We always thank Siri, and even complement her. “Thank you Siri, you’re the best.” “Siri, you never let me down.” My kids are uncomfortable because Animal Crossing often doesn’t have an option for thanking villagers. It feels so wrong to just walk away after talking to one.

I have to say, I don't know that I'd do a butt swat if my kid ran into the street, because the whole experience would be so shocking and scary without that! That is NOT when I might be tempted to spank, lol. (I don't spank. But just thinking about when I'd feel even a bit tempted to...) I agree! My autistic daughter got so excited that she ran in front of cars a couple of times. Never did I feel like hitting her because of it. One Christmas Day, she ran in front of a car in the movie theater parking lot. My sister grabbed her in time, then got on her knees and looked into her eyes and told her how much we could never stand to lose her because she is so amazing and absolutely irreplaceable. That had a huge impact on her, and I could see her trying to stop and think more. But I also agree that for spankers, running in front of a truck is the exact situation used to illustrate why spanking is needed and justified.

Right now, I’m lucky. We go to the pool several times a day, but it is only 10 minutes away. Next year, my 14 year old starts dual enrollment. That is 30 minutes there, but much longer coming back due to Napa traffic. When I lived in Texas, it was 45 minutes to the pool and girl scouts. It was 30 minutes to boy scouts and orchestra, but piano lessons were 1 hour away. Coop was close at 15 minutes and they could walk to horseback riding lessons. Here are a couple of things that made it easier. We had listened to educational CDs in the car. Each kid kept a bag of extra, finish work in the car to work on while we were waiting. I made up a flash card activity where I packed a big bag of legos or magnetic building pieces and the first kid to get the flash card right got to pull out a block or piece. We also had long talks on the drives. I despise driving, but I don’t regret it at all.

Dh had an old friend call yesterday. The friend’s wife had COVID and fainted. By the time he found her, she was turning blue. The ambulance took her to the hospital, and she was in an oxygen tent. They were getting ready to put her on a ventilator when she took a turn for the better and avoided it. Meanwhile, Friend is home taking care of 4 little boys and worrying about his wife when he notices he can’t taste anything. He gets very sick and is in bed when his boss calls. Yup. They laid him off. He was calling Dh for job leads. How sad is that? They are in their 40s. The only reason he was laid off was because he made more money than his coworkers. I brought up an age discrimination suit, but I don’t know if it is worth it.

When I finished chemo, my goal was to get off all medications so I could go back to being the person I was before my cancer diagnosis. I worked with my pharmacist to get a plan for tapering off Gabapintin, but for me, when I got down to taking one every other day, my nerve pain caused by chemo was just too much. So I’m pretty sure that for me it helps pain and anxiety.

Unfortunately this side effect of Gabapintin contributed to my falling and breaking my knee.

That makes me really hopeful.

I’ve really had a year. I’m trying to put it behind me, but more things keep happening and I can’t get ahead of it. I’m pretty sure I’ve had high anxiety all of my life, but way back when I was a kid, no one knew what it was. They just called me high strung. I started learning more about anxiety as my adult kids started getting diagnosed with it. Then a year ago, I had 5 pulmonary embolisms which led to the discovery of advanced colon cancer. Then I had surgery and was given heparin in recovery and started to bleed out. That was my second near death experience in a week’s time. Then I had 6 months of chemo and just when I was exercising and getting stronger, I fell and fractured my tibia and tore my meniscus and ACL, and just when I was working through that setback, emotionally, my other knee started hurting worse than the broken one because I was favoring it so much. And then, there are also the skin issue I posted about here that seem to be some sort of histamine reaction. I started losing it yesterday when I was talking to my doctor. She said that when my life was going okay, I could manage my anxiety with natural methods, but the extreme stress of this past year has deleted all of the serotonin in my brain and now I. Can’t. Even. I was pretty miserable before I went into the hospital. I was having hot flashes that woke me up 20 times a night. I had very low oxygen levels. I had very low hemoglobin. It turns out that they started giving me Gabapintin in the hospital for pain and it had the side effect of bringing my anxiety way down. Since that was working, my oncologist upped it from 600mg a day to 900mg. Before this, I could be pretty confrontational with people, and if there was even a slight conflict, it would replay in my brain for days, making me unable to sleep and just really ramped up. With the Gabapintin, I am able to let go of things a little more easily or even prevent them by telling the other person, “I’m not really in a place to talk to you today.” which allows me to not get so worked up in the first place. Yesterday, my doctor said she was changing my prescription from 900mg per day to 1,200mg which she still considers low. She also wrote me a prescription for Buspar which I haven’t picked up yet, so I don’t know the dosage. I know there is at least one poster here who has had success with combining Gabapintin and Buspar. I’m wondering what dosage worked well and how long they continued to help. Thanks!

No, actually I don’t. We collaborate. When they were toddlers, I might have had some rules for safety, but we don’t have power struggles. We don’t have fights. There is no yelling by anyone ever. Maybe there are kids who this wouldn’t work with and that is fine, but in my kids are 5 for 5 for doing well socially, and academically within a framework in which no bending is required. When something isn’t working, we brainstorm. We agree to try something. We reassess. We agree again. I don’t punish, and my kids don’t ever have cause to lie to me or hide things from me. I choose to let them have privacy and they have proven to be trustworthy. I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t have anything to prove, because we aren’t having issues. I’m not trying to say that parenting differently is wrong. Authoritative parenting might fit other parents and kids better, but it is a lie that if not forced, all kids won’t do well academically. It is a lie that if you allow teenagers to have their doors closed, all kids do destructive things with their privacy. All I’m trying to say that parents have options. I don’t think that should be “upsetting” to anyone.

I think we just disagree. I don’t ever think it is my kids job to “bend” because I have issues expressing myself or setting boundaries. I don’t want to fight with you. People have a right to parent in ways that I ways in which I would never choose to. And I have a right to say that very different strategies have worked for me.

I’m really having a hard time seeing how this is victim blaming. Yes, it would be bad if I constantly did everything and felt like I couldn’t tell him to pull his own weight, but that is why I specifically said, “The scale isn’t even slightly tipped in my favor.” Of course it would be different if that wasn’t the case. That is why I specified that it is the case in our marriage. I have no problem standing up for myself and standing up for others. I am quite assertive in real life, so for me, it is a very good practice to stop being so bossy for a moment and realize that if I want healthy relationships, sometimes I need to change my behavior rather than expect others to always change theirs. My mother has some sort of a personality disorder, so I decided I would never become the controlling person who sucked the fun out of everyone’s life because she always had to have her way.

I think we are technically north bay but close to inner east bay. I feel like there will be foreclosures when when everyone’s mortgage forbearance ends. It will depend on how Dh is feeling about his job here if we decide prices have come down enough to buy or if we go back to Texas.

I’m hoping that people want to move to Texas because I want to list our house on acreage there. We finally decided that even if we move back, we would want to live closer in. Then I’d love it if houses here in California had a bit of a price drop.

This has been such a helpful and timely thread for me. The minor children I still have at home are great at cleaning and helping out with anything I need, but I have 2 adult children here as well. I have no complaints about how they clean or help out either, but both older kids have had horrible roommate situations. Everyone is hopeful and excited when they move in with their closest friend then not only does the living situation blow up, but also the friendship is over too, not just dissolving away but with blow ups and sometimes retaliation. Wow! That is a shock, but as parents, we kind of assumed it was the friend until it happens again with the next roommate. Yesterday, I was able to talk to both of them about what could be learned from the past about living with people and how can they apply it to the future to make those living situations more successful. So far, the best advice I’ve gotten was on another thread where someone talked about treating chemical problems as if they are behavior problems. Wow! Is that super helpful, because both of those kids have pretty severe anxiety and at times in the past, it was untreated. Well, that is it’s own thread on how difficult it is to live with someone with anxiety. So I talked to both of them about if the relationships start going south, check in with their doctors to see if their meds might need adjusting. The next thing we talked about was changing their own expectations. My son’s chore when he was a kid was doing the dinner dishes. Well now, he finds it unbearably disrespectful when a roommate doesn’t wash his own dishes. I’ve tried to explain that getting a bunch of 20 year old boys to wash every dish as soon as they use it is just not a reasonable expectation. The next thing we talked about is when there is a conflict, to ask themselves how they could change their behavior rather than ask the other person to. For example, my son and husband had an issue when my son got off work at 11:00 pm and listened to music when his room is right above ours. He quit doing it when his dad asked him to, but I suggested headphones where he could still have his music and Dad could still sleep. My husband can also sleep with ear plugs like I do so every footstep and door closing doesn’t disturb him. We don’t get to have the pleasure of close relationships if we are not willing to ever be the one to change. One day, I got frustrated that my Dh leaves the shower curtain inside the tub to mildew after his shower. He also forgets to open the window when he gets out, which means the steam starts creating mildew on the walls and ceiling as well. I remembered a thread here about a teen who would not fix the shower curtain after showering, and I convinced myself to change my own behavior rather than resent Dh or try to force him to change. So I made a new routine. When I wake up and go in the bathroom, I fix the shower curtain and open the window while I’m brushing my teeth. It doesn’t help when I start telling myself, I shouldn’t HAVE to do these things. It shouldn’t be MY job. He does plenty of things for me. The scale is not even slightly tipped in my favor, so it makes more sense for me to change my own behavior rather than try forcing him to change his. But back to the anxiety, I really think that is the root of my adult kids’ issues living with roommates. They get ramped up where everything irritates them. And then they don’t even want to look at someone who could be so disrespectful and there goes the relationship. I was really hopeful, last night when my daughter said, “I know I can be toxic at times, and I don’t want to be that way.” I’m about to apologize to her about the times in her life when I have been toxic. It was tied to postpartum depression and miscarriages. It is like my mom’s bad day getting to the DMV. I might have been justified in feeling bad, but I wasn’t justified in letting it spill out over a child. So I just want to say thank you for everyone on every side of this discussion for getting me talking with my kids about these complicated relationships.

One day, my mom got lost on the freeway going to the DVM and by the time she got there, it was too late to do what she needed to get done there then she had to come home in horrible traffic. She was a wreck when she walked in the door, which I think is pretty understandable. My 2.5 year old was happily playing in her toy kitchen when my mom came in, and my mom started yelling at her about picking up her fake food and pots and pans. My kid hadn’t been asked to pick up, she wasn’t doing anything wrong at all except existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was the moment when I decided that my mom would not have access to my kids. It is just so damaging to allow kids to be treated that way.

I grew up with a mom with pretty strong generalized anxiety. (my dad has pretty bad anxiety too, but it manifests more with his own rituals and rules whereas my mom's was pretty strictly about the house). I’m old, so we didn’t understand back when I was a kid that anxiety was what our parents were dealing with. They just seemed like impatient perfectionists. My sister can do a pretty good impression of my dad yelling at us when he was driving because a can or bottle was rolling around on the floor. With my 2021 eyes, I can recognize that his anxiety was ramped up with driving in traffic, but no one I knew was calling it that then.

Whenever we went to camp or visited grandma for weekend, our mom would “organize” our rooms which consisted of going through all of our things, reading our journals and letters from friends, throwing out anything she didn’t want, and sometimes even painting our rooms what she claimed were our favorite colors. She got into almost physical fights with my teenage brother over whether or not the way he combed his hair made him “look like an idiot”. I’m sure no one on these boards is that extreme, nevertheless my mother really believed she was just doing her best parenting and was never aware of when her desire to always have everything her way became personally violating behavior. I go to the other extreme, I only require my kids to clean when there is a justifiable reason. “Do you mind cleaning the kitchen so I have room to start cooking breakfast when I get home from the store?” “Could you please find time today to finish your laundry so I can get mine in.” “My friend is coming over at 3:00 do you mind making sure the bathrooms are wiped down before she gets here.” I have 100% compliance with these requests. I don’t open their doors without permission and have promised that I will never snoop unless their behavior gives me good cause to think they are not alright AND they refuse to talk to me about it. My 11 year old chooses to stretch and then straighten her room every night before she gets into bed. My 14 year old voluntarily got rid of 1/2 of her clothes because she realized she didn’t really love them but the sheer volume made it more difficult to keep her closet clean. They will be more able to chose how to care for their adult environments because they have experimented and learned strategies that work best for them. I have known more than my share of over controlling mothers. I once got my daughter’s friend a good job as a receptionist for my best friend’s company. It was a nice office and good pay for an awesome boss. I had called in a favor to get it for a 16 year old, but she would have been great at it, and it would have really helped her self esteem to excel in an adult environment. When she was due for orientation, she called me in tears. She had been so excited getting ready that she left her eyeshadow on the bathroom counter instead of putting it in the drawer under the counter. Since she broke her mother’s rule about not keeping her bathroom “tidy” she was not allowed to take the job. Since her mother would not allow her to work for money to buy a car, I decided to hand her down our red Thunderbird. Dh wanted to use it to teach her to change her own oil and change tires and learn what she needed to know about owning a car. Then at the very first perceived infraction, her mother declared “If you are not mature enough to (fill in the blank) you are not mature enough to own a car.” You guessed it! She sold the car and kept the money. My point is that her mother 100% was convinced that she was just being a good parent. The result is that now, decades later, her kids are closer to me than her mother. I’m who she comes to for marriage advice and to celebrate victories and cry about setbacks, and her mother lives in a very tidy house. I have way too many examples of this kind of parenting. I won’t bore you with more, but the kid I was helping last week explained it very well. “With my mother, it was her way and there was no highway. She had a very clear idea of the kid she wanted, and it wasn’t me.” I knew exactly how she felt. I’m not in any way saying that it is crappy parenting to make kids clean. I’m just saying it is a tragedy for everyone when parents let their anxiety or need for order or control blind them to basic respect. So yes. I agree to mostly treating teens as peers. Maybe not friends, exactly (because they for sure don’t want to be friends with me. LOL!) but teammates and collaborators working towards the same goal of eventually launching them with the best odds of a happy successful future.

YES. I literally have happy dreams about finding dolls and toys in attics and at garage sales and in thrift shops. I love quilts, too! My happy dream is moving into a new-to-me old house, I keep finding new rooms and dolls and dollhouses in the closets. I really don’t think I ever became a grownup and it is way too late to start now.

I want to come shopping at y’all’s houses. I love china and quilts (not the polyester ones though) and heavy antiques and dollhouses and all toys. I’m not a super big fan of rusty nails though, or anything broken, so I’ll leave those for the next person. I’m just thoughtful that way.

Usually we have 3 home meets a year, and the previous meet director would have a big party afterwards because it is just so much work for the parents and the kids. But due to COVID, we can’t have huge meets with 800 kids. No one is hosting away meets, but our kids are practicing and they want new official times, so we have been having 2 home meets each month that include only our team and sometimes one other team. This makes so much more work for the tiny core of families who do 90% of the work. I will try to alternate after meet celebrations. For example, this month, I’ll host a party. Next month, I’ll invite people to go eat together on a restaurant patio, but people would pay for their own meals, then the next meet, we might just meet for Boba afterwards and then the next meet, I’ll host a party again but I might make it a potluck, then start the rotation again. It is important, partly because hospitality is a core value of our team. We might not always be the fastest, but we are the most gracious and the best cooks, LOL. But I’m starting to realize that these gatherings have another function as well, the kids have been so focused to get good times at the meet, so they need a minute to decompress and goof off together. The parents want to talk about what went wrong and what went right and what we can do better next time. I’ll have to start brainstorming ways to meet the team’s needs during these unprecedented times while not completely blowing my budget.

I forgot that I did want to make a fruit salad too. One coach is vegetarian, so I will make sure I have something for her. We have a huge lemon tree so I’ll make lemonade for people who don’t want water or margaritas or juice boxes. I know that there isn’t anyone attending who doesn’t eat pork, but that is a good reminder. I do have some frozen patties I could cook if someone has preferences I’m not aware of. Gathering on the patio, and the grill is right there, I think it will actually be easier for me than trying to have everything ready ahead of time. The more I think of it, the more I think that the wine is a bad idea. I remember a meet where my husband was given a bottle of wine, but that was because the person it was given to didn’t want it. I have some soap that I made, I might give them a bar of that to be personal, and a gift card to be practical. I just with I could think of something really nice, but that is probably too much to ask for $20 each. Thanks for the ideas.

Next weekend, we have a swim meet. You know that saying about how a small % of the people in the group always do a large % of the work? Our former meet director always had those people over to his house to thank them after meets. They had tons of catered food and drinks. Now my husband has taken over as meet director and I need to work out our own way of saying thanks. The previous traditions are a little out of my price range, but it needs to be a special. Here is what I’m thinking. We have a nice fenced on patio to entertain. I’m going to make homemade hamburger buns and hamburgers that also have ground sausage and bacon formed into them. My 14 year old has also requested pulled pork sandwiches. I need a fail proof recipe for this that can be cooked in the oven or stovetop. (My instant pot is small and my husband’s smoker gave up the ghost.) I’m just going to buy juice boxes for the kids, but I need a killer margarita recipe for adults. I usually entertain in the summer, and I make watermelon margaritas by putting fresh watermelon through a sieve and then adding lime juice, contreau and tequila, but I don’t think I can get a sweet tasting watermelon in February. I’m not going to buy a bunch wine and beer, so unless guests bring those, margaritas it is, so they need to be memorable. I think I’ll make chocolate eclair crepes for desert. I can make them the day before and keep them in the fridge until we are ready to eat them. Other than stuff to put on hand burgers and individual bags of chips, is there anything else I should include that won’t jack the cost up too much? One more thing. We have stroke and turn officials who volunteer every meet. I’m not having them over, but I have about $20 per person to buy them token gifts. Starbucks gift cards are something a lot of teams buy. That feels kind of generic to me. We live by Napa, so I think I could get a wine maker to give me some bottles of very good wine for a very low price, but not everyone wants that for a gift either. Can you guys think of anything that would be special, appreciated, and not break the bank? Thanks!

For adult sizes, we like Jolyn suits. You have to find the right cut for your body, but they really last.

I’m a native Texan, and when I first read the title of this thread, I thought, “Well, who else’s responsibility could it be?” Also, my husband works in the energy industry, so I understand a little about blackouts and how much effort usually goes into preventing them. I do think that each person needs to be as prepared as possible, and yes, the news usually gives plenty of warning before an extreme weather event but the news also constantly “warns” about events that never actually happen. I was in high school working at an art supply store when hurricane Alicia was predicted. All day, I laughed at the gullible people buying tape and candles. For some reason, I was certain it was a false alarm. We lost power for a week and my mom and I were fighting over birthday cake candles to read by. We ate whatever was in the pantry, and I just remember being so excited that the start of school was delayed due to power outages. I have no idea, why I didn’t think the ample warnings were anything to worry about, but I do remember how shocked I was when the hurricane actually hit. Since then, I’ve been through more hurricanes and floods and wildfires and earthquakes and I’ve come to believe that while everyone should be as prepared as possible, in the end, your community is what really saves you. I had a 3 day old baby when my house flooded in Tropical Storm Allison. It was a neighbor, not the sheriff’s department that brought a boat through my front doors and rescued us. And it was neighbors who came afterwards and cut sheetrock and pulled up carpet. During Hurricane Rita, we were actually out of the country. One neighbor moved our cars to high ground. Another one spent the entire day moving our furniture and photos upstairs so that if water came in the house, those things would be spared. My dad texted, that he had gone to our house and taken our toilet paper and beer. My best friend siphoned gas out of my station wagon and shopped my pantry for food. My best friend became a bit of a prepper since then. She has a spare bedroom turned to food storage that she rotates. She bought a whole house generator about 15 years ago. Her son is in dental school in San Antonio and he rolls his eyes a little at her preparedness. So they are all without power. My friend had a pipe burst and water poured into her laundry room and den. Nevertheless, she is helping her neighbors. She ran an extension cord from her generator to the house next door where 80 year olds are recovering from COVID. The newly widowed neighbor came over in a panic, and my friend talked her down, and put her in bed with her to get warm and watch Downton Abby together. My friend was fine, but I could tell she was feeling helpless about her son. He can visit friends who have power during the day, and a Mormon friend delivered a phone battery and a head lamp and food, because the gas station he could walk to for snacks is closed due to the power outage. And he quit rolling his eyes at his mother for her prepping. He even asked if she would stock an emergency supply closet for his birthday present. None of this is to say that power companies are blameless. I know that they make some bad choices and have priorities which are in direct opposition to customers needs. But it will always be a system that does not work 100% of the time. If you fix one problem, another one will pop up . I don’t believe we will see a time where there are no more power outages I am not minimizing what is happening in Texas, I’m afraid it will be like Katrina, and when people go door to door afterwards, they will fine people who died in their homes. So my advice to my kids is to prepare as much as you can, try not to panic and really nurture your support system in your community because when a crisis hits, you are really going to need each other.

My 14 year old is fortunate to see her friends daily when they have swim practice. It is outdoors and they mask the entire time they aren’t actually swimming. Since the coaches enforce this, it equalizes the situation and you don’t really know which families are pro mask and which are against. It helps that we are in California as well. Firstly because the weather is mild enough that they can meet outside all year and secondly because the anti askers are probably in the minority, so they keep any risks they are taking very quiet. My friends’ FB pages have gone dark. Even if my daughter knows a friend is on vacation, she will be sure to tell me, “They aren’t telling anyone, so keep it private.” This has kept there from being some big divide between the families who are more cautious and the ones who are less so. With my older kids, I was vigilant about how much screen time they had. My son could only play video games on the weekends and that was limited to the number of hours he had earned in the week. He also wasn’t allowed to play first person shooter games until he turned 18. Well, all of that is out the window since the pandemic. We still don’t use screens for school, but during the past year, my kids have spent so much time on devices. My 11 year old is doing okay. My 2 adult kids at home make an effort to play with her and do something nice for her everyday. She misses my oldest, but they FaceTime and play Terraria together once a week. She also plays Tekken with my son. He brags about all of the other players she can beat. She also plays SIMs with my middle daughter. So basically, if she isn’t swimming or doing school, she is on a device, or two, but not ever playing alone. I never could have predicted that I would allow this. My 14 year old has actually gotten closer to her friends during the pandemic. She plays Minecraft or Fortnight with them every day. She doesn’t have WiFi in her room, so she plays in the kitchen and it is nice to hear all of the kids laughing and yelling together. It would be a completely different situation if she was the only one at home while her friends went out together without her. She has strong leadership qualities and is always steering the group to play the games she wants to play and to include the kids she wants included, so it is all working out for her. We had a swim meet this weekend, and 2 different moms told us how close their daughters were growing to ours. One said her daughter even asked, “Why can’t the other girls act like L?” I feel like we have developed a good balance with safety and mental health. No one in our family works outside the home. No one but my husband goes to the store. We don’t go out to eat. I do allow my son’s girlfriend to come over, but no one at her house works outside the home either. My middle daughter needs more social activity than the rest of us. She plays animal crossing with friends from college. She has one friend here who was really struggling before the pandemic and has only gotten worse. I allow him to come over once a week to play D&D. They stay masked, and the other players play remotely. This is the worst risk we take, but he does school online, and really needs a couple of hours a week of human contact. Actually, I may be able to move their game to the back patio in the future. I feel like it is always such a delicate balance. We are able to reduce risk in other areas to allow the kids more of our COVID budget. Not everyone has those options. I feel like we have hit our stride and could continue like this for another 6 months or even a year. I know some people here resent our using metal health concerns to justify taking COVID risks. I’m trying to keep our exposure as low as possible while also making sure my kids stay as happy and healthy as possible. If one of my kids were still struggling, I would keep looking for a game format that they might enjoy and for some friends who would be happy to play with them. Good luck!