I definitely heard it growing up in Minnesota... But this is my fruit salad anthem (from my older two kids' childhood...somehow the younger two missed out on it until we recently reminded everyone about it):

That's a really good point! I know people who have done that for baby showers also - several people going in together for the $$$ stroller or whatever.

We have a $1000 espresso machine because my crazy aunt Linda (actually!) sent us a check at a time when we were struggling with a lot of things going on in our life (DH had a cycling crash and long recovery, 4 kids including a baby, etc) and said we absolutely must spend it on something fun for ourselves. That's a bit different than a wedding registry, but I sometimes wondered if our friends thought we were crazy for spending the fun money on a fancy coffee machine!

Most registries I've seen recently have quite a variety of items, from $5 towels to high ticket items like appliances or electronics costing hundreds of dollars. I think some items on registries are like pie-in-the-sky wishes. Or they may know that family members will spend a lot. My mom strongly encouraged me to put expensive china on my registry. She and other family members bought place settings of it for us. No regrets - I use it a few times a year and it's never something I would have bought myself. But I'm sure people wondered why we had it on there!

He has sooo many books on pretty much any topic. There are other history books too...most are hard to find. (I also loved Asimov on Numbers!).

I really liked SPQR by Mary Beard when I listened to it ~5 years ago as an audio book. If you can find it, The Roman Republic by Isaac Asimov is written in a really engaging style (it is long out of print, but I got it through interlibrary loan). He also wrote a subsequent volume, The Roman Empire, but I haven't read that one.

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I haven't tried the Dyslexia Games but a number of years ago we had other books from the same publisher and I wasn't impressed at all. It felt like someone did cut-and-paste on a few different pages to make a boring workbook with a ton of basic prompts, lines and boxes to draw a picture in. I'd be pretty skeptical of anything they produced.

That's essentially what I am doing. I post "content considerations" with my reviews, trying to keep them judgment-neutral, such as "characters smoke and drink alcohol in this book". - it's up to the reader to decide if that "consideration" makes it a good fit for themselves/their family or not. I post on Goodreads (though I sometimes don't detail my content considerations as thoroughly there, just because I don't want to get into a public argument in the comments section about what does or does not merit a "content consideration"). But I also post in two different Facebook groups, where I know the vibe and people won't generally argue about what should or shouldn't be noted.

There are a lot of board games available for iPad - you can play against "bots" - essentially against the computer. I really adore Wingspan. It is very relaxing, and the theme is nice (attracting birds to your preserve). There are in-game "achievements" to try and get, so there's something to try for besides just beating the bots again and again. There's also nothing wrong with reading kid's books if you are looking for books that are clean. I'm reading through the Newbery award/honor books and writing reviews (there's 400 some, so it's a multi year project). It's super interesting to see how children's lit changes over time. Some are interesting, some are wonderful, some seem laughably terrible now...but it's an interesting journey.

I didn't write any application essays and I think I must have written at least one scholarship essay, but maybe more. I have no idea what I said, but whatever it was I'm sure none came true because I changed my major radically, pursued a job I didn't even really know existed when I was in highschool, and then have spent most of the past 20 years focusing on my kids while doing a bit of part time or freelance work here and there (had no interest in kids while I was in highschool, so I certainly wouldn't have written about that!). 😁

My DD applied to three public universities - two were not at all selective and required no essays, and one has a fifty percent or so acceptance rate and required essays. She wrote a ton of scholarship essays though!

Years ago Amazon once gave me a label to return items sent to me incorrectly...but other than that one time, I've always been told to keep or donate anything I've been sent incorrectly.

I could imagine a pastor perhaps having various guests that might have stayed long enough to receive mail - like missionaries on furlough. Or maybe renting a room out to make ends meet on a pastor's small salary.

We have one of the "smart" ones - a Nest. I think they were bought out by Google (after we chose this brand), which I don't love because Google is famous for not supporting products. I do worry that "some day" we will have to replace it because the app doesn't work anymore. We live in a super safe/quiet neighborhood so I don't worry about anyone hacking my smart lock. They could get in by breaking our back patio door that isn't very visible to neighbors' houses so much faster! But meanwhile, I love being able to remotely lock the door if a kid forgets to lock it, easily set new codes in the app for temporary use, etc. I have used the lock/unlock history to check if a pet sitter has stopped by or not (we had a slightly flaky teen neighbor helping us out). I love that our kids don't have to carry keys. We were partially reimbursed by our homeowners insurance when we bought our house for "upgrading" our lock, so ultimately if we have to pay for replacing it someday due to obsolescence, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Are all feline vaccines affected? I notice it doesn't mention any specific ones. It would make me super nervous to not get rabies boosters taken care of! I haven't heard anything about it here (but my cat is just due for his annual vet visit in a couple weeks).

I was an only child growing up in small towns. My younger years my mom was a single mom, and then after she remarried we still didn't have a ton of money for fun outings (though we did do some). I didn't have tons of friends when I was younger, so getting together with friends was a rarity until high school I read a lot of books, tried a lot of different craft/art projects, had a tape recorder and created my own "radio shows", and bought a computer that was old when I bought it in 1988 for something like $25 at a garage sale and teaching myself programming. 😁 I think one of the major differences I notice between myself and my kids is that starting in 5th grade I had quite a bit of freedom around town to bike to the library, corner store, park, or sometimes to something that cost money like mini-golf especially in 7th-8th grade when I had a bit of chore money I had earned. My kids can only get to a "boring" neighborhood park on foot, and places to bike often meet with busy roads. It's nice that I have older kids that can drive, but they are busy, and that doesn't mean they can take the younger two anywhere very often so I still drive them even if it is just to the library.

DH took a trip to Honduras last year and stayed with a family while he was there...he decided he wanted to try making tortillas after he got home! We have done Maseca so far and haven't been 100% pleased, but he thinks we might need to special order something to get anything different. I think the oil you use to fry can make a big difference to the taste as well. We have been using lard (DH renders it himself when he cooks a big cut of meat), but the huge downside of this is it's very smoky and despite running the fan, opening the kitchen window, etc, the smoke detector goes off constantly. 🤪 The tortillas are really tasty though!

Group travel can be tricky if the airfare is purchased together at a group rate through a travel agent. My husband traveled with a group last year where that was the case, and a couple people had last minute issues that came up - they were not able to individually change their tickets because of the stipulations the tickets had been purchased under. It seemed like a weird situation to me - the people ended up not going on the trip because of the inflexibility of the type of ticket they had (obviously they could have purchased entirely new tickets to fly a day or two later, but apparently they weren't able to swing the cost financially). Not excusing the whole weirdness with the OP's parents, but just thinking that depending on the situation it might not be as easy as just changing their ticket to add another destination.

I have one this year that no other people shelved! A zero!!! It was Skipping Village: A Town of not so Very Long Ago by Lois Lenski. It just hit public domain this year, so I read it online for free, but it was a very rare/htf book previously. Lenski was a prolific author, but this was one of her first books.

Logic of English has a quick reference folder: https://store.logicofenglish.com/products/phonogram-spelling-rule-quick-ref

And these lists may be incomplete or incorrect - I double checked and the school my DD attends isn't listed on one list and is incorrect on the other list, but if you go directly to the school's page for prospective students, you see a very clear chart of automatic awards based on GPA/test scores. So anyone perusing these lists should still be double checking directly with schools of interest.

I don't think any of the lists are very complete. I have googled and looked at some of those lists in the past, and the school where DD attends never seems to show up in the lists, but offers pretty decent merit aid based on ACT/GPA. I think it's better to build a potential list based on location or size or other factors of interest, then start googling school + merit aid to quickly get to the correct page on the university's websites.

Back in the dark ages when I was a student, I took a work study job (applied for during orientation early in the summer) thinking it was going to be my best bet (because it was included in my financial aid offer), only to discover that I could have waited until I got to campus and had a much higher paying job elsewhere on campus. My job was as an office assistant in an academic department, but a variety of other jobs offered a similar number of hours for higher pay. My DD was not offered work study, but got a well-paying job in food service, and was quickly promoted to being a student supervisor because she had good work ethic and previous experience working in a food related job in high school.

I'm sure this varies tremendously, but at the school where DD attends, each college releases college/departmental scholarships at different times...AND, sometimes more are added to award offers as time goes on in the spring. I am assuming this is because they award a scholarship to an incoming student, who then decides not to attend. We knew all of DD's going into her freshman year by May 1, but I know other families found out about additional scholarships after May 1. Then for returning students, they can find out about departmental/college scholarships anytime from May 1-August 1. DD found out in mid-May last year that she got a much bigger departmental scholarship for her sophomore year than the one she got her freshman year!