Brownies from a box (the only baked product I do no make from scratch), cut into triangles, and decorated like reindeer or Christmas trees. Here is an example. It is a lot of bang for your Christmas baking buck. I did reindeer a bunch when my kids were small and have Christmas trees on the list for this year. That mix with melted almond bark and Chex mix + add-ins is also a lot of bang for your buck, and addictive.

Chickens. They are endlessly entertaining, and you can build a coop together.

All of our cars have names. My favorite name is my daughter's black Camry, which was named after one of her friends because they are both black and handsome. (He and his mother approved.)

I used a set that someone had given me that included peppermint, eucalyptus, frankincense and tea tree oil. Then I smelled other random things as they were at hand, hence the vanilla, chap-stick and even, in the earliest days, nail polish. (I know--probably not advisable, but the fact that I could smell nail polish and vanilla early on were enough to confirm that my smell was not totally gone.)

Have you tried retraining your sense of smell using oils? (I hate to admit there might be something essential oils are actually useful for.) Loss of taste and smell was nearly my only symptom. I googled how to retrain it and found the one set of instructions that gets posted over and over. I happened to have almost all of the oils in the standard protocol because a relative gave me some to try to get me to use essential oils. It didn't take except for this. I also used Vitamin A drops in my nose for a couple of weeks, but--fair warning--they HURT. Maybe I was doing it wrong. I still think there are some things that don't taste or smell quite right, but 90% of the time, smell and taste are normal. I also just smelled everything I could for a while. Sitting at a red light? Sniff my Chap-stick. Cooking? Inhale vanilla. Putting lotion on? Smell my hands. All that said, I have heard of smell or taste disruptions coming up months after Covid.

For future reference, there is OFTEN a pair of buttons you can push on the sides of desk (and cabinet) drawers to make them pull all the way out. It is sometimes on the rails on the sides of the desk. You can google or look on youtube for instructions.

This sums up so much of being the parent of a young adult! Congrats to your son! For other parents of YAs looking at grad school (or whatever other next step), one thing I did accidentally that turned out well was make suggestions for other people she could consult. "Maybe X (a friend who is a couple of years older and already in the program to which she was applying) would look over your personal statement," or "Is there somebody in your department or in career services who can do mock interviews with you?" She took those suggestions and ran with them, finding a couple of good people to look over her essays. A club she is in had a speaker one night who does interviews for his similar program, and she asked him during the meeting for interview tips. So my strategy was essentially to outsource the advice. I didn't really do it on purpose, but I would have if I'd thought about it.

Yes to this even if they do not wear glasses. My daughter in college in Texas was just telling me yesterday that she had to run out during finals to buy a repair kit for her sunglasses. It's Texas--she needs her sunglasses even in December. One year I bought screen cleaner spray for everyone's stocking, and that's been great. I got it at Office Depot or something. (Or maybe I saw it here and ordered minis on Amazon?)

Second option--do you have an offset spatula? Mine is very thin, and it might fit through the gap.

Flip the desk on its back. Be grateful it isn't a kitchen cabinet. . ..

Card games. One of mine is a Squishmallow fan, and also a Mickey fan, and I found an 8" Christmas Mickey Squishmallow that will be jammed into her stocking. It is one of the gifts I am most excited about giving. Chip clips, because they always have bags of chips and gummies and cereal in their rooms.

No one on here is saying blood ties should be honored over everything else, but there is a distinct trend in the younger generation to see no value in actual family relationships.

This is such a big thing right now in that generation, i.e., the thought that family is meaningless, I can make my own family, my friends are my family, etc. It's frightening how easily 20-somethings can cast off their families and how many of their friends will cheer them on for doing so. So many YAs apparently do not feel a loss when they break up with their parents; it's like an entire generation has an attachment disorder. It is indeed baffling, but it is far more common than I would ever have thought.

Bless her heart. She's in for a big surprise. I have 3 teen boys, all athletes. They eat like hobbits some (most) days: first breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, after-school meal, first dinner (which is the only one I cook) and second dinner. Thank goodness for fast food, as I almost cannot cook enough first dinner to satiate them. I routinely cook 3 pounds of meat for dinner and rarely have leftovers.

Is it good enough to make up for the fact that they have tampered with the formulation of Reese's PB trees so that they're now just meh? I think it started with the PB pumpkins. I tried in October to convince myself that I had just gotten some that were stale. But I swear, having tried a couple of trees, that they've mucked up at least the chocolate portion, and maybe both the chocolate and PB. Evil scroogey scum.

On etsy, you can get a personalized wood-burning branding iron. You specify an initial, a logo, something like that, so he can stamp wooden things he builds. You can probably still get one delivered before Christmas.

Sounds like you have figured out something that will work, but I will tell you what I did--money orders (yes, you can still get money orders) in the mail. There is a dollar limit on how much you can buy without--something--I don't remember what; identification, maybe? But if you're over that, you'd have to go to two different stores. Anyway, I mailed the m.o. with a typed note about how I very much wished that that the recipient would not try to figure out our identities and would accept it in the spirit in which it was given. As far as we know, they complied. We learned later that they were able to keep their house out of foreclosure due to some sort of miraculous gift. We don't know for sure that it was ours was part of that, but someone's was.

Poshmark seems to have some, NWT. I won't link but I found them googling "poshmark carter's size 8 Christmas pajamas." I've been on Poshmark kicks from time to time and have almost always received items very quickly.

I used to post on here pretty regularly when I was in the thick of homeschooling 3 kiddos. Now I mostly just check in with the college board, but I wanted to come back and encourage anyone whose kiddo struggles, especially with writing. One of mine could not write to save her life. I don't mean she could not write the great American novel; I mean that she struggled to write an intelligible paragraph; heck, a sentence could be a struggle. I gave up working on writing during her eighth grade year because it was affecting our relationship and sent her to high school. She made a D--a generous grade, I might add, on her first high school essay. She never got a ton of help in high school English classes, but her final grades were always fine because her grammar--thanks to 8 years of Rod & Staff--was impeccable. Her standardized test scores were always solidly 50th percentile, and she graduated from her large public high school just above that. To summarize her post-high school education, she took the ACT 3 times to get her superscore up as high as we thought it could be; attended what is basically an open-admissions university on athletic and merit scholarships; will graduate in May with a GPA in the very high 3s; took a GRE prep course for credit; scored a 301 on her GRE (with her usual significantly higher math than verbal score); applied to 5 O.T. schools, which required multiple essays; received offers for interviews for all 3 of the O.T. schools that do interviews; received an almost-immediate acceptance from a school that required a writing sample at the interview and only made offers to 5 of the 20 interviewees at that session; and has now been accepted by her first choice O.T. program. O.T. programs generally have a 20% acceptance rate, and she has been accepted to 2, rejected by 0, and is withdrawing her applications from the other 3. Somewhere along the way, she learned to write well enough. I do not know how! I take no credit for it. Well, I take credit for her grammar, because we hit that pretty yard, but putting together a good essay? No idea. (And, no, I have not read any of her essays. She did solicit input on them from an academic advisor and a friend who is already in O.T. school.) She and I laugh now about the state of her writing. I even had an ed psych evaluation done on her in about 7th or 8th grade, and he said, basically, "There is something going on with her language processing that I can't diagnose, but you are correct that there is a disconnect somewhere. You should see an SLP. That'll be $2,000." We did not see an SLP, by the way, because dang--it's hard to see an SLP in our area. But she had other strengths, and we let her run with those. She is going to be an amazing O.T., and I'm so excited about her career choice. When she was a little thing, I called her Practical Princess because she could figure out ways to do stuff. She just sees what needs to be done and does it, and if that's not an O.T.'s job description, I don't know what is. I apologize for the brag, but I'm so proud of her and so amazed when I look back at our struggles--it really all worked out exactly like it should have. She works harder than anyone I know; her sport has forced her to be disciplined; and she has never been afraid to ask for help. She is not perfect, but she has done a great job playing the hand she was dealt. If your student is where she was, I hope this is encouraging.

I have not read the article, but I did read Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, which covers this (and related issues) a good bit. ID is the book Target briefly pulled off of its shelves/website, apparently without reading it. Shocking. Anyway, if anyone is looking for more info, I highly recommend her book.

Luggage. Good sunglasses. Swimsuits.

You can get bulk Halloween wind-up toys from Amazon for about $1 each, and they can be delivered (at least here) by Sunday. One of my kiddos had to have non-candy treats for some buckets her club was putting together for Special Olympics athletes, and this is what she contributed.

Marriage ceremonies in nearly any culture or religious tradition are chock-full of symbolism and tradition. That's pretty much all a wedding ceremony is-a hodge-podge of cultural and religious symbols and traditions. I don't understand harping on this one. You like it? Great. Knock yourself out. You don't? Do something else. If I attend a wedding that uses the traditional language, I just sit there, smile politely and assume it holds no more meaning than the bride's white dress. I love weddings, but I love all flavors of weddings and think the picking-apart of anyone else's special day is just mean.

I donated platelets for a while when a friend's son had leukemia and explained how vital they were. Then a friend of mine also got (and eventually died from) leukemia, and she also benefited from platelets. But if you've never donated platelets, read up first on what it involves. Giving whole blood is a piece of cake compared to platelets. Platelets requires needles in both arms, so you can't move, for two hours. You can set up a movie (you can take your own DVD, or there is a library to choose from), and that helps pass the time, but donating platelets is hard. I am always wiped out afterwards. Some people have terrible chills; my lips went numb; there are a host of weird potential side effects. I haven't donated since our local office started requiring masks. No way I can sit there in a mask for 2 hours with my arms strapped down. But if you can, you should give it a try.

I've been on a furniture-from-Wayfair spree this last year, and everything has shown up within a week. I've also had good luck with Overstock, but Wayfair's furniture quality seems to be better. But I got my sectional sleeper sofa as an allegedly-damaged (but not that I ever found) floor model from a local store. Sofas may be a challenge because I think they are too big for one guy in a FedEx truck to deliver. My Wayfair furniture all came FedEx, but it could be disassembled and put into boxes. There is always Craigslist.