Only the French would ever think to use three vowels in a row to spell the sound of yet another vowel!

I don't care if it is a zombie thread, I'm all in favor of barefoot scootering!

I color my own. Takes about half an hour total. I've never had it done professionally and am not going for anything fancy, I'm just covering gray. I use a shade somewhat lighter than my natural (very dark) coloring, I like the resulting somewhat variegated look.

I called my mom Mommy throughout my growing up and young adult years. I had 7 younger siblings, that probably played into the word staying in common usage. Eventually the younger kids stopped using Mommy much (because, presumably, it felt socially awkward-- as it did to me once I was older and especially once there weren't littles around) and since then we've all been a bit at a loss because-- that was her name and we never really adopted another. These days if I'm addressing her with my kids or nieces and nephews around I just use Grandma, if it's in private I still sometimes use Mommy. I refer to her as mom at times but don't think I've ever addressed her as mom. Some of my siblings switched from Mommy to Mama. My kids use Mommy, mom, and mother.

That's balderdash.

Condenser dryers collect water; they are standard in Europe. Definitely something to check for.

Unisom--doxylamine succinate--is the only thing I have found that helps me stay asleep.

Some kids are just wired that way. I'm a very non-directive parent; the sort that in some versions of the Mommy Wars would doubtless be labeled as overly permissive. But as I mentioned earlier, my kids trend high-anxiety-rule-follower. When I do make a rule, they tend to follow it meticulously. Which honestly has its own drawbacks, as every parent of high anxiety kids knows.

Oh, the scene is totally believable! I had a running joke that my toddlers were incapable of differentiating between Mom and a jungle gym, in spite of me regularly pointing out to them the many obvious differences!

I definitely did a lot of muddling through, and at this point in life I feel like any mom who is keeping her kids alive and fed is doing a darn good job. I did a lot of reading amd thinking as a young mom though. Some of that was a need for mental simulation, and reading everything I could get my hands on regarding parenting and, later, homeschooling, was a way of meeting that need that was also deeply relevant to my life. The extent to which I followed any of the advice depended on how much it made sense to me both intellectually and instinctively, and how much executive function it required. The last was in very short supply!

I definitely sing instinctively to help regulate both baby and myself. I had a diaper changing song--one I made up. "It's diaper time, it's diaper time, it's diaper changing time, hurray!" etc. It was a way of framing an unpleasant-for-both-participants necessity positively, and of distracting baby to help them be more cooperative.

There is a lot of space between "abusive behavior that no child should have to endure" and "behavior that doesn't match my personal conception of ideal parenting." "Not ideal" by any given person's standard must not be conflated with "abusive"; doing so dilutes the concept of abuse so far as to make it meaningless.

If our understanding of the genetic, epigenetic, and other factors that influence individual drug responses were sufficiently developed, genetic testing might be more helpful. Human bodies and brains are so complex though and the depth of scientific understanding we need really isn't there yet.

If you think singing the alphabet song during a diaper change is abusive you have quite an unusual definition of abuse. Now, I did have one child who apparently found my singing quite distressing. I liked to sing to my kids when nursing them to sleep, but this one once he started to talk would put his hand over my mouth and say "uh-uh-sing"... he loved to sing himself, including humming away while nursing, but apparently did not approve of my singing!

If you try it and it doesn't work, you try something else.

? She explained her process. It sounded quite reasonable to me. Would it work with every kid? Of course not-- nothing does! But it worked for hers and from her description was definitely not in the realm of abusive behavior.

I'm very much an attachment parent, but I did keep my babies in car seats even when they didn't like it. The only way to get around in my area is by car and the only way for a baby to ride safely in a car is in a car seat. So yeah, I forced that on them even when they screamed bloody murder over it. Can't say I liked it much more than they did, but safety and legality were both on the side of keeping the kid restrained. That reality does make me roll my eyes just a bit when someone suggests that babies and toddlers should have bodily autonomy at all times and anything else is abusive. We all have to live with some realities we don't like--even babies.

If the quote above about having a bunch of little boys and initiating blanket time was from the Duggars (sorry I was skimming the thread and might have missed something, but I thought it was from them) it sounds like they implemented whatever their version of blanket time was for kids of multiple ages not just babies.

This might be a bunny trail--I don't have much to say about training babies to stay on a blanket, it's not something I've attempted. But the discussion brought to mind the reality that some kids are compliant people-pleasers even as babies. They will watch their adults for signs of approval or disapproval, and regulate their behavior accordingly from a pretty young age. That kind of kid could easily be encouraged to stay on a blanket without resorting to any kind of verbal or physical harshness. And there are other kids who never would become compliant regardless of how many times they were spanked. And everything in between. I was the "ain't nobody gonna control me" kind of kid right from the start. I was, incidentally, the reason my parents mostly gave up on spanking as a parenting tool. Mild spanking was clearly not effective, and my mom was too wise a woman to engage in attempting to break a child's will-- she's told me that at some point she realized that that is what it would take to force me to comply, and she just knew that was wrong. My kids, however, trend towards high-anxiety-rule-follower personalities. Some of them would almost certainly have stuck to a blanket had I encouraged it. Turns out I'm as allergic to trying to control as a parent as I was to being controlled as a kid; I have zero interest in trying to make my kids do something unless there is a significant safety concern.

Maybe this book will be one step on the path towards better protections for reality TV actors, both children and adults? The contract stuff was very, very sleazy.

When I was in the Air Force everyone knew I was a Latter-day Saint because I didn't drink when everyone else did. I remember several of my friends and acquaintances at the time asking me about the religious guidelines I followed and telling me they wished they had had similar guidelines to follow growing up because they could have avoided a lot of pain. I did feel protected by the guidelines of my religion. I still do. I attended high school in a location where drinking was legal for teenagers and excessive drinking was actually a huge issue among my peers. I had one friend in particular who really struggled with navigating peer pressure to do many things she hadn't intended to do--I knew her struggles because she would talk about them with me. She had personal convictions and parental guidance, but they didn't have the same protections my religious convictions did and she repeatedly ended up doing stuff-- sometimes stuff with long-term negative consequences--she had meant to avoid. There were two ways that my religious convictions protected me: 1--they were backed by deep, personal conviction that I was following the will of a God that I believed in and trusted, something that was more significant to me than following the expectations of my peers, and 2--my peers themselves recognized and respected the significance of my religious convictions and protected them as well by avoiding pressuring me to behave in ways that were outside of those standards. That actually seemed to be the biggest difference between my experience and that of my friend who had far more pressure put on her to go along with the crowd. My parents, like all parents, were not perfect and I don't parent exactly as they did (for better or worse!) but I have never regretted growing up with what seemed and still seems to me to be protective standards and guidelines.

Jill clearly cares very much about protecting what privacy is left to her siblings; I appreciated that she was not out to air all of the family's dirty laundry and cause even further re-traumatization. I thought the narrative was well-crafted and sounded sincere--she and the ghost writer both did a good job. I don't at all doubt that there were plenty of good parts to her childhood. We humans like to pigeon-hole people and their behavior as "good" or "bad" but people are always complex mixtures of both.

SSI is very, very picky about assets. You as a couple cannot have more than 1 house, 1 car, and $3000 in assets to qualify for SSI (if it is SSDI you are dealing with, there are no asset limitations--so be clear on that!) Things to look into --assets in an ABLE account can be sheltered, but I haven't yet researched how this works--I need to for my disabled son. If your husband has been permanently disabled since he was a teenager and does not have significant work history to claim SSDI on his own, he may be able to claim it based on the work record of a parent or sometimes a grandparent. If SSDI rather than SSI is an option he needs to be on SSDI because there are no asset limitations. Please verify whether what he is receiving is SSI Supplemental Security Income or SSDI Social Security Disability Income; both programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but only the first has an asset test. You could call a disability lawyer if he has SSI and ask about trying to get him switched to SSDI. Disability lawyers do nor usually charge clients up-front, thry take a percentage of any back-pay the client wins. Shouldn't cost you anything to just do a consultation.

Resources are definitely a huge factor. We have portions of the US that are very arid and lack the resources to support large populations. They just don't make up as large a percentage of our landmass as do similar regions in Australia.

My son is working with a private tutor we found through preply.com; there were quote a few tutors offering Python lessons.