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Garga

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Everything posted by Garga

  1. The East and West are so different we might as well be from different planets in some regards. We are apples and oranges. We can't compare ourselves to each other.
  2. I LOVE it when kids get into a role like that. My little guy wore his Superman outfit EVERYWHERE except for church. And then he insisted that the Sunday School teacher call him Clark Kent.
  3. ...really works! WOW! I am not the best housekeeper. If you walk in, it looks pretty clean, until you really take a harder look. Like, the refrigerator door and handle were getting pretty grimy. And so was the front of the food cupboard, and the microwave. And the oven--sheesh. There was a grimy layer of grease on the back drop. But 2 magic erasers later, my kitchen is so gleaming white that it hurts the eye! Those things are great! And you have to use barely any elbow grease. The dirt just floats off! I'm going to buy a big box of them on shopping day and start in on the bathrooms next week.
  4. Might depend on the kid. I was 14 and 15 when I had a job babysitting a little girl (9yo) after school. And in the summer, I babysat 2 little girls (8 and 10 yo) all day. I hated it. I have no idea why I did it. I remember that the kids broke their phone, broke a thermometer (with mercury in it, while they were taking their temperatures, so it was in their mouths--broken glass and mercury), sprayed their mom's $90 perfume around, and fought constantly. We watched Dirty Dancing every single day. The one kid would turn on the microwave and then stick her head in the microwave (fortunately, the microwave turns off as soon as you open the door.) And I had NO idea of how to control these kids. It was barely contained chaos. No one ever knew what was going on... I would never leave my kids with a kid like me!
  5. If they let me, I will. Also, they have that kid's pack at the movies: it comes with a small amount of popcorn, a small drink, and a little bit of candy-maybe m&ms or gummi bears. That movie kids' pack is PERFECT for me. I get the drink without ice so there's more drink. It's the perfect amount of popcorn so that I get that lovely popcorn taste, but don't eat until I'm sick. (Movie theater popcorn is my weakness...love the horrible stuff!) And then I top it off with the bit of chocolate. Ahhh. It's great. And it's only $5.
  6. Guys, thanks for the brands that don't have hfcs. I read about 6 different labels yesterday and they all had hfcs. I got so fed up I guess I stopped reading too soon. It was a day of reading labels. I realized that there is a ton of unpronounceable stuff in the "low fat" options of things. I ended up buying the "full fat" version because I didn't trust what I read on the low fat stuff. (Like the parm cheese that you sprinkle on spaghetti and the cooking spray)
  7. that there is high fructose corn syrup in bread? Even the wheat bread? Egads. And here I thought I was feeding the kids a nice nutritious food. I'm going to start making my own bread in the bread machine.
  8. Is your goal to earn money or to get rid of stuff? If it's to get rid of stuff, organize the stuff into a few piles. Then write signs, "Everything on this table $2" "Everything on this table $5", etc. If you want to make money, I guess you'll have to price more individually, which sounds like a huge pain to me. Do you go to a lot of garage sales? I do. Consider what prices you would actually pay at a yard sale before you mark it. If you overprice things, they won't sell, people will just walk away. For example, people try to sell VHS tapes at like $2 a tape. That might be a good price for one movie, but if I want to buy 5 of your VHS tapes, that's $10. I'm not spending $10 at a yardsale. I won't buy a tape over $1 at a yard sale, just because it adds up. In fact, I almost always haggle over the price. So for a tape marked $1, I'd say, "Will you take 50 cents for this tape?" They almost always do. (But maybe they make faces at me when I leave, I dunno...) Most people don't haggle, though, so don't overprice your items expecting to be talked down. IMHO, yard/garage sales aren't really about making money. They're about getting rid of stuff and making a little bit of money. So just put it in piles of "Everything on this table $1", put out a box of junk and mark it "Free" and accept all the haggles. That's my plan for this summer when I have my yard sale. And NOTHING comes back in the house. At 1:00 load the stuff up in the car/truck and drop it off at Goodwill. Then go and have a nice late lunch with your earnings. Ebay is for making money if you have nice stuff. (Maybe Craigslist.)
  9. My friend has not lived near me in years and recently moved into the area. So, I took my ds4 to her dd4's b-day party at a bowling alley. My ds didn't know anyone there and was intimidated by all the strangers and the bowling alley, like many 4 year olds would be. We only went so I could meet up with my friend again and get the kids to start knowing each other. My friend's mother saw my ds4 holding on to me while I held him and said in that lovely sing-songy voice, "Uh oh! He's too shy because you're homeschooling him! You need to get him in school!" I almost burst out laughing. I told her, "He just turned 4. He won't be old enough for preschool until September, so homeschooling has nothing to do with it!" My first snub! I'm in the club, ladies!!
  10. The pp's about books on how to get their kids to sleep reminded me of this: The ONLY thing that got both my sons to calm down when they were crying was the Beastie Boys song "Rhymin' and Stealin'." I used to play it loudly on the stereo and my kids would go from screaming their heads off to sleep by the end of the song. I kid you not. I have it on video tape. Too bad that people would think you were nuts if you gave a new mom a Beastie Boys CD. It works like a charm...
  11. For the future: I'm guessing you don't have maternity dresses to wear instead? Maybe you could put antiperspirant on the area? Caveat: I've noticed that if you put antiperspirant on one area, the other normally sweaty areas get sweatier, so your underarms or feet might get sweatier if you do (just FYI.)
  12. Have you read "Hold on to your Kids" by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate? It talks about how to connect to your kids. Might be useful if you feel that you push her away or shut her down.
  13. The one thing that helped me to understand where Charlotte Mason was coming from was this: She lived what, a hundred or more years ago? In Victorian England. Think: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist. Kids were in workhouses. Kids were taught to memorize long lists of names/places, etc and if they didn't they were beaten with switches, or hit on the hand with rulers until they had welts. Children worked and died in coal mines. They begged on the streets. In Victorian England, middle to upper-class parents spent only minutes a day with their children. Both the mother and father ignored the kids. Kids were raised by nannies on the 3rd floor of the house. Children were to be seen and not heard. They were a hindrance, or else a small adult to be worked 12 hours a day. They had no rights: if their parents abused them, there were NO laws against it, NO recourse for the child. Charlotte Mason's ideas about children being their own persons and not little drones to be worked and abused, and her ideas about education were revolutionary at that time. Today her ideas are old news and are commonly practiced in most western countries, but back then, it was radical. I could go on and on about her ideas, but you already know what they are: getting outside, treating the child with firm respect, short lessons, living books. To you, as a modern woman, you don't know why she's going on and on about the things she goes on and on about...but when she wrote her books she was trying to explain a brand new concept to possibly skeptical people. Many people find that classical schooling and Charlotte Mason styles are very complimentary and they borrow from both styles to provide a wonderfully balanced educational environment for their kids.
  14. We signed a 2 year satellite contract. About 3 months into it, we realized that we could easily go without it. But we're stuck with the contract, aren't we? Maybe I'll look into breaking the contract. Maybe we'd have to pay a fine, but it would probably be cheaper to pay the fine than to pay for the rest of the 2 year's monthly fees. Can you break those contracts?
  15. 2nd grade and preschool. I've spent about $300, but don't have any science yet. If I buy an expensive science program (which I'm tempted to do because the ds6 needs a challenge in science) it'll be closer to $400. But someone on this board gave me a WONDERFUL resource for science so I'm thinking she just saved me $100. I have to delve into what she gave me just to be sure. (I'm so grateful to her!)
  16. As far as thrift stores, I just spent 2 hours in one trying on probably about 100 shirts and came away with only 5 that fit, but the cost was only $17.50. The two hours and the energy-draining trying on were worth it to me to get 5 really nice shirts for under $20. With the other 4 shirts that were already in my closet from last year, I'm done with shirt buying for the summer, for under $20. So, take a careful look at your local thrift stores. You might think that nothing's there, but if you have the couple of hours and the stamina to try on up to 100 items, you can get some nice stuff very cheaply. I'm considered to be very nicely dressed by the people I know. I just take a loooong time at the thrift store and reject anything that isn't complimentary to me. That's how I make it work.
  17. A friend of mine took her yard sale type stuff to a local auction house. She says that a lot of the stuff was junk, but she ended up getting over $300 for it all. You might want to try that. I don't live in a city. I live just down the road from Gettysburg: mostly farmland. So, this wasn't a big fancy auction house. This was just a little place that the local farmer-type people go to. It's not a long-term way to make money, but it's a better return than a yard sale and certainly a lot easier. She just dropped off the boxes and the auction house did the rest. (Of course, the auction house also kept some of the profit, but it was still more than if she'd yard-saled the stuff.)
  18. It seems like for people that we are just getting to know or don't instantly and perfectly "fit" it's about 2.5 hours. But we've recently met a couple that we have clicked with and it'll last up to 3.5 hours and then we only have to stop because the kids are getting tired and cranky. (We only seem to be able to schedule time with them in the evening.)
  19. Were there a lot of sex scenes in Star Trek? There was an almost sex-scene: it was dark and they were kissing, but stopped. They were in underwear. The kissing lasted all of 10 seconds before the lights came on. Someone kissed Spock a couple of times. With all their clothes on. No bedroom. That was it.
  20. That's funny! And true... I had started decluttering just ONE item a day. I had gathered a LOT of things in the few weeks I did it. But then I started forgetting to do it. I'm inspired to start getting rid of one thing a day.
  21. Did anyone already say that MUS isn't DVD driven? He says right at the beginning (either on the DVD or in the intro section of the Alpha book) that the DVD is for the parent to watch to understand the lesson, then the PARENT teaches is. The kid can watch, too, if they want, but the DVD isn't intended to be the teacher. With that said, you make whichever choice you need to make! Miquon or MUS, they're both great.
  22. What other forums are you on? I've been meaning to search for some others to check them out.
  23. BK (before kids) I used to be slender with (gasp!) a flat tummy!! It seems like another lifetime ago. Sigh. Now I'm 15 lbs overweight and I do NOT have a flat tummy! I have a floppy tummy! A floppy, flabby tummy that ENJOYS turning into a muffin top in those awful mid-rise pants. (And low-rise pants??! Don't EVEN go there.) And I had to go pant shopping today. (moooaaaan!!!) I have to say I have a lovely tiny waist. And then the floppy tummy. And then nice mostly thick-solid, with a little bit of flop, thighs. (Thick, floppy thighs!! Ack!) So my pants never fit right. If they fit at the waist, they're a JOKE at the hip/thigh area. And if they fit the hip/thigh, they sort of slide off the waist. But not in the store. Never in the store. They stay up in the store until I wear them and then they slide off my waist and the butt looks all bunchy with the extra fabric hanging down. And I have to constantly hitch them up all day or wear a belt. And then the belt just makes my floppy, flabby tummy look bigger. So today, after shopping, I feel pretty miserable about my lower half. What do you guys say to yourself to bolster a flagging self-esteem? I need some words of encouragement. Even if I lose the 15 pounds, which I've been trying to do for 3 months now, (and I'm running out of movies to watch while I'm on my treadmill) my tummy will still be floppy flabby. I mean--it's reeeeeally floppy flabby right now. All that loose skin from pregnancies. And my youngest is FOUR. FOUR! It was supposed to be 9 months up and 9 months down for losing the weight!!! What a lie! :tongue_smilie:
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