Ooh, that's hard when you know that it would hurt the giver's feelings to know you've given it away. I'm probably not much help since I've taken to giving it away anyway, and if the giver (also my mother) asks, I just answer, "Oh, it's around here somewhere," and think to myself that "somewhere" includes whatever charity received it.

I would wonder what has changed that he is sleeping through it now. Is the alarm still working as well as it did originally? Are the batteries failing? Is the sound not as loud and/or the vibration not as intense?

I love my aluminum jelly-roll (half sheet) pans from a restaurant-supply store. They're super thick, so they don't warp, and they transmit heat really evenly. I've had mine for 20+ years, and they're still as flat and effective as they were when new. These on Amazon look quite similar.

Reading through the replies, I was left with a question. How dark is his bedroom? I know that for many people, including me, if the room is very dark, it is much, much harder to wake up. Would it help him get up in the morning if his room had no blinds, so the morning light could naturally help him be in a less deep sleep by morning? There are other vibrating alarm options other than the Sonic Boom one. Here's one. I think it's reasonable not to get one that goes bouncing around the house out of concern for the neighbors, but I also think that getting one that shakes his bed to wake him at a reasonable waking hour (8 am is plenty reasonable) is perfectly fine, even with neighbors below you. I completely support being considerate of your downstairs neighbors, but having an alarm go off around 8 am is reasonable. You're making yourself responsible for a lot of things here--your son's waking/job and your neighbors' comfort--that you may not need to take quite so much responsibility for.

But what if she didn't know that clementine didn't have a clue about it? I might easily have assumed clementine at least suspected. I'm sorry this has been so hard on you. I do wonder if it's possible that she thought you might have known or at least suspected some of it. I don't think that would be an unreasonable assumption on her part. I can easily see why it's so painful for you, but I do think meeting with you in person to apologize for a long-ago wrong shows a real desire to right that wrong. If she wanted easy closure, she could have sent a letter, but she did choose the much harder path.

I tried both MFP and SparkPeople for tracking, and I didn't like MFP as well. I couldn't figure out how to save favorite foods, so I was constantly having to sort through other folks' entries for foods. In Sparkpeople, I have a hundred or so foods that I've added to my favorites list, and 95% of what I eat, I can enter straight out of that list, which makes tracking much faster and easier because I know all those entries are reasonably accurate. I do read the forums on MFP (can't stand Spark's community features) but track on Spark. AdBlock on Firefox takes care of the ads for me, and also I use the app on my phone for most tracking.

I don't go to the trouble of entering recipes if it's a recipe I can easily guesstimate like redsquirrel did above. I will often measure just the more caloric items (cheese, oils, butter, coconut milk, beans, potatoes, rice, etc.). Then I'll dump the whole pot into a serving bowl that I've placed and tared on the food scale and weigh the completed dish. Then I can tare my plate/bowl on the scale and weigh out a portion of the total (1/10 or 1/4, for example) and enter the appropriate amount of each of the higher-calorie components (e.g. 1/4 of the total amount of cheese). Then I'll guesstimate how much I have of the other components (low-calorie vegetables like greens and onions). I do the same thing for restaurant meals, but there I obviously have to guess on all the components. In those situations, I tend to add a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil to my guesses of the other ingredient totals. I also found that it was worth it in the long run to enter a lot of my recipes into sparkrecipes, so I could easily track them in the future. If I alter a recipe, I'll go in and edit it to reflect what I did that time, and I regularly edit the number of servings to reflect what portion of the dish I plan on eating. It really gets much easier and faster once you have a bunch of your stored recipes and most-often eaten foods.

Yes, this is what I wondered as well. It's hard to say without actually being there and having the interactions with the person, but the behavior you describe does sound like it could be Asperger's. In my admittedly limited experience, there can be a certain inability to predict or understand how something will sound to someone else, and it can come across like you describe. I think that Asperger's and autism-spectrum diagnoses were much less common 20, 30, or more years ago, so it's not uncommon to interact with adults who, if they were young today, might end up diagnosed as being "on the spectrum."

Oops! Now you know the dress I was thinking about... I think I've fixed the link, but here it is just in case. I usually go back and double check my links, and look what happens when I don't!

I'm sorry to hear you're having a hard time. :grouphug: I heartily second Kalmia's recommendations for My Family and Other Animals and Durrell's other books. They're laugh-out-loud funny. I can't help but love any book that can make me wish we could have a pet tortoise. If you like gardening books, I read Slug Tossing several years ago and loved it. It's basically a woman's story, told in a humorous voice, of moving into a new house and learning to garden.

Um, yeah. A grand piano is nice to have for a serious piano student, but there are many, many professional, classical pianists who primarily practice on uprights. If you want a grand, get a grand, but don't do it because of pressure from your daughter's teacher. In fact, after that kind of pressure, I'd be seriously evaluating whether or not we wanted to continue with that teacher.

:iagree: Those poor children, and her poor DH. Stories like that break my heart. I have a cousin who died of cancer. She's actually included in the survival statistics because she made it more than 10 years, but it still killed her in the end, after 12 years. But those were TWELVE YEARS that she got to be with her family. It meant that her children were old enough to remember her well. It meant that she had time to think about how she wanted them to remember her and what lessons she needed to pass on. If she'd passed on treatment or just tried alternative treatments, would she have gotten those 12 years? Her initial prognosis at the time of diagnosis was less than 6 months to live, so probably not, which means her younger kids would barely have remembered her. People who scam cancer patients are truly despicable.

Oh my! When I clicked over here, I thought you were referring to the Australian woman with bone cancer in the shoulder area who received a lot of publicity for her attempts to defeat cancer naturally. She died recently, and I worry that cases like the one you linked may lead others like her to avoid conventional treatment at a potentially very high cost.

It definitely varies according to pant size, with larger sizes taking more pounds. It also varies depending on where you lose weight from first. If you lose from your upper body first, then it may take longer to show up as a smaller pants size. I've found that for size 8-10, it's about 20 pounds for me, but 0-2 is about 5 pounds. I'm sorry to hear the Crohn's is flaring up. That's not an enjoyable reason to lose weight. :grouphug:

Yeah, actually, I do get to be shocked by someone else, just like you're apparently shocked by my thoughts on the issue. What does hiking through the rain to an outdoor internet cafe have to do with thinking that it's a disjointed set of priorities to put flushable toilet paper and lack of bugs over a chance to share an experience that her daughter really wants to share with her? That's the part I find sad--that she would choose to miss out on an experience that her daughter really wants to share with her because she doesn't want to be uncomfortable. I do get to be shocked that someone would let her need for creature comforts lead to missing out on important experiences with her daughter, one who is presumably of an age where there will be fewer and fewer experiences that she really wants to share with her parents in the same way as she does now. (And I say this as someone who's actually been to Costa Rica and stayed in a place where we couldn't flush the toilet paper and had no walls on most of the house where we stayed. Forget internet--we didn't have electric lights when the generator failed, which it often did, and internet was something we only got once we were at the airport to go home. We survived, we had a great time as a family, and we got to experience a different way of life for a while.)

I didn't say anything about poverty tourism. I didn't say she should go gape at how the poor live. I said that she has a very entitled attitude to whine about taking cold showers or having to throw tp in the trash rather than the toilet when the people with whom her daughter is spending a year working would love to have those cold showers. It has nothing to do with poverty tourism. It has everything to do with being unable to set aside some of her privileged life for a WEEK to join her daughter and let her daughter show her the Costa Rica she is experiencing. The OP is planning to give up a week seeing her daughter's experiences in person because she doesn't want to experience the inconvenience, and I find that really shocking.

Honestly? This may sound a bit harsh, but I'd take a good long look in the mirror and ask myself why I felt I could not give up one week of my extremely privileged existence to see what my daughter was experiencing. And I'd remind myself that the life I'd "have" to live for a week in Costa Rica would still be much, much more privileged than the lives of the kids your daughter is working with. Billions of people would love to live the life that you can't bring yourself to live for one week. Putting toilet paper instead of the garbage is not a hardship. Taking a few cold showers in a very warm place will not kill you. If I were your daughter, I'd be horrified and offended that my mother could not take on a few days of hardship to see what I was seeing, particularly after having seen how the poor live there.

We never get foreign currency in advance of arrival (unless we happen to have some leftover from a previous trip). We find an atm at the airport or stop at one in a cab on the way to our hotel from the airport. ATMs operated by banks (as opposed to one of the currency exchange places at the airports) generally have as good of rates as you can get. Do check your home bank's policy regarding charges for foreign transactions. Our current bank doesn't charge foreign transaction fees and refunds any charges imposed by another bank for using its ATMs, but our previous bank's charges made it worth it for us to take out larger amounts less often.

According to the TSA itself, kids do not need ID. The TSA will ask the kids their names and ages and occasionally how the kids are related to the adult they're with. The age questions often have to do with whether they need to take their shoes off, and I assume the others are to be sure the kids are really who the boarding pass says.

Kids under 18 do not need id according to the TSA website on this page (scroll down to the ID Requirements section). We've taken DS on 10-20 domestic flights per year throughout his 12 years of life, and not once has the TSA agent or the ticket counter agent ever asked for anything for him other than his boarding pass.

I was waiting for someone to point that out! That's why my friends and I would wear bikinis in the front yard (or the tops to the store) as teens! It was all about flaunting the assets!

Do you actually live in town or just near it? If you're in the town, then could your 11 y.o. run to the store for you? Could the older two go to the library together? Could they all go to the park? If your area norms are such that three--or even the two older--kids at the park alone would cause alarm and calls to the police, could you do something else in the park while they play (like hit tennis balls, jog circles around the perimeter, etc.)? If you fly somewhere, let your kids be in charge of getting your family through the airport, while you follow their directions on where to go. I think looking at what the normal range of behaviors in your area is can help you figure out ways to encourage independence. It's a gradual process of teaching and allowing more freedom as responsibility and comfort are developed. We live in a major city, and DS started taking the city bus occasionally when he was 11. A couple of years before that, we started letting him walk to the closest grocery store (about a mile away) with his same-age friend. (I still love the convenience of asking them to get me a missing dinner ingredient, so I don't have to go!) When he was younger, free-range looked more like me browsing in the adult section while he hung out in the kids' section at the library, him running into the library on his own to return a book while I sat in the car outside, or him going inside the grocery store on his own to buy one specific item while I sat in the car outside.

Mid 40s here, and I lost 43 pounds last year. I probably did "diet," though; I tracked what I ate (or, more accurately, I usually planned it ahead of time to fit my calorie limits) and used exercise to burn extra calories on heavier-eating days and to lift my mood. Once I got in the swing of things, I found it pretty easy and very satisfying and empowering, and I stopped thinking that I was just unable to lose weight. I'm happy to talk about how I did it via PM, if you'd like. You can definitely lose weight just by doing lots of exercise because weight really is a matter of calories in vs. calories out. If you expend more than you eat, you will lose weight. The larger the difference, the faster you'll lose--or gain if your calories eaten exceed what you expend. The problem is that it takes a lot of exercise done consistently to burn enough calories to start showing up as a consistent loss, and studies have shown that a lot of people unknowingly eat more to compensate for their extra exercise, thus undoing their calorie deficit. Also, trying to figure out the actual calories you've burned is difficult, and many (most?) online calculators seem to greatly overestimate burns.

Ok, I feel so ignorant and sheltered now! I know that song and could even sing along to parts of it if I heard it now, but I had no idea what it meant.

Ok, I knew MILF, but I do not know OPP, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to google. Help me out?