Yeah, it's not the dancing. Just to clarify. I have no problem with dancing in general, or fathers dancing with their little girls, or wedding dances, or whatever. It's the over-the-top-ness of it all. The make-up and hair and limo rides, etc. are what, to me, make it creepy. It has a very prom-ish vibe that's just icky. Something about playing those roles that have traditionally been associated with the romantic (female dressing up and making herself pretty, male wooing her with fancy dinner/flowers/entertainment, etc.) with your kid weirds me out. Obviously not everybody feels that way, and that's okay. Nobody made me Arbiter of All Things Creepy or anything. I actually remembered this morning that dh and dd did go to a daddy-daughter dance at the YMCA 5 or 6 years ago. It was nothing like this one. Wasn't their cup of tea but not creepy either. So I guess I'm not opposed to the daddy-daughter dance, in theory. Just this particular execution. But then this church does a lot of things I personally find objectionable, so that's probably playing a factor here too.

I get that they're supposed to be sweet. And cute. And maybe it's because my only girl has never had the slightest interest in putting on a dress for no reason (nor my dh in putting on a suit, for that matter). But seeing all the Facebook pics of the daddy-daughter dance at the local megachurch, with the grown men and their 7-year-olds with their make-up and their corsages and their RENTED LIMOS just makes my skin crawl. I guess it reminds me of those skeezy purity balls. I know, I know... not the same thing exactly. But still. Ick.

I have permanent raccoon circles (thanks, Mom! :glare:), and Pixi Correction Cream is the best thing I've found. You can get it at Target, probably drug stores too.

This will be an interesting experiment to keep an eye on: One of the biggest VCs in Silicon Valley is launching an experiment that will give 3,000 people free money until 2022 The company's president, Sam Altman, is expressly concerned about the increasing automation of jobs and its potential effect on our economy, hence the experiment.

I am a big fan of casseroles. Most everyone here likes them too, except for ds6, who doesn't care for his food being mixed up. One of my favorites includes shredded chicken, celery, rice and water chestnuts mixed with cream of chicken soup and a little mayo and topped with crumbled crackers. It freezes great and is perfect for when we have leftover chicken (or turkey, but don't tell dh because he hates turkey!).

DH is leaning towards RSVPing "yes" and then inventing an emergency the day of. I'd typically consider that bad form, but in this case I'm willing to make an exception.

I knew the sex of both my children from the get-go. I wasn't even going to find out from the ultrasound, but DH was adamant that we needed outside confirmation! Just before dd turned 2, my youngest sister left home for a summer job at a camp about 4 hours away. We were there as she and her boyfriend were leaving, and DD went absolutely HYSTERICAL when it was time for them to go. I'd never seen anything like it. She was not the kind of kid to throw tantrums -- that's the only one she ever had. But she was beyond distraught. A couple of weeks later, both my sister and her boyfriend were killed in a car accident. We never saw them again. The day after she died, dd told us my sister had been in her room. It was very early in the morning and we'd gone into get dd out of her crib. She wasn't super verbal yet, so we had a hard time piecing together what she was trying to say, but still, it was weird.

MIL's concerns aren't unjustified. Aunt and Uncle will definitely give her a hard time. They will take it as a personal affront that anyone would dare miss their special snowflake's big day. They are just that kind of people. They will give DH a hard time too, but he doesn't see them that often so that doesn't really bother him. The situation is complicated by the fact that MIL currently lives with Aunt and Uncle since she sold her home a few months ago. Her new place will be ready the same weekend as the wedding. MIL has always been close to this particular brother and his wife. She has three other brothers, with whom she is much less close. She has always been close to her two nieces, one of whom is the bride. She thinks of them as the daughters she never had. None of this changes the fact that DH doesn't and never has had the kind of relationship with this family that she does. The policy was supposed to make things like this easier. We know that we will get invited to these events, and frankly we're not interested in attending any of them, so the idea was to be able to say, "Sorry, we just don't do that" and avoid having to explain why we went to this one and not that one. And because we didn't want to be forced into attending something just so we didn't have to listen to the whining. See how well that worked? :glare: If there was something we DID want to attend, we'd be the first to break our own policy. Those would typically involve my family, though, LOL. Then we'd just not tell MIL about it. :lol:

That's a good point. It's really more the latter. We are closer to a few cousins. They happen to be on my side and are all married with kids already so it's less of an issue. We did attend some of their weddings/showers, but all but one of those occurred before we were even out of college and the other was seven (eight?) years ago. DH is weighing the hassle of the wedding with the hassle of hearing his mother complain about it for the next two months and beyond. That's really his only concern -- which of these will cause me less stress? LOL I will go along with his decision either way but I do feel bad about picking one over the other since they are really all on the same plane, relationship-wise. DH isn't close with any of his extended family, and naturally I am even less so.

Yum! Can I be part of your tradition?? :)

Here's the situation: Between the two of us, DH and I have close to 40 cousins. We made a decision sometime back not to attend any weddings, showers, etc. of our cousins. There are just too many, and we don't feel that it's fair to go to some and not others. We do send a nice gift and well wishes with our regrets. One of DH's cousins is getting married in November and his mother was very perturbed when DH told her we intended to RSVP with regrets. She says that the parents of the bride will give her a hard time if we don't go. This is probably true, but it doesn't really change our position. Another cousin from MIL's family married a couple of months ago, and no one had any qualms about our absence then, so I'm sure it's this particular aunt and uncle who are the problem. But I would feel very badly if we were to go to this wedding having just skipped the other one. Plus, DH works long hours at an extremely stressful job and really needs his weekends (when he gets them) to recharge. Weekends aren't a guarantee in his business -- it's possible that even if we plan to go, he will have to work instead. Which means I get to go alone. Yay. FWIW, the bride did attend our wedding. However, given that she was 6 at the time (and her mother, who was peeved that I chose a flower girl from my side of the family instead of her daughter, dressed her in a white flower girl dress and had the photographer take pictures of her on our dime) I don't really find that compelling. DH and the bride have never been close and are separated in age by about 15 years.

That's exactly what my grandma did, LOL! She started everything early in the morning, though, so I expect most things were just left in the oven to keep warm during church. She was used to getting up early to cook though. She and my grandpa ran a restaurant that served breakfast 6 days a week for decades. My mom definitely doesn't get up like that! She makes good use of her crockpot. She's also usually home from church by about 11, so that helps.

Yep. My grandmother cooked a huge meal every Sunday when I was growing up. She would get up at 5 am and start cooking, then finish after church. She made all kinds of things: pot roast, chicken pie, even her take on moo goo gai pan. There were always at least 5 or 6 side dishes, in addition to the entree. And usually dessert. VERY rarely, when my grandfather was alive, we would go out to his favorite restaurant instead. My mother took over Sunday dinner for our side of the family after my grandmother died. She cooks most weeks, although sometimes we have other things going on, or my parents do, and we skip a week. Or some weeks my dad will pick up something, like fried chicken from the deli. My mom's meals are more simple, like grilled chicken or a pork roast, with a couple of veggies. Not the elaborate meals my grandmother made. My mom doesn't love to cook, but since she rarely cooks during the week since it's just her and Dad now, I think she enjoys making one meal a week for the family. I certainly enjoy it! :)

Where is the pain? Does it hurt when you're doing any certain kind of movement? I have De Quervain's Tenosynovitis, and if it is flaring up it can cause sharp pains when I'm doing odd things, like trying to pull up the bed covers. The pain is mostly on the inside of my wrist, near the base of my thumb. I haven't had a major flare-up in a couple of years but I still usually have a general stiffness in that wrist. Mine was brought on by my workouts (weight lifting, kettlebells, stuff like push-ups and planks, etc.). It's a repetitive-use injury, so could be a result of your weightlifting, even if you haven't done any in the past few weeks.

My 7th and 8th grade years were he** because of stuff like this. It was never-ending. Sometimes I was on the receiving end, and sometimes I was part of the group that turned on one of its own. Both were awful. I don't have much in the way of advice, just commiseration. IME, girls this age tend to gravitate to packs, and packs of 12-13yo girls just seem to act this way for no good reason. I'm not optimistic that finding a new social group will help. Perhaps there is another girl in her class who is also new and not attached to the pack who might make a good friend? As much as I agonize over DD12's dearth of friends and complete lack of interest in anything social, there is a part of me that thinks she will be better off if she just skips this stage entirely and waits until high school to find friends.

I achieved the Gold Award (highest award in Girl Scouts, at least at that time) and no, it definitely isn't on par with Eagle Scout. Nobody even knows what it is unless you say, "It's like Eagle Scout."

She has some anxiety issues so I don't think it's just a matter of getting used to the routine. She will stress over this all year. Last year was her first in scouts. She didn't hate it, but she definitely didn't love it either. We encouraged it specifically for the social aspect. She isn't shy and is always well-liked amongst her peers but doesn't seem to *need* a lot of interaction. I was concerned that she wasn't getting an opportunity to befriend other kids -- particularly girls -- her age at a time when that seems to be so important. There were three other girls in her age group/patrol, and she got along fine with them but didn't really hit it off with anybody. At least one of those girls is not returning this year, and there won't be any new girls because the upcoming class is forming a new troop. She has never once complained about not having enough friends. She rarely complains of being bored. She mostly is content to be around the house, reading or drawing. Most of her interests are individual in nature (e.g. golf). But really, she's not ever asked to do any activity. We have encouraged her to try different things, and she often likes them just fine, but until golf she'd never had a single activity that would have upset her if it suddenly disappeared. On the one hand, I'm happy if she's happy, but I also feel like I've made the choice to isolate her by homeschooling and don't want her to look back and think she missed out one something important. We had a conference call with DH and have decided to let her drop scouts. She seems relieved. Golf ends mid-October but we can start up again in the spring. There is a homeschool league here that she may be able to join as well, and she will definitely do the Jr PGA league in the summer. She's not been playing long so hopefully she will begin to build some relationships as she goes.

It's the week after Labor Day and already DD12 is starting to feel overwhelmed. Aside from her usual schoolwork/chores, she is participating in the following: Golf -- 90-minute group lesson once per week Violin -- 45 minute group lesson once per week, plus minimal practice time Girl Scouts -- 75-minute troop meeting once per week, occasional outside activities (these are minimal, and optional) Confirmation classes -- 60 minutes once per week, some homework but mostly I try to work that into our morning time Is this too much for a 7th grader? She's never been one who liked to have a full schedule, but we are rural and she has very little opportunity for interacting with her peers. DH and I see these extracurriculars mostly as social outlets; we really don't care if, say, her scout badgework is top quality or if she gets all her violin practice time in. We know she will do a good job, even if it's not her *best*. We have explained that to her, but she still feels a lot of pressure. I am very much that way myself, but I wish I had learned earlier how to let go and that good enough is sometimes good enough. I'm not sure if it would be better to back off some things or try to help her work through and practice setting priorities. The most likely thing to go is Girl Scouts, and since the first meeting is tonight, I'd just as soon go ahead and pull the plug now if we're going to. She's already moping around and acting like she doesn't know how she'll make it through the week. (If we had a fainting couch, she would be swooning on it.) Mondays are hard because they are both golf and Girl Scouts, but golf (which she loves) is only for 6 more weeks so after that her schedule slows down a bit. Also, Girl Scouts is her only activity with other girls who are close to her age (Confirmation is all boys and golf/violin have younger kids). TBH, this is of much greater importance to me than to her, but her social circle is almost nil, and I feel an obligation to at least give her a chance to make a friend close to her age. But I really don't feel like fighting her on this all year.

I've only had one knock on my door at that time of morning, and it was two close friends of my father's come to tell me my sister was dead. So yeah, no. I'd have a hard time finding the humor in this. If the phone or doorbell rings in the middle of the night, I literally become sick. It was probably an honest mistake, but I'd be hard pressed to be nice about it.

Yes. Both of mine ask for food all day long. I think, though, that only one really needs to eat that frequently. He is NEVER still. He also will almost always accept fruit and usually accept raw veggies with no dip when he asks for a snack. I have an open-kitchen policy on those; anyone can have them at any time throughout the day. My other child will generally refuse vegetables, and to a lesser extent fruit, even at meal times. She has a sweet tooth and an affinity for junk food and carbs, which she would eat all day long if allowed. I have begun encouraging her to think about whether she is truly hungry when she asks for snacks, especially since she is now the size of an adult and her growth spurt seems to have waned. Going without snacks seems to help her be willing to eat more variety at mealtimes, and also I think learning to discern true physical hunger from boredom, etc. is an important skill (obviously this applies to older kids, not littles!).

Well, we took a beach trip when dd was 6 weeks old, with my parents and both my sisters (teens/early 20's) for help and no other kids -- plus the comfort of a 3-bedroom oceanfront condo -- and THAT was miserable, so I'd vote no. But camping sounds miserable to me under the best of circumstances, and dd was our first, and I didn't adjust to mommyhood well at all, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Soft cover

We've had ours for about 4-5 years, giving it daily use for much of that time. It is worn on the cover but still intact and not in any danger of losing pages or anything. My dd is really hard on books. If it were up to me, she'd absorb the content via osmosis and never crack the spines. :)

Hated it. The whole season not one major plot point that I couldn't see coming from a mile away. The scene at the end with Bran and Sam was ridiculous. It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. If Bran had revealed the truth to Jon, that at least would have been something new. And what's with Sam taking credit for Gilly's discovery -- which he didn't even acknowledge when she told him about it! What, are we supposed to think she brought it up again on their drive to Winterfell? Why? She didn't have any reason to think it was important.

I hope they are still in style. I wore one to church this morning. :) I like them on occasion in place of jewelry. Today I used one to dress up my skirt and t-shirt. My favorite way to tie is simply fold in half, drape around my neck, and pull the loose end through the folded end. (You need a longer, skinnier scarf for that style.) Quick and easy. This page shows lots of different ways to tie a scarf: http://www.scarves.net/scarf-tying-index.html