no...we've never wrapped...not stocking stuff nor non-stocking presents from Santa. I was startled when my Dad married my stepmother and she wrapped stuff in stockings.

Thank you! I see that I'm getting a good many views but no replies, which I gather means that no one knows anything about ACNES syndrome, but that, like me, when they see a thread about some obscure health concern they need to click on it so they can read and find out if they think they have it, too 😂

I've had weird, persistent but fairly mild pain/discomfort in my upper right abdomen (it alternates between burning pain just to the right of and above my belly button and just vague discomfort on the right side) for over a month now. Normal labs and a negative H pylori test at my PCP, so now I have a GI appointment in a week. PCP thought maybe either ulcer or gallbladder, but...neagive h pylori and she said it's a little low for my gallbladder. But of course I cannot stop googling in the meantime. Came across "anterior cutaneous nerve entrapment syndrome" last night, and it sounds...like me! Particularly being able to pinpoint one spot with a single finger. That's what I DID when I saw my NP a few weeks ago, without being asked. Everything I read about it says it's very common but underdiagnosed, and that people tend to go through a lot of unnecessary tests before they figure it out. So that sounds fun. Anyway, anyone have experience with it?

Solo Stove Mesa tiny tabletop fire pit. We have an RV, but he doesn't want to haul a full size solo stove around with us. This one seems like a good compromise and also overpriced enough that we wouldn't buy it except as a splurge for a gift.

We do Victor Hi Pro Plus (from Chewy)...it's well reviewed on dog food advisor, high protein but not grain free (I don't really know what to make of the controversy over grain-free food, so that seems like a decent compromise), not crazy expensive, and our dogs seem to do well on it (it's advertised as "for active dogs" but my dogs are not especially active and they stay nice and slim on it...even the beagle!)

Flaky professors are just a part of college life (as are professors with excellent intentions who are overworked and can't get to everything they want to). I wouldn't worry about a B (here DE grades are weighted like AP grades, so a B would count as an A on the transcript anyway), and I also wouldn't assume it will end up a B yet. My kids' experiences with a lot of their DE and college classes is that if they're struggling usually most other students are, too, and professors very often find ways to help students improve grades as the end of the semester gets close (particularly the students who are clearly making a good effort).

Having read about what happens to returns much of the time, I wouldn't try too hard to return them. In my experience, it's often pretty much impossible to get things straightened out in such cases anyway; the system just isn't set up to handle it. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/30/business/online-shopping-returns-liquidators/index.html

One thing my kid did almost by accident that was helpful was take a proof based discrete math class dual enrollment in high school. He had time to do a couple of DE math classes post BC calculus, and wanted a break from calculus itself, so ended up doing linear algebra and then the discrete class just because it sounded interesting to him instead of doing multivariable calc, which would be the more typical sequence. So he had some experience with higher level, not just computational, math before he started college, which helped clarify things for him, I think, by giving him a taste of what being a math major would be like (as opposed to a major that involves a lot of math, like physics or chemistry or comp sci or whatever).

My son is a senior math major right now...he was never interested in engineering, either, and has always liked the pure math side of things. Until this year I think he always assumed he'd be going to grad school for a math phD, and he did All the Things you're supposed to do for that track (studied math in Budapest for a semester, took the right classes, did a teaching assistant job for a semester, and then did an REU (research experience for undergrads) last summer (and is about to present a paper that came out of that at a conference). But this year he's feeling burned out on that side of things (bad timing, since he signed up to do an honors project in addition to his regular final project for his major), and is now planning to look for a job or internship for next year instead and then reevaluate grad school after working some. He has a data science minor as well, with a concentration in GIS (he's taken stats, comp sci, and GIS based geography classes to get the data science minor), and I think that's where he's going to mostly be looking at jobs; it seems like data science is big right now. I could definitely see him liking a GIS job a lot and maybe going to grad school for that (geography, GIS, urban planning possibly?) instead of math. But we'll see. So. Not sure how helpful that is, since things are still up in the air for him...but just throwing it out there as an experience of a mathy kid who didn't want engineering.

I had nothing but a sore arm (got it at the same time as the flu shot)...I had mild fatigue with the others, so I guess less of a reaction with this one...but I didn't have serious side effects with any of them. Same for my husband and all of my kids except one who said he felt cruddy the next day (after not having much reaction to any of the others); he's the only one of us who has had covid (but it was back in January)--not sure if that's the difference or not.

Mine aren't particularly fashion conscious, but they all wear canvas Vans or converse. This might be because I just buy them whatever I wore in the 90s, though.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was the first thing that came to mind when you said dialect. Although I think it's pretty frequently assigned in high schools, so she might have already read it.

I vote twins because pretty much any two people can stay in twin beds, whereas I have one kid who absolutely cannot sleep in a bed with siblings (and none of them sleep terribly well that way). ETA: honestly, as someone who's used to a king (or a queen in our RV), I'd probably rather have twins even for just DH and me; a double is tight for two adults who aren't used to it.

It does sound like a really crowded park. We'll mask outside if we're sitting still in a crowded place sometimes (outdoor concerts, etc), but it'd take a lot for me to be willing to go back to masking most of the time outside. My 9 year old did manage to catch some sort of non-covid virus outside from someone on his baseball team this past fall, which was not my favorite thing. At least we're pretty sure he did....a few other kids had similar symptoms the same week, and the only indoor group activities he had that week were at masked homeschool coop. I don't know what the latest is on how contagious covid vs an ordinary cold is, though.

My kids would probably ask while clearly expecting me to say yes, like "okay if x comes over?"...but they ask about just about everything out of habit, I think. My almost 17 year old will still ask if it's okay for him to have a bowl of ice cream. I have no idea why--I've never been the sort of parent to really crack down on ice cream consumption!

yep! (at least that's the plan; we've been trying to get this trip done for YEARS now, so I'm afraid of jinxing it)

Incidentally, do other people immediately think of the Marianne Moore poem when people talk about the glass flowers or just me? "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow's grave or the glass flowers at Harvard..."

Newfoundland in summer. Not exactly tropical 🙂 Oh, and we might visit my college kid in Saint Paul for spring break. ALSO not tropical! I live in Georgia, so I look for the opposite of tropical come summer.

ah yes--I wasn't really thinking about the season!

The USS Constitution is great, and it might be really interesting for a Canadian to see a War of 1812 site from an American perspective...at least I found learning about the war from the Canadian perspective really interesting when we were in Nova Scotia a few years ago (in America the War of 1812 is mostly that one that happened but didn't really change anything in between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. We gathered that Canadians are more likely to actually know stuff about it). And seconding the MFA and Museum of Science both being great. Seeing the ducklings in the Public Garden and/or riding a Swan Boat if your kid has any nostalgic attachment to Make Way for Ducklings or The Trumpet of the Swan.

Have fun! I like to spend some time checking out the area around the school post tour if we have time--get a feel for how the community and school interact. CWRU had a 25% acceptance rate last year, so not really safety territory for much of anyone (unexpected things can happen even for kids with tippy top stats at that level; ask me how I know!)--definitely don't let THEM know you think of it as a safety at any rate 😉

What's the best gift for someone whose love language is picking frivolous fights online?

The scoring guidelines don't even mention spelling (though I've seen spelling errors not being penalized talked about elsewhere), but I would think what they say about grammar mistakes would also apply to spelling; if the meaning is clear, mistakes are not a big deal: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap21-sg-art-history.pdf

spelling does not count 🙂

They do! That was a negative for my DS; they require a 5 year dual degree.