I don't know. My mom passed away when I was 19. (I had been married for 3 years by then, so we did have a small taste of an adult relationship). My dh is much closer to his parents that I ever was. He talks to his mom nearly every day. When my mom was alive we only talked once a month or so. My dad and I only talk about once a year. I really think it has much more to do with family dynamics than gender. I'm just not close to ANY of my family, whereas my dh is very close to his.

I'm not Negin, but I give a crack at your question... People one hundred years ago didn't drink a large amount of their dairy from pasteurized sources. Much of their dairy intake would have been from fermented products made from raw milk. (yogurts, cheeses, curds, etc.) The raw milk contains enzymes that aid in digestion and absorption. The processed stuff we drink and eat today really doesn't resemble what people in the past consumed at all.

I cut my own because I got tired of paying other people to give me horrible cuts :lol: Seriously, my head must scream "give me a mullet!!" I have super thick, curly-frizzy hair. There is a lot of forgiveness if I get it uneven. But what I do is flip it upside down (while wet) and brush it all straight out. Then I'll trim straight across. It gives some decent layers. Then after it dries, I cut any curls that look funny. The downside is: once you get used to cutting your own hair, you may be more likely to chop it all off on a whim. :tongue_smilie:

Our closing documents are being overnighted today :party: We close by Monday! So glad to get that portion off our backs.

Sarah will do this! She likes to just walk up and start massaging your shoulders. She will not, however, rub lotion into her dad's feet. Not even for money :lol:

Oh no! Have you looked down the air vents? My dh lost his ring once, right after we got married. We tore the house apart looking for it. Eventually we moved out of that house. We moved a cabinet and voila! There it was.

This is probably the reason. He is traveling this week. Which means hanging around men who smoke, going out to eat with them, sitting in hotel bars with them, etc. He normally works from home and isn't exposed to smoking at all on a day to day basis. But I know the sights and smells of it while he is on the road has to bring up some of the old urges.

after which you wake up absolutely livid at your dh? :glare: My dh quit smoking in 2007 and hasn't touched a cigarette since. Last night in my dreams he started smoking again, and was being a total turd about it! We had this HUGE horrible argument...it was awful. Then when I woke up I was STILL mad at him. Like REALLY mad. So glad he wasn't home this morning :lol: I hate when I have dreams that sour my mood towards him...it affects my whole day!

:grouphug: I'll be praying for you! After my dh's colon rupture and colostomy I went through a similar thing. You don't realize how much such a close call takes out of YOU. I was able to mostly hold it together as he was healing, but after it was all over, and he was mostly healthy again, I just had a melt down. (kind of scared him actually..lol) Be prepared for that, and know it is probably normal. Make sure to take care of yourself. It is too easy to put your own well being on the back burner!

I love the planning, the books, the curriculum. I love when I can look back and see that I TAUGHT my children something. I love it when they spout off knowledge about things I thought they weren't paying attention to. I love being this close to my girls as they navigate adolescence. I don't love the days that it seems like I need a hammer and chisel to engrave the math lesson into their brains. Or the days that we all wake up in a sour mood and nothing goes right. I don't love the tears over lessons that are hard. And I don't love teaching the same thing for the nth time because she just. doesn't. get. it. There are aspects of it that I will miss horribly when it is over. And there are some parts that make me glad that I only have less than 6 years left. :lol:

I had a long scan at 8 months with my oldest (part of a study) With the twins I had so many that I lost count. It was every week there towards the end. All mine are fine :)

I think that I would have done the same thing in a heart beat, and without pausing to think twice about it. I also think that when I stood before God on Judgement day, He wouldn't condemn me for it either. There is a difference between murder and killing to protect your family. I'm praying that this entire family will be able to move on from this. Any trauma from this isn't the father's fault. It is 100% the molestor's fault.

Keep in mind that it may also put your income in a different bracket come tax time. We withdrew ours for various reasons last year, and although I had thought about all the penalties and taxes at withdrawl, I didn't think of our overall tax bracket for income taxes. :glare: I still would have made the same choice, but I didn't like that surprise in the spring :lol:

That's awesome!

The shampoo is worthless IMO. It never worked for us. What DOES work is nit combing EVERY DAY for about 2 weeks.

I'm in the trenches right now. (although my younger two are only 12, they are well into puberty and all the hormonal junk that goes with) For us, we haven't really gone easier on them just because they are hormonal. The same responsibilities are there (actually a bit more since they are getting older). But there are LOTS of talks and love handed out. And grace. Backtalk and disobedience are not tolerated, but I also try not to call them out on every nasty tone of voice or drama induced sigh. (this is HARD!) Mostly, keep talking to them. Don't be judgemental when they open their hearts to you. My almost 16 year old still talks to me about EVERYTHING. Boys included. It is because she still trusts me. (I never had that with my own mom). She knows that even when I don't agree with her, I'm not going to have a fit, yell at her, or whatever. It is tough, and I am no where near the end. But here in the middle of it all, there generally is peace in our home. It doesn't always have to be bad when they hit their teen years.

Mine are all girls, so I haven't had to deal with the boy/girl thing. But my twins have always shared a room. They wouldn't have slept apart even if they HAD separate rooms. All three of mine shared a room at one house we lived in. My brother (6 years younger) and I shared a room and a bed in the winter! His had no heat and was cold.

It really was brief, but yes I have. All of us, plus dh's parents hopped in their RV to go out to eat. As we are pulling down the road, one of the kids yelled, "You forgot Sarah!!" :001_huh: She was 9 or 10 at the time. If one of the kids hadn't noticed, we probably would have gotten to the restaurant before we knew. It was an honest mistake, made during the hustle and bustle of loading everyone into the RV. She still likes to give us a hard time about forgetting her.

We've done it 4 times. 2 were corporate moves. One we moved ourselves, and the last time we hired someone (it was expensive, but we had no choice since my dh was unable at the time to move anything) When we moved ourselves, we rented the biggest U-haul we could find AND a pull behind U-haul trailer. Our church helped us load up. Dh's brother helped us drive down, and we flew him back home after he helped us unload. Dh swore he'd never do it again :lol:. But they drove from TN to TX in a straight shot (16 hours) and there was hairy construction going on in AK. Get rid of as much stuff as you can stand before you move. There are things now that I think I'm nuts for moving across the country!

The more houses we have bought, the fewer showings it seems to take! This fall we will begin looking for our 5th house to purchase. It will be our 10th house that we've lived in. We've got it pretty down pat what works for us and what doesn't. We can narrow down to a specific price, general layout, and type of neighborhood before we ever go to a showing. That usually narrows the showings down a LOT. I can't remember how many we looked at for the first house. But for our second we looked at houses until I was sick of it. The third one we looked at maybe 15 or so. The fourth one was probably around 10, and that was that high of a number because we weren't real sure what neighborhood we wanted. I think it helps for us that we aren't afraid of cosmetic work on a house. We have purchased some ugly ones, and made them nice. We are looking at the bones.

My MIL got named Nanny because my oldest dd couldn't say Granny. (And she had been called Granny by HER oldest son for years before grandkids...started out as a joke and stuck) Dh's aunt is NoNo. Her oldest grandson was rambunctious as a child and heard No! No! from her a lot, so that is what he called her :lol: But the funniest is my SIL's dad. Her much younger brother taught her son to call her dad Old. And it stuck!!! FIL is Papaw (what he picked), and then my step-dad was Grandpa Kevin, and my real dad is Grandpa Taylor (Although he refers to himself as Pa....just never stuck with my kids since they don't see him much). My mother passed away before grandkids. When I was growing up I had Granny *insert last name* and Grandpa *Insert last name* for all of my natural grandparents. My step-grandparents were called by their first names because I never felt comfortable calling them anything else.

:iagree: Take smoking. My dh was seriously addicted to it. (3 pack a day smoker) He even got up to smoke in the middle of the night. Through lots of prayer and the grace of God, he broke that addiction. He STILL occassionally has the desire to smoke. But he's strong enough to over come that desire now.

My house is lived in. It is clean in that, with some regularity, the dishes are washed, the floors are swept, trash is emptied, laundry is washed and the bathrooms are cleaned. I try to pick up the messy stuff if I know we are having visitors. (although if you are family or a close friend, you get what we live with!) About once a week the girls and I'll go through and put things in order. I have better things to do with my time than stress out myself and everyone else that lives here with keeping a spotless house. My mother had to have a *spotless* house. We couldn't even leave a glass out without the house being declared a pig sty. I won't live that way and I'm not going to make my kids do it.

FWIW I had one and took it back within the week. Cons: The touch screen turned the phone on anytime anything bumped it. The phone would stay charged for less than a day. :glare: Also, it would download ads of it's own accord, which turned the phone on in the middle of the night...and it stayed on, again running down the battery. I now have a regular phone with a slide out keypad. I've been happy with it. If you don't need a smart phone, I'd stay away from the touch screens if you can.

Sarah and Miranda :lol: (that's what we named ours, dh picked them) If they had been boys they would have been Christopher Thomas and Michael Stephen, both after my dh.