freesia
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Posts posted by freesia
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3 hours ago, mommyoffive said:
I agree that I think tweens are just as hard or harder than teens. I just add up the years that we will have tweens and teens and wanted to cry. Every time I meed parents out of the teen years my hope is restored. I just ask them "So you made it through the teen years?"
I'm on my last. You will make it. My sense of humor increased with each child. I had one where I wanted to ask --did you just read the parenting teens book I have upstairs because that line is straight out of there? I decided not to bc I didn't think laughing at him was the right approach.
I complained about my dd up top, but she is really great alot of the time. I found the teen years really great except when they weren't and then they were really hard. lots of hills and valleys. I can't believe I'm almost done. (Oldest is 23)
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3 hours ago, ScoutTN said:
Love the texting pictures idea! I need ideas to help diffuse emotional intensity.
My boy is vastly harder than my girl, but I was that hard teen girl for my mom. Hugs to y’all with those girls!!
I would also say my boys were harder--but in a different less verbal way.
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3 hours ago, HomeAgain said:
No, just so, so tired of teen moodiness. 😄 I know it's a stage but it doesn't make it any easier to keep being cheerful when treated like an emotional punching bag sometimes. I just needed to remove myself from his immediate reaction. Part of it works because I throw the good in there, too:
- A football and disco guy to tell him the halftime show was starting
- A picture of ice cream and toppings for Forced Family Fun night
- A funny meme stolen from the WTM
So he never knows what he's going to get when he opens the text, lol.
Also, for kids who did NOT grow up with technology, I have found it to be hit or miss. I can text ds25, who grew up in a different time and place, and it will be a full day before he looks at his phone. He texts everyone back when he feels like he has a minute, not like ds14 who has a Pavlov-effect going on.
I tried it. She said--why did you text me a picture of my socks? lol However, she didn't argue or push back and I can see the potential in this. However, the socks are still on the floor. . .
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45 minutes ago, HomeAgain said:
No girls here, but boys....oh man. I am so glad our 14yo has a phone because it honestly makes some interactions easier. A lot of our text conversation is pictures only:
- dirty sink
- emoji of a shower
- picture of the calendar
I text and then go about my day. And then because I know this child has his phone in his hand constantly I know it's being seen. It's so much easier than dealing with "I KNOW!" or insinuating that I'm treating him like a baby or "I'll get to it" but it never happens. Bonus points for the grumpy mornings because no sleep is the amount of sleep he wants.
But I definitely feel for his poor coaches who wrangle thirteen 13 and 14yo boys daily. One is enough. Heavy emotions and unregulated social skills in a group are a ton of fun. LOL
You are a genius! I will have to try this.
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21 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:
If women are going to dominate medical field and if we prefer to work part time, then we need to really massively increase the number of residency spots and medical school spots in this country. What we have now doesn’t seem to factor in part time work. It’s already hard to get an appointments locally.
I will say that most jobs are not that friendly to part time work. I was expected to be in the office put in more than 8 hours per day. I wasn’t on the male dominated profession. In fact most of us in the office were women.
But was there a place you could have done similar work on a part time basis? Is that still true?
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Just now, ktgrok said:
Today her big complain, with lots of feeling, was that "If I do something I shouldn't, you say something to me, and then I don't do it anymore." This was said as a complaint, because somehow I'm forcing her to be good and she really wants to be rebellious and bad?
Lol. Yes, apparently you are. Because, Katie, it’s all your fault. Everything.
dd gets annoyed when I tell her to do something bc then it somehow doesn’t count. Everything she does must be self-directed or something. And apparently she is always just about to change the cat litter or pick up her soccer gear even if I’ve been waiting for 24 hours for it to get done. I finally say something and then she says in an exasperated tone—now it doesn’t count!!!(except to me and the cat)
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(((Hug))) I’m in my second dd. She’s 14. Lots of big feelings. It is a challenge. This dd and I are closer at this age than I was with big sis. I am still the brunt. She’s either exhausted bc her life is too busy or bored bc we aren’t doing anything. And either way she tries to pick a fight with me to get the big feelings out. Apparently I was the same way….
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14 minutes ago, Clarita said:
Some types of Doctors and nurses can still choose to go part-time. (Surgeons have a harder time because of how long surgeries take and the need to be on-call.) Not to mention some of those umbrella term professions when you get to the highest paid levels get back to being male-dominated because of working hours.
A company I worked for did a study of why they were unable to retain female engineers. The conclusion was overwhelmingly lack of part-time options. Since a lot of engineering firms are opened to offering flexible working hours, remote work, etc.
Then as a side note (I don't think you meant anything by your statement), but I remember feeling very ostracized as a girl when other girls would say things like "couldn't pay me enough to be an engineer." I basically kept my desire to be an engineer a don't ask don't tell sort of thing since I was also very much a girly girl aside from my apparent interest in math and science. Makes me wonder how many girls would be interested if it weren't so OK to poo-poo it.
I was just going to post this. I know several doctors who’ve been able to work part time. Or, work in rehab or other places with set hours. The engineers—at least where I was—were expected to work many hours and go back after dinner. There just was a lack of flexibility. I’m sure you could point out other careers with a lack of flexibility. I’m just saying what I see and what I’ve heard women in the field say. I think heading into many careers one can perceive a way to make it work. Engineering school is too intense a commitment to try when you are being told by women in the field that it is hard to balance it with a family. I think that’s something that needs to change in the culture if the profession much as I’ve seen medicine flex.
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53 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:
🤷♀️
Women in physics and CS is huge. Red carpet if you are willing to try. I think employers are struggling to hire in that field and pressure is there to show equality. So first you have to produce female engineers before you hire them. I think that’s the obsession. I mean nobody cares at all if other fields are female dominated. Nobody ever bothers to change that ratio or is bothered by imbalance.
I think there needs to be a shift in making engineering as a job more family friendly. We used to live in an area with lots of engineers and it was definitely not the type of environment that would be easy to bear children and have small children ( if you wanted to ever see them.). If the work culture becomes more flexible, I would imagine it would attract more women.
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1 hour ago, Dmmetler said:
I think confessing everything can easily turn into trauma dumping. I have one friend who tells me literally everything, and honestly, it's exhausting enough that I'm unlikely to do it to any one person, including DH. I feel I CAN tell DH stuff, and I have other friends who I feel I could tell anything to-but I'm not going to put THEM through the trauma of hearing everything!!
Yes, this. I answered mostly bc I do have a couple of people, including dh, who I could trust/share everything, I just don’t bc I don’t see the point. They don’t need to feel burdened by it and it won’t help me. It’s enough to know I could.
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2 hours ago, Momto6inIN said:
We spent a week in the Cancun area and scratched snorkeling off our bucket list.
This would have been my dream anniversary! Maybe for our 30th.
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Lol It’s great to hear others are as exciting as us. We were supposed to do something big. We had a budget honeymoon bc dh was headed to grad school. Then every big anniversary the plan was to go somewhere nice bit I was nursing or something. This year was 25 and we moved—with a salary cut while having two kids in college. Not the year for a splurge. So, we, uh, went to a hotel by the mall and ate at Applebees. (Because dh has a food allergy and has a dish he can eat there.) At least it was something….
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I would tell myself that they likely wash their hands before they start working with food and move on.
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Praying here. Idk how I missed this yesterday.
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We have a marketplace plan. It’s easy to see if you qualify and how much it would cost. They have all kinds of plans.
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My in-laws had one and liked it. It did cover FIL’s cancer bills. I think individuals sent my Mil money directly. (FIL passed from his cancer.) I would never do it because of the risk that something wouldn’t come through.
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56 minutes ago, Ting Tang said:
We are self-employed, so our health insurance is over $3,000 per month. Of course, I looked into one. Since I do not have my rear end in a church pew every Sunday and do drink wine, I had to rule our family out of that, lol.
For me, it just seems very risky. As someone else said, read the fine print.
Our health insurance is about triple our escroed mortgage payment. They keep saying they are willing to pay $20 per month per gym membership costs (big LOL), but I've been requesting my debit card for that since October without much luck.
Can you get health insurance through the health exchanges?
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33 minutes ago, Halftime Hope said:
We've got the testing dialed in. The weirdest thing is that pasta with ground beef and marinara or spaghetti sauce drops his blood sugar. Yep, drops it. It's the weirdest thing.
When is he testing? It may spike it high first—at one hour and then drop it lower ( bc of all the insulin that is pumped out) by two hours.
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2 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:
My older kid didn’t need to prep to get a near perfect score either. This kid though is a different story. I have old paper exams I am thinking to have him work though those for grammar and math. We will download blue book. Is there anything else out there do you know?
There are books out there, but I think pretty much they are just best guesses. The College Board dSAT prep has paper versions of the practice test so it’s useful for what the problems look like. There’s a new note taking part for writing. I did get the dSAT book by Meltzer(?) to use as grammar review for dd —to get her used to the wording. Math is where she’ll need the most prep, but she’s just ninth so I’m waiting.
What I meant to say before I started rambling was that I think Khan academy is as good as anything right now as everyone is just kind of guessing. There is a DSAT prep section up that I’ve had dd playing around in.
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On 11/30/2023 at 6:16 PM, knitgrl said:
So, dh was laid off today. Under more normal circumstances, it wouldn't be too bad. We have savings. We can tighten our belts. But I am doing cancer treatment that costs thousands of dollars a month. And dh is a software developer, and that field does not have the opportunities that it once did. He has always worked remotely, but those jobs are really hard to come by now. We live in a rural area, where our families have lived for generations. I guess if we had to move, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I really, really don't want to. That is all.
UPDATE: Dh accepted an offer on Friday, and right now is busy filling out all the forms for his new workplace. The benefits are better than at his old job, and there is actually a career path for him to advance in that isn't management. He doesn't start for a few weeks, which is nice in that he will be mentally well-rested before starting this new position.
I want to thank all of you for your prayers, thoughts, and support. I generally run on an even keel, so when I wasn't doing that and didn't have the option of crying on someone's shoulder in real life, I am so grateful I could come here and vent. It was a bit of a sanity saver. Thank you.
Wonderful update!
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There are some changes. The questions are less wordy for one thing. I know I’ve seen write ups on line about the changes. I would have him work through the practice tests on the College Board Blue book app. You can go over what you miss.
Im interested to hear how it goes. We had a system that really worked for the paper SAT. Now I’m starting over with a kid who isn’t likely to score as high as her sibs—but I need to prep her as high as she can get for scholarships. Sigh
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I get the ramped up thing. That’s what happened on our case. Plus, this mother was still contacting me to arrange getting our boys together when THEY WERE IN COLLEGE. My kids didn’t have cell phones, but we had a landline and they had access to GroupMe, Skype and TextMe. There were plenty of ways for them to arrange things. I did begin with—that doesn’t work for ds. But eventually went to what I wrote above. Ds needed to own his decision not to be closer friends. That is a social skill.
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I used to say my ds is not open to me arranging his social life anymore. It was awkward when ds did not respond if my friend’s son texted to get together. But ultimately it isn’t my responsibility to arrange my children social life at that age.
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18 minutes ago, ktgrok said:
Yeah, I think maybe she just needs to do extra history the other days, if need be. Maybe two lessons on Mondays, which are usually are day at home.
If she does 5 lessons a week from now on she'd finish July 11th, so still have some summer break before we start back up mid/end of August. Or I may get to mid/late June and I'll decide that's enough bookwork, and just do some videos for the last few units - they do have videos and such to go along with the text on their supplements page.
Honestly, if she just started the book, I wouldn't worry about finishing. My older kids, in particular, did a four year cycle, so they would have covered half of American history one year. You did do history with her the first half of the year in some fashion, right? I wouldn't even hesitate to just do half. Make next year the second half--or switch altogether. One of mine studied the world wars for one whole year in high school. It was fine.
Don't make too many rules for eighth grade. High school can be confining in and of itself. Eighth grade is the last completely flexible year.
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JAWM - teenage daughters are not for weak
in The Chat Board
Posted
Update: the socks are gone. I texted a pic of her coat. She laughed and said the her father—dad, mom’s sending me pictures of things I need to clean up. She was laughing.
So, I have a new trick up my sleeve. Thanks!