I don't know, couldn't you make a strong argument that it's not about punishing the child but about teaching the child that if you damage or destroy someone's property, you offer to pay for the damages, even if it was an accident? I mean, no one appreciates it when adults don't understand this concept (thinking about the discussion where the autistic child broke a $250 table and the mom didn't even offer to help pay for it). But if someone has always been sheltered from the consequences of their actions and taught "honest mistake means no negative consequences" then why would you expect someone to suddenly grasp this concept as an adult?

Huh, when I was a kid I had a very small growth on my lip that was removed by the dentist. Though it was very small, the size of a little flap of skin, so maybe that's why the dentist could handle it and your husband's is bigger?

There are five generations on my dad's side of same first name, different middle name. Though my dad was the third born son, I guess my grandparents didn't feel like being traditional with the first two! On my MIL's side it was traditional for the women not have middle names and have their maiden name become their middle name when they married, but my MIL broke this tradition by just using first name married name and giving middle names to all her daughters.

I've always thought that if I qualified for SNAP but had no need for it, I'd accept and spend it all at our local food co-op and/or farmer's market (which you can do here, probably isn't the case everywhere, I imagine). The government gives so much in subsidies to the big agrofarms, I would not feel bad at all about accepting food stamps I didn't truly need if I could use it to make sure local farms benefit.

Don't you think that might be a little offensive to someone who does spend $700 a month to feed their family, calling that amount a ridiculous amount? It doesn't seem that excessive to me to spend $700 a month. I don't know why SNAP allotments would vary so widely in your state. They do take other bills you have to pay into consideration, so high mortgage or rent payments could mean getting a higher allotment than someone else with the same income and family size...but it doesn't seem like it should vary that much! And you're sure your brother and SIL were getting $900 a month?? In my state to get that much you'd have to have 6 people in your family (pregnancy doesn't count) and very little income (like less than $1200 a month). I wonder if they took a couple months to approve their application and backdated it so that the first month they received several months SNAP dollars all at once so maybe they misunderstood and thought it would be that much every month?? I just can't see otherwise how two people could qualify for $900 a month.

Not YEC, but I don't see why it would. You couldn't expect people who were uninspired by God to keep all the details straight, right?

And people can only live for relatively short intervals that high up. That's why when people climb Mt. Everest, they have to summit quickly before they succumb to the effects of the altitude.

And you count the grass fed beef into your monthly food buget? I just ask because we buy a cow at a time and when I am calculating what we spend on food, I often forget to average out the price of the beef by the number of months it takes us to consume it.

Huh, I always heard that it was the Fall that caused some animals to become predators.

Just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding...you have to pay money in order to donate your body to science??

Actually, it is a religious belief in Orthodox Judaism that hands are to be washed before eating, after using the bathroom, etc. There are also verses in the Bible talking about how when you need to defecate you need to leave the city and bury it with a shovel. The handwashing part might be found in the Talmud rather than the actual Bible, I'm not quite sure, but that doesn't seem relevant because I'm sure Jewish people would believe the Talmud was inspired by God as well, yes?

Assuming we're just talking about simple power outages and not SHTF apocalypse type scenarios, you can put dry ice in your freezer and that should keep things frozen for a day or two.

This article seems relevant: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/nyregion/ice-picks-are-still-used-as-weapons.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

How do you know what the statistics are for really large families started by women after 25? Are you just looking around and seeing it happens very rarely? Because when you have 99% of people using birth control at some point in their lives, that isn't a reliable way to determine how many people could have a large family if they didn't use birth control. Especially since women who start their families over the age of 25 are starting them at a time when their energy levels are typically starting to decline and so are more likely to use birth control to space births than someone younger than 25. (I would only have 3 right now and no pregnancy if everything had gone according to MY plans.) I remember thinking when my second was 1 that a megafamily was only possible for people who got started in their early 20s because you need to have your oldest one or two old enough to help by the time your energy starts declining in your late 20s. So I would guess very few people choose to pursue mega families if they don't get started young because it is exhausting to be dealing with multiple little ones in your 30s without significantly older kids to help out! But that doesn't mean it's not physically possible to get pregnant that often! Looking it up, the average amount of children in the 1800s was 5-6, which is maybe what that stat is based on....but nutrition for many people was considerably poorer than it is today. It's also not totally reliable since there were surely people who found themselves in circumstances where they chose to abstain rather than have more kids, so it doesn't tell us the up most physical limit of how many kids they could have had. Also, average would mean that approximately half of those women were having significantly more kids than 5-6 to make up for the women who were having less. So that could easily leave you with 50% of women capable of having large families. Just from doing genealogy, I found it really interesting that on my mom's side, most of my poor ancestors had about 8 kids, the rich ones were averaging about 16! (They were in a culture where they would have been using wet nurses.)

I don't know about that. 15% of couples suffer from infertility, meaning it takes them longer than one year to get pregnant. So that leaves the other 85% with normal fertility and while some of them may end up suffering from secondary infertility or early menopause, I think it's a stretch to say the chances of having a large family, if you're having sex without birth control, is really all that low. Yeah, miscarriages happen, couples miss their fertile time, but most of the time that is going to only set you back by a couple of months. I am a little biased though because I didn't become pregnant until 25 and am due with my 5th and it's only been six years since my first was born. So I've almost reached by quota already and I probably have at least 10 more fertile years ahead of me (judging by the other women in my family). :tongue_smilie: Anyway, I would just be careful about assuming that women who make comments about having huge families if they didn't use bc are ignorant, maybe they know their own bodies well enough to be making an educated guess about what would happen. I would imagine that women who do have a lot of miscarriages or who take a long time to get pregnant each time are not the ones making those comments to you.

No, that study was done among North American mothers. For African women, it varies of course, but one study found that the !Kung tribe women would breastfeed an average of two minutes out of every 15 minutes even when the baby was a toddler and they would not conceive again until an average of 35 months. So I guess if you do that you might only end up having 6 children in your lifetime but I cannot imagine any Western women being willing to nurse a toddler that often! For Rwandan women living in cities and breastfeeding, most (75%) mothers would conceive between 6-15 months, but most rural breastfeeding mothers would not conceive until 24-29 months. Here is where I found those stats: https://www.ewtn.com/library/MARRIAGE/BRESF.TXT

Oh come on, drawing on a table with markers and breaking it into pieces by jumping on it do not belong in the same category!

Does it really help to get one of these licenses and not use it for 10-20 years though? It seems like it would a considerable investment of time and money to get one of these licenses and continually renew it when you have no intention of ever working at a job that would need the license except under worst case scenarios and if your life plan is to have a new baby every couple of years, it could be very hard to find the time and childcare to do it. Since they aren't that hard to get it, it doesn't seem that risky to wait until they're needed to get one. A CNA, for instance, can be earned in as little as a few weeks. A few weeks and then you would be in the exact same position as if you had earned it in the beginning of your marriage and then didn't use it for 20 years. I have a Bachelor's degree and haven't worked for for 7 years and sometimes I think if something were to happen to my husband, I would be better off NOT having my BA. Reason being if I didn't have one, I could go back to college with grants and subsidized loans (that are not available for pursuing undergrad classes when you already have an undergrad degree) and pursue a degree in whatever I thought would best give me the opportunity of financially supporting my family, rather than be stuck with the degree that was based off what my 20 year old self thought would be the most fun and interesting. Even if my 20 year old self was being more practical and thinking, "What should I study now and pursue a career in so that after 20 years of being a SAHM should something happen to my husband I would have the best chance of being able to re-enter the workforce?" still seems likely I wouldn't have made the "right" choice. There is no way to predict what the labor market will be like in 20 years. My husband just recently completely his Bachelor's. He chose to specialize in a field that was one of the highest in demand at the time, but three years later when he actually graduated the demand had completely slowed and no one in his class had a job offer upon graduation. Same thing could easily happen with maintaining one of these licenses. You could maintain it for 20 years, have something happen to your husband, try to find a job with it only to realize that a different license would give you better job opportunities.

To play devil's advocate, a college degree, by itself, doesn't necessarily make you marketable either.

Before my husband knew what it was like to have one baby, he wanted to have boy triplets and name them Boris, Gleb and Igor. Because apparently there is a trio of Orthodox saints with those names that he's always liked. I really can't stand any of those names, but you did say you wanted to be entertained, so there you go.

The idea of cutting back on children's food portions due to budget issues just makes me feel sad. My husband went to bed hungry every single night because portion sizes were limited in his family due to poverty. His parents didn't know either, because if he or his siblings acted like they were still hungry after eating dinner their mom would start freaking out and then they'd feel guilty for making her feel bad, so they'd pretend to be fine and then lay in bed for hours with their stomachs grumbling. It's made him kind of hyper vigilant about making sure our kids always have had enough to eat before going to bed. So if it were me, based on seeing how painful of an experience that was for my husband, I would try to find some other option besides restricting how much a child can eat at dinner. Maybe more rice and beans and other cheap staples or even looking into getting some kind of food assistance? As long as it's healthy foods, I'd much rather err on the side of my child eating a little more than absolutely necessary than risk them feeling hungry.

I wouldn't. I don't think anyone would even notice that you didn't bring anything.

I think the purpose of standardized testing for homeschoolers is to give the parent some idea of where their child is and serve as a wake up call to parents whose child is behind. This would still be accomplished if the parent was cheating, because they would see what their child should be able to accomplish based on state guidelines. If a parent helping was really such a big deal, they would require the tests be given by proctors, but they don't, I think because they figure either way parents will still get an idea of how their children measure up to those in public school.

How much do these new fangled dishwashers cost? One dishwashing employee working full time at $10 an hour is going to cost the employer $20,000 a year in wages alone. Do these dishwashers cost more than that? And I also don't understand who is going to load and unload this new fangled dishwasher, the owner? I guess that works if the owner has a few hours of free time that he doesn't have to spend doing any other duties at the restaurant.

Re:Transportation costs, it does bug me a bit when people are like "Just buy an old reliable used car!" like it's not some huge gamble whether the old car you bought turns out to be reliable or not. Five years ago we thought we were buying an old reliable car when we spent around $5,000 for a Ford Focus that was about 5 years old. Even had our trusted mechanic check it out and he saw no issues with it. Well, 7 months later the clutch was starting to give out and it would have cost $2,000 to replace it. So if we would have opted to fix it, that would be $7,000 in that year just for the car and the repair, which would have ended up averaging $583 a month, which wouldn't even include gas or car insurance or any additional repairs that could be needed. Well, instead of doing that, we did the completely irresponsible thing of buying a brand new car *gasp* and were saddled with a $300 a month car payment for five years. (BTW we originally thought we'd just get a car a couple years old since everyone says "Don't buy a new car, they lose so much value just driving off the lot" but I think everyone else had the same idea and the cars that were just a year or two old were just marginally cheaper than the brand new ones.) Yeah, so it's definitely not as simple as "Buy an old reliable used car" because that's a total gamble that could have you ending up being out more money per time spent driving the car than just buying a new one.