Just back off for a few weeks. Then go from there again. My youngest potty trained before my eldest. She potty trained herself at 2-ish. My eldest was 3 almost 4 before he decided he wanted to be potty trained. I was not prepared to potty train two kids at the same time. Early potty trainers have a lot more accidents. Those who decide to potty train later seem to have less FWIW.

I have a Chrysler Pacifica. There are different seating arrangements you can choose for the center passenger seating. One of which will have a center "bench seat" in the middle and another will just have two captains chairs (the seating like the driver and front passenger). I can also choose how I want the back seats folded down. So I can have two of the back seats folded down leaving one of the back seats up (so it's more of a regular sized seat for a third person in the back rather than the "bench seat"). Or fold one seat down and have a one full seat and a "bench seat". ("bench seat" isn't really a bench but it's not the full size seat; it's the squished between the two seats seat.) If you have the non-hybrid model I believe you can fold the two center seats into the floor of the minivan as well. Of course in any configuration as you desire. I have no skin in the game for Chrysler Pacifica and I also want to say the Honda Odyssey probably has similar configurability (wouldn't be surprised if all the minivans do). BIL around 6 ft had no trouble at all sitting in the back seat for a 5 hr car ride.

You should decide what to do before the wedding date. Basically you do want to be able to hand the photographer a list of the family pictures you want with a list of people that will be in each of the formal photos. It's a way to speed things along so you get all the formal pictures you want in the allotted time. It also takes off the burden of the bride and groom to be the bad guy, let the photographer be the bad guy (whether the photographer is a female or male). I've seen this addressed in all sorts of ways. It ends up being it is what it is. The bf/gf are arranged at the edge of the picture to be potentially cropped out. (This is more complicated because arranging needs to happen. So I've just seen it for people who have photographers for a long time.) Have some just family photos with blanket non-family members cut out (you decide on a blanket cut, yes it does mean the other bf/gf that you deem worthy are also not in this picture). Of course the blanket could be long-term vs. short-term with a time frame. Another photo can be taken with "everyone" were you know even friends or distant relatives are in the pictures. So people don't feel left out. Or like an informal formal picture where it's an informal picture but it's a picture with everyone and the bf. Bride can choose to just cut that one person out. Then I would absolutely suggest they just give the photographer a list of names of people in the formal pictures and have photographer announce names for the pictures. His is just not announced. Or announced for one of the n number of other pictures you have with all the people you are certain to want. I would be against leaving it up to chance or the bf to make the "wise" decision. There is a lot of order following at these events and no matter how wise and mature bf is he may feel pressured to be apart of the picture. This can be because some well meaning person is making sure everyone gets in the picture and shoves him in there, or photographer trying to hurry things along and "forces" him in the picture or whatever.

@Heartstrings yes keep this episode away from your kids for a few years. I just read the recap (Bluey isn't something my children are watching). This episode would have had me super angry at my parents at 7 years old. I immigrated with my parents at 6 years old, to a new country. I understand from a TV show standpoint why they would do the storyline the way they did, but they should have not done that storyline. What under 10 year old is really going to understand look Bluey's dad made a decision based on something other than financial gain. Most children don't have a salaried job. When I moved at age 6 whether my dad made more or less at the new job was completely lost on me. The first year after the move I was devastated - bad things happened, new place was not unicorns and rainbows. Subsequently a few years of not much would have been different if we had not moved. A decade or so after the move everything "worked out for the best" for me. Also, note that decades later my mom's opinion on the move is that we shouldn't have done it. These are the real feelings that a child moving has to deal with and the parental guilt that comes with having to move. An episode of "oh, we don't have to move anymore" is not helpful. Anyway, in short I totally agree it was terrible to address moving in this way.

We have a cabinet above the fridge and all it's there for is for looks, well or my family's stash of we don't want mom to know about stuff. If you want it to be practical any cabinet or shelf I put in would have a built-in dead space at the top back.

Also to add, I'm an only child and all my cousins lived an ocean away. I always wanted an older brother as a child. Now I see my daughter has what I've always wanted and the grass isn't greener (they actually get along pretty well so far). Sure, I probably would have been happy with my idealized older brother but I am no longer disappointed that I didn't have this mythical older brother.

Not every provider can do or schedule like that. For them if you don't show up they don't have money. I want my lesson providers to also have a steady income. The answer is as you say for the community to have some sort of community enrichment classes. Some providers do volunteer their time to do just that for the community but I think it's a bit unreasonable to ask them to do it for their job (the way by which they provide for their own families).

Do what you want to do. It's all going to be fine. There's no guarantee having close in age children means they'll be best buddies. There's nothing to say people with huge age gaps can't be close to their siblings. Not BTDT but I know a lot of people with huge age gaps between their children (seriously up to decades). I've seen people do either and nothing's predictable. FWIW my mom was much closer to her sisters who were decades younger than her than her brothers who were years apart from her (in fact my mom spent decades not speaking too much with her brother who was a year younger - they didn't like each other growing up). My friend is super close to her sister who is 11 years younger than her. Also nothing to say the older sibling moves far away after they become adults. They might still be around (or in the neighborhood) to be a big part of the younger sibling's life.

Originally I thought so too. Now DS is only 7 and sticking with it in terms of an all-in-one curriculum feels overrated. When we left it and found other stuff it wasn't stressful. Some subjects we are even "doing our own thing". The thing is the all-in-one curriculums do similar things over and over again through the year and the years. There's a routine to it all. So we leave because maybe our children have different interests than the assigned reading every year (that's why we didn't stick with ours because DS really likes dragons, mystery and action and a lot of the all-in-one curriculum has a lot of nature/farm books). DS is also advanced in math so we had to find a math curriculum that fit how he prefers to learn and his speed. It's not stressful because deciding is about what makes learning more enjoyable (sometimes just more tolerable). You don't second guess because you see the evidence of progress or stress right in front of you every day.

Good point! I suspect that there is no janitor and that the person doing that is the person we've been dealing with over the last few months (who I was going to tip anyway) but will confirm. Anyway you may or may not have access to this person. You can ask what the protocol for this is and hope everyone is honest.

If you want to tip it would be whatever you want to the staff. It is not 20% of the total cost. I don't know what it is but I calculated 20% of total cost for mine and everyone said it was too much and returned a bunch of cash to me. I guess if they have a break down of cost then maybe it's 20% of the staff cost.

If you want to start simple one is to look for things similar to that but less ingredients. So like find a chicken pattie or nuggets that have less ingredients or just have chicken breast that you could freeze. For the pasta roni, start with buying higher quality pasta (https://www.cucinabyelena.com/pasta-quality-matters-cheap-vs-expensive-pasta/) and a jar of marinara sauce. I think once a person starts the journey it gets easier to take the next step and the next step. It's how I started to make healthy meals from scratch. At some point I realized making things from scratch is sometimes easier than the drive-thru or even having the convenience foods. You look up and figure out how to defrost meats quickly (that meal isn't going to win you a Michelin but that doesn't have to be the goal of made from scratch meals). Or because you are doing it you acquire an appliance or two that makes making these meals easier like a rice cooker, an instant pot, a food processor or a smoker. You know what you like and you get the appliance that makes doing that easier. I think the mom rightly took the first step and now just needs the next step. So, yes her meals may not be healthier than the McDonalds meal but she is moving in the right direction.

Honestly I think they are probably all "equally bad". The only thing is with option 2 and 3 they can either substitute or add some frozen vegetables to the mix so at least there are vegetables. Simply that could be throwing a bag of frozen vegetables (I've seen some that come in microwavable bags) or dish and microwaving it. You can get fancy (and make it taste better) by stir frying those on a stove. Convenience foods tends to have a lot of salt and variety of foods. Also, there are ways that some still convenient foods are still more healthy than others because of the ingredients they use. Sometimes though that means additional cost or people are so use to certain flavor/texture they don't "like" the healthy alternative (for example bread whether you get white Wonder bread or wheat bread or some other healthier bread).

Did they self taught how to use that? If they did they will do just fine learning on their own how to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe (All the things), etc. All those softwares are made to be user friendly and easy to use. Excel and Adobe can get complex but by that point you are doing very specific things (like job/career things) , there are a ton of you tube videos and stuff to teach you exactly how to do specific things. Basically self teaching how to use user friendly software is just to be comfortable with playing with it. If you are capable of learning how to use one you are capable of learning how to use them all. I would suggest rather finding a game or something to work on typing fast.

I have 2 and right now we are in the middle of DS's baseball season and we do that 2-4 times a week. We have rainouts this year so the schedule changes a lot so it takes over all our lives. It makes me happy that DD hasn't found her passion yet (although she loves swimming and biking...). I do not know how traditional school kids do sports. My kids are young and elementary school aged but traditional school students are in school until 2:30pm they have homework. We finish our homeschool day around lunchtime or 3pm at the most if a field trip happened, but no homework. We are still exhausted after evening baseball. Other things we do are a PE class, piano, Chinese school, our homeschool charter school offers an activity or field trip day, AWANA, church, but some of these don't need commitments and all are pretty close to our house. We live very close to a lot of activity options so even with doing a lot of stuff I don't feel like we live out of the car. I do think it varies for families and what personalities are and locations. Chinese school and homeschool charter is 30minutes away but everything else is within 10minutes. There are a ton of activity options within 5 minutes from my house. If I didn't live on a steep hill distance-wise would be walkable.

I don't even like coffee and now I want to join their rewards program for this perk. I love glorified adult milkshakes. I just don't like paying for them.

Don't know what Reading level your 6 year old is but we just discovered Itty-bitty Princess Kitty over here. It's a chapter book with larger font, so DD5 loves to read it herself (with help).

Have you tried transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS)? I've found it really good at relieving pain.

It sounds like you have(had) a good relationship with your parents prior to this. When your parents pass, the inheritance is something you are going to have to deal with but the things that will hit you emotionally are going to be your interactions with them during their lives, and the milestones and events they miss now that they are gone. Just know it sucks to have your last interaction with someone you care about be a bad one and not everyone knows when the last interaction will be. I was age appropriately immature for the last 3 close deaths I've dealt with. Every one I've regretted my last interaction with the person. Of course to be clear none of this is been there done that because inheritance for me doesn't make sense in any of those deaths. Even my dad because my mom is still living so it all just went to her.

I had my wisdom teeth pulled out by an oral surgeon. I was under 18 at the time so I don't know about cost or anything, my parents wanted it done then because they felt the dental insurance we had at the time covered me very well and if I recall correctly the price was somehow going to be very different (more) when I was 18+. Later my mom needed another type of surgery on her teeth (I don't remember what), but she wanted to save money and did it at the regular dentist. She said "Never again." There were a lot of issues afterwards and the healing took a lot longer than it should; anyway she ended up having to go to an oral surgeon to fix whatever happened. My other friend also had minor surgery done by a regular dentist and she was very unhappy as well. Basically that doctor kept her in surgery all day as the dentist was going in and out performing surgery on my friend and working on her other routine patient stuff. Based on these experiences I'd go to an oral surgeon if I need oral surgery.

Also for this age group don't rule out comic books or graphic novels. The reading is less intimidating because the words are bigger and interspersed in a lot of pictures. You can find loads of them at the library for this age group. Yes, some are not great literature, but I've found even those can help with building stamina and confidence.

With my son (first grade) we only do copy work, narration and dictation (this is nothing complicated no commas, no dialogue). My son's reading ability far surpasses his ability to write and I think this makes it extra hard for him to sit and make original compositions. For example he's reading sentences like He can't write like that and he knows it. So, he doesn't like doing original writing because of this discrepancy. The copy work, narration and dictation are the pieces that bring him to this point. He happily learns, the phonics, the grammar/punctuation, the spelling, etc. but he doesn't really do a lot of original composition. For us, I've really liked the book (not the workbooks) of Writing With Ease. It gives me a frame work of what to do but not dictate to me what he's reading/writing. I also have the book The Writing Revolution which is the style Exploring the World through Story uses. I use those activities for science and history to have a little bit of "original writing". Have you tried having your son respond to non-fiction writing instead of fiction? I did that with DS7 to get him narrating. The questions made more sense to my son with non-fiction because then he was answering real questions like where does a frog live or a dimetrodon eat rather than what is the main idea or what happened. That bridged the gap so I can now ask him what happened in a story and he tells me something. Scholastic has a series of books call branches, which includes series of stories with different interesting to an elementary school child themes. They were really high interest but more simple reading. Then he can gain confidence with reading something interesting. I also had my children read a lot in the wild like menus, grocery labels, etc. I'd start off asking about things I knew they could read.

I have that. For this year K and 1st, most of the kindergarteners learning work requires me to work with her, but she can really only be working for 5-10 minutes on new learning at a time. Then she does either "busywork" she likes to write and draw so I give her some write and draw assignments she can work on so I have some one on one time with my 1st grader. 1st grader can technically do some work independently (because he can read fluently). So his independent work (so I can work with Kindergartener) is reading a chapter out of a book. I come back to him after I finish one-on-one with Kindergartner to ask him to tell me what he's read (look up narration, that's what I have him do). Then I look at his math if it's a new thing then I work with him on it, sometimes it's just review stuff or stuff that's scaffolded enough that he needs me to make sure he knows the instructions and then he can work on his own. Of course by independent it means the kindergartner or the first grader doesn't need my undivided attention, but they still need me near them to either remind them to do the work and to check that they are doing it correctly.

I like Story of the World or Curiosity Chronicles. Story of the World because it connects Western Civilization better and Curiosity Chronicles because it covers all the civilizations more equally as opposed to spending most of it's time in Western Civilization. I do like Curiosity for the younger crowd because it covers more the people, culture and inventions compared to Story of the World which comparatively spends more time on the famous people and events which tend toward the fighting and politics. I do timeline with every chapter and with my Kindergartner and first grader but we just talk about the mapwork and look on a map as opposed to write/color the mapwork. I only do the activities that look interesting so we don't do activity for every chapter. I really like Mystery Science. It's video based (online streaming). First grade and above there is hands on work ("experiments", observations, activities). Recently there are accompanying assessments, comprehension worksheets you can print out for the units. These are there for teachers but you could use them if you want. For a 3rd grader you can just go through their lessons. For Kindergartener they can follow along with what the 3rd grader is doing and/or do the mini-lessons which are short 5 min videos which answer science questions posed by children. 3rd grader would like the mini-lessons too but the lessons have the activities and have a little more thinking. BFSU and Science Connection Through Inquiry (which makes BFSU open and go) are also good choices for science. I'm not continuing with that path because it's a little too serious for what I want in elementary science. I want science and history to be fun, not work.

Cleaning service and nice hair cuts. I can't even tell you what a good hairdresser does differently but it makes my hair low maintenance while looking like I put a lot of work into it.