While I don't want to see cameras in every classroom, I am aware of cases of abuse at school that were only addressed after the parent sent their kids to school with recording devices on or when the abuse was caught on security cameras. Special education students are especially vulnerable because the schools have the hardest time filling those jobs so often the people hired are the least qualified. Plus, they are being hired to do an exceptionally challenging job that probably merits the most qualified and exceptional teachers. The teacher in the contained sped classroom we sued the district to keep my son out of? She was provisionally credentialed and was placed in charge of a classroom at first before she even had a *BA* when a Masters is the standard requirement here. One of the reasons we sued was because I was aware of other lawsuits against the district over that teacher's classroom. Yet, that teacher still has her job. I wouldn't blame a parent for sending a camera if they were concerned about a child's safety. I can't get behind cameras for curriculum through.

My dad probably wouldn't accuse a child. He's thankfully never accused a grandchild. He's convinced that the maintenance man of his building steals stuff from him though. Everything from a bottle of sesame oil to some of his western shirts. The oil was in his pantry and he'd left the shirts here when he was visiting for a few days. 😛

My dad is like that- he misplaces anything and he thinks *someone stole it*. Scatterbrained + a big old dollop of paranoia.

Totally.

We have a strong familial history of addiction. Addiction is a disease and isn’t something that is avoided by supervised sampling- in fact the younger people start drinking, the more likely they are to get addicted. I would come down hard on a parent supplying my kids with alcohol, even at 18. I get what you are saying and agree to an extent but I draw the line at anyone supplying my kid because they think I’m too strict to permit it. People who are permissive about alcohol and kids are either not honest about their own problem drinking or they are unburdened by the realities of addiction. My brother who ended up addicted? He’s a 47 year old with a minimum wage job, never graduated from high school and has been a lousy parent to his three kids and an entirely absent “dad” to who knows for sure how many other kids. I’ve told my sons, nieces and nephews that they don’t have the luxury of experimenting with substances young. I am quite sure that one of the main reasons I graduated from high school, college and was able to build stability for my family was that I was St8 edge until well into college. First time I was drunk (one of two times, lol) was when I was 28.

Sometimes a non-strict parent has a very good reason for not allowing a child to go to (blank). Let's not make the mistake of thinking that only kids with strict parents make stupid decisions. My 14 year old niece has the street smarts of a garbanzo bean and a high conflict relationship with her generally overly permissive (in no sense of the word strict) parents. Not being strict doesn't necessarily engender a good relationship where the kid is always going to loop mom and dad in on their generally sensible plans. She's definitely lied and sneaked when what she wanted to do was ridiculous. I can see it escalating in the not-to-distant future.

Probably I would. Depends on what I know about the neighbors and the kid. The age of the kid also matters to me. My older brother’s sneaking out escalated to him running away and ending up on the street. He got involved in drugs and crime and nearly died of a drug overdose. If my parents had known sooner, they might have been able get him help sooner when that help would have been more effective. He was sneaking out starting around age 12-13.

This meal has become a regular here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/roasted-chickpea-and-broccoli-burritos/13489/ I like the filling on its own- you can do bowls instead of burritos if you want to skip the tortilla.

Societal navel gazing. I think it’s mostly harmless but that doesn’t stop me from thinking it can definitely get a bit ridiculous. One of my friends has a child who claims to be “star gender”. Okay. I’ve never seen anyone who was announcing their sapiosexuality be in a relationship with a physically unattractive genius. All of the people I’ve observed doing this are young men who date young women who are very physically attractive.

Good guest editorial in the NYTs by people across the political spectrum opposed to state laws banning CRT. It sums up my opposition to these types of laws. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/opinion/anti-critical-race-theory-laws-are-un-american.amp.html

My older brother is the result of rape. My brother found the man via what I call “recreational DNA testing” and they are now friends on Facebook despite the fact that my brother knows what that man did to our mom. On Mother’s Day, my brother posted a picture of our mom and this man commented on it. I remind myself of this everytime my heart softens towards my brother and I am tempted to let him back into my life. I could see wanting to know and I’m sure it was/is hard for him to know the circumstances of his conception (which he only found out about because our grandmother dropped that on us kids like a bomb one day when she decided it was too quiet or something- my mother wasn’t planning to tell until he was an adult, if ever). But I just can’t see friending the man on FB or letting him look at pictures of our mom. I miss my mother very much but I am *very glad* that recreational DNA testing was not a thing before she died. I couldn’t help it- I foolishly looked the rapist dude up. He’s a retired postal worker in Ohio. His FB has a bunch of pictures of the band he was in in the early 70s which lines up with the few particulars that our mom told us. There’s a part of me that wants to go punch that man in the face but my mom wouldn’t want me in jail for assault when I have kids to care for and a life to live. Still, I never needed to know who this man was. I was also in a hard place trying to hit on the appropriate response when my niece and nephew told me their dad had found their “grandfather”.

So we landed on: 1 cooler with seltzer, sodas, lemonade and iced coffee. Big thermos water dispenser filled with water and ice. 1 cooler with cold cuts, cheese, “salads”, fruit and cut up carrots, celery and peppers. We are taking bread and condiments for sandwiches. I made macaroni salad, my MILs recipe for potato salad, a spinach salad and a curried chicken salad. I’m not a fan of lunch meat myself and I can eat the chicken salad instead of having cold cuts. Decided to not worry about having anything hot but I am totally using that hot dog tip sometime. I thought about Mac and Cheese but my husband was really wanting potato and macaroni salads and I decided that that was enough pasta/potatoes. If it were just me and my husband I’d do fried chicken from the deli but most of the kids are the sort who don’t like meat on the bone. I put the teens to work making brownies. My older son and niece like to bake together so might as well capitalize on that. The fruit got put in individual sized containers, enough for everyone who will eat fruit to grab a container and use it as their bowl. I threw a can of whip cream in there so people can put that on their berries if they want. My brother grabbed chips and various snack foods. No one will go hungry.

I don’t think there’s anything abnormal about crafting, reading or beach combing. Sounds like a wonderful time. The parades and similar are cancelled here. Our plans are primarily a function of: ensuring my kids get to see fireworks + providing a fun and safe time for my nieces and nephews. If I didn’t have the gaggle of teens around, my ideal weekend would be a nice hike and catching up on my reading. My grandmother used to say that only boring people were horrified at the prospect of quiet alone time. 🤣

All great ideas in your post. Fortunately, the food trucks are a little bit of a hike from where we will be and people seem to pack a lot of their own food. We’d totally buy them ice creams but I’m figuring Grandpa will take care of that pretty quickly—- he loves buying the kids little treats. I’m filling one cooler with drinks and one cooler with dinner/snacks.

My mom came from a dysfunctional, criminal (not an exaggeration - my grandmother was and other relatives are no stranger to incarceration) family. Lots of screaming, lots of physical violence. She survived physical violence that left her disabled- both her hearing loss and seizure disorder were attributed to head injuries and she was frequently hit, thrown against walls and once literally thrown down a flight of stairs. She was lucky to have lived TBH. My dad came from a big, loud but generally functional Catholic family. My parents were both loud but generally quite loving towards us kids. There was no physical violence when I was a child between my parents or towards us kids but there was a degree of mayhem. My mom was very intent on marrying someone who didn’t hit women and children and she was very hands off with us kids in a lot of ways. I’ve come to realize that she was hands off because it was her way of making sure she didn’t act like her mom with us. Both my parents were loud and tended to think arguing loudly and in front of us was healthier than it is. My husband come from a family where dad was mostly a drunk bully and mom was mostly a conflict avoider (almost certainly as a self protection mechanism). Early in our marriage it became clear that my husband was the sort to avoid all conflict and then explode. We separated for the better part of the year with an eye on reconciliation and each got counseling separately and together. Ever since then, for the most part, we have been able to discuss disagreements in a productive way and nothing simmers until it becomes a huge deal. We have kids who have developmental disabilities and if we parented the way either of our families did, we would be completely screwed as a family. Our sons require a large degree of patience and explicit instruction in communication and other skills. Given our backgrounds, I’m very proud of the way we have been able to change the script for our own family.

My dad can not handle that my family prefers a really low key Christmas dinner (I have served things as simple as soup and grilled cheese for Christmas dinner). I sent this meme to my brother a couple of years ago saying we should do this for sure and he’ll never whine about our low key holiday dinners ever again.

So we are taking our crew of 12 (four adults, 8 teens/tweens) to see a drive in fireworks display. While there will be food trucks, I don’t really want to shell out quite as much as it will likely be to feed everyone dinner (food trucks seem to run $10-15/person). We are meeting up with 2 other families. We will arrive in the evening while it’s still light out. Trying to decide if I treat it like a tailgate and take our little propane grill or if I pack a cold dinner. I keep thinking of different salads I want to make but I’m kind of at a loss for kid pleasing entrees unless I drag the grill out there. Maybe I’ll just take bread and cold cuts for the kids to devour since most of them will pick at the salads. Or I could make wraps. Another thought is I grab fried chicken from the grocery deli and pair that with the salads.

I’ve seen this tried a few times over the years but it hasn’t seemed to have fully caught on. The stores that used to have it don’t anymore though none were as robust as the one pictured on this thread.

I’ve never watched it but presume that there has been an audience for Counting On all these years because TLC keeps renewing it. I wonder how much of the audience after the first show was cancelled were Duggar fans and how many people were rubbernecking/hate watching it. My brother used to do that with Jon and Kate + 8…he made a hobby of watching that show and going WTF Kate, WTF Jon. I suspect a lot more of their audience is like that than when the first show started.

You are not being paid enough to deal with dead rodents. Even if you were, it would be within your rights to refuse the job for any reason or no reason at all. You are doing them a huge favor. I was paid more than that for cleaning over 20 years ago. Even in a LCOL area I. 2021, I’ll bet money that you are a steal. Here, they would be unlikely to get a professional cleaner who would be willing to work around hoarding issues for less than 2-3 times the going rate for cleaners and the going rate for cleaners is $25-40/hr per cleaner. My brother has significant cleaning issues (not quite hoarding but there’s some stuff beyond regular mess). The quotes we got for helping him clean that up were $$$. ETA- cleaning services are more per hour than I listed.

My period has quite often/most of the time stopped or significantly lessened for a day or so and then come back to finish with a whoosh. I’ve also observed a similar thing when I swim on my period.

She’s not of a generation that is particularly savvy online. It’s also clear that she must be authoring her own tweets because no PR firm would post anything like that.

In Washington State, with a simple visit to the DMV you can change your gender marker to M, F or X. You do not need any verification of social and/or medical transition to do this. Currently, it is harder to get an appointment at the DMV to get a Real ID Act compliant ID (so that you can travel by airplane after the deadline) than it is to change your gender marker. You fill out this form: https://www.dol.wa.gov/forms/520043.pdf You may also change your sex designated on a Washington State birth certificate by filling out this form. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Pubs/422-143-SexDesignationChangeAdult.pdf For school, you don't need to change your ID to change your gender at school - in the local districts that I am familiar with, you can do it from the same app you look up a kid's grades and attendance on. That was not the case when my brother transitioned. He had to send documentation to the state (it was not very much documentation- IIRC, it was a letter from his HCP stating he'd socially transitioned and started medical transition), then he received a letter back from the state and simply took that letter to the DMV. As a practical matter, most businesses and other entities aren't checking IDs WRT this anyways.

It remains a false equivalency to say or insinuate that males and females navigate life with even somewhat similar risk factors for sexual violence, plain and simple. The pattern of meeting female concerns with “but what about males” is common enough but it’s tiresome. ETA- I’ve deleted a lot of this post because there’s no real point.

Blech.