This is common behavior in cats and kittens that were not weaned properly - and if you think she's between 5-7 weeks old, she is apart from her mother at a *very* young age! She might grow out of it, or she might not. The only thing I can think of that stands a shot at working is removing her from you as soon as she starts, just like you would with a toddler or preschooler. She IS a toddler, in kitten terms. Just gently but firmly take her off your chest and put her in your lap as soon as she starts. If she immediately tries to climb up again, put her on the floor. If you do end up shutting her out the door, return to her in a few minutes and snuggle her with the same rule. It is also possible that she wants to play. Remember, she's nocturnal. Many cats do learn to acclimate to human schedules when they live with humans, but they don't learn at the age of two months. When it starts getting dark (but before she starts nibbling on you), try playing "catch the ribbon" or "catch the foil ball" or "catch the laser pointer" with her. Her behavior might improve if she's getting active attention from you before she starts nibbling. Oooh, I thought of one more possibility! Have you just brushed your teeth? Catnip is a type of mint, and many many cats really enjoy all sorts of mints. She might be going a little kitty crazy for the minty freshness of your breath.

SNAP (food stamps) doesn't care about vaccinations one way or another. WIC only cares about vaccinations under the age of 2, and they won't deny benefits for not vaccinating or call child services or whatnot, they'll just advise you on how to get affordable vaccinations for your child. She won't get flagged in any system, because the system just doesn't care that much. http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/immunization-screening-and-referral-wic

He can get a passport *card* instead of a passport *book* if you, for whatever reason, can't manage a non-driver ID. It's much cheaper than a regular passport because it's only good for land transport into Mexico or Canada.

Whether or not I'd circumcise any son, doing it just so he can match his brother seems... well, I'll say it, it seems frivolous. If his brother was a girl, you wouldn't cut it off entirely so they'd match. If his brother had, I don't know, a missing finger you wouldn't cut that off either.

Do you have any food already stocked? Does it have to be portable? Are there any other options for feeding your family if the money *doesn't* stretch (free summer food for kids, foraging, food pantry, friendly neighbors who have regular weekend barbecues)? It's a doable budget, but it's more doable if you already have beans and flour and rice, y'know? (Do you need sample recipes?)

A nice chilled soup, like gazpacho, perhaps? http://www.saveur.com/article/-/Cool-Soups http://www.marthastewart.com/275145/chilled-soup/@center/276964/60-days-summer But then, is it possible that they could get contamination from gluten simply by eating food that was cooked in your kitchen, using your cookware? Maybe some nice fresh fruit might be better.

Grate it finely, squeeze it, add it to meatloaf. After a while, you forget that not everybody has to sneak that stuff into the menu.

Grate them raw and toss them in salad.Yes, just like you do with carrots. Roast them, toss with feta and dill. Steam them, toss with lemon juice and diced mint. Cook them like this or like this.

Cover it with horseradish and lemon, shove it in the oven. Salmon is too rich for me without something strong like horseradish to help out - and the girls can just scrape the horseradish off to get to the fish! I serve it with this stuff.

Just remember - with the new reboot, Enterprise is now the only series that is canon!

Have you seen Grimm? It's a silly show, with a silly premise, but I enjoy it. And Buffy is totally available on Netflix. I may or may not watch the musical episode once a month.... Have you seen Stargate Universe? Agents of SHIELD, which all my fannish friends squee over but I don't much care for?Defiance?

Oh! All this talk about Star Trek reminded me! Have you guys seen this yet? Face blends of TOS actors with their Reboot counterparts! I never was a fan of TOS, and the Reboot leaves me a bit cold, but man, is that or is that not the hottest incarnation of Kirk ever?

Star Trek, particularly DS9 - although, yes, neither of them is even in the same room as B5.

We're starting homeschooling this year too, and it looks like my younger kid is the same age as your daughter. Many schools don't put much of an emphasis on spelling nowadays. Even when they do, spelling for a test is different than spelling in the heat of the moment. When it's for a test, you have the word right there in your memory, because you studied. When you're writing - especially when the test is long in the past - it's not there anymore, you're focused on other things. On the plus side, her spellings for our and stole are perfectly reasonable. They're just incorrect. I've seen some doozies of misspellings on homework over the years, a reasonably spelled (but incorrect) spelling doesn't shock me anymore. I can't tell you what spelling curriculum is a good idea for homeschooling (because we're just starting!) but I bet if you go back and review with one, things will get better. Not pausing at the end of a sentence is another bad habit - and that's all it is, a habit - that kids pick up. I wouldn't worry about that.I did cure my kids of that before this summer by reading aloud to them, pointing out the punctuation if they skipped over it if they were reading to me, occasionally reading in a super exaggerated monotone (you know, to set the example), and repeating "reading aloud is an art!" a bazillion times a day. As for math facts... you know what? I got this advice from teachers, and it's really good advice. As much as possible, make drill into games. Get a deck of cards and play multiplication war, addition go fish. Get some dice and play shut the box (we use 8 sided dice). Get a copy of Sleeping Queens, and another of Zeus on the Loose. Sitting there with a sheet of 100 problems, after already spending an hour and a half doing LA that's apparently too hard and stressful - I think my girls would kill me. Seriously, I'd be a puddle of goo on the floor, and they'd be quite right! It sounds like misery. We had to do a lot of extra math work with the one girl and extra spelling with the other over the years, and if we just threw it in there after a stressful homework session they would get simple easy stuff wrong and cry while they did it as well. The easy, gentle, fun way works just as well, but without all the drama.

On a tangent, the peeving about utilize and commentate (I'll be honest here, I don't even like the word "comment". I prefer "talk"!) and orientate has a precursor in Latin. One of the things that happened in Latin as it developed from Classical Latin to Medieval Latin is people started arbitrarily expanding words to make them sound more authoritative or cool. Well, I don't really know what they were thinking. Most likely, just like English speakers today, they weren't really thinking anything, they just thought it sounded better. So we have words like "masculine" which come from Medieval Latin "masculinus" rather than Classical Latin "masculus". I wish I remembered my Medieval Latin better. We had a whole long talk about this with examples when I took it, but now that's the only concrete example I can point to.

But how does that sound "worse" than saying "I was really freezing my butt off"?

Do you object to people using "really" as an intensifier? Or "honestly" or "truly" or "very"? Or "absolutely", "positively", "totally"? All those words have followed the exact same trajectory, but for whatever reason the only one people object to is literally. And that really, really sticks in my craw. (But not, you know, in *reality* really.) To be honest, the only intensifiers I can think of that do NOT have a meaning asserting veracity are slang terms - mad, hella, wicked. I'm not going to switch to using just those. If you can think of any, I'd be glad to hear them, because if they exist I must be suffering from terminal brain fart right now. Even if there are such words, that doesn't change my stance. I'm not arguing with Mark Twain. I'm just not. Nor am I arguing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, or any of the myriad others who have used the word in this sense. I mean, are we really going to say that Jane Austen doesn't use English properly? Or Thoreau doesn't, perhaps?

People who use the word "literally" as an intensifier ARE using the meaning of the word. It's a perfectly valid meaning, one that has been in existence for hundreds of years. Look it up! Unless you're opposed to all language change, in which case, again, you should only be using the word "literal" to mean "relating to letters". But if that's the case, Mark Twain (among others) would like to have a word with you.

It really makes me explode. It truly is the worst thing ever! It is very nauseating. ... Ah, I feel dirty just having typed that! If the use of the word literally as an intensifier is good enough for Alexander Pope, I'm certainly not going to argue! Besides, if I did that I'd be fighting the tide - the word has been used that way since the very beginning. (Well, since it first shed its literal usage of "relating to letters". And that is the only peeve I will entertain on the word. If you want to stick to *that* meaning, more power to you!)

If you don't keep the door open too long, especially in a humid place, then you shouldn't have to defrost too often.

You can use cauliflower to substitute for rice by grating it or chopping it in the food processor (then just quick fry for a few minutes if desired), or for mashed potatoes by steaming it. That's much lower in carbs than the foods they're replacing, and healthier still if you use orange or purple cauliflower.

If you want to keep her as an indoor cat, I would suggest that you invest in a good air purifier and put limits on where she can be. She doesn't need the run of the house unless your house is really very small. A few rooms, none of which is a bedroom, is quite sufficient. You should wash your hands after playing with the cat, and change your clothes (you might want to keep some special "cat smocks" for playtime, in fact, to facilitate this) if they have cat hair on them. I would also recommend that you (and by "you" I mean "the least allergice person in the family") vacuum your house frequently (especially any area the cat goes in) using a vacuum with a HEPA filter,and comb the cat once or twice a day on the porch, washing the brush afterwards and, if possible, wiping kitty with a damp cloth. If the cat is amenable, you might even bathe her once a week - just water, no soap or a gentle soap only. And, of course, a higher-quality diet can reduce dander on your cat (or, to phrase it correctly, low quality diets *cause* dander to increase). It's the dander that makes you sick. None of these will eliminate the need for medication in a severely allergic individual, but they will reduce it. You might also consider immune therapy - you'd have to talk to your doctor about that. I love cats myself, so I don't think it is necessarily unreasonable to do everything you can to keep one. However, you should be aware that allergies sometimes worsen with exposure. If your symptoms get worse after having had the cat for a year or two, it will be that much harder to rehome her at that point.

You know, up until recently I really thought I was the only person who had ever even heard of this book! OP, when you say "modern" do you mean "written recently" or do you mean "set in the present"?

Dude, Mo Willems is the best thing to happen to children's literature since the printing press. And I will say that, based on my experience as a child and that of kids I know, readers bring out qualities in books that outsiders don't know are there. Honestly, a good reader can get quality out of the silliest, tackiest extruded book product on the market. I don't know *how*, but it happens. But with that said, you do not have infinite bookshelf space. No matter what your philosophy is towards twaddle and how stringently you define that, you're just not going to have enough space, ever, for every single *quality* book out there. So if you choose to cull the books you don't feel add to your kids' experience, well, that's your business. You can be as ruthless as you please, and there will always be more books out there to fill the shelves. There's no need to regret anything. Just make sure you pass the books you don't like to people less fortunate than your own children.

I'm a fan of 660 Curries. Mmm. That's a cookbook rec, not a recipe rec, but I don't want to have to type more out.