office on one military base and we lived on a different military base. We just got used to making it part of our routine to go pick up the mail once a week or once every other week. If we got a package, we would get a ticket in our box and you took the ticket to the counter to pick up your package. It was different than what we were used to coming from the States where mail is brought to your house usually but it wasn't too long before we got used to the new system.

Goodness, I didn't realize I was in the minority for only doing stockings for minor children. That's how my family did it. That's how dh's family does it. Heck that's even how ex's family did it. Since I only have one minor child left at home, I thought about letting him stuff stockings for his two dogs this year but I was afraid it might be weird. I guess I'm in the minority on that one too lol!

If the name change wasn't included in your divorce paperwork, you will have to file with the court for a name change before you can go to the SSA. Once you have the court paperwork and file with the SSA and get the new card, then you can change everything else. Of course things like personal email addresses, you can change without a legal name change though. Dh had a legal name change when we got married (LOOOOOONG story there lol). We had to file through the court, put an advertisement in the local paper for so many weeks that stated he was changing his legal name and then a court date where the Judge signed his name change making it official. Of course if it's included in your divorce decree you can skip this part. Once you file with the SSA and then change your driver's license, we just updated people as needed from there. We didn't make special trips to change anything, just notified the different places as we needed to. It wasn't any harder than when I changed my name when we got married. The only place that gave us a hard time is the local Walmart Pharmacy. They insisted that by law I had to have my former married name and my new married name on my prescriptions. Even though those prescriptions were for mental health that was triggered by seeing my former married name everyday on the bottle. When I pointed out that other pharmacies had no problem with only using my current legal name on my prescriptions, they basically told me "well, go to those pharmacies then" so I did lol. ETA: I didn't change my name as part of the divorce decree, which pissed off my ex to no end but anyways. I kept my married name so I would have the same last name as the kids. It was important to me at the time. When I remarried 2 years after the divorce, that's when I changed my name (and current dh changed his as well, the only part that was harder about changing his name is the number of people that don't understand that a man can change his name too. lol)

I also live in a very small rural town with only a small Walmart. We also have a tiny mom and pop shop that is the local pickup point for UPS and FedEx. It's also where we take Amazon returns. We can request that our packages from UPS and FedEx be held there. Do you have someplace like that in your town?

How do you buy Legos? Do you always buy from Lego site or store? Or do you find buying from Target/Walmart/Costco to be better deals? Most have been from Walmart or Target or the thrift store How do you build Lego sets? Does everyone get their own sets or do you do family builds? Ds is the only kid left at home so he does most of the building but we will help if asked How do you display your sets? I'm working on this, hope someone in this thread might have some good ideas lol Do you invest in Lego? Have you sold your old sets or pieces? We invested in a 1500 lego set when ds was about 4yo. It was his Christmas gift that year. Other than that, no I don't really consider them an investment What are your favorite sets that you have? I don't have any faves personally, ds is in to the Speed Champions car sets at the moment What do you have your eye on? Well I have two Speed Champions set hidden in my room for Christmas, does that count? lol Who builds Legos in your house? Kids, teens, adults? Mostly ds who will be 10 a week after Christmas Do you only buy sets or just loose pieces? We bought that huge 1500 loose pieces set when ds was little. And we bought a huge bag of loose pieces from the thrift store once because the price was right and most of it was real lego. Other than that it has been sets. What collections do you have? Ds is currently into the Speed Champions but he also has lots of Minecraft and some Star Wars

I choose no but in reality, there is nothing to wrap in the stockings as I generally only put candy or loved food items in the stockings. so I put them in the stocking in whatever packaging they came in.

Definitely look like plantar warts to me.

I slept in and treated it just like any other day when mine were younger and it wasn't my year. We'd celebrate either before or after they went to their dad's, which ever made more sense that year. I guess being a former military family made it easier to think of December 25th as just another day and Christmas was whenever you could be together to celebrate it. One year, when my ex was deployed over Christmas, we had a small celebration on 12/25 (only because the kids were still really little then) and then had our traditional Christmas celebration when he got home in February.