IMO the instructor sounds like someone who doesn’t care about helping people learn anything. If someone comes in with that kind of warning and doesn’t offer any suggestions for how to succeed, then they just like to gloat over people who fail.

I have anxiety about dressing in anything above leisure-casual and I really hate to do it, even when it’s totally necessary to not stand out as under dressed. I think I understand your situation and concern for her discomfort. What helps me through it is to find super plain items that meet the minimum requirements. Well tailored but not form fitting or short. ie Plain sheath dresses in dark colors. Plain knee length skirts with a fancier fabric type of tee or tank and a cardigan. Really simple jewelry, no scarves, plain low heeled shoes. I like boring simple clothing. It gets me through with minimum discomfort. BTW therapy would never help me with this, ever, not even a little bit. Finding my own way through with what I can tolerate is the only way. I’ve accepted that super plain is my style and I won’t be changing. Plain can be a style. It’s okay to embrace it.

I get it - my dad would never leave the house in jeans, shorts or tennis shoes - those were for yard work ! He dressed for the office everywhere he went and in the fall and winter, that included an actual wool tweed men’s dress hat. No kidding - even with a little feather in it !!! Dressing up like people did 35 years ago (then) made him comfortable as much as it makes me itch. When someone feels this strongly about how casual or dressy they like being, IMO it’s a temperament thing and there is not much that will influence what they feel comfortable in.

Hugs. Some kids are like that !! Some people are just like that and it wouldn't have mattered who raised them. I have seen it ! There is no way to do it right and no way to win. You just do the best you can, and they have to own and resolve their own issues that don't belong to anyone but them ! I'm sorry you are hurt.

If she has a need for dressier clothes for a specific reason, you can encourage her to find a style that she would be comfortable with and offer to pay for a couple of outfits. But do NOT attach strings meaning that you have to like what she picks. My mother tried this on me. It backfired. I only wear casual clothes unless I have a specific reason to dress more formally. When I do dress up, the shapes and styles have to be very simple. I would rather skip an event than have to wear something I'm not comfortable in. I look at people who dress up for no reason - meaning, not for work, or a wedding, funeral, church, recital or fancy party - and I just wonder what the hell they are up to ! Wearing fancy clothes around for no reason - I will never understand ! To me it's like wearing just a swimsuit to the grocery store. If someone tried to tell me I should dress fancier just to do it, no other reason, I would conclude that we are from different planets. Pushing me on this would erode our relationship.

He asked me what stone shape I liked best (marquise) and bought the stone and presented it on a very plain band. Then we went together to pick out the setting I wanted. I didn’t like anything because they were all too delicate. I wanted a thick solid ring like a men’s ring as I am pretty no frills. So we had one custom designed. They sketched what I wanted, made a wax model for me to try, and then made the ring. It’s very heavy and plain, and I wear it every day unless I have a reason not to for safety or security. The wedding band is thin, titanium, and so light it feels like plastic. I like the contrast between them.

I love that homeschooling gave us the freedom to find our way through the three Rs during some very tough years due to challenges with health, vision, LD and developmental issues. With those behind us, both are doing well in part time school. It’s just enough and not too much. They both needed a part of their lives to be outside of home. I see this as developmentally expected. It’s good for them and for me.

Kilz original is IMO very fumey. Ventilation matters if you use an oil primer.

White wide slat blinds, white sheers, and grommet top blackout curtains.

You may be able to use Klean Strip to prep them for painting. Also I am in the process of painting ours, and I ended up using Rustoleum Chalked gray paint as a primer. Not cheap, but a great primer. It is easy to apply, sticks, covers, and is matte for the top color latex cabinet paint to stick to, and a good base color for the latex gray/taupe I chose. It also builds up a nice texture on the laminate end panels that had zero texture - now they look like there is wood under the paint. I’m using cheap natural bristle chip brushes that I keep damp with a little water and then blot on a rag before adding a little paint to the ends of the bristles, and adding thin layers slowly. They latex is going on nicely over the primer. Also the chalked paint dries faster than the primers I have used in the past.

If you haven’t purchased a mandolin yet, I suggest spending some time in the Facebook group called Mandolin Group, and don’t buy a super cheap mandolin. It is the nature of the instrument to be difficult to tune and that they need to be set up just right to play with a nice sound and not sound thuddy. Mandolins are great fun and very pleasant when they work well. They are also simple because the string courses are tuned at the same interval apart from each other, unlike guitar or some banjos. And with mandolin you can use fiddle/violin songbooks because the range is the same.

Grapes do it too. So will mini carrots. It was done as a demonstration at a local museum science night. The explanation given was that wet things that are about 1/4 the length of a wave in the micro. Also I found this explanation involving metals in the food. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/10/03/495975189/snap-crackle-kale-the-science-of-why-veggies-spark-in-the-microwave I got a display out of cashew butter once. Never again !

Sample pints were so helpful ! We ended up choosing Dutch Boy Greyed Pebble in the DuraClean Kitchen and Bath semigloss. I got it on the first set of cabinets today. Call me crazy, but because of what I'm covering, I wanted a primer, and I wanted a gray non-latex primer. I'm using Rustoleum Chalked in Aged Gray as a base coat. It's working really well, especially on the end panels that are not actual wood.

I would need to work full time at something and stay until kids were done with the local school system. Then I would get out of this state. I would try to move about 40 minutes north, across the state border. This is our plan anyway and I wouldn’t change it. If it weren’t for the school involvement we would probably go sooner.

Tractor Supply 4Health lamb and rice. Our vet recommends it.

I have some time to myself which very rarely happens. I wasn't sure which project to start, but I was going to declutter a little bit in my "office" - also where all the school stuff lives - and I ended up starting a pretty hard purge. I needed to do this about three years ago. Good gravy, the amount of stuff - our garbage and recycling is going to be overfilled this week. Unfinished stuff from over two years ago that was no good to anyone, not to finish, not to sell, not to give away - just no reason to have - just me having trouble letting go of what didn't get finished. Bleh. I also have three large stacks of books to decide to sell/donate/give away at the co-op. And a bunch of empty shelves. After the first wave of books is gone, I think most of the rest will follow. I've reached the stage of our homeschool that doesn't require much stuff. DS1 is enrolled in distance high school and we only need the books for his current courses - there is no reason I can think of to keep the textbooks for the courses he's already finished and received his grade for. DS2 will be in school part time for science and social studies, and home for math and writing, which are both outsourced to online programs, so I don't need much for him either. It's weird to be on the edge of emptying most of it out.

Our DS1 had flown through Dreambox with all the pictures - he did it all by counting. He got through the whole program easily without memorizing a single fact. He was 110% on the concepts. I tried letting him look facts up repeatedly from a placemat with all the facts on them - dice - also letting him get them from a calculator over and over, thinking that punching them in repeatedly to get the answer would help him memorize - I tried the books with a story for each fact - flash cards - songs - tapping each number of a fact with his fingers while saying them - writing the facts over and over - typing the facts over and over - name it, and I think we probably tried it. The problem was that in his head, the facts were a tossed salad. He has a semantic clustering issue that showed up in testing. He was not organizing any of the facts into groups. Combine that with poor retrieval, poor visual memory and low working memory and it became almost impossible. Almost. But taking a break from math and starting completely over, and building the library very very slowly, one new fact at a time, in a very ordered way, is what finally worked for him. And now, to see him do math, you would never be able to guess it was so hard for him.

Our DS had problems with extremely low working memory and poor retrieval, and extremely low visual memory. Completing the visual processing part of VT was a huge help. I also think that getting through the process of finally memorizing the facts and learning to use them has helped him improve some of these skills. Also the Mastering Mathematics method of adding one digit at a time can be used with this free worksheet generator because you can choose the min and max digits to include. You can also make the worksheets with just a few problems which is great for people who get visually overwhelmed by crowded pages. http://www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/math/

DS1 has similar issues. I don’t know if it’s still available but Mastering Mathematics is what finally worked for him to learn the facts. You start with just what you can add with 0, 1 and 2. You don’t move on until those are completely solid. Then you include 3, etc. only increasing the library of memorized facts in really small increments at a time. You don’t subtract until all the addition is solid and then do subtraction as a rearrangement of the addition facts so they aren’t brand new facts. For multiplication you start all over with a new library. Then division is a rearrangement of multiplication. It took him months just to get the addition facts, but after so many years of facts being out of his reach, it was like a miracle. After learning the addition, the others came more easily. I believe in math facts no matter how hard they are for someone, because mathematical fluency is impossible without it. DS1 is a person who a psychologist thought may not be able to learn them, but with this method he did, and it made a tremendous difference in the ease of math for him. A “disability” overcome. A life changed ! Letz Farmer wrote this program for students with LDs.

Avent bottle brush, great for dishes. Green Gobbler drain opener tool, pulls out all the hair and makes a huge difference. This bathmat. AmazonBasics Non-Slip Microfiber Shag... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y34D17T?ref=yo_pop_ma_swf This tea. Coastal Tea Company Loose Leaf Pu'erh Tea, Dark Ripe Shou, 3.5 Ounce Bag https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0198R3EJY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OXPvBb2HCZ44V This infuser Bodum Yo-Yo Set Mug and Tea Strainer, 12-Ounce, Black https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006UV7Z1K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_q0PvBbVCYGTHZ

I tried the Rustoleum gray glaze on a sample today and I don't like it. I'm going to try the brown glaze tomorrow. The two BM paint samples I have are both too light by themselves - they look like foundation makeup and I don't want the cabinets that color - but the darker one might be okay with brown glaze over it.

Now that I'm pretty sure I'll use a gray glaze, I feel more open to colors that are more tan, lighter and less gray. I need to get out and buy that can of glaze and make up my samples.

Since I'm not stripping off the pickled finish, I don't think I can use a stain. We talked about replacing all the doors with unfinished doors and using stain, but the boxes would be painted. Also the end panels that fit this cabinet series are veneer, and they have to be painted. I think nothing would match. It's frustrating to start with what we're starting with.

Thank you. This is for kitchen cabinets. Looking at pictures online, I think what I want may be taupe with a gray glaze. I got some sample pints today of Sherwood Tan and Sierra Hills. I’m going to try them on some wood disks tomorrow, and get some gray glaze to put on the back side of the disks. To make the project more complicated, I’m starting from original builder cabinets from 1992 with a factory pickled finish on them, that has turned pinkish. I want the wood grain to still show so I am not planning an opaque primer - just a light sanding. I have already painted three bathrooms with the same cabinets and finish on them, so I have a feel for how they take paint, but I painted the bathroom cabinets white, so going for a slight color change with wood grain still showing is really different. I suppose the good thing is that they are currently so awful that as long as I stay in a medium brown range, there isn’t much I could do that won’t be an improvement. We would like to replace them, but it’s a large kitchen and that has never been in the budget. I’ve been living with pink cabinets for 14 years and I’m done - we may still replace, but that could be another ten years and I am going to make them less ugly while I wait. Also the kitchen is part of a great room, so I have to make the color fit with the other half of the room, where there is a lot of brown, and red brick. And I don’t want to make them too dark because the kitchen only gets light from one direction. If it was just a kitchen by itself, I would go for very gray, like I made the bathrooms white and gray. But the kitchen has to blend with brown.

I started taking a daily scoop of Zint collagen for reasons other than appearance, but I have noticed good changes in my skin and hair since I started it.