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mamakim

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Posts posted by mamakim

  1. I call my MIL "Mother" to her face and "Mother LastName" to others. My own mother has never wanted to be called Mother, so that works.

     

    Glad you posted this question, though. My eldest son is getting married and my soon-to-be-first-DIL and I have been discussing this. I'm just really not a first-name kind of person, so I've been struggling with this. She has no preference. I've always disliked the baggage with my first name, so I've been thinking about asking her to call me "Mama Jo" (Jo being my middle name and Mama being what all my own children call me).

     

    Does that seem just really weird? Sigh. I want to be a good MIL and not drive her insane, y'know? Although since we live half a country apart, this should be easier :D

  2. We ditched the landline recently, but had our home phone # transferred to my cell. I spent $6.99 IIRC to buy an app called "Call Blocker". Wow, best $ I've spent in a long time! Sooo many of these calls blocked. Purchasers of the app report telemarketers/scams/etc, then those numbers are blocked plus any you personally blacklist. "Rachel" still leaves messages, as do the carpet cleaning people, but the app blocks a boatload of other stuff.

  3. You might want to consider, too, regarding your fear of letting your 11 year old use the stove . . . at what age will that fear go away? My 10 and 12 year old dd's, because they have severe food allergies and have an entirely separate diet, cook their own food. We did knife skills "class" and stove safety "class", but they've done very well. Dd 12 even handled an event well where someone before her had left a drip in the oven that caught fire when she went to preheat, remembering what she'd been instructed.

     

    Dd 10 and 12 also do ALL of the family's laundry here, with ds 6 helping distribute people's stacks. They kind of like this because they are allowed screen time during this :-).

     

    Dh does our grocery shopping, and we have GF, allergenic, and "regular" diets here. He does grumble about what he calls "exotics" but he's just learned to do a lot of phoning. We're on a tight budget, and a lot of our money goes to food because you're right it's expensive, but I want him to be aware of those costs for SO many reasons. Our budgeting needs to be based on realism, and GF foods are the reality - other things need to bend, not the food. Your dd 11 could go along and that could be their special time on the weekends. My dh has always taken someone along, and over time my dd's have become the experts on the "exotics", having more patience for all of that ;)

  4. :grouphug:

     

    I kept typing out different things but nothing sounds right . . . as Wendilouwho said, there are a lot of us here who understand that crazy swirl of emotions. I personally decided that if I couldn't be excited (and I couldn't - it was just too hard) I'd at least send that baby all the love I could so that if it was another lost baby I'd loved him/her while he/she was in me. Which makes no sense, I realize, but comforted me. "I love you as long as you're here" was what I could hold onto.

     

    :grouphug: Prayers here.

  5. I'm on Armour and have Hashimoto's and am grain free. I don't have celiac disease. At first I went gluten free, but improved in the bloating department only when I also removed rice and potatoes. I'm still able to do dairy. If you love your dairy stuff, maybe do two or three weeks off grains/starches altogether (using whole 30 or paleo) and see if it improves?

     

    I have two sisters, two daughters, and a niece who all have Hashimoto's and do well on Armour. One sis and one dd tried Synthroid and Levoxyl and were miserable, but I know everyone is so different and reacts really differently to these meds. My sis is actually on Erfa and does better on that than the Armour, something about the binders.

  6. :grouphug: We just went through a huge work-up through Children's in Seattle, and once there, our experience was really good. They're so set up as a referral hospital that it was all seamless.

     

    You know what really bothers me about your scenario? Your dh has the knowledge to push it through, and what we've seen having to do the same scenarios (we're both RNs) is that sadly, we can get listened to because we're "medical". I always wonder what happens to other parents in similarly frustrating roadblocks who don't know, since they don't work with it, where to push and how.

     

    :grouphug: Hope Children's gets you just what you need and that it's a super-nothing-bad diagnosis.

  7. Our very favorite Paleo cookbook here is "Make It Paleo". The other two we have and use in every menu rotation are "Paleo Comfort Foods" and "Well Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat". (BTW, I linked to Amazon for ease there; not affiliate links or anything).

     

    I've got too many blogs bookmarked to list here, for sure! But here are a couple of good aggregating websites:

    Chowstalker

    The Foodee Project

  8. Another stainless and cast iron girl here.

     

    Three words: Bar Keeper's Friend. Although that actually might be two words.

     

    I love to pick up good quality stainless at thrift stores - they're there because someone has burned gunk on 'em, and I bring them home and use BKF and make them gorgeous :D. Just got a Cuisinart stainless windsor pan (wonderful for reducing liquids and making sauces) with lid this week that way. Even optimistic-me was wondering if this one was salvageable, but BKF and gentle SOS pad, and it is sooooooooooo gorgeous! Shines like brand new. I'm thinking someone made an awful mess with their first use, because once the gunk was off, it's pristine.

  9. How very odd. Even the sign-in splash page at the portal now says, "looking for your student's WSLP? Click here" or somesuch, and at least when I click, I'm just getting sent to the page where our orders are. It's called Student WSLP, but there are no goals to be found.

     

    I'm assuming this is CVA as usual, and they'll eventually put goals on this page, but not until everyone is thoroughly confused and I'm sure there will be a storm on facebook over it. Which I will miss . . . not even clicking over there this year!

  10. I was 45 when I had #8. The pregnancy/delivery was no harder than any of the others. Well, except the pushing part . . . he had a military acynclitic posterior positioning :tongue_smilie:. You don't want to do that :D.

     

    I tell ya, one thing about being this age is that dh and I are so grateful every day to be in our 50s and parenting a just-turned-6-year-old. He has a health disorder that has him still waking like a newborn and needing night-time parenting, but the age brings both patience and the perspective that we'll blink and he'll be graduating. Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

     

     

    ETA: Uhmm, oops, didn't notice this was an old thread! Well, at least I didn't post in the same thread twice :-)

  11. We had such a great one, kept him for all four years - but I just got contact letter from a new AT, and have a vague feeling I've heard her name before. Anyone here had Angie Matherly (feel free to message me if you want)? It might well have been one of my local IRL friends, I can't remember.

     

    So bummed, no matter how nice she is :crying:

  12. JoAnn,

    Are you sure the reaction was OAS? Since he reacted to the blackberry juice on his hand, it could just be a blackberry allergy instead of OAS. My OAS symptoms are blisters and burning in my mouth/throat, not hives and choking. That is more in the regular and severe/systemic allergy category.

     

    My OAS son and daughter both get rash/welts up their hands/arms when, say, peeling potatoes which they're OAS to. They're for sure not classically allergic, as they do fine with them cooked (potatoes being an example -dd in particular will rash on contact to all of her many OAS foods).

  13. We use Virgin Mobile no contract. We have the plan that is $35 per phone per month, which gives you unlimited text, data, and 300 minutes of talk. We're mostly text-ers so this is great for us, and wow - finding the phone so handy for going online while out for maps, price checks, coupons, etc (but then, that's just having my first smartphone, not some glowing feature of VM).

     

    We have the Optimus Elite phones which are amazing.

     

    The only thing is that you need to check the data map first. We're fine here, but I noticed vast areas that aren't covered in the midwest.

  14. The duration of protection offered by the vaccine appears now to be about 3 years. They thought it would be longer, but are learning quite a bit during these recent outbreaks. See study Clinical Infectious Diseases here.

     

    Natural immunity after the disease is about 3 years as well. I don't have a print citation for that one - our pediatrician just offered that up verbally :001_smile:.

     

    Whooping cough itself cycles through communities - you'll read the headlines saying "Worst year in a decade!!!!" and sometimes there's an implication that "it's getting really bad!" or at least I see people I know interpreting the news that way. But pertussis has always been cyclical.

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