I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, because I'm a good liberal Episcopalian and should NOT enjoy these podcasts, but I really like Revive Our Hearts and Family Life Today. Once in a while there's a topic that raises my hackles and I just skip it, and I don't agree with everything they say by a long shot, but I find both very useful, pleasant, and encouraging overall.

I'm not going to fault anybody for needing public assistance. Being poor is not a reason for shame, and having been fortunate enough to be able to provide for a large family is not a point of pride. And I'm most certainly not going to write off the children of people on welfare or in poverty. I don't shudder to think what the children of people on welfare will grow up to be like, and I'm saddened anybody would. It's this kind of smug self-righteousness that the Duggars seem to inspire in people that makes me dislike them. They may be great people. But the fact that so many people look at them and think "If they can have 20 people and not take public assistance, then anybody who does rely on public assistance must be a lazy irresponsible bum who doesn't deserve kids or will ruin their kids!" really bothers me.

While I'm not a fan of the Duggars, one couple having 20 kids isn't a problem. If it was a trend then, yes, it would be an issue. But I think it's a mistake to make overpopulation an individual issue. We've got three kids, and may have a fourth one day, but I have one sibling who has no kids, and my DH is an only child. So we figure we could have four and still not be overpopulating the planet. ;)

This. And I really don't find somebody having their 20th child any more amazing or worthy of congratulations than somebody having their 1st or 3rd or 6th or whatever, you know?

I don't know. My husband's cousin just got married for the third time (and he has a child by a fourth woman). He's only 36. All of the previous relationships ended badly, as far as I can tell he's taken no responsibility for his part in it (he's convinced that all of his exes are crazy), and while I don't think he necessarily shouldn't ever get married again, I can't say that we thought this marriage was a particularly wise choice. I'd say that by marriage #3, if you haven't taken some responsibility for what went wrong in marriage #1 and #2 and tried to make some changes, there's not a very good chance that marriage #3 is going to end well. I do think some people can be happy alone, perhaps happier than they are in a relationship, and if they don't want to marry, that's fine and they shouldn't feel pressure to do so or feel like there's something wrong with them. I obviously don't know for sure, but I tend to think that if anything happened to my DH, I wouldn't seek out another relationship. If it happened, fine, but I think I'd probably plan to be single. I like my solitude, and I have lots of interests and friends and my kids to fill my life. I love my DH, but marriage is hard. I'm not sure I'd want to put that work in again, you know? I don't know, I might feel totally different if I were in that situation, but I tend to think I'd be okay as a single person.

I know I've harped on this before, but a huge problem is the way teacher education programs are structured. You do NOT find four-year programs ending in a teaching certificate at many selective schools, public or private. There's a few, but they are exceptions. Students at more selective universities have to go to grad school for at least one year, and often two (sometimes three), to become certified to teach. They have to pay for that themselves (there aren't TA-ships available for these programs the way there are for doctoral programs), at grad school rates. I have a good friend who did her undergrad at University of Michigan, a well-regarded school. They did not have an undergraduate education program leading to certification. She went elsewhere for a master's and certification program, and now owes $60K for loans for grad school. And that isn't unusually expensive. I was accepted into a few MAT programs after I graduated college. The cheapest was about $18K/year; the most expensive was $44K for a one-year program. I ended up entering a doctoral program because that gave me free tuition and a teaching assistantship. I had really wanted to be a high school teacher, but it just wasn't feasible financially. (I am now qualified to teach English at the university level, and have been doing so for almost ten years now, but if I wanted to get my teaching certificate in Michigan, to teach high school English, I'd have to take at least two years of additional coursework.) Less-selective schools are much more likely to have undergraduate education majors and certification programs. So, students at those schools are probably much more likely to become teachers. If we want to see a higher caliber of teachers, we need to address this. I knew numerous people at my undergraduate university--and who I went to grad school with, and who I taught when I was in grad school at UM--who wanted to be secondary school teachers. Most were dissuaded because certification would have required paying for another 1-3 years of school. We need to encourage selective schools to have certification programs so that students can leave in four years ready to teach; to provide scholarships, grants, and/or assistantships for grad study for talented students wanting to to into teaching; to have generous loan-forgiveness programs for people who stay in teaching for a certain number of years; and/or to come up with other ways to encourage and support really good students who want to teach at the K-12 level. Right now the desire is there on the part of many good students, but the support just isn't, and the way the system is set up is a huge, huge deterrent to better students entering K-12 teaching.

I live in a relatively safe neighborhood in a not-very-safe city. By the time DS was 6, he was allowed to ride his bike up and down the street by himself (no turning corners), to play in the yard alone, to play in the yard or on the sidewalk in front of the house with friends his age or older, to walk by himself to a friend's house who lived around the corner (we had one yard separating our yard from theirs, so he was expected to go to their yard when he got there and give me a wave, and call me before he left to come home), and to walk around the block or to friends' houses a block or two away with his best friend who is four years older than he is and very responsible. Now, he's allowed to ride his bike alone around the block if I'm outside in the yard or on the porch, and he can travel around the block with same-age or older friends whenever he wants. I'm still nervous about him crossing streets without a responsible friend, because our neighborhood is between two major streets, and sometimes people drive way too fast or fly through the stop signs, so that limits how far he can go quite a bit. I've told him that when he's 8 I'll revisit the street-crossing issue, but honestly I think he'll still be a bit too impulsive and oblivious for me to feel comfortable with him crossing streets alone at 8. Maybe 9 or 10. ;)

I'm no help. I'm turning 34 tomorrow and my wardrobe sounds pretty much exactly like what you describe. Jeans, t-shirts (with cardigans when it's cold), sneakers (usually a "mary jane" type sneaker). I tend to think clothes like that are just fine for women of any age. I have every intention of being an old lady wearing jeans and t-shirts. ;)

Right. And, from what I can tell, the Easy Bake Ultimate is not much different, in terms of function, than the regular Easy Bake. There's no lightbulb, but you still push the stuff in one side and wait for it come out. If she isn't playing with the Easy Bake she has, she's not going to play with this one. Maybe this is a silly idea, but would a small toaster oven be a better, more practical choice? You can make a surprising amount of things in them, and it might be something that she could use with minimal supervision. You can buy one for less than the Easy Bake.

Depends on how sick. Usually if my DS is really sick, he just kind of curls up in a ball on the couch and wants to sleep all day. I let him. If he's sniffly or coughing or kind of complain-y but seems capable of doing stuff, we'll do school.

I do agree with that. I always feel a little unsettled when they test the EBS.

This. She's not going to use the Easy Bake oven more than a couple of times. You know this. She doesn't. In the end she'd just be disappointed with the Easy Bake oven and wish she'd chosen something else. I like the idea of getting her some baking stuff to use in the real oven. We put our foot down with DS about stuff like that all the time. Frivolous is fine with us. But if there's a product of type of product that he has and doesn't enjoy, we know that he won't enjoy the newest model, even if he thinks he will. We usually tell him that, if he starts using the one like it he already has, then we'll consider buying the new one. That's never happened.

Why? Doesn't your PBS station ever do this? I'd say once every few months, we get a test of the emergency broadcast system on PBS; I'm assuming this is similar, just on a larger scale.

I'm not sure. We usually have dinner as a family, but one of my friends is thinking of hosting a dinner at group home in our neighborhood, and so we might go help with that and do our family Thanksgiving dinner the day after.

Sort of. My kids have a lot of used clothes, but not much from each other. I got a lot of stuff from friends with older kids when my first was born, and a lot of that stuff I passed on to friends when I was done with it. When DD was born, a couple of friends of mine with girls gave me a lot of clothes, and I've been passing them on to a friend with a daughter a year younger than DD when she's finished with them. With little DS, I've actually gotten back from friends some of the stuff that DS1 had worn. What's funny is that I got some of it back from different friends than the ones I lent it out to. Apparently the clothes made the neighborhood rounds for 6 years or so, before making their way back to me. I don't generally hold on to much baby stuff, though, just bigger, more expensive things like cribs, high chairs, and strollers. Clothes and toys I give away to friends when we're done with them. I figure if I need more clothes/toys for future kids, we'll borrow from people we know, get gifts from family, or just buy stuff either used or new. I don't really see much need, for us, to hang on to stuff that other people could be using for years and years just in case we have another baby. My kids are too little for it to be an issue. I think that, if it was, if I could afford it, I'd let the younger one pick out a few new things she really wanted during shopping trips--not an entire wardrobe, but a couple of things that she really liked. Buying used clothing for the older one is also a possibility--that way they're both wearing hand-me-downs. ETA: I have a sister two years younger than me. We both had some hand-me-downs from cousins, so it wasn't like I had all new stuff and she had all used stuff. In general, she just took hand-me-downs that she liked. It was less of an issue as we got older. By the time we were in our teens, she would NOT have liked wearing my hand-me-downs because we didn't have anything close to the same taste--but by that time, neither one of us was growing at such a rate that we needed new clothes each year. I think we both stopped growing around 8th grade, so by high school we could both keep wearing the same thing for years. (I had shoes I got in eighth grade that I wore all through college, and some clothes I wore that long, too.) At that point I was 5'8" and about a size 12 and my sister was 5'3" and a size 6, so there wasn't going to be any passing down of clothing anyway. So, if it's any consolation, they probably won't have this problem the entire time they are growing up, because at some point they'll stop growing and hand-me-downs won't be an issue.

I don't think it's just practice. Numbers come in a logical sequence: there is a logically-understandable reason why 3 follows 2. That doesn't happen with letters. There's not logical reason why R comes after Q. So, it's much easier to count backwards because we understand the way numbers work. With letters, we don't understand how they work, sequentially, because they aren't ordered in any sort of logical way. There's no clear relationship between S and T--other than the fact that they are arbitrary next to one another in the alphabet--the way there is between 5 and 6. You don't have to memorize all the numbers from 1 to 1000 in order to count backwards from 1000. You just need to understand the way numbers work. Knowing the alphabet backwards, on the other hand, is simply a matter of memorization. If somebody can't count backward, we can assume that they are lacking some necessary knowledge about how numbers work; if somebody can't say the alphabet backward, we can't assume they are lacking necessarily knowledge about how language or the alphabet works. You can understand language perfectly well but not know how to say the alphabet backwards; you can't understand numbers perfectly well without knowing how to count backwards. I can do it visually but not orally, if that makes any sense. If I write down a letter, I can easily write down the next one. If I say it, though, it takes me a moment to think of the next one. I can also produce the next letter very easily if I see it written down, but not as easily if asked orally.

Right now it's hard to say, because they're all still young enough to just be really cute, period. I will say that my first was a better-looking newborn than the younger two, though. He was just strikingly adorable from his first day. But, he was also over 9 pounds, so he came out looking like he was about two months old. The other two were a little over 8 pounds at birth, and had that typical grumpy-old-man newborn look. DS2, in particular, was very scrunchy and splotchy and scrawny. He was a funny-looking little guy at first. But, both of them got really cute once they filled out and got over their newborn funny-lookingness. DS1 really didn't ever have that funny-looking phase, though.

I wear a Decent Exposures bra to bed. I usually put in a t-shirt and PJ-type pants in the evening, and then sleep in the t-shirt. (I can't stand sleeping in pants--the legs always bunch up and it drives me nuts.)

How many overweight/obese people gained a ton of weight in six months? Few if any. The whole thing is a stupid, offensive publicity stunt. His actions have NOTHING to do with what being overweight/obese is like for most people. It would be like somebody eating 300 calories a day, dropping a bunch of weight in a few months, and saying that their experience reflected the experience of most thin people. And then, when they were able to gain all of the weight back very easily (because they are not naturally inclined to be that thin, so when they resume eating an adequate amount of calories, they'll easily gain the weight back), they'll ask why underweight people can't just eat a little bit more and gain weight. It doesn't work that way. Most overweight/obese people do not eat more than thinner people. Yes, if somebody is fat because they eat tons and tons of food every day, not eating tons and tons of food will cause them to lose weight. But if, like most overweight/obese people, they are consuming an average amount of food, that won't work. Their metabolism will just slow down to compensate for the lowered calorie intake and in most cases they'll have short-term weight loss but soon regain back everything and more. There is nothing interesting, admirable, or useful about this stunt. It's like going in blackface in an attempt to say you understand racism.

There's a difference between suing over the library using filtering software and suing because you can't sit and watch porn on a computer that other people can see in a public place. The problem with filtering software is that, AFAIK, none of it is perfect. I'm not aware of any filtering software that doesn't inadvertently also block some non-porn sites. Personally, I'm not in favor of libraries using filtering software. I'm in favor of them having a posted, clear, and enforced policy of not allowing people to view pornographic material on the computers, and being asked to leave if they do.

I'm not sure that's true. If somebody is viewing pornography and its viewable by others, I'm pretty sure that they have every right to ask that person to stop viewing it or to leave.

I liked the little girl who threw the candy wrappers at the camera. I'm pretty sure that would have been my response.

If we're talking about library internet access, I don't know. I don't think libraries should have filters, but that's mainly because I'm not aware of any filters that only catch pornographic sites without accidentally filtering some non-pornographic sites. I don't want somebody unable to do a web search on "breast cancer" or to see images of how to do a breast self-exam because of a filter. But, I do think it's fine to ask a patron viewing porn to stop or leave. I've run into people watching porn on library computers many times, in areas that are accessible to everybody, and the screens are viewable by everybody, and I think it's inappropriate. I also think there'd be a lot more free computers if people knew they couldn't just sit there looking at porn for an hour.

Like, actual pornography? Or stuff that might be considered "pornographic" by some segment of the population but is seen as acceptable by many others? If we're talking about actual pornography, is *anybody* in favor of it being in public libraries?

Sometimes DS will ask where his brother or sister is (he can never seem to keep track of where everybody in the house is), and I'll tell him I sold them, and that's okay with him, right? He thinks it's funny.