Words with friends :D

We've had a savings account with Ing for at least a decade now and never had a problem. We're increasingly unhappy with Wells Fargo, where we have our checking account, and Ing just sent me an e-mail saying I could get a $50 bonus if I sign up for their checking account. Do I want to do that? Looks like they offer checks now, which, IIRC, they didn't before, and that was the main reason we never considered it (we don't write more than a couple of checks a month, but we do want the option to use them occasionally). They have a free ATM location 3 minutes from my house. So it all sounds good, but I want to make sure I'm not overlooking something. Anyone used Ing for checking? good? bad?

They're already inside cats and eat a good, grain-free food, and we've been keeping them out of his room lately. So I guess that's good, anyway. I don't have any particular reason to assume he's allergic to them; we haven't noticed him reacting to the cats in particular (he has lots of general allergy symptoms and was just diagnosed with mild asthma). But I've worked myself into such a state of worry about it that I'll be kind of shocked if he's not allergic to them at this point. Pleasantly shocked :)

Just curious/prematurely panicking. DS5 goes in for allergy testing on Monday. We have 3 cats. It seems like most people I know who have any major allergies count cats among them.

My oldest had similar problems with WWE, and he never really got past it. We finally gave up last year, but we were also doing MCT Town level, so I felt fine dropping it. I did have him do written summaries on his own from SOTW, and, oddly, he was fine with that. By the end of the year he was easily producing two paragraph summaries of each section without any help from me at all. I'm not sure how much of it was just maturity and how much taking out the step of him telling me the narrations somehow helped. And now he's three weeks in to Writing with Skill and is doing fine with it. He's a bit of a puzzle.

:iagree: We've been really impressed with Country Inn and Suites considering how inexpensive it usually is.

DS 5 is doing soccer, drama, tap, and swimming. Swimming is just for something like 5 saturdays, though, and then it will be the other three. We have a standing park day with friends one day a week, too. He the only kid I don't have to push into trying new things, so for now we're just letting him go for it.

eleven

This is completely and totally anecdotal, but I find that my weight tends to be lower in the mornings after I've had a glass or two of wine. The not so anecdotal part is that there have been studies that wine lowers your blood sugar. So it may be more than wistful thinking creating a happy coincidence in my imagination.

I'm at the same place with my DS. He just started 6B a couple of weeks ago. My current thinking is that I'll have him keep working through it until mid September when we have a week break and go on vacation, then switch over to AOPS when we get back.

there's not enough real chocolate in oreos to worry about. If you want to be cautious, though, you can induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide. With the disclaimer that I am not a vet....I have a dog who gets into EVERYTHING, and I've gone that route a couple of times for large amounts of chocolate with no problems (other than the mess of cleaning up the chocolate when it comes back out :ack2:). There are charts you can find online that tell you how much chocolate it takes to hurt dogs; I mean, it can definitely kill them, but it takes more than you might expect, especially when it's not really dark chocolate.

Agreeing that the easiest/cheapest thing to do is mostly skip the stuff with gluten rather than finding replacements. For lunch today my kids ate salad, deli meat (no bread; I roll them up into little cylinders, which, for some reason, makes them seem more lunchy), and yogurt. Dinners we do meat and veggies, mostly, sometimes potatoes. For breakfast they either have chex (most kinds are gluten free) or I make protein shakes (ideally we'd all eat eggs in the mornings, but we're not big on heavy breakfasts). They snack on fruit and cheese a lot. For salty stuff, tortilla chips and popcorn. When I bake, I use sunflower flour, coconut flour, sometimes some oat flour. But a lot of time when we do desserts, they either have a square of dark chocolate or ice cream. I do buy gluten free pasta and Udi's pizza crusts to have stuff on hand to make easy dinners sometimes. Breakfast for dinner is good--eggs, sausage or bacon, home fries or pancakes made from gluten free bisquick. We've only been doing it for a month or so, but I find cutting out gluten at home is pretty easy; it's only a pain when we leave the house.

I have a sentimental attachment to the Eloise Wilkin illustrated one. I can't really separate the poems from those illustrations in my head, even.

I sold a couple of things last winter (should have waited!) I did a mail order place that seemed safe and reputable (had a great BBB rating and all that) and claimed to have the super highest payouts around, and it was fine, but it turned out they didn't offer me any more than the pawn shop down the street. We got three quotes; one from a jewelry store, one from the pawn shop (that advertised out front that they buy gold), and then the online place. The pawn shop had the highest initial quote. The online place's original offer was less than the pawn shop, but when I told them that they matched what the pawn shop said.

3 indoor cats....2 kittens and one grumpy 12 year old

My oldest stayed in a booster until 4'9", which, in his case, meant he was 9 1/2. He didn't care at all about it, interestingly, until maybe a month or two before he was tall enough to be finished with it.

:iagree: that's me pretty much exactly. I do sometimes feel like I missed a window with the makeup thing. I never really learned how to do it, since I was very anti-that sort of thing in high school and college. I still have no desire to wear it every day, but I do kind of wish I knew HOW, for an occasional, special occasion kind of thing (DH thinks it's outright WEIRD when he notices some of my friends wearing makeup to the grocery store or the park or wherever. He can't quite grasp that lots of women do that:D) I do really like clothes...and I'd like them even more if I lost another 30 pounds or so...

that sounds awful, speedmom! I'm sorry you and your kids had to go through that. It does sound like a much different situation, though...my kitten's not acting strangely at all, and he stays inside. Okay, thanks everyone...I'm going to relax for now, I think. I will wait to panic until I have some sort of concrete reason to do so! Really, as terrible as having a kitten with rabies would be, mostly the thing that was going to keep me up at night was having KIDS with rabies...and it sounds like that's something we'd be pretty likely to be able to to prevent.

Twist my arm, why don't you ;)

I just chatted with my former vet tech friend who points out that: 1. a raccoon bite on a tiny kitten would have been pretty obvious 2. rabies isn't contagious until the symptoms show up I'm feeling somewhat reassured.

You all do realize that the fact that no one has responded is convincing me that you all KNOW I already have rabies, and you don't want to be the ones to break it to me. :D

I like to worry. We just got a kitten from the shelter a few weeks ago. Said kitten had been found, said his card, as a stray in a parking lot. We took him to the vet a couple of days after we got him, and she said he wasn't old enough for a rabies shot yet. He gets it on Monday. I was just saying something about this to DH, and he said, "so how do we know he doesn't already have rabies?" And...I have no idea. How DO we know? There have been (I just checked) six confirmed cases of rabies in wild animals in our county this year. And, you know, he was in a parking lot. And I just read that the incubation period is 1-3 MONTHS. And, he's a kitten, so he's scratched the kids a few times playing too rough with them (no bites that have broken skin, I don't think). But, I mean, people adopt kittens all the time and don't worry about rabies. Right? What do they know that I don't? Should I stay up all night worrying?

Well....my 10 year old is a lot less, umm...issue-ridden than he was when he was younger :D

I got this one: http://www.healthcheckusa.com/Thyroid-Panel-II-with-TSH/46938/ ...which seemed to be comprehensive enough for what I wanted. Look around for a discount code, too, if you order from them...I think I got something like 10% off.

You might look at rescues where the dogs are in foster homes instead of shelters, particularly since this is your first dog. The foster can give you a lot more information about the dog's personality than a shelter usually can, and rescue organizations will be able to work more with you to find a dog that's a good match.