Supertechmom
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Posts posted by Supertechmom
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So what should we do? It's in 3 weeks, we've never done anything big for anniversaries....but we feel we should do something beyond dinner without the kids. I don't want a party. It's in the middle of the week and too late for either of us to take off much time from work. What have you done for such an occasion?
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I would just tell the parents that she is too young to hang out with them as 13-14 year olds have different needs than a 6 year old. I have little kids and big kids and it isn't fair to the big kids to always have to deal with the littles. As the mom of a 6 year old, I wouldn't want her hanging around a group that much older. As the mom of teens, I wouldn't want them hanging around a non sibling that young either. Once in awhile is alright. Everyday, I would say no.
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change the code. You can look that up online and it will walk you through it. MIL's house or not, I would not be comfortable with anyone having a code or key to my house. I know formal lease/rental agreements are different and they have access but given this is your MIL, i think you could get by with having new codes and keys.
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My SS benefit paper says only 67% of the scheduled benefits will be paid in 2037 which is when I will be 66. When I helped my mom with her SS, the lady in the office said her understanding is that if nothing changes and laws do not correct it, all SS benefits will be reduced to pay everyone something. So far nothing has changed that I am aware of. So I am basing my thoughts on that I won't get all back especially since retirement age I believe is 70 or 72 for my husband and me and not 62 and 65.
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I think what is being missed is that the school had no reason to move the child. He was not a danger to the CF kid because he did not have CF. He's not going to wake up one day and have CF. He's a carrier. If he hooks up with another CF person or a CF carrier, then his kids might develop CF. He isn't going to have CF. But as a carrier, his rights were violated. He was removed erroneously. The only possibility I can think of is if he has siblings who have CF and the concern was that the sibling had passed germs to him that might in turn carry over to the CF in the classroom. Which is basically what every CF kid in America faces everyday. The school was wrong. They had no reason to move him as he does not have CF. And should have never shared his medical information.
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Well, I think people should get pensions for the amount of work that they agreed to. And medical care. OUr rates here are about 1.25% of assessed value, and I can't say that I feel I am getting a raw deal.
i agree. But yet, social security has no problem telling me that we will not get the full amount of money we put in. that there will not be enough social security to go around. that we must have other options cause the money wont be there. i remind my mil every time she gets up in arms over any changes to her benefits that not making changes means more money that is forcibly taken from her son and family and less money that will come back to us ever. there is going to be a generation that will suffer. I'm afraid it is going to be us. Unable to collect what we put in, unable to save for retirement or have it lost to the economy crashes, all we can do is say go ahead and screw us since we are already screwed. Maybe our kids will get a break if we go ahead and take the bullet. The babyboomers certainly aren't going to. And given their numbers, they continue to vote in ways that protects them and continues to make it harder for us. i have no expectations that my old age will be anything other than a daily grind. no fancy rv, no touring, no cruises a few times a year, no travelling all around. just the same trying to make ends meet as the early years, the middle years, the now years.......it is hopeless to think about.
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I think one of the problems is that so many elderly think they are OWED a separate house, with money to do what they wish. Remember the old days, when grandma and grandpa lived as part of the family, working alongside the family? The grandma rocked the babies and grandpa helped with chores. They didn't plan on subsidizing a zillion stupid "charities" and they didn't give away all their money to ONE child and then expect ANOTHER child to bail them out, all whilst insisting on their OWN place, own car, etc. They didn't buy expensive cats and waste a pile on unneeded vet bills. They didn't buy a newish car every two years. They didn't expect to live in seniors' housing where every whim was catered to. They weren't so busy with their "ministries" that they couldn't help out. They came alongside the family they were living with, listening to piano practice and stirring the soup. Yeah, sore subject around here.
One of mine asked my dd if she was going to college? Because if she was, SHE was going to starve to death! I grabbed the phone and said, "If you ever bring this up again, not only will you never see your grandchildren again, but they won't come to your funeral!"
Sore subject around here too. Life could be so much easier for everyone involved if the idea of just living together wasn't akin to living under a bridge. Don't even get me started on that one.
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Arctic Mama, I have at least 3 Alabama quarters. How many do you need? PM me an address and I'll send them out to you.
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Remember the 50 states quarters?? I was going through and getting the kids quarters straight so I could get rid of the bag of extras. Figured enough time had passed. I need one Alaska and one Hawaii state. If anyone has those hanging around and wouldn't mind sending me one, I would greatly appreciate it!
I have 42 different states some with multiples if anyone needs one to finish out a collection, just pm me! I'm ready to get this bag of quarters off my shelf :laugh:
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I would have her wear the same dress. The bow in the back could most likely be carefully removed from the seams. Go to a craft store or walmart ribbon section and find some wide ribbon that matches something you guys are wearing and tie a new one that goes in the front. Or find some tulle or a silky fabric and get a yard or two depending on size. Iron on hem tape to the silky fabric to finish the edges. Then wrap it around the child and tie it in the back like a shrug (scroll down to faux shrug) or like this (brownie points if you can tie a rosette bow) or like this (scroll down). Pair it with matching shoes and great hair bow/band and I think it would look more evening formal then bridal party.
I wouldn't buy another dress just for this one event. Does your hubby know the bridal colors?
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ROLL TIDE! We aren't football fans but my oldest is at UA and one can't help being sucked into ROLL TIDE. it is the greeting LOL! I worked last night so watched bits in various rooms with patients who were watching. Everyone was pulling for Clemson so I was the lone UA and I think made it fun for the patients last night. I had a few ask me to wake them up near the end if it was close and they fell asleep so they could see the end. I did and went room to room with a few patients as it finished. We had a fun night joking over football as most Gamecock fans rooted for Clemson.
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I left it completely up to my son. He decided to forgo the ceremony and instead had a huge bash. He is not the serious type, knew what he wanted to do, and saw no reason for cap and gown and long drawn out ordeal. We invited everyone we knew, friends, family, the mailman, seriously everyone we could think up. We served up burgers and hotdogs, a few close friends brought over some sides and helped out a little with the food.
I made him a deal though that he had to let me get senior pictures with his honor cords and a cap. We put up for display his scholarship letter, his diploma, the senior pictures and draped it all round with honor cords. And I got to play in the background pictures from his baby years to his senior pictures.
Then, we partied! The kids brought over various game systems, we pooled all the tvs, controllers, games etc we could, they linked everything up and played all sorts of video games until dark and then they played flashlight tag, ran the fire pit, and had smores. Then a few card games. It was a big bash that lasted till the wee hours. I think a few spent the night.
Wasn't at all what I wanted him to have. I miss not having the cap and gown and the walk and all but he remembers all of his friends seeing what he had done, a brief review of his life for the family, and playing like a kid before he left for college! I wouldn't have had it any other way now. It was the perfect topper to his school career.
Maybe you could do the walk and then party at your house?? Might take some of the serious out if she knows it is going to be a fun time afterwards??
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you can't know it's not normal - it's normal for you. I did see other families - and I could sense there was something different (and much healthier), but I was powerless to do anything about it.
there were still things I was nearing adulthood before I realized they were not remotely "normal" (let alone healthy.)
my grandmother waffled between not allowing me to grieve my father's death - and telling the repairman all about it.
if I said I needed something (re: new glasses), I was told, essentially, to shut up and stop trying to get attention.
OP - when something good happens for your "good" child - let them shine, support them in something good happening to them. let them know how thrilled you are for them - that they deserve to have good things happen to them. (don't focus on what they didn't accomplish.) when good things happened to me - my grandmother treated me as if I'd stolen something from my problem sister. that is not how to create filial affection.
I had not thought of it that way but that is the perfect explanation. Anything I do now or my kids do now are thefts from the brother and his. He should have the college degree, the nice home, the cars, the stable family, the great kids. Mine should be trouble and I often feel that the family is just waiting for everything to go south for me because how dare I have the things the problem child deserves. He works so hard and everything goes bad for him while my life is just charmed (sic)
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Pay attention to the non-squeaky wheel. Offer them support even when they don't "need" it. Remember, these patterns will continue into adulthood. When your difficult child needs lots of hands-on support to raise their children, TRY to spend time with the grand kids who have capable parents too. Those kids are just as deserving of a relationship as the kids with screwed up parents. The capable kids will give up on you and stop asking you to be a proactive participant in their lives. If you care, carve out the time. If you don't make time for them because you're too busy putting out fires, they will emotionally distance themselves from you and your dysfunction.
Do NOT put all of your time, effort, and resources into your troubled children and expect your capable children to be your old age support. That's like blowing all your money on the lottery then wondering why those Apple stocks you never bought aren't paying off.
This is so true. My kids don't have a relationship with my mom because she can't stop handling my brother's needs which only got passed to his kids and now their children. Now in old age, the expectation is for me to shoulder the care which means do my part and his. You can't spend your life dealing with the troubled kid and think the "right" ones are going to hang out in the wings until called. I can't recall a single memory from childhood that wasn't filtered through my brother's issues.
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Come out ahead? Wow.
In our situation, my brother's step children had Christmas morning at their house, Christmas eve at my mom's (paternal step grandmother) with our family, Christmas eve morning at my brother's wife' mom's house (maternal grandmother) and her family, the maternal grandfather's house, then another Santa Christmas at their dad's, another at the dad's mom's house and her husband, his dad's and his wife's house,
so they had two Santa's, one step family gathering, and 4 bio grandparents celebrations (yes four separate ones)
My niece had Santa, us, and her step moms family gathering. Her step siblings came out ahead always. Their dad and his family had no obligation to buy her gifts as she was the ex wife's new husband's child. So i can see why in some step situations, some come out ahead in the gift department.
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Yes, they do, and it can be overwhelming to the step. It really sort of takes some of the fun out of it for the kid, or at least that is what I saw in my own stepson. My and my husband's parents are both divorced as, of course, are his parents, so he would get stuff from a whopping six sets of grandparents (three bio sets, two step sets and one great-grandparent set) and two sets of parents, not to mention aunts and uncles. I tried to explain this to my parents, but they insisted on getting him stuff. I always insisted that when he was with us at my family's celebration, it was my and my husband's responsibility to provide something for him to unwrap. They never listened to me. It helped when he started spending Christmas with his mom, and then he grew up and it wasn't an issue any more.
I don't love the idea of forcing a relationship between steps and grandparents. My stepson is unlikely to have an ongoing relationship with my parents; in fact, he doesn't. And that's okay; he has perfectly lovely grandparents of his own. I know plenty of families do it differently, and that's fine, but it's not important to everyone.
See this has been the problem with steps in my family and my husband's. Everyone bends over to make sure everything is perfectly fair and that in no way is one slighted. But yet, the steps come out way ahead by the time they do Christmas with their other parent, that parent's divorced parents, and so on. Then they grow up and just drift away from the step family in favor of the bio family. None of the step kids have continued to visit at Christmas or Thanksgiving because you can only do so much ( 5 or 6 different Christmas gatherings and bio over step seems to be the way). Both my mom and hubby's mom have had to learn that despite all the years of complete inclusion sometimes to the exclusion of the bios, the steps have only a minimal relationship with them. They have their own host of family and relations. My niece did the same thing. She has little to do with her step family now that she is an adult on her own. She has her own. Plus, if another divorce occurs, the step family goes away anyhow.
My hubby is the same way. He had great step parents and still does. But truth be told, he would rather not be involved with them at all and just have time with his bio parents and family. And this has been going on since he was 5! They were great to him growing up and did a lot with him but as he says they are extras in a complicated picture he doesn't need or want. They are there because his parents bring them along. Since nobody has ever asked if it is okay (until this last marriage), he's never felt he could say I'd rather have celebrations with my bio family and let my step family have their own.
I don't know what the solution is. When they are little kids, you have to make it fair because it does hurt to be excluded or feel not wanted and they are kids. But it is certainly no guarantee that they will continue to feel a part of the family when they are adults. My husband has always said he already had grandparents, brother, aunts/uncles, cousins, He didn't need more and felt it was just another little way of saying the original family wasn't good enough to begin with so here's the new one. Worse, he said no one ever asked. It was always taken for granted that he would just flow with it and roll into the new family.
I have no clue how to navigate the waters during the holidays.
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When we were in the same situation, the reality was do nothing because of the grind or suck it up and grind away. It's two years. In two years, he could be making more money and you would all be in a better position. You are not going to get in a better place by waiting for the tides to carry you which ever way they flow and how ever long they take. Sometimes you have to understand that life is going to suck big time and not be your ideal at all before you can make it your ideal. I've spent the last 5 years grinding away and now we are reaping the rewards. It sucked while I was in school, and it sucked less in the not so ideal job to get the experience and knowledge to get to the current job which is SWEET! So my advice is make the sacrifice, suck it up and do whatever needs to be done to get the better position.
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That is so weird.
Did the realtor have an explanation?
WTH? Did they tell you WHY they did that? That's just weird.
Nope. Never got an explanation. They did stop using my drive so the realtor must have put a note on the realtor listing to use the driveway that belonged to the house and not block my drive. Even had one person tell me they would just be a few minutes and I could wait couldn't I? WTH was an understatement. Sometimes, you can't wait a few minutes to use your drive.
and i think the OP is in a neighborhood like mine where the street is really just access for the people who live there. It is a public street but yet only those who live here are on it. So no random people using the street for parking like in the city. Park in front of a house here and people will step outside and ask you what are you doing. Yea you have the right to park in front of my house but it is such an oddball thing that I have the right to find out why you would do that and have the police buzz by and ask you if need any help. They can't make you move as it isn't illegal to park but they can inform you you have no business here.
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when the house next door was being sold, the lookers would park in my drive, walk across the yard to go look at the house next door. No one ever used the driveway attached to the house. I couldn't figure it out. More than once, I would open the garage with a load of kids in the car to find the driveway filled with cars or blocked at the end. I think I scared off a few potential neighbors with my demands they get out of my driveway and finally had to call the selling realtor and ask her what the hell was up with using my driveway. Out in neighborhoods with large yards and driveways with garages, parking in front of someone's house as a matter of course is a no.
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(When I was abandoned by my friend back in 9th grade, I had a dime and access to a working payphone. We were not allowed to go out without phone money --> today's equivalent is a phone.)
This..... We did without a cell phone because we had phone money to call on the pay phone that was usually within throwing distance. Now you can't even find a pay phone in my area. They are simply gone. Get a basic phone. We have a dumb phone just for anyone who might be out for any reason without us. We don't even rely on other adults they might be with. One never knows if someone will decide your child's reason to call you the parents is a good enough reason to call. Otherwise, your daughter did fine.
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yea, the news is disturbing today as neighborhoods are now under mandatory evacuation and cresting is beginning. EVery hour seems to bring a new issue. But Chick fila was out today handing out sandwiches (door to door), crates of bottle water are out in front of grocery stores and other drop points. If they can get the canal dammed up again, the water should work again (its a pressure thing) i'm glad im in "safe zone" so to speak
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We are okay on the out skirts of Columbia but many in our area are not. Columbia is toast, soggy but toast. More dams are expected to be breached today if measures don't save them. Many of the flooded areas didn't know it could flood there. Local disaster control compared it to the aftermath of Katrina. I haven't seen this many closed roads since Hurricane Hugo and can't remember a time when the INTERSTATES were closed, flooded, or missing pieces. It may be worse tomorrow as evacuations are going on today. But at least the sun is shining!
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Yep, this is why I scoured craigslist and finally got a perfectly good free puppy from a "oh crap my dog came home preggers" situation. Great dog that we are training for agility. Same breed the breed rescue refused to adopt out to us because we have children and wouldn't be able to give him the appropriate time and resources for his mental and physical health. plus, we were getting him as a christmas present and oh my the horrors! No repsonible sane capable person gets a pet for christmas. Whatever....if we had not found the craigs
list puppy, I was going to our local shelter who practically pays you to take a dog and a buddy or two. Hubby refuses to support a rescue at all as he says if it takes more to adopt a dog than a kid there is something really wrong.
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I read through the entire Hobby Lobby decision when it came out and one thing I remember is that no one else can define a sincerely held religious belief for someone else. They used the example of a Jehovah's Witness that had worked in a factory making sheet metal, then the factory switched over to making weapons. The JW said that it was against his religious beliefs. They tried to argue that the JW was behaving hypocritically to make metal that went on to be turned into weapons, but claim it violated his religious beliefs to make the weapons himself. However, the Supreme Court ruled that it didn't matter if one's beliefs were inconsistent or hypocritical. All that mattered was that they were sincerely held, which as best as I could figure out, was just taken on faith. I actually don't agree with the Hobby Lobby decision, but I am confused because it seems like the KY clerk being jailed should conflict with the HL ruling. Why do employers get to not follow the law by not providing health insurance that meets legal qualifications because it violates their religious beliefs, but the clerk doesn't get the same right?
The clerk is an elected official in a government office. That's the difference.
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25th anniversary
in The Chat Board
Posted
Thanks for the ideas! I'm not sure what we are going to do but I did order a very neat key ring for him. :laugh: