Oooh! Like Simple Simon! He went to catch a little bird/ and said he couldn't fail/ because he had a bit of salt/ to sprinkle on its tail! The only old wives tale I heard a lot was about glass. It's everywhere, apparently, and if you eschew shoes all the old biddies will tell you about it. Me being me, I'd try to point out the illogic of this. And they'd listen, too, convinced they could convince me! I'd get them to agree that we all had functioning eyes. I'd get them to agree that there was NO GLASS visible anywhere in the vicinity. I'd get them to agree that if any of us saw glass, we wouldn't step on it, whether or not we were wearing shoes. They would agree that yes, I did appear to watch where I was going, and that no, drunks did not routinely congregate on our quiet street to break bottles. And then, as I turned to go, they'd come out with the same five lines, every time: "BUT THERE COULD BE GLASS!" (Spoiler: There never was glass. The only time I ever got something in my foot I was actually wearing shoes. Stepped on a pile of twigs, didn't realize they had big huge spikey thorns. One went right through the sole and into my foot. Never would have happened if I'd been barefoot, I'd've walked around.) That's not a traditional old wives' tale, but I only ever heard it from old wives, so... yeah.

There is wide range of parenting books out there. It might help to narrow it down just a little bit. For example, if you're not okay with spanking (and it sorta sounds like you aren't, as you don't say you've tried it), then many authors are not going to be helpful for you because they're really big on spanking. (And some of them go well beyond that, but I'll leave it to others to name names here.) Are there any things that are absolutely not acceptable to you, advice-wise?

It's not people posting spam, it's bots.

Probably eggs. We go through them by the dozen when the girls decide they hate my cooking and want to do everything themselves. And then I go out and by a gross, just in time for the girls to decide they hate eggs and I'm mean for making them cook. There is no winning.

I lived through it (though not as close to the actual disaster as some people, luckily, just on Staten Island). I don't want to rehash it every year. For the first few years I actively stayed in to avoid even seeing the lights (which are plainly visible from my part of Staten Island).

They are certainly protected, and whoever did that is scum. Go ahead and call it in. On the off chance that this IS actually normal eagle behavior, the people you report it to will know the difference. For that matter, the nests of ALL native birds, I believe, are protected, at least once they have eggs in them they are. If I've told the girls once I've told them a million times, never, ever meddle with a bird's nest when there are young. It's okay to look at an old robin's nest that's empty, as we've done, but never, ever bother their young.

By use of the phrase Remembrance Day combined with a September date for Labor Day, my guess is Canada. Edit: Hey, look, Dory knows where she lives better than I do. Who'da thunkit?

Because there are only so many seats available at Stuyvessant. I attended that school. In my experience, about half the kids there, possibly more, aren't extraordinarily intelligent. Oh, they're not slow in any way, or even average, but they're probably just bright side of average, not supergeniuses. Those kids simply have been preparing for this test since kindergarten. You'd be surprised to know how many kids in my 9th grade homeroom admitted they didn't really want to attend that school, their parents pushed them. (Smart enough to get in, not smart enough to flub the test.) Those kids probably do better than the very smart ones, when it comes to that. Well, the Selective high schools start in 9th grade. Did your husband attend Hunter? That starts in 7th - and yes, after a very competitive entrance exam that's only open to students who did well on the statewide tests.

Even in the US school schedules vary a lot. I was an adult by the time I realized that down south (and other places) they run from August to May! It surprises me every year when friends down south start talking about the "end of the school year" a month before our kids get out, and again when they start talking about "back to school" a month before we start up! Our schools actually just started last Thursday here in NYC. Only a few years ago we had this weird schedule where school started on Wednesday, and then we immediately took two days off for Rosh Hashanah. Stupidest thing in the world, and hardly anybody came in on that Wednesday, not even the teachers. We couldn't start sooner due to the contract, but they could've fudged it a little and made the "first day of school" a staff development day.

I had trouble telling time on an analog clock until high school. If I asked the time, and somebody showed me on their watch and it wasn't digital, I just nodded sagely, thanked them, and went to find somebody else. After reflecting on my problem, and on that of the darling girls, I think the problem is that darn minute hand. They look at 4:59, observe that the hour hand is *just short* of the 5, and determine that it must be... 5:59. If they could learn to tell time with just the hour hand, noting if it was about halfway between two hours or whatnot, and then add the minute hand in much later, they'd have much greater accuracy in the long run. I don't think textbooks agree with me.

That IS very interesting! Why were your cousins sent to an Amish school?

You can often get them used, though. That helps.

Why feel guilty? You're not being lazy or anything, you're teaching your children important life skills.

By the time you eat it, the lye is gone or harmless.

I just thought of something. If she names kiddo 4 an E name, and then has kiddo 5, she either has to pick a U name (or perhaps a Y name, such as Yvonne) or make it look like she's completely clueless and didn't realize she had a theme going. It'd be like naming your kids Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Hector. Faith, Hope, and Carter. People would notice. Back to the drawing board. How about Bridget or Caroline or Danielle? Or Frieda or Gwendolyn or Hope or Judith? (How about I stop before I find myself trying to justify Xiomara as a name for your child? Actually, apparently about 330 girls in the US were given that name as recently as 2008, so clearly very many people like it and I don't know what I'm talking about.)

Indeed. Sadly, there's nothing more I can say about lye other than that it can be used when counterfeiting money, but don't ask me how. I copied all that directly from Wikipedia, LOL.

If your baby is swinging out when you bend over, you haven't cinched your ring sling tight enough. They should move with your body. Of course, with an older baby you can use a ring sling on the hip or even the back, though that doesn't help much in those days before the kiddo can sit up. That said, a mei tai or a soft structured carrier of some sort can be ideal for a busy mother.

Lye is used in making hominy. It's also used in curing olives, making pretzels and other forms of lye bread, making those crispy orange Chinese noodles, making century eggs.... Well, suffice to say that lye has many uses in the kitchen. It also can be used to clean your drains and to prepare certain illegal drugs. If you really are that set on making your own meth, for crying out loud, at least use food grade lye. (But really, don't do drugs.)

I just reassure myself with the hope that soon they will be very, very deaf.

Really? I imagine cake mixes that don't involve adding an egg just use powdered egg in the mix. I wouldn't consider a home cook who uses powdered eggs to not be "cooking from scratch".

A news aggregator is a website or an app that collects the news for you from a bunch of different sources. You can set them to collect news with certain keywords (my google news is set up right now to specifically collect news that mentions the Kurds or Kurdistan, as I grew very interested in them after reading several articles about Iraqi Kurds fighting ISIS) or to collect news from particular sites, or both, really. Then, instead of checking a dozen news sources every day, you just check one - your aggregator, which has done all the work for you. You can find a list here, though there are many options that they didn't mention. I'm about as liberal as they come, but I'll tell you, I recently read an article there that had been crossposted on Metafilter, and I was really surprised at the quality of the piece.

I don't think three is a very large sample size, especially if all three kids are your kids.

If your friends want to make you some nice almond milk, I'm sure they're welcome to. Otherwise, why are they privy to your grocery receipts?

From scratch means your own ingredients (or your own ingredients that you got from the store)... but some of those ingredients can be prepackaged. Frozen vegetables and canned tomatoes are often more nutritious than fresh (especially in winter!). Few of us are going to routinely bake our own bread and make our own pasta, though kudos if you do. And if your entire meal is made from things you grabbed out of the garden, but you decided to use a prepared salad dressing instead of making your own, I promise, the whole foods police won't come knocking at your door :) For day-to-day life, I don't think this is a term that needs a very precise definition. A gut feeling, rule of thumb definition is good enough for most of us.

Just make sure you use proper sling rings and NOT craft rings, which are not strong enough to fit the needs of a growing child and can break.