My dad is a university professor, and our family went on international sabbaticals with him when I was 7 and 14. They were both great experiences for me and I feel incredibly lucky now to have had them, but I complained quite a lot at the time about leaving my friends and "normal" life at home. The first was in Paris, where I went to the local French elementary school for the first half of second grade. I was in a special class for non-native speakers, which I think made fitting in easy as I had a ready-made group of "outsiders" to bond with. I had friends from all over the world. I remember mostly liking it, and I spoke French with no accent by the end. At 14, we were in a Flemish part of Belgium, and I went to a pretty upscale British private school instead of learning Flemish. It was FABULOUS. A million times better than my decent PS at home! I had friends from all over the world there again, and had in-depth, challenging classes for the first time in my life. My parents agonized about sending me back to public school when we returned home, but in the end they did. I turned out okay :001_smile:, but I still remember how great that British school was!

Which drug is it? I've tried lots of them. :tongue_smilie: I think I remember taking most of them after meals because of stomach upset issues, I'm not surprised it's worse for kids. Lariam (mefloquine) made me feel pretty queasy, but I always kept it down. Unfortunately it eventually gave me unpleasant hallucinations (something that's relatively rare but turns out to run in my family), so I switched to a chloroquine-paludrine combo that year. Another year, I started with doxycycline, another one I remember needing to take with food. Unfortunately that made me incredibly sensitive to sunburn, which was a big problem as I was working outdoors all day, every day. That year I switched to Malarone (atovaquone), which was quite expensive but had no side effects at all for me. I don't remember having any problem with queasiness with that, but it's been a few years. Good luck with this! I seemed to be particularly unlucky in the antimalarial reaction department, hopefully your experience will be better. On the other hand, I never got malaria, so I was quite lucky in the grand scheme of things! ETA: I'm pretty sure Lariam is a brand-name mefloquine, maybe mixed with something else? Anyway, as LG mentioned that particular one causes unusually vivid and unpleasant nightmares in many people, but if you're super-extra-lucky they progress to hallucinations. I'd personally lean towards Malarone for kids if you can afford it, but I'm not a doctor and there are probably things to consider I don't know anything about.

I know this thread is slightly out of date now, but it's been at the back of my mind. I teach a community college course, and the students' first assignments were due this week. A handful of people missed the first day of class, and NONE of them turned in their assignments. This is exactly the kind of pattern Regentrude and Kiana were talking about! Of course, there's often an exception to the rule, and the OP's son will probably be that exception-- I would likely have done the same thing in his place, and then spent the rest of the course on my toes trying to prove I wasn't a slacker.

It's the distal (bottom) end of a femur, almost certainly cow. Trust me, I'm a zooarchaeologist! As a general rule, human bone tends to be more "spongy" than animal, but that's hard to judge unless you're familiar with both. People bring hunks of bone into the archaeology lab where I work all the time, we never mind taking a look for them.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone. My daughter is very excited about the idea of making a donation to the animal shelter (she knows she will still receive some toys from family separately from the party). Not too many people here expressed horror at the idea, and her class is so diverse in terms of people's backgrounds I don't think parents will be sticklers for "traditional" invitation etiquette (or ever agree on what that would be), so I think we'll try wording the invitations this way. I sure hope this works!

The animal shelter idea would be a big hit with my daughter! Would it be acceptable to say "No gifts, please. E will be making a birthday donation to the Humane Society, and you are welcome to contribute a can of pet food or pet toy if you would like?" I know people get touchy about implied gift expectations, are charity requests an exception to this?

Has anyone successfully had a child's party without gifts? My almost-6yo really, really wants to invite her whole class to her birthday party at a local party place; she's been asking for this for almost a year. We really, really do NOT want 20 gifts, just a fun time with her classmates. Other than putting "no gifts, please" on the invitation (which we intend to do) and crossing our fingers, is there anything we can do? Anything else we can say on the invitation to make it clear that we really do mean it without offending people? This is a public school class and we're afraid most people aren't going to RSVP, so we won't be able to underscore the request through RSVP-type conversations. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

I keep seeing people mention washing dishes with bleach; please be careful, as that can easily make people sick too! I had a horrible GI reaction from dishes washed in bleach this way in a group kitchen setting a few years ago-- to an extent that would be dangerous for a young child. I don't know whether the bleach was too concentrated or not rinsed well enough, but just the smell of bleach makes me nauseous now, years later. If anyone out there decides to wash dishes this way for some reason, please make sure to check on *exactly* what concentration is safe and to rinse really, really well.

I disagree. People were foragers for the vast majority of human history. In many, many studies of foragers, women's labor is responsible for many more of the calories a group consumes than men's labor. In a lot of foraging societies as they exist today, men do more hunting, which is viewed as a higher-status activity and provides more of certain nutrients (like fat) but has a very low return rate. Women's "gathering" (interestingly, this term is often extended to include trapping of small animals, not just plants) is much more reliable and contributes most of the food. In farming societies, I can't think of a single example in which women did not contribute substantial labor to food production. If by "breadwinner" we mean putting actual food on the table, our human history is one of both sexes making meaningful contributions. The man as the "breadwinner" in terms of supplying all the wage labor in a household which doesn't produce its own food is a very recent phenomenon, and that disparity is at the root of what feminism is fighting against, as I see it. Foraging societies also consist of groups of people working together-- it's not at all uncommon for women to nurse each others' babies whenever it's convenient, or for extended families to join in to care for children. The nuclear family structure we in N America often see as "natural" is not at all characteristic of most of human history, or of most societies.

Thank you for saying this. Although I have an entirely different opinion, I appreciate your being open about the underlying reason for your beliefs. For some reason if people are open about things like this I have no trouble agreeing to disagree, it's when I can't figure out their reasoning or motivations (or suspect they're trying to hide them) that things get weird. I will remind myself to self-identify as a feminist up front when I jump into a discussion like this in the future.

That's the kind of thing I was referring to earlier-- no one has attacked me personally, but this type of negative description of working moms who don't "have to" work has popped up every couple of months just in the year or so I've been hanging around here. I don't think it's a majority opinion on the boards or anything, but it's definitely out there. A strong belief that a woman's place really is ideally in the home and that *choosing* anything else is "selfish" when women do it clashes with much of what I see as equal rights regarding work and family, and thus feminism. Others probably see this differently, though.

:iagree: For what it's worth, I do see comments here fairly regularly with a highly judgmental view of women (never men) who CHOOSE to work for reasons of personal happiness and satisfaction rather than dire and painfully obvious economic necessity. These women are often called selfish and accused of loving their children less than sahms do. This may be the type of "woman-hating" comment the OP was talking about. (The "modesty" discussions that flare up every few months may be another one.) To me, feminism means equal rights and opportunities, regardless of how a woman chooses to use those opportunities. Here's where my interpretation of "equal rights" seems to vary from some people on this board, though. I think part of that equality is that women should not have to choose between working and having a family any more than men do. Women and men should BOTH get to choose the life path most fulfilling to them, whether that's being a stay-at-home parent or working outside the home, and we ought to respect both choices equally. I don't buy the argument that a full time stay-at-home mom is ALWAYS what's "best" for the children, although it may often work out that way. There are many examples throughout history and worldwide of groups of relatives and other loving, responsible adults contributing to childcare; I don't believe that our modern American ideal of the nuclear family as a stand-alone, completely independent unit is the only right and proper way to raise a child. To me, the idea that a "good, unselfish" woman must have either a family OR a career but not both is the very antithesis of feminism, and I suspect that is where a lot of the anti-feminism on this board is coming from.

Another vote for "it depends on your hair." If your hair dries naturally in a nice-looking way when it's short, I'd go as short as possible-- short hair is so much easier to wash by sticking your head under a tap or into a sink or bucket than long is, and requires less time standing in cold water when there's no hot water available. It's also possible to dry it with those teeny pack-towels, which won't dry long hair IME. If it dries naturally in an I'm-a-crazy-person way and requires styling products or blow-drying to look reasonable when it's short (like mine, sigh), I'd leave it long and ponytail/braid it when it gets dirty. I do a lot of camping, and a ponytail can hide a lot of dirt. I think there are waterless shampoo powder or spray things available nowadays, but I've never tried them. That may be worth looking into, depending on how fast your hair gets greasy.

Not a weird catalog per se, but Forestry Suppliers has some odd outdoorsy items, including a dazzling array of waders, a zillion colors of flagging tape, and belt holsters for things I never imagined holstering before. http://www.forestry-suppliers.com/ ThinkGeek and Archie McPhee are always good for weird stuff, if he leans towards the geek side of "manly." There are catalogs devoted to refurbishing old tractors (Steiner Tractor Parts is one). There's also an emerging industry of making small houses out of old shipping containers which a web search may bring up catalogs for. A friend of mine managed to get on the mailing list for a personal jet catalog by telling them his budget was "less than 8 million." I'm not sure what the name of it was, though.

Here's another one I just bought for a family member: giant microbe Christmas tree ornaments. http://www.giantmicrobes.com/us/products/merrychristmasmicrobes.html E. coli looks especially cute with those reindeer antlers. (I just bought two OCD cutting boards as gifts. Last year we gave someone the Enterprise pizza cutter. I don't know what that says about our family, but I love this thread!)

:lurk5::lurk5::lurk5:

The stone age items don't show up in the US version of the Playmobil site, though, just the European versions. I guess I could try ordering on another country's page and just hope it goes through. Has anyone here done that successfully?

Thanks OP, that was a perfect gift for someone on my list! Anyone else who's looking, try Amazon.com or ThinkGeek-- Uncommon Goods is sold out. I think the personalized sippy cup is really funny! I like offbeat gifts, though.

Do any of you Playmobil aficionados have any idea when (or whether) their new Stone Age line might make it to the US? It looks pretty cool! I don't understand why there's so little Playmobil in the US in general-- Target seems to have stopped carrying it, and Toys R Us has very little. They always seem to find shelf space for other kinds of action figures that seem just as expensive, though. Thank goodness for the interwebs.

I had a Grow-a-Frog in college (that specific brand, with the see-thru skin), and from what I remember the kit explicitly says you *must* move the frog into a larger aquarium once it passes the tadpole stage. Perhaps that information is on the inside of the package and not the outside, though? Anyway, I really enjoyed the frog as an adult. I liked watching her eat and swim around. Watching the tadpole limbs develop through their see-thru skin is fascinating. Mine was a nice pet and easy to take care of-- buying water and changing the water/cleaning the aquarium was never a big deal for me. This particular frog is fully aquatic, so it's not much different from keeping a goldfish. Just be prepared for it to live for years-- as others mentioned, you can't release them. The Grow-a-Frogs were bred as a laboratory animal and are ill-equipped for life in the wild, in addition to being a potential threat to native species. I just checked the company website (ahh, memories) and it looks like they are committed to taking the frogs back if people are unable to care for them, which I find somewhat reassuring (although it doesn't say what they do with the adults).

If you have an animal-lover, Miranda the Great is one of my 5yo's favorites. It would be either a quick (a few hours) read-aloud or a fun independent reading book for a 9yo.

Don't the actual amounts of various nutrients a person needs vary enormously? I've trying to remember my college nutrition class eons ago, but as I recall this is actually a very complicated issue. Nutrient requirements vary by age, sex, activity level, body size and composition, etc. Plus, some vitamins and minerals use the same carrier proteins and can potentially inhibit each others' absorption, and others complement each other, so consuming different foods in the same meal makes a huge difference. I think this is why doctors always default to "eat a varied diet with lots of fruits and vegetables;" it's very hard to pinpoint *exactly* what people need. If I remember correctly, a lot of the minimum recommendations are more or less made up as well (like the difference between M and F zinc recommendations). We don't know exactly what some nutrients do or how quickly they're "used up" by various processes, and new research comes out all the time. I think pinpointing the optimal amount of many nutrients would be so situation-specific it would be pretty impractical. Except for things like fat-soluble vitamins (which have a maximum RDA as well as a minimum), most just get flushed out in our urine if we don't use them, so it's easier just to make sure we get lots of them (in other words, treat the RDA as a bare minimum) and let our bodies dump whatever is left over, rather than spending time figuring out exactly what we need.

If you're not going anywhere, try putting band-aids over her lips-- not on the lip skin itself, but right on the edge of the red area. This works well overnight too. I cut them in half lengthwise to get two very skinny band-aids and then put them on so that the gauze part hangs over onto the lip skin. I know that sounds bizarre, but it stops my 5yo as soon as this habit begins to show up. When she starts to unconsciously lick, her tongue touches the band-aid and she remembers to stop. Vaseline has helped her skin heal up, too.

Oddly enough, I have a daughter the same age as yours who's been counting to 14 too, and we don't know where she learned it either. I'm not convinced it's true counting in my daughter's case-- I think she's just picked up the idea that pointing at objects and reciting those words in that particular order is a fun/important/grown up thing to do, rather than having a real understanding of numbers that high. It's amazing the things little kids can pick up without anyone consciously showing them!

I'm an archaeologist, and I can explain this. The person you met was rude and approached this in entirely the wrong way, but I know why he said what he did. A lot of the time, we get date estimates for sites without excavating; we walk back and forth over sites mapping them and counting the numbers of different items (especially different pottery types) on the surface, often without collecting them. Then, we calculate the proportions of the different types we've seen, compare them to the proportions of those types found on excavated sites with known dates (based on tree rings, radiocarbon, etc), and come up with date estimates for the unexcavated sites based on those proportions of surface finds. We can learn a lot about the ages of sites, where their inhabitants' social and trade connections were, etc. by doing this. When a site gets a lot of casual visitors picking things up, the proportions of pottery on the surface are no longer representative of the site's age. This can get really frustrating; sometimes particular pottery types can give us really useful information on a site's age or on trade relationships with other areas, but if it's gotten a lot of foot traffic we're usually left with nothing but unpainted pieces that give us much less information. It's actually kind of shocking to compare well-protected sites far away from casual traffic to ones that get a lot of visitors; sites right by roads sometimes have nothing but remains of walls left on the surface, every bit of pottery has been picked up! The other, bigger problem for archaeologists is that when people start to think of artifacts as cool things to use in home decor or fashion, it can unintentionally start us down the slippery slope of creating an economic demand for them. Mimbres pots are a good example of this; they're really famous for their beautiful black-on-white designs showing animals, people hunting or dancing, etc. In the 1970s the demand for these pretty pots gave them substantial economic value, and sent waves of looters with bulldozers through the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico. The pretty pots are generally found in graves, so the commercial looters bulldozed ENTIRE VILLAGES away-- just scraped them off the surface of the ground entirely. This exposed the floors of the rooms, under which lay all the burials. The looters then picked the pots out of the burials, leaving behind a pile of jumbled stones and a bunch of desecrated graves where a well-preserved ancient village had been a week before. The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 is another horrible example of what happens to artifacts when they acquire an economic value. People who buy these things often don't realize they've just helped finance the bulldozing of a site or robbing of a museum, but they have. In a matter of days, the people who "mine" archaeological sites for economic gain destroy the scientific information archaeologists spend our lives looking for and take away pieces of the past that can never be replaced, so we get pretty upset about it. So, the first example is why we encourage people not to pick things up from archaeological sites. The second is why we worry about artifacts getting made into decorative things-- we're very worried about anything that could create a commercial-scale demand for artifacts. Your acquaintance responded to you in the worst possible way, however-- we need to explain these things to people instead of getting all judgemental and alienating everyone! Little items from the past are inherently fascinating, and I would venture to guess most archaeologists wandered around picking stuff up as kids, before we knew any better. When someone from one of my college courses brings in an artifact they've picked up, I try to tell them something about its age or who made it, talk about what makes it interesting, and encourage them to put it back if they can. If they can't, they should keep it and not feel guilty for breaking a rule they had no idea existed, knowing that now they understand why it's important to leave things where they are in the future. A little fragment of something common like blue willow from what sounds like a pretty disturbed area is not something to get all upset about. It's the bigger picture of learning about the past, sharing what we learn widely, and helping people understand and care about preserving archaeological sites and the information they contain that matters.