I frankly don’t even want an 18 year old driving my kids around, especially at night. I am a lot more permissive with stuff than many parents, but I draw a hard line at who my kids ride with. being super close to school doesn’t make me feel better either. OP, is this something your daughter would even enjoy?

With the new information it would be a definite no. Like there is so much no going on here. This is age appropriate for the coach’s age of early 20s. Maybe even seniors. But for a 14-year-old? Absolutely not and I also would see if the school itself know the details. My other concern is that not going affects her social standing on the team. There are no other parents who object to their 14-year-olds being surprised in their bed at 1:30 am and then carted around town by 18-year-olds? Do you know the other parents? If they’re raising concerns and objections, it might be easier for your daughter if/when you say no. Always trust the mom gut.

It’s forever been the norm in my homeschooling circles. Back in the 90s my parents were so annoyed by the early marriage pressure that they pulled us out of all homeschool related activities. I had a “boyfriend” when we were 15-16 and his parents were heavily pressuring us to get married at 17. Um….no. My parents were horrified. My cousins all got caught up in this conservative Christian movement and were all married by 19. 20 years later and all are now divorced.

It’s the same here. But it varies wildly. Schwarztenruber Amish are extremely isolated and I’ve had some Amish acquaintances who never speak highly of that sect lol. A great many of the small construction companies here are Amish and Old Order Mennonite owned and run. They adhere strictly to building codes or they’d never be able to get a building permit. People seek them out because of the skill of their work from Roofing to cabinetmaking. My husband subcontracts frequently with an Amish construction company so I am fairly familiar. There are definitely some who leave the Amish faith(my best friend’s grandparents did and were half shunned—it wasn’t severe, They all still visited and I even got to visit her Amish family several times as a teen), but they don’t seem to have trouble finding skilled work here. But honestly; the contracting companies, cabinetmaking, woodworking, bicycle repair shops/sewing machine repair/etc, and greenhouses that the ex Amish here gravitate towards don’t care if you have a GED and pay okay enough to raise a family. One thing I have noticed over the last few years is more female run cottage businesses and women working outside the home. I don’t know why though. They do not have insurance. A couple times a year my ambulance service transports an Amish or OOM person from our local hospital to the big city specialty centers. It runs thousands of dollars, and we usually get a check within a week of sending the bill out. The community is very good at raising money and paying for medical bills. As with any religion, how they approach life varies widely from sect to sect and location to location.

People I love, including my brother in law, served in Afghanistan along with Aghani troops and translators. My BIL had a close friend who was killed in action there. One of my coworkers has significant PTSD from Afghanistan to the point he can no longer work on an ambulance and stays in the office now. He had to leave work today and just go home. This is an extremely difficult day for all of them. I am grieving for so many lives lost, no matter the nationality, the translators, all those that the Taliban has and will execute, the women and girls who have had hope snatched away. I am grieving.

Yep—there isn’t more land to buy. We aren’t talking a small 15 acre hobby farm, but hundreds, even thousands of acres. Mostly we have Old Order Mennonite families here but some Amish clusters. Many are being forced away from agricultural based jobs, which is having a profound effect on some of the Amish precepts. It’s difficult to run a construction business without a cell phone, for example, and the Amish who work in favorites are among the English all day instead of their own sect.

I read it the other day. It was poignant. I know a couple firefighters who died and I had a tangential cousin who worked for Marsh and McLennon. It’s very hard for me to wrap my mind around it being 20 years.

She’s home now. My sister was able to get her into a pediatric ENT in Tampa which was awesome. We waited for him to clear her to fly before bringing her home. We’ve got a follow up here so we’re continuing to watch it, but the antibiotics have done great for her. I also think we are all more interconnected than we know.

I’m just looking for something light to entertain me while I pack up my house to move. Lol. I’ll go first(I have many but this is the most recent). I worked last night so took a nap when I got home. While sleeping, I dreamt my estranged sister texted me. She’s completely estranged from my parents and only contacts her siblings occasionally. It’s been 3 years(I think, it was when the live Lion King movie came out) that I last heard from her. It was a really nice dream and I woke up happy, because I miss this particular sister a lot. Not an hour ago, she texted me. How about you? Any weird enertaining stories while I throw out—I mean pack up—my kid’s broken toys?

If nothing else; the pandemic has shown what a razor edge margin our healthcare system operates on. I took a patient, who had had hip surgery, 200 miles today to a rehab. She’s not from there, her family is not there, it’s just the closest place with a rehab bed open. It’s not Covid related; it’s a serious lack of employees in my area. My local Hospital is full. They don’t even have beds for surgical patients so they’re cancelling elective surgeries. We’ve been taking patients from there to other hospitals all day. But here’s the thing—it’s not really new. We had surges like this before Covid and and we don’t have many Covid hospitalizations right now. But RSV is rampant and I know of three babies that have been flown to larger hospitals this week. Covis is the tipping point, absolutely. But the healthcare system is finally being shown for the disaster that it is.

We’re moving in two weeks from a very blue collar area to a much wealthier school district. I’ve been watching the mask arguments at the new school and this is exactly what I’m seeing as well. Highly educated, intelligent, wealthy parents who expect the school district to bend to their will. It disturbs me for a lot of reasons, Covid being one.

That’s awesome!! We are too rural for ToT’ers at the new house but my MIL always gets quite the crowd and can move some lol. I found two teachers that got moved to middle school who took some for their classroom libraries. The rest I think I’m just going to keep and find a place for. Apparently I am a book hoarder.

Fingerlakes area. I’d be open to posting and shipping if the new owner covered shipping and promised to love my books.

Meet our new puppy also, meet DH who was absolutely dead against getting another puppy and was going to dislike it all the way forever and ever.

We aren’t seeing much Covid in kids here yet, but huge numbers of RSV. That is unusual for summer.

I posted on our local school’s FB group. It’s nice books like Because of Winn-Dixie and Little Bear collection and Paddington. I just have to cull down to about 1500 books. The real issue is that I don’t actually want to get rid of any, because they’re all loved and lovely books, but we’re going from about 2500 square feet to 1300/1400.

About 2.5 hours one way. And they want you to leave them and come back 24 hours later to get the ones they didn’t buy. Ive been listing. I may just keep trying. I have a ton of lhousehold goods and stuff that I can’t get rid of either. Every place is overwhelmed with donations. A lot of peolple spent last year cleaning out.

No half price books or any used bookstores. No schools are accepting donations. I gave two boxes already to a homeschool library but that was all they wanted.

I have around 3000 books. We are downsizing significantly and some just have to go—but where? No Goodwill locally and the Salvation Armies are not accepting donations as they’re completely overwhelmed. No little free libraries. I’ve advertised on FB as book giveaways. Libraries are not accepting donations. I shudder at just dumping them but…any ideas I’m not thinking of? I could just make room for them in the new house if my husband’s construction tools mysteriously disappeared, but then I might mysteriously disappear…or at least my marriage might….

He lost me when he wrote a book about his awesomeness at quelling the Covid pandemic—last fall when we were still smack in the middle of it. I have met Kathy Hochul a few times and honestly liked her. I am not a democrat so we might differ politically, but she seemed like a genuinely decent person. Time will tell, I guess.

I’m flying the end of October and taking my 11 year old, who will probably not be vaccinated by then. I wouldn’t miss my sister’s birthday and wouldn’t drive that far in such a short amount of time. I actually think driving would be riskier because you’re more likely to have to stop places where people aren’t masked, whereas they’re required to be masked in airplanes and airports.

I have one child that could go weeks without seeing another human being and be perfectly happy. I have another child who very much needs hours of social interaction a day, preferably with a peer group. And a third child who’s in the middle. It just really depends.

I am so sorry, it sounds like she just was not a good person at all and that isn’t the way to handle it. Even if you live someplace like I do where hospice can really only be offered in the home or a nursing home, there were better ways of handling that.

The homeschool Facebook groups here that were pretty large this time last year have lost 50-70% of their members. IRL, everyone I knew who homeschooled for the first time last year put their kids back in public school this fall. All anecdotal, of course. But I suspect it’s a larger trend. People didn’t enjoy homeschooling and/or never planned on making it a long term thing. I have also noticed a lot of lifelong homeschoolers suddenly putting their kids in school this year. Schools here are wide open and many of the homeschool activities still seem to be online or closed. As you said, I think many people need to be around others more than they need to be homeschooled. I was raised in the homeschool community where the mantra was always “Socialization is overrated” and “Kids don’t socialize in schools.” I still see a lot of these attitudes on some of the National homeschool FB groups I follow. I kind of wonder if we’re seeing the start of a shift away from that attitude.

Unfortunately in many places hospice is really designed to only be done at home. Insurance does not like to cover extended hospital stays when the patient is on hospice and many areas do not have hospice homes. There is one locally to me within a two hour drive and they have four beds. It is actually a huge problem, because more and more families don’t have people that can provide round the clock care even temporarily, don’t have areas in their homes that are able to be turned into a hospice room with a first floor hospital bed and commode and still have privacy, etc. However the majority of hospitals do not offer hospice care or a hospice wing. People wind up in nursing homes for end of life care, which often is not a really good setup. But in a place where there are no hospice homes(which are often lovely, homelike places), and there isn’t family that’s able to put their own lives on hold for however long the dying process takes, there is often no choice. I love hospice. Our local hospice is a non profit agency that is made up of some great nurses and social workers. But they don’t provide round the clock care or have facilities where hospice patients can stay. It’s often an abrupt shock to the family to learn that the patient usually cannot stay in the hospital once they are moved to hospice services and that there is no round the clock care available. There is a fantastic hospice nurse on TikTok that answers a lot of hospice and end of life questions. I really appreciate her channel and it’s helped me answer questions for my own patients that I meet as a paramedic and their families. It’s HospiceNurseJulie if you want to look it up)