No problems here! In the past 20 years of living here, I think the only time something was mis-delivered, it came from UPS and not USPS.

I’d totally forgotten that the first workbook was all review! You’re right that it can be skipped if you’re doing grade levels back to back without a summer break. I agree with the placement test and with not skipping problems. We didn’t skip problems either.

When I wanted to get my son “up to speed” on math because I did feel he was behind, I used Christian Light Education (CLE) and did it year ‘round for a couple of summers. He was able to complete 3 years of math in under 2 years. Why that worked: CLE math is broken up into 10 workbooks per school year, so the student constantly feels a sense of ending something old and starting something fresh. It’s a little emotional boost for them. There were two quizzes and one test in each of the workbooks, which were intended to be 3 lessons. I skipped those. I saved 30 days of lessons a year by skipping those (which is 6 school weeks per grade level.) The math is spiral, so a new concept was every-so-gently introduced, but then dropped for a lesson or two. If the student didn’t quite get a topic the first time around, no problem. It would show up again later, very gently. I learned not to force the issue if he wasn’t getting a new concept the first time it was presented. I learned to trust the system. My son went from not remembering any math and hating it, to being proficient in it. Just last month, he took a placement test at the local community college. The lady in the testing center said, “I haven’t seen a score this high in a long time!” I honestly had thought he had dyscalculia up through about 5th grade, because his brain was such a sieve when it came to math. I absolutely attribute it to CLE. That’s when things turned around for him. And, like I said, we were able to get through it fast with only 1 lesson a day, because we could skip the quizzes/test and we did a lesson a day during summer break and during other breaks too. When you have 52 weeks a year to work with instead of 36 (maybe 50 weeks if you take 10 days off for vacation days), you can get through more without doubling up lessons. My son wasn’t happy about doing math during the summer or on other breaks, but it was just the one class a day, so he was able to suck it up and get it done.

I watched some recent seasons of Married at First Sight. It’s a reality show where men and women are matched and agree to marry a stranger. They meet at the altar and then start getting to know each other. Anyway, in the past couple of seasons (that were available to me—I think I’m a season or two behind), the women have talked about what they hope their future husband will look like, and “bald” is a plus. One woman was a little disappointed when she saw her husband at the altar with hair. I suppose it depends on how the guy carries it off. Bald with beards was what the women wanted.

You either have to move to Siberia, or lean into it and send everyone a copy of “Everyone poops.”

I think she means write up your Christmas cards now, before the busyness of Nov/Dec.

My ADHDer started college part time. Only 3 classes as opposed to the expected 5. He’s never taken 5. Yes, it will take him longer (6 years instead of 4), but he’s getting through it little by little. It’s just his reality. He commuted for the first 2 (3) years and I provided a ton of support with his task management. He’s halfway done (has an AS from the community college) and is going away this fall for the first time and I hooooooope he can handle it on his own. Still not taking 5 classes at a time, of course. That would set him up for failure. Oh, the grey in my hair from all this. So much grey.

This is what I think. If the people living there think this will help, maybe they know what they’re doing. Of course, they might not, but I just don’t feel fit to dismiss the affirmation out of hand. I don’t think the affirmation would work in my little rural town, but in another place with different stressors? Sure, I can see it having meaning to the people there.

Bingo! That’s the key. In this context, royalty means dignity.

I’ve felt that way at times. Everything’s a little meaningless. Maybe do something odd and unlike you. LIke, go to the paint store and buy a funky colored paint (or a nice colored paint!—whatever you. like) and then paint only the inside edge of the door (where the lock shoots out to latch onto the wall.) You’ll only see it when the door is opened. (See picture.) I’m thinking of doing that with my doors just for fun. No one else will really notice, but I will.

Both of the above. I immediately recognized royalty as having special meaning to black families. But at the same time, without giving the children a strong leader in the classroom who can explain the affirmation and carefully live it out in the classroom, guiding the children, it’ll be meaningless. Ultimately, as a white woman in an area with a demographic of 92% white people (next biggest group is hispanic), I don’t know enough about the time/place/people the declaration is aimed at to judge it.

I have thought about you a lot lately and am just so sorry for your loss.

I cook the same meals every night, too, except I have a job now, so we go out to eat 2 nights a week. M-spaghetti (like you!) T-tacos (like you!) W-out Th-homemade pizza (like your Friday!) F-bean enchilladas or 8-can soup or minestrone soup Sa-out Su-rotisserie chicken or baked chicken or beef in the crockpot Every week it’s the same. There are 3 picky eaters out of 4, and these are the only things we can all agree on. It’s been this way for a few years now. When someone gets tired of a meal, I say, “Come up with something else.” They can’t, and so we continue. The boys are 20 and 18 now and capable of coming up with other meals if they get sick of the above. There can be flexibility in the above. For example, on Monday we could have alfredo sauce, chili sauce, red sauce, butter sauce on skinny noodles, spiral noodles, penne noodles, etc.

I can’t get the idea out of my head that older dishes (like from thrift stores) might have unhealthy levels of lead leeching out of them. I had to replace dishes a bit ago because the older ones were getting cracked and bought some decorative ones. But I quickly got sick of the pattern, so the next year, I replaced everything with white Corelle. It’s not exciting, but they’re getting the job done and they’re light and easy to handle. I’ve had them for about 2 years now and am still satisfied. And if one breaks, I can easily replace it with another new white dish.

It was the opening scene and was a comedic spoof of the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the beginning of 2001, some sort of huge monolith appears on the earth and a bunch of apes get all excited and smash things up. Here’s the Barbie trailer with a lot of the scene, with side-by-side shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Barbie spoofs 2001 perfectly and was pretty funny to watch, if you have seen 2001.

Wait—you’re allowed to make cinnamon rolls other than on Christmas eve/morning??

Saw it at the drive in. (Picture, because it’s the DRIVE IN!!). It was much funnier than I thought it would be. We could hear people nearby laughing at a lot of the lines, and I laughed a lot, too. (Those horses!) It was very much in your face about the Patriarchy. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about that. I’m not sure we’re as downtrodden as it made it out to be, but patriarchy is definitely still an issue. DS20 went to see it with his guy friends who are all 21-22 in a different theater on the same day, and as I watched, I remembered the thread here a few weeks ago about how our young men are just messed up nowadays because and everything is about toxic manhood, until just regular manhood is made out to be toxic and young men have no clue how to “be”. But my son and his friends looooved the movie. Patriarchy is so evil. Sacrificing our sons by telling them all their lives how evil they are isn’t the answer. And I’m just not sure we’re as beaten down as the soliloquy made it out to be. The movie was about how in BarbieLand the female Barbies were in charge of everything and the Ken dolls had nothing. In “The Real World”, Barbie ran into over-the-top sexism. And then the worlds sort of collided. I loved that scene where Barbie looked at the old woman and said how beautiful she was.

Aw. 😞 The teens I know are sweethearts.

That’s happened to me a few times. The kids went to VBS when they were little and I would have 3 hours a day to myself in the house for a week. 15 hours total! Glorious! The first year, I had my 15 glorious hours of alone time. I decluttered the attic. The second year, my DH was sick and home for a couple of the days. Totally threw me off. I got little done. The third year, he had taken off work for something or other. Thrown off again. Didn’t get anything done that I wanted to do. I was really disappointed each time I lost that alone time. I would wait an entire year for those 15 hours, and then they were yanked away from me. And I couldn’t quite complain about it to DH, because it would make him sad to think I was upset that he was home. But…I was upset that he was home! Oh, the conflicting feelings.

Yesterday the guys all left the house and I had three hours to myself. I sat on the couch and just stared around the room, thinking for about an hour of that time. It was lovely! And then I quietly read a book for the other 2 hours. And made myself some tacos. Oh, and sang LOUDLY and off key while I washed up my taco dishes. For me, my kids have been old enough to leave alone in the house for a long time. So, now the rare treat is when I’m home alone. Ah, to be home alone! My three hours were unplanned and so I just sat around thinking and reading. If I had been able to plan an entire day, I’d probably declutter something without someone else interrupting or saying, “Wait, you want to get rid of THAT?!” And I’d get Chinese food delivered to the door.

Well, since my oldest has ADHD and the executive function of a young teenager, I sure have been helping him with the paperwork! Add to that that college websites are often confusing or even flat out wrong, and I couldn’t just throw him in there on his own. He’d have probably dropped out because he’d have dropped an important ball and gotten so muddled he’d have given up. I helped him a ton at first, but he’s going into his junior year now and I only help a bit with a few things. Mostly, I’m the calendar/reminder for him to get going doing something (see ADHD/Executive function above.) I’ve told him that there are 3 things going forward that I will fuss, fuss, fuss at him about: signing up for the next semester’s classes, ordering his books on time, making payments to the college. Otherwise, if he drops a ball on something, I think he can handle the consequences without setting him back too badly. My youngest doesn’t have the ADHD/EF issues the oldest has, so I’m walking through the process with him now and keeping an eye out for how well he does things. I’m pretty sure that I can release him to doing things on his own much sooner than with the oldest. But I’m helping him for now. I do not want to be this hands on. Honestly, I’m just tired of having other people’s life be my responsibility and I want them to be able to handle their own stuff. But since there are so many pitfalls in the college process, I want to be sure things don’t fall through the cracks, so I stay somewhat involved. They’re too inexperienced to know how to handle some things and the consequences can be more than I want to handle. Because if they mess up something important, it affects me as well as them. Here’s an example of something that can mess with a young person if they’re figuring this stuff out on their own: My son has no idea that in the business world, it’s common to send someone an email and not hear back. After 3-4 days, it’s acceptable to send a follow up: “Hi—just following up on the below email.” My son would wait for weeks for a reply, thinking, “Well, I emailed them and I guess they’re busy and will get back to me later,” and he wouldn’t get answers. As an adult, I know that if you want to get your business done, you have to follow up. If someone doesn’t reply to an email, I will pester every few days until you do, sorry not sorry. A couple of months ago, he had an online appointment with someone at the college. He asked me to attend with him so that if I thought of something to say in the meeting, I was right there. We signed into Zoom. The time for the meeting came and went. One minute…two minutes…three mintues. I said, “We may need to call the lady.” He looked aghast. I said, “We’ll wait until 5 after. That’s an appropriate time to wait for a meeting on Zoom before you contact the person.” He didn’t believe me and was super stressed. At 8 after I finally had to force the issue, “SON. No one is this late to an online meeting. Something is wrong. Call Her.” He called. She was sitting in the meeting the same as we were, but somehow we were in wrong meetings. Now, why she didn’t call us is a question I don’t know the answer to, because she should have known better. But when someone is 5 minutes late to an online meeting, you call them and make sure they didn’t forget or are having tech difficulties or are sitting in the wrong room. My son would have never called her and apparently, she wasn’t going to call him, and then he’d have had the hassle of needlessly rescheduling the meeting. So, that’s the sort of stuff I help him stay on top of. I tell him how to remember things: “You wrote to X today. Put a note on your calendar 4 days from now to send a follow up email if you haven’t heard back by then.” Bottom line: I don’t fill out forms or write the emails or make the appointments for them, but I do help them figure out which forms to fill out and when they need to email someone and how to follow up and when they need to make the appointments. And I keep backing off more and more whenever I sense I can. (Except for picking classes, getting books, and paying bills. I will always double check those three things.)

When the kids were little, it was hard. So many days I would think, “Today is the day that when DH walks in the door, I will get my car keys and go ANYWHERE until 10:00 and then come home and go right to bed because I CANNOT TAKE ANOTHER SECOND OF THIS.” I never did that. I would make it through another day, but it was a number of years that I thought that thought every single day. Looking back, I should have gotten in that car at least once a week and taken the night off. Tthe point I’m trying to get to is that it ended. The years passed and things changed. Right now, I experience some of what you’re going through, but not with quite the same intensity or amount: the anxiety/depression in other family members, the neediness of young people who ought to be able to handle their own stuff, but can’t, the thinking for everyone else. (Oh my goodness, all the thinking for everyone else! No one ever asks me to do something and then follows up with me, checking in on me and making sure I’m doing what I need to do or checking whether I’m sad or depressed. It’s like no one has MY back. I get resentful about it sometimes.) But these years will pass, too. I do my best to live in the moment when I can, when the moments are good. And I also balance that with looking forward to the peace that I hope to have when these years have passed. Fingers crossed that the years ahead are peaceful and I don’t have to devote yet another couple of decades of my own life to others. Fingers crossed. You don’t really need advice, but I hope that you can start to find ways to make some changes to help lessen the load. Or just drive off once a week and get a coffee at McDonalds and read a book by yourself for 2 hours. Maybe that’s not doable, but when the boys got older and I finally did have some time to get out of the house alone once a week, it did wonders for me.

Maybe a little hard rock, too? Metallica once played to an audience of literally 1.6 million people in Russia in a live concert. I never knew that until a few weeks ago. They might deserve a spot in your class. (One point six! Million! Yikes!) https://www.wearethepit.com/2023/04/that-time-metallica-played-a-free-concert-for-over-1-million-fans/ (ETA: I see now that there were some other bands at that same concert. So, feel free to include them, too, for a little hard rock section.) For a Metallica song, I’d pick Enter Sandman. Here’s a flash mob of 500 people in Central Europe all playing it together:

I had a homemade salsa recipe and something about it wasn’t working, it was just Too Much somehow. A friend of mine said, “It’s too acidic. Add a tsp of sugar.” I did and it was perfect. It certainly didn’t make it sweet in the slightest, but it cut the acidity. I have no idea how much they add to jars of it in the stores, but my homemade recipe only had a tsp in it.

This. The colleague doesn’t believe it either. It’s the sort of stuff you say at work to smooth things over and attempt to be a team player while you keep your fingers crossed that the change will in fact be good. If you were complaining about it too much, she just might not have wanted to go into a negative headspace over it and said “Change is always good” just to change the tone of the conversation.