I don't think the facts that Driver A was a teenager, unlicensed, was driving a rental unauthorized, had a baby in the car, and had an adult passenger who fled the scene have anything to do with who caused the accident, though. I would follow up with the police department if you can and see if the officer who was going to cite the teenager could at least provide a statement or something to the rental car company or to your daughter's insurance.

Speaking of driving, in NZ the pedestrial does not have the same right of way that they do in the States. In the US you can usually trust (at least outside of NYC or whatever, I'm just familiar with smaller cities and suburbs, up to about 2 million metro) that cars are watching for you and know to stop if you're going to cross at a stoplight or stop sign. when a car is turning left or right, the pedestrian waiting to go straight has the right of way everywhere I've lived in the US. So as a pedestrian in NZ I just walked right out when I thought it was my turn (that is, I was going straight and the light was green, or I was crossing a side street that a car might or might not have been turning on to). Imagine my surprise on finding that the car has the right of way in those situations! I'm sure some of them thought I was not paying attention, or being presumptively (American), or something, but really it's just a difference of rules of the road.

I have a similar story from when I moved from suburban midwest to Colorado Springs (a city of about 300k I think, very airforce/military town). At 4 way stops there, no one stops to wait to see if anyone else is going to go, or if they might like to go. You're expected to keep an eye on it and be going right when it is your turn, even a bit before as long as you're not going to hit anyone, and any pause at the stop sign is just not done. In the midwest, you wait until the other person or people have seen you stop, see if someone else might like to go first out of turn, etc. That kind of thing isn't really a moral judgment one way or another - the midwestern way is more yielding and polite but the Springs way is a lot more efficient - but I'm sure that to them Midwesterners seem slow and stupid on this account while to a midwesterner people in the Springs seem like they're always in a hurry and never give you a chance to just figure out the situation for a second.

My SIL, who was born and raised in the midwest, said recently as she was describing fixing something sort of haphazardly with materials she had on hand, that she had "rednecked" it. My dad (raised in the South in the 40s) also had a term for that activity, and it was also something most people consider derogatory. I told her the word he used for it (which I am sure I can't repeat here) and said it was probably the redneck term for "rednecking it." I don't think she got the implied criticism, sigh.

He can think of it like the Amish quilts, where they deliberately leave a small imperfection so they're not guilty of trying to approach the perfection of God (or something like that, I just read this on a sewing blog somewhere so it could be completely made u)

Seriously speaking, I think it depends on where you go. When we lived in NZ some things that I had to change to fit in were conversational style- in NZ, it seemed like people really waited for the other person/people to be very done talking before they started with a new thought. Even in a conversation between 5+ people, where in America often people will sort of talk over each other some or start side conversations depending on the situation, in NZ they NEVER did this and I found myself feeling like I was interrupting constantly until I got used to waiting past when it felt natural to me. But I don't know if that is the case in other countries. I mean, if I go to Saudi Arabia or Nigeria or China, the cultural differences, even in terms of conversational style, are probably going to be very different both from America and from NZ, so it's hard to say what to do. One thing that is a nice advantage of being American (and having American TV/media exported to at least other English-speaking countries) is that while you might occasionally not understand their speech because of accent, they both understand yours and can often imitate the American accent to make you understand what they're saying. I remember once in teachers' school there we were reading a poem that had a term in it that sounded, when the person reading it said it, like "tossia." "What is 'tossia'?", I said. "Taaaah seeeaaaah," a few different people said slowly. I still didn't get it. Finally someone put on an American accent and said (emphasizing the Rs) "tarrrr seaalllll." Well I had no idea wth tar seal was. Someone had a bright idea and said, oh, the American word is "oshfolt." Uh, no clearer! Eventually the girl who originally did the American accent (and it was a good one) said (emphasizing the short a), "asphalt." They were very helpful. One thing that is good when you're visiting abroad is to be able to laugh at yourself, since people will laugh at you. In NZ they serve this insane dish that is like little boiled sausages with an unsweetened tomato sauce on the side. They brought it out once at some function and said look, you have these in the US right? Uh, nope, I said. Yes! they said, they're called smokers. Oh, I said, lil smokies. Well, yes, we have them, but in the US what we do is fry them and then cook them for a while in a sugary sauce. They thought that was hilarious and said it was no wonder Americans were all fat. So it helps to be able to laugh at yourself.

Well if you're in Canada I wouldn't advise this, but I doubt most Americans (outside of southern accents or other broad accents) are all that different. Certainly when I was in NZ, where most of the foreign students were Canadians (at a ratio of like 50:1) most people assumed I was Canadian.

you can pretend you're canadian no one will know the difference unless you're quite southern of accent or brash of character, and they'll be prejudiced in your favor instead of being prejudiced against you

this needs pictures

and you're paying a zillion dollars for it! That is what irritates me the most about what feels like unnecessary road work (some is great, some feels like a project someone at city hall dreamed up for the financial benefit of someone they know)

It's just an extra few pages; evidently (so said my edition, which had both endings) the published ending was something Dickens was talked into by a (colleague? friend? not sure) who thought the ending he had written was too bleak. As a side note, I read this one in an edition that had a lot of explanatory footnotes, and boy was it a better way to go. I didn't realize before how much I was missing just by being not of the time and not particularly well read or well informed otherwise.

They're not brand/model specific, but I bet they just changed something in the last 20 years . We have a large one and all the large sticks fit (I've bought multiple brands). Sidenote: boy does that stuff hurt when you accidentally glue your finger with it. I'd forgotten! DDs have recent gotten into glue gunning everything and it is hazardous to my health.

One of our customers makes stainless straw sleeves (her name is Cheri Strawsleeves, I think she's on Etsy). I use reusable menstrual pads, most of the time, although DD14 who is not home every 2 hours uses disposable ones of course. I found that an enormous unexpected benefit of them was I never got rashes, which I had constantly with disposable pads. okay I found Cheri, she's here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/StrawSleeves

On the ride to the grocery store today DS11 said hey mom, listen to this great riddle! And then quoted one of the bilbo/gollum riddles, and couldn't believe it when I knew the answer (having of course already read The Hobbit). He's having a great time reading it 🙂

I have found that that is how stressful periods work, you manage through them and then once things calm down some afterwards all the stress sort of hits you and you're just wiped (and sometimes really emotional/anxious) for weeks.

I don't read aloud to anyone who is capable (in any capacity) of reading silently to themselves. Goodnight Moon is about as far as I go. I'm great at reading aloud to toddlers/preschoolers, and I love it, but not for people who can already read.

I also read it in school, about 7th grade. I remember it as just the saddest story ever, and kind of scary, so I forbade DD14 from reading it until just this year. I finally let her and she was amused by how overdramatic it was, which is probably why it works well for young teens/school age kids - no shades of gray in this one! eta, sorry that I missed that you were using this as a journal and didn't want discussion here!

We did BA as a spine with Math Mammoth for explicit teaching of topics for a while and eventually switched to MM as a spine and BA as review (that is, not using it as the discovery method, but for enrichment/problem solving/ thinking practice). When we did it as a spine, which was kind of a fail as my kids are not discoverers, and used MM to shore up this or that, it worked well. It's just that it worked SO well, with so much less frustration and time spent than BA, that eventually it made sense to just go with what worked better for us. A lot of it, though, I didn't bother to even go to MM for, I just taught from what I knew how to do. I used to have a huge fear of that and bought all kinds of curricula, but after a long time of just teaching it myself anyway because they didn't get this or that topic (from more than just math, of course), I realized that if you know how to tell time, you really don't HAVE to have a book tell you how to tell your kid how to tell time, for example. But I can't make up puzzles, so BA kept its usefulness.

Hey, I am not a Dance Parent but the local youth ballet training center (dance academy? not sure what you call these places) came to my DD8's school in Dec. and performed a scene or two of the Nutcracker. Of course they told them when they'd be performing, etc., and DD8 was enchanted, so off we went to see the Warrensburg, Missouri Dance Academy (or some other name) perform the Nutcracker. Warrensburg has like 20k people and draws probably 40k more from surrounding small towns. I was not expecting much. I'd seen the Nutcracker performed by the KC Ballet many years before and was honestly bored to tears, so I was just hoping not to have the baby make too much noise and planning to suffer through it for DD8 (and DD14). It was wonderful! Tickets were so reasonable (I think $12) and of course you can get much better seats than you can for a profession production. Costumes must have cost the parents a small fortune, but the set was pretty basic so maybe they saved money there. Anyway, it was really well done and quite charming. I think for nonserious ballet watchers, the thing is, we don't really get the difference between fancy dance moves and not too fancy dance moves anyway, so it was all pretty impressive. Even the best dancers were clearly students. I just wanted to say for all of you who shepherd your kids through countless practices and recitals to put on a Nutcracker at Christmas, it was totally worth it from a non-invested audience POV!

My middle kids are in a "giving concerts" phase. They have not yet reached "competent at their instruments" phase. In one way it is charming and I love that they do it together and etc., but also I am anxiously awaiting (in several years' time) "competent at their instruments" phase to catch up with "giving concerts" phase.

Well I think the original ending was fair enough; the one in which they (spoiler in white) get marrried was a bunch of nonsense but otherwise it worked out okay imo.ied

We tried Light of My Life, abandoned after about 20 minutes (we lasted that long because the premise seemed so interesting). The girl was such a brat! and the execution just made no sense, if you're in the wilderness trying to protect your daughter, who is the last female alive (presumably), why have her carry around a girly looking paperback?! and when you tell her to stand behind a tree because a dangerous man has discovered your campsite, and she comes out anyway and talks to him, why be so sanguine about it afterward? That's a do or die situation, and surely you've developed better discipline than that in the (months) you've been in the woods! And also when you're walking around, why ask schooly questions (I don't remember them specifically but it was things like how do you spell grasshopper) instead of useful things like is this mushroom over here edible, or, maybe, just maybe, WHAT DO YOU DO IF A STRANGE PERSON COMES TO THE CAMPSITE AND I TELL YOU TO HIDE BEHIND THE TREE YOU RIDICULOUS CHILD?! anyway, such a good premise! such a fail movie.

I found a great local motivation to go through our stuff and purge. We are minimalists (who have 7 kids) so we generally don't have a lot of extra stuff, but we've been in this house for 2 years and there's definitely some extra at the WalMart last week an elderly lady stopped me at the checkout and told me about a thrift store she works at that actually serves poor people directly - you pay $2 for a bag and fill it up with as much as you need. (instead of the ones where they're making money from sales to fund a charitable mission, if that makes sense, like Goodwill, etc.) So I'm super happy to donate there. So far I've donated one pair of jeans, from back in my teenager jeans thread if anyone remembers it, that my teenager never condescended to wear. I held out hope for long past a reasonable return timeline but they were great jeans with the tags still on! This week I'd like to go through my maternity clothes and figure out what to keep.

we read a lot; we don't have a tv or small electronic devices, and it's been a slow work week (or rather, I haven't worked much!)

My favorite book from childhood is The Tombs of Atuan, which I discovered at about 10 or 11 and have reread every year or two since, along with the rest of the trilogy. There is always something new for me to discover in them, spare as they are. I also reread Little House every few years, with a similar experience. I did read all 753 Babysitter's Club books (exaggerating a bit, but not much!) but I don't remember much about any single one of them.