I keep looking at it, but with people losing their VIPKid incomes and turning to Outschool instead, the market is ridiculously saturated right now.

My 11 and 9 year old use Facebook kids messenger, linked to my FB account. It’s on their Kindles but I have it on my phone as well and they know I spot check. I have to approve all contacts anyway, but I had an issue where my 9 year old and her slightly older cousin were sending each other swear words because they thought it was hilarious. They mostly talk to their cousins over it using the video chat while they play Minecraft together. Cousins all live 5-18 hours away so it’s nice that way.

Yep. My grandmother feels the same way. She’s been insistant from the very beginning that Covid would be endemic and she’d catch it sooner or later; at 88 waiting a year or two to see family and friends was too long. Her Parkinson’s has now advanced to the point that she is homebound. I’m glad she didn’t lock down last year and continued to see the people and do things that were important to her, because now she can’t do that. Honestly, at 91 you’ve probably got above a 12% chance of dying from anything. The flu, a common cold that causes dehydration, tripping and breaking your hip, anything. My great grandmother died at 98, independent and in perfectly wonderful health, by tripping over something left outside the door of her favorite breakfast diner. She hit her head causing a massive brain bleed. It was a total freak accident, but when you’re 98, even a knock to the head has a high mortality rate.

I didn’t even think about that, but yes, I think that’s part of my feelings this year.

It might just be me. I’m working a couple hours this morning and when I stopped for my coffee in uniform someone bought it for me and thanked me for what I do. I literally started crying. I grew up in a firefighting family and live near the NY firefighter academy, where my grandmother worked at the time. We knew a several firefighters who died. I have a distant cousin who was a broker who died in the towers. It’s been a rough year and we’re overwhelmed with Covid and always short staffed because there’s no hospital beds and we’re transporting patients 3-5 hours away. I’ve known a couple first responders this year that caught Covid on the job and died. I caught Covid on the job and am still not 100% almost a year later. I can’t taste or smell and what I can taste is terrible. I can’t eat to the point we are going to have to talk about TPN. I’m down from around 160 to 120 pounds. I’m not saying any of this for sympathy. I just wondered if anyone else is feeling it differently this year.

Get it and get insurance so you’re not out anything if you cancel or reschedule. Don’t fear paralyze you. Things may be more complicated right now, but not impossible. I have long planned to take my kids to Universal Harry Potter world the year they were 11. My oldest is 11 and I have the trip booked for next month, but I did get insurance just in case.

I’ll bring the pinata! happy birthday!!!

She is still going to the bathroom outside. It is regular poop. She is also eating and drinking normally and acting like herself. She is actually crated less than she was before the move because we now have acreage for the dogs to run around on. We have a vet appointment in two weeks for her shots.

We just moved this week. Every day, my 8 year old golden retriever is pooping or peeing in her crate. She has been crate trained since 10 weeks and has never had an accident. We are making sure she has hours of outside time. Could it be behavioral/stress due to the move? What can I do? our vet never returns anything but emergency calls, so I haven’t contacted them yet. She’s due for vaccine boosters and a physical next month.

I have 3 golden retrievers. If we don’t clean it daily….Yuck. We just put it all in a garbage bag and toss it in the trash.

And school hasn’t even started up here yet. It begins this week. For whatever reason the state has basically shut down the possibility of virtual school as a choice for parents. Everything is five days a week face to face.

At this point ya’ll are my only friends. 😂

We’ve had problems forever locally with finding short term psych beds. We have one local 38 bed crisis unit and it’s always full. That means people wind up going 2-5 hours away(by ambulance and we’re already short crews) for short term crisis psychiatric stabilization. The director let us know that they are dropping to 17 beds in two weeks. They have so many RNs and LPNs that are refusing to get vaccinated and so won’t be able to work past the deadline, and they honestly just aren’t getting nursing applications so they’re closing a wing of the unit. The end result is that people who are in need of crisis stabilization will wind up discharged because there are no psychiatric beds available. There are so many consequences to everything. I personally expect we’ll see a localized suicide and suicide attempt spike. The hospital I primarily bring patients to has been suffering a nursing shortage for years, and they are now projected to lose 10% of their RNs and 30% of their CNAs. They are overflowing now with patients as is everyone—the other night the ER was looking 6 to 7 hours away to find a hospital that would accept a patient with a dental abscess who needed surgery and IV antibiotics. I am not usually gloom and doom and I’m one who believes we have to coexist now with Covid and it’s life, but the healthcare system is collapsing around me.

We’ve had flu pandemic drills on a county level as long as I’ve been a paramedic. Mostly it was mass vaccination drills. Unfortunately, pandemic plans were all built around flu(which can certainly cause pandemics) and not a super contagious, virulent, unknown pathogen.

Honestly? Only two things. An Afghan my great grandmother made me when I was born. a thank you note from my beloved, late grandmother that she wrote me when I baked her some bread when I was 16. She died a month later. There’s nothing else, other than my husband, kids and dogs, that matters to me.

We have 3 people at work who have tested positive in the last week. All 3 are vaccinated and not seriously ill, but the quarantine really hurts staffing.

We have three current positives for Covid. All those people are quarantining for ten days. All 3 though were fully vaccinated and we’ve been told that if we were in contact with them we don’t have to quarantine if we’re vaccinated(we only have 1 employee holdout who isn’t, and she’s also an ER nurse, go figure). But having 3 people out for ten days at an ambulance company that only has around 60 employees is a big deal, even if(fortunately) none of them are sicker than the common cold. My bosses are finally starting to think what this is going to look like long term. People get sick every year, of course, but they don’t miss almost two weeks of work usually. It’s another aspect of Covid we never considered(I honestly think my bosses had put too much hope that fully vaxxed people wouldn’t catch Covid). now that we know it does happen, they’re trying to figure out how the quarantines affect us long term. It’s another aspect that a lot of people hadn’t considered.

I just stayed at home for 14 days after I knew I’d been exposed, then a little longer after my positive result. I had no real way to quarantine from my kids though. We watched a lot of movies.

My local ER has been averaging a 7 hour wait and we’ve been the busiest on the ambulance that we’ve ever been. We’re still seeing only a small number of Covid patients compared to the overall numbers, but I swear there’s something in the air. We are seeing huge numbers of RSV in adults though.

I wondered if the heaviest rains were close to you. I hope you are all staying safe.

I guess maybe we’d have to have a spin off but I’d love to revisit this topic now(I also remember this thread clearly lol) with all that’s changed in the world in the last 6 years. Also it makes me nostalgic for some long gone posters.

OP—I think you need to maintain the boundaries as is. This is likely to be a several year thing before the baby has outgrown seizures and needs to be kept away from illness. It’s generous of you to offer the help, but it’s not a long term solution. Are you and your husband in a financial position where you could offer to help them afford an in home babysitter? Someone who will come to the house and watch both kids? That would help your DIL, who is understandably overwhelmed and frustrated, while protecting your health and maintaining your boundaries.

This is random, but I may need someone in the area who would like to make some money and hang out with a charming 11-year-old who loves video games and Pokémon. I’ve been asked to speak at the Wisconsin state EMS conference on Saturday October 28, but I am in Florida all that week with my son and can’t fly back to NY and then to Wisconsin in time. I could take him with me and he’d happily swim in the hotel pool, but he needs an adult to hang with him. Anyone maybe? Lol I know it’s random.

By the way, I sometimes post things like that on FB because I know that others may have suggestions or solutions I haven’t thought of. I vent to DH, but honestly, we’ve already discarded our ideas before I turn to FB. She may have just been trying to come up with an idea and overwhelmed when she posted.

I guess I get where your DIL is coming from. I have the level of family support she’s used to. My in laws watch my kids 48 hours a week. I worked a 72 hour shift last week and they had the kids the whole time. They do take them for date nights and just randomnly call and ask to have them. We’ve offered so many times to pay them but they refuse. We pay their phone bill without them knowing sometimes lol. When they aren’t available or I am trying to give them a break, my sister, sister in law or cousin watches my kids. But my mom is not physically able to watch my kids like that. She can take one kid for a couple hours. I know she would love to have them more but has been specific with me about her limitations right now. That’s fine. But I desperately need afterschool childcare right now as MIL is busy a couple afternoons a week(and rightfully should be doing her own thing!) and it’s impossible to find. I DID post a rant on FB about how I’m tired of upending my life because childcare is so freaking impossible in our area. But I didn’t mean it as a slam against my mom. We’ve been incredibly fortunate for 10 years to have grandparents, aunts and cousins who all live close by and we frequently trade childcare. I didn’t expect that to last forever, but transitioning from high levels of family support to more limited ones IS very frustrating. I would not take this personally. If anything, you’ve told her before that you can’t physically babysit all the time and it sounds like she listened and understood that. It’s okay to vent. It is frustrating for everyone involved. And this may or may not be a short term health crisis. It can take a while for kids to outgrow seizures, so she may be looking long term, not wanting to expect you to watch him for years, and trying to figure out how on earth to manage this without the high level of family support she’s used too.