Overall rates have been falling here since mid September. 44 new hospitalizations and 2 deaths in my county since 11/12. The schools my sons attend have very high vaccination rates and generally good protocols including masking and weekly testing. There have been 2 cases at my older son's large high school and more at the middle school (assuming this is because middle school covers some ages that were not eligible for the vaccine until very recently). My younger son was in a positive batch test so had to get a PCR test. The test positivity rate for these in our district is very low and my son's test was negative. The batches are classrooms with all samples tested together. If you aren't vaccinated and are in a positive batch, you have to self isolate until you get a negative test result. If you are vaccinated, you just need to go get a test. You do not need to isolate if you are vaccinated and have no symptoms. If you opt out of testing but the child is in a classroom that has a positive batch, you have to get PCR testing ASAP and self isolate if not vaccinated. We are generally still sticking to outside recreation but we have done a couple of larger events and occasionally, I am meeting a friend for drinks in the corner of a local eatery. Our indoor group things are school, work (WFH has ended for my husband's company at this juncture), healthcare, fitness. All of our friends and family are vaccinated so we do some in person social stuff.

I like it. I have a bin of stuff exactly like that for my sons. Some of it new and some used things. My son's grandmother just moved into assisted living and she was very happy that we took a lot of her kitchen things so that the boys don't have to buy them when they move out. It appeals to her thriftiness AND somehow made her feel less sad about the transition. She was very happy to see pictures of the things we kept and use in their new home. I've heard hope chest for girls but no alternative for boys.

What is this?

Focus on relationship stuff like having them over for a fun weekend. I would probably do one of the following in this situation: Send them funds to put in a savings account. Set aside what I might have spent on their gift and then let that pile up and give it to them as a high school graduation gift. Make a charitable contribution in their honor to a cause that you know resonates with them. Send something the family could enjoy together like a game basket.

This is me. When I was a kid, the fridge or freezer going out meant we just started eating things faster than we otherwise might have. I definitely eat a lot of things most people seem to toss. My husband stops me from eating anything that's too out there.

Fidgets are popular for boys and girls in that age group.

I've been going to pilates 2x a week and then the other 4-5 days riding my exercise bike. I am scheduled for 2x a week pilates for October, planning to up that to 4x a week when the budget allows.

I'm glad you dropped it. The tuition is a sunk cost- no need to throw your time and effort after a sunk cost. That leads nowhere good in almost all instances.

I recently saw an ad on Facebook for sanitary napkins that used the terms "for people who bleed from a vagina" and made "by menstruators for menstruators." Not a parody. Not shared for outrage- just a regular ad. No thank you. Woman is not a dirty word. Always brand removed the Venus sign from their packaging to be inclusive but left the hashtag #likeagirl all over the wrappers. I use a particular pad of theirs and when they removed the Venus symbol, the next wave of wrappers had all of these circles and half circles that were reminiscent of the symbol. It was an odd design choice, especially paired with the decision to still use the girl hashtag. It's like, ok, I'm a perimenopausal 40 something using your nearly diaper sized pads but go ahead and provide motivation by putting Run#likeagirl and Strong#likeagirl on the size pad I could have used as an actual towel when I was actually young enough to be #likeagirl Somehow I doubt they will be putting #grownasswoman on their wrappers but that would be more accurate.

In my state, there have already been male prisoners transferred to women's prisons on the basis of self-id. There have been news reports in conservative media of at least one rape. Progressives tend to dismiss these reports because of the source but very few people in the mainstream outlets will address this issue with any nuance whatsoever. Nearly 9 in 10 women who are incarcerated have been victims of sexual violence in their lives. I have worked with organizations that serve inmates pre and post release and I know several women who reported rapes while in prison from male staff members. These are just not women who deserve any additional risk in their lives to validate the identity of other prisoners. Last summer, I was discussing this issue at length with a long time friend who was stunned that I'm not lockstep with the party line on these issues. He was, in my view, incredibly dismissive of this issue around incarcerated women and women in shelters. It dawned on me that it's just outside of his frame of reference both as a male and as a person who doesn't really *know anyone who has ever been to prison well enough to actually care about them on a visceral level*. One of my grandmothers and both of my maternal aunts have been incarcerated. I have cousins and an uncle who have recently been caught up in the criminal justice system as well. I think one reason so many progressive people like my friend don't take this seriously is that they are living middle class lives with middle class families and the idea of themselves or someone in their family going to prison just doesn't compute for them. Males who are gender non-conforming, transwomen or really any one at all deserve to be safe in prison. Prisoner safety is an issue I really care about. But we can't make a tiny group safer at the expense of some of the most vulnerable women in the country. And we can't suspend disbelief. Sex offenders lie. A lot. If their mouths are moving, they are probably lying. Self-ID in this case hurts women and it hurts trans people who get unfairly associated with lying liars who do something like *rape a child* and then say "oh, I'm now a woman" for whatever aim might induce them to make such a claim.

When my older son was born, I was working at a non-profit as basically an office admin. I revamped their bookkeeping and grants reporting system because it needed doing and found that people with a head for numbers and analytics are kind of a rare commodity in the non-profit world. At my next job, I was running a small organization and learned the relevant to non-profits side of tax accounting on a trial by fire basis because they neglected to tell me they were several years arrears in filing their taxes when they offered me the job (like 5th day on the job, there was an IRS investigator with a badge knocking on the door FFS) and also doing all of their grant writing. At my next job, they needed a grantwriter, fundraiser and full charge bookkeeper. I did well in both the fundraising and bookkeeping but it became clear that my son really couldn’t go to school. We landed on homeschooling, and I started staying home. I did some contract work in grantwriting and fundraising but was quickly reminded that fundraising and part time work don’t really go together well. At my last job, I had hired a contract bookkeeper to give more me more time to focus on fundraising. He was impressed with my attention to detail and understanding of non-profit accounting needs and had mentioned that I could probably do what he did. I called him up, picked his brain and got my first client or two, mostly from people I knew from my past work who needed bookkeeping services that really understood fund accounting as it applies to non-profits. I found that bookkeeping, unlike fundraising, could be done on a part-time basis. I got myself certified in the software that most small non-profits use for accounting. I took more accounting classes here and there with an eye towards perhaps becoming a CPA. I found though that I didn’t really have time for homeschooling and part time work AND full-time school plus I absolutely didn’t need to be a CPA for what I was doing and in fact there was a huge space in the market for people who were more skilled than a basic bookkeeper but not as pricey as a CPA (CPAs in my area bill north of $200/hr). I had helped clients with audit prep and such and so some of my referrals came from the CPA firms that we worked with who had clients that needed someone who understood non-profit accounting; the rest of my referrals came from staff WOM. When I was in undergrad, I had studied business and economics and part of that was the core accounting series but those 3 accounting classes were all I had when I started out. I have done career assessments and worked with a career coach when I was thinking of going to law school. The coach felt that I’d be good at both law and mediation. I stopped working with her right at the start of Covid because I didn’t have the bandwidth. I may resume at some point. While I don’t want to go to law school, I have considered some pivots that would use more of my writing and analytical skills. Basically my work is helping people not make accounting and bookkeeping mistakes, untangle labyrinthine state reimbursement processes, prepare financial reports and budgets that are grant ready. It’s a lot of explaining the basics of accrual accounting and setting up clean accounting systems and processes. I do some writing for it- mostly policies and procedures. There’s a clear overlap some of the same skills that would have helped in law but it’s also rather dull work. That said, it’s dull work where I can earn great money because looping back to what I said at the start of this: people with a head for numbers are a commodity in the non-profit sector.

A vacation would be nice but I'll settle for a cookie.

I would add that seeing and acknowledging the opportunity costs of homeschooling or any other life event (having kids, staying home) in no way means that someone is bitter or regrets spending time with their kids. I honestly don't feel that I spend all that much less time with my younger son who is in school full time than I did with his big brother at the same age who was homeschooled. Sure he was homeschooled but a lot of that time was used for therapy, classes and extracurriculars. Now, the therapy and classes are in the context of the school day and I am free to work and invest in myself rather than using the downtime of OT, SLP and other therapies to plan our next homeschooling endeavor. I'm still home when he's home, I'm still soccer momming it to activities etc. I don't have any patience for mommy war type stuff that places any particular path above or below others.

Thank you. I frame this in terms of opportunity costs. Choices and circumstances do close doors. I am someone who, due to when I had kids and the extraordinary needs that those particular children had, more or less missed my calling. When my older son was born, I planned to attend law school while he was young. We had financial considerations and he had needs that simply made that path impractical. I *could* go to law school in my 40s and still practice law for 20+ years but it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to do so as I presently work less hard for more money than I would be likely to make after going to law school (to say nothing of PAYING) for law school. I would rather pour our resources into securing our retirement, getting the kids through college and travel than bust my butt in law school for 3 years and spend the next decade paying off those loans. The opportunity cost of law school at this juncture are ones I don't wish to pay. And that's ok. The niche of accounting that I function in provides me with decent money for reasonably meaningful work and very little effort on my part because I am good at what I do and I don't need more education to do it.

Pre-homeschooling, when I had a kid in kindergarten and another one on the way, I did a year long professional certificate at the local university in my professional field. The class was about 1/3 young people just out of college looking for a resume booster to get their first “real job”, 1/3 people in their late 20s and 30s who were working one of those “real jobs” and wanted a career boost without the cost and commitment of a master’s program and 1/3 un or underemployed career switchers who were mostly in their late 40s and 50s. Of the “career switchers”, a sizable number were women who were empty nesters and looking to re-enter the workforce after having been SAHMs. I remember thinking very seriously that I didn’t want to be in their shoes. They were mostly wonderful women but more than a few were in some dire situations and they were all vastly underemployed for their talents. I also had an older boss when I was 23-25 who had gone back for her masters after a financially devastating divorce when her kids were in high school and college and she said some things to me about what she had gone through to get back on a professional career trajectory that stuck with me. While I was home, I did generally have a foot hold in my field even if it was just 1 very part time client or a few projects doing things like editing grants or crafting fundraising letters. The money wasn’t much, but it kept my contacts warm and when I was ready to start growing my business, it was ridiculously easy to do so (I grew from 1-11 clients in 18 months without one bit of marketing other than WOM). I still made some regrettable, foolish decisions rooted in a mix of fear (scared for the impact the bad school situation was having on my son) and lack of knowledge (that the school district could do more but wouldn’t unless we made them)but I do think that being in that class with older women helped influence my decision to maintain a professional toe hold + and have a long term plan for professional reentry. I do wish that I had thought more about the financial implications of getting out of the Seattle real estate market in 2012 but we will be ok.

I viewed it as a streaming subscription and the shipping is a bonus. For a long time, we were gifted Prime each year. Now we pay for it. The renewal is in May and I am not entirely sure we will renew or not. We have shifted most of our ordering to other merchants + I am not sure how much we are using the streaming. We will evaluate before we renew.

I don't know that I regret it but I do have a sense that it was not worth it. The opportunity costs were pretty high for us- in order to homeschool, we moved from a house we owned/were paying a mortgage on to a small apartment. We assumed that we would get back into the housing market within 5 years but here we are, 10 years later and in our early 40s still in that small apartment. I don't mind being in an apartment or that it's fairly small. I do mind that we don't have a house or condo we could pay off as we careen towards retirement age. Between forgone income, home equity and the loss of my full retirement contributions, homeschooling was a very, very, very expensive schooling option. The other thing for me is that my sons both have special needs. Homeschooling felt very necessary at the time because the local school district didn't really meet their obligations under the IDEA Act. I feel that I provided a home/family solution at pretty high cost for something that the school district should have been providing. 2 years ago we sued the district and the district almost immediately offered private school tuition. We didn't want that (we wanted our son to be able to attend the local school with appropriate supports rather than a long commute to a specialized private school) and we prevailed. The district now provides that support at the local school and that son is in 7th grade, on ASB and the cross country team. Had I known how cost effective it would be to sue the district (the district ended up covering our legal costs), I honestly would have done it back when we started homeschooling as the facts in our older son's case would have probably made for an open and shut case. I don't know that homeschooling was a mistake, but I do think we should have held onto our house and I don't think I should have just been home/out of the workforce for the better part of a decade. We live in a HCOL area and the opportunity cost of a SAHP was too high here. Staying home was also NOT part of my plan, it was something that I felt I needed to do in order to address the mess of the district not accommodating our older son. We are looking to buy a house again in the next 1-2 years or so and will have a lot of catching up to do on retirement and paying down a mortgage.

I would not wear heels. Pants or a skirt and flats.

His iPad is primarily used for listening to books and messaging a few pre-approved people. We have the password and can see everything. The iPad largely stays home and is not in his pocket with internet access all day. He needs permission to add any games or apps. Other than streaming books, he’s using his iPad a couple of hours a week, not multiple hours a day. When my niece was about 13, she was chatting with a person online and that person started asking for her address so he could send an Uber right then to pick her up. That’s the most extreme example but as a consequence of unmonitored, unfiltered, unlimited access to the internet through a device that they keep with them all the time, I have observed my nieces and nephews: Lose a considerable amount of sleep to the point that it exacerbated mental health conditions. Get involved in toxic social situations, including bullying, harassment and in at least one case, what’s apppeared to be grooming. Waste considerable energy on games of marginal quality Become combative when they lose access to their phones because they are so used to having them. Some things, like sexting and sending inappropriate pictures are normalized in some of their peer groups. The two older girls (14 and 19 at this point) have both been asked for nude photos, not just by randos online but by classmates. My nieces and nephew were between ages 8 and 12 when they got their first smartphones. While I know from first hand experience that parents can monitor and supervise their kids phones and teach their kids to be more digitally savvy, one of my brothers and exSILs do not due to the chaos and poverty in their lives. The other two nieces have had phones since they were like 8 as digital babysitters because my exBIL is a jerk. Access to their phones is part of the divorce decree and my brother, who is a more involved parent than his ex-husband, is all but powerless to limit their access or guide their use. While my kids do not have the same risk factors in their lives as their cousins, I’ve seen similar things as above for friends kids who do not come from the same high risk background as my nieces and nephew. I’ve reached the conclusion that my kids don’t need smartphones at all and don’t/won’t get them until high school. I’ve observed most parents don’t seem to have any idea what their kids are doing on their phones. Many functional, loving and thoughtful parents seem to have a blind spot regarding the ubiquitousness of phones. I have had many friends realize after the fact that some truly messed up shit was going on in their kids lives via their phones. TBH, even with being older when he got a smartphone and with us having more limits on his phone, we observed issues with my older son and his iPhone (mostly struggling to manage his time and staying up way too late) and, with his buy-in, his phone doesn’t stay with him at bedtime and we have a time limit app that helps us help him limit his time on one app that was taking up to much of his time.

Our 12 year old son has an old iPad mini and a Chromebook. He can use it to message approved people. We have a high level of parental controls + full access to his devices. He doesn’t have a smart phone and will not have one until high school. My nieces and nephews had unlimited access to smartphones entirely too young and the impact on them has been intense.

My son is a senior this year. He’s also returning to the school after switching to a different program for the pandemic and he didn’t really have any friends at the start of the year. Joining crew and choir seems to have really helped him connect. He ate lunch alone a few days and was bothered by it so I told him to try to connect with someone in the class right before lunch and ask if they were headed to lunch and then walk and talk on the way to lunch. It seems to have worked and he now has a friend he’s been eating with most days.

We worked opposite shifts to save on childcare costs. It was hard. The worst was the years he worked at a place that didn’t have a set shift rotation- he’d get day, swing and evening shifts all on the same week. They released the schedule a month at a time and there was NO rhyme or reason for it. Now things are much better. He starts work at 6AM and is generally done around 3 but does work longer some days, which is pretty common for salaried IT jobs.

MMA and Boxing are the only sports I can think of where you can chose your opponents. Most athletes don’t have a choice. I also know that the blow back for female athletes who express a view that biology matters for women’s sports is quite large and I seriously doubt that many active female athletes are really able to share their true view on the topic. The performance differential is less in some sports but it is real and it takes a lot of science denialism to pretend that this is fair. Testoterone is a crazy advantage. My husband has been to TWO CrossFit classes in the last week after being sedentary for most of the pandemic. He’s lost 6 pounds without much dieting. My son started rowing crew recently and he’s developed visible pecs, large biceps and starting to get defined abs. How many of us ladies could say the same after a few weeks?

I am wanting to see The Connors. also, what is this about a new Wonder Years?!

At least Alana is openly trans so her opponents can make that choice. Fallon Fox didn’t disclose three plus decades of living as a man with male levels of testosterone. Alana is 38 and just getting started. 35ish is usual retirement age in MMA for females. Some are done by 30. Laurel Hubbard (Olympic weightlifter) is 43. That they are competing in these sports at these ages should be a sign that transwomen who have experienced male puberty have a huge competitive advantage in many sports. I find that most people who don’t see a problem with transwomen in women’s sports DGAF about sports at all and often are derisive about people who do love/follow sports. The novice boys crew team at my son’s school outstrips the varsity girls. At the high school level in my state, NO medical steps or testosterone reduction is necessary for a trans athlete. This simply is not fair. The ink wasn’t dry on Title 9 when I was born. Women and girls as a class only recently won the right to access competitive sporting opportunities. Everything we do in life has opportunity costs. Transitioning ended my brother’s softball career. That was a choice that he made (BTW, he’s a huge women’s sports fan and is appalled by the push for transwomen to compete against women as if it’s a level playing field.) I would love to see more intramural, recreational and co-ed sporting opportunities. But competitive levels of women’s sports for the most part need to be preserved as a single sex endeavor.