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eternalsummer

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Everything posted by eternalsummer

  1. I generally think lasagna is better the second day anyway. It's messier than a taco bar, though, esp. with kids.
  2. I've always seen other parents' emails through cc's (granted, just two schools, both public - one a charter).
  3. I read it not for the information, exactly (although it is really interesting to read the state of the science in the 50s, and of course some of it is still accurate), but for the poetry. It is beautifully written. I got it for me, but I could see giving it (I have the full edition, the one still in print) to a kid who has already had some geology and/or biology - maybe an early high schooler - with the caveat that some of the science is outdated (and the caution that this implies that some current science is probably wrong, too, or at least incomplete). It was just such a lovely read. As a side note, some of the outdated science in it made me look things up and refresh/re-understand them, which was pretty cool. And some of the parts where she basically says, we observe this phenomenon but we have no idea why it exists, here are some ideas - those were great, because I could go look up the topic on wikipedia and see if those questions have been answered yet (the answer is often yes).
  4. I'm not sure why you took her for a tour when you had no intention of letting her join the school. Going for 9 weeks is not joining the school.
  5. Yes, when we almost moved to Bend, Oregon (we were there for a few weeks), they had a vegan donut shop in town. With like, normal donuts - not hibiscus mint or macadamia matcha or whatever, but just regular old glazed, chocolate iced, etc. vegan donuts. And they were cheap(ish). I gained I think 10 pounds in 3 weeks. Where we are now, the nearest vegan bakery is 2 hours away, just far enough that I only go every few months (but close enough to get a donut fix every few months).
  6. Well if she wants to come home, that's entirely different and I'd pull her tomorrow. If they want to stay, I'd let them finish out the year.
  7. Oh, and for this kind of thing (we have similarly restrictive diets so I do a lot of research when we travel) I like Yelp and I think TripAdvisor - good place to start to weed out local restaurants and find things that can work. I do a lot of food tourism when we travel :) (even if we're just passing through, if it's somewhere with a vegan bakery I'm trying it out).
  8. My sister lives in Astoria (north of Manhattan a ways) and works in Manhattan as a nanny; she eats out at Bareburger pretty regularly. They have GF buns and veggie burgers and for the meat eaters, they have bison or (I think) grass-fed beef. The best thing, imo, about NYC, is the food - I would look for hole in the wall ethnic restaurants if possible and just order something without gluten. Most Asian places won't have a lot of dairy options anyway, if any. But if you have Celiac and cross-contamination is an issue, that is harder to do.
  9. Personally, I am super proud of my throw pillows.
  10. What an obnoxious lady! I would have totally caved like you did (because I hate confrontation), then come back at a different time with a different librarian and paid it (or paid it online).
  11. Yay! Great name, congratulations :)
  12. My kids don't sleep more but the older ones do entertain themselves (and feed themselves, and clean up after themselves, etc.) My downtime and productive time (and on occasion some sleep time) happens while they are awake.
  13. Maybe we just got lucky with lice. We did get them several times - I can't even count, but at least 3 or maybe more. The thing is, the cousin has them pretty much constantly, so whenever they spent the weekend with cousin (we used to live in the same city) or vacation there, now that we live farther away, DD12 would share a bed and hair grooming and etc. with cousin and surprise, we'd get lice. I never went to these things so I couldn't monitor; refusing to visit cousin was definitely not an option. We did wash pillowcases and sheets every day during the lice purge and banished stuffed animals from the bed. We did the heat and the shampoo both with the first infestation because I was so freaked out (and we had so many, because we had no idea that cousin had lice at that point, so spent 2 months treating head itchiness with hypoallergenic shampoos and hot oil treatments and etc.). I don't know that the shampoo did anything; I think the heat did kill the nits that I missed with the comb, but after I read about the life cycle of lice I realized that killing the nits was really unnecessary - as long as you are combing every morning, you catch any newly hatched ones and eventually you've caught all the hatchlings before they can reproduce and lay eggs. The key is, for us, that each child, even children without lice at first, have to be combed every day, because if a hatchling climbs from one kid's hair to another kid's hair and you have ignored kid 2 because he didn't have lice in the first place, you can eradicate lice on original kid completely but the hatchling on kid 2 will grow up and lay eggs and they will hatch and then you have lice again. I have 6 kids; DD12 is old enough to do her own hair now and can also do the little boys' hair; DS9 takes about 5 minutes a day; DD6 takes 10 minutes. When I was doing DD12's hair (long, thick, etc.), it took about half an hour most mornings. So total time less than an hour. A sucky hour, and I still occasionally have a paranoia that I've got lice somehow and I comb everyone just to make sure, but not the worst thing in the world. I read somewhere that ancient Egyptians used to be buried (entombed?) with their lice combs to take to the afterworld. I can say that this is something I definitely understand. I always own a lice comb now, and always will. It is one of the things I will grab during an escape from the Apocalypse. All of that said, if your kids don't want to leave school I do think it would be unnecessarily traumatic to bring them home in the middle of the year unless you have an exceedingly good reason. For me, "they might get lice" is not a good enough reason to make kids that sad.
  14. When we did get lice it wasn't from school, btw. We got it from a cousin. (more than once, the same cousin)
  15. Lice is not that hard to deal with. You get a lice comb (a good one, from Amazon) and comb everyone in the house twice a day for about 2 weeks. Combing takes maybe 15 minutes for a grown woman/teenage girl with long hair or 30 seconds for a small kid with short hair. (and in between, of course). If you comb the kid who is in school every day you should never get lice to start with.
  16. I am not Christian, but I've always seen that and similar sentiments less as "God has favored me in this way because I am an especially righteous person" and more as "I am lucky that God has favored me in this way." If you see God as the essential controller of things, and something good happens to you (or something bad doesn't happen to you), then the only logical conclusion is that you've been blessed or spared by God - but it doesn't necessarily imply that he's blessed or spared you because you're super awesome, just that you were lucky enough to be, at this point in the plan of the universe, blessed or spared. I don't see God as a person sitting in the sky (or a sort of separate deity - "tao called tao is not tao," etc.), so for me, when I miss hitting a deer on the highway and say to myself, Thank God, I don't mean literally that a person in the sky has chosen to spare me from the deer (and not spared the people who do hit deer); instead, I'm expressing gratefulness at what you might call luck or providence or good fortune.
  17. Oh, I think it turned into that because he seemed more or less okay on the granola bars, but he ran out and I assumed he couldn't figure out how to get more. (since they were working before, and are generally a convenient and portable source of energy, not to mention relatively cheap). So I thought the problem must be that he couldn't figure out how to get more granola bars (because they're easier to get than boiled eggs or breakfast sandwiches or burritos, ime).
  18. I'm sorry, I didn't mean for him to go to the grocery store; I thought you said the mail delivery center (where he could pick up an Amazon shipment) was a mile away. So I was thinking you or he could order 100 granola bars from Amazon, walk a mile any time he has free to get them, and walk back. Then be set for 2 months or more.
  19. International package shipping has gone up enormously. up to 8oz to Spain (that's half a pound, really tiny) is $13, approx. OP, we did this when we moved to NZ. We had one set of flight(s) to LA, then another set from LA to Christchurch. Unfortunately, we had a delay in one of the domestic flights, which made us miss the connection for the second domestic flight, so we got in about 6 hours late to LA and missed the NZ flight by about 10 minutes. Luckily some other travellers had a similar issue (2 Australians and 2 Kiwis), but they had booked their flights altogether. The ticketing people tried to get out of putting them up for the night and putting them on the next plane, but they argued them into it (fairly, as it was the same airline's delay that had caused them to miss the NZ flight). Somehow the ticketing people for the NZ flight assumed we were in the same situation as the Australians and Kiwis - we sort of hung around with them while they argued - and so they gave us the next day's flight and hotel vouchers too, otherwise we would have been SOL. The domestic flights were through the southwest, though during winter, so we thought the weather was likely to be fine. It wasn't. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, maybe she might consider flying into NYC one day, staying overnight, then flying to Spain the next day. It would give her a bit more buffer.
  20. I think it's always good to have a current passport, even if you're not necessarily planning on travelling soon, so that is great!
  21. I walked a mile to and from school or to and from the grocery store when I was in college. When I went to get groceries, I took a backpack. Just thinking now, I think you could get ate least something like 100 granola bars in a backpack (I agree to pick high protein ones), so that would be a trip every two months at most. I did the grocery run twice a week. A mile is not that far. If you don't think he can walk a mile, you could pay for a taxi to take him to the mail center, wait for him to pick up a couple of months' worth of granola bars, and bring him back. Depends on location, but most places this would run less than $15.
  22. Wow! No way! That is very exciting and I am so happy for you :)
  23. I looked quite briefly and found that her SAT was below average for their last admission class, and in combination with not actually being interested or demonstrating interest in going to the school, I'd be surprised if they had admitted her. I doubt it has much to do with homeschooling.
  24. The thing is, with mental illness, you can't just count on staying on his good side forever by doing the "right" things and appeasing him. Someday he will react illogically to something you either didn't mean to do or say or that you didn't even do or say or that has nothing to do with you or that doesn't even exist except in his head. I would feel really terrible about your parents too, and I'd give them all the advice I could and monetary support I could to escape - but I'd also take my kids (and husband) and leave yesterday.
  25. I had this problem too for a long time, then I gave up folding. No one has noticed or remarked on any difference. We literally just shove clothes into drawers or cubby holes or wherever they go. The world has not stopped spinning as yet.
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