"We accidentally hit Poland, which used to be part of our territory, while intending to hit Ukraine, whom we've been aggressively trying to reconquer" is not exactly a winning defense.

What sort of "love language" involves telling people that your wishes trump theirs?

There's a lot of really good storytelling in animation. There's no "for a cartoon" about it! But I actually came here to say I forgot about region-specific DVDs and after double checking I found out that Malory Towers DVD is only watchable in the UK, basically. I, um, may have just streamed it from somewhere-or-other.... (Look, if the BBC would just let me give them my money, I'd be happy to do it!)

What they said. If I hadn't once happened to be in whole foods and see a bag of sugar marked "vegan" I would never have known either. "My sugar is processed using bones!" is not exactly the first thing to spring to mind when you're sweetening your tea. Also not vegetarian (though less likely to show up at T-day dinner, I should think): Many, many, MANY flavors of potato or tortilla chip include chicken bouillon. Basically, you always have to read the ingredients. ALWAYS.

If you like historical, you can do worse than Road to Avonlea, which irritatingly enough isn't on any mainstream streaming services.... The newer BBC tv show of Malory Towers is on DVD right now, and as somebody who happens to have a lot of Blyton fandom friends, I gotta say, it's much better than the books. (The series is not complete, and not all seasons have even aired!) Trying to think of what I've watched lately. The younger kid and I watch a *lot* of animation together, both because we enjoy it and because she's studying animation in school (gratuitous brag time). I'll go back and look over our history later, see what's available on DVD as well.

I grew up in Bensonhurst. Many of my neighbors spoke Italian (or, I guess, Sicilian) in the home and got the paper in Italian (Sicilian?) as well. Which I know because of that one time we got robbed and the robber considerately put a newspaper under the steak he fed my dog... honestly, he probably spent more on the steak than he got, lol! Anyway, it is very traditional to cook a turkey as a side and also a lasagna or a baked ziti. Ravioli is a little less "showy" than a baked dish, but sure, you can make it work. As for vegan foods, please remember that gelatin (including marshmallows) and sugar (!) are not vegetarian unless specially labelled. Many veg*ns don't know that, especially about the sugar, and thus don't really care - but just as many do.

And then there are some companies that have both a 3 and a 3T, a 4 and a 4T - in those cases, typically the T sized pants have a bit more room for a diaper.

"I don't know if I should send my mom a text on her birthday. There's every chance I'll get a mean response back about how disrespectful I am, how mad and sad she is, and that her heart is closing to me." And that's what I took from the top post on this thread, a post that I assume OP made hoping to gain sympathy from people. If this is what people say when they want other people to agree to them, then I wonder what they say and how they act when they aren't putting their best face forward.

Is this job so amazing? You don't like it! And for a valid reason - it's boring! So, so, so very boring. Do you really need to change your perspective? Or do you need to look into changing your job? Surely there must be options other than "this one forever" and "that same one I left for a good reason which is filled anyway"?

Which is why most families don't get cut off, or even have their access to That One Person strictly restricted. Lots of people on this forum will say with a straight face that they don't know any LGBTQ+ people or atheists. If you all knew more of those, you'd all know a lot more people who had to break from their families for their own well being. Also... listen, I've got a family history of estrangement on both sides. On the one side, my father was mostly estranged from his mother and brother almost my entire life, and if it wasn't for my mom interceding he would have been *totally* estranged from both of them. Before he limited contact, his mother engaged in shenanigans like "give the four month infant a heaping teaspoon of honey after Mom said no" and "try to steal custody of the children to break up the marriage". He strongly suspected his brother was a child molester. These are good reasons to limit contact with your family! But most people didn't know his reasons because hardly anybody knew that he was estranged from them. This wasn't something he talked about, and if he had had reason to talk about it he would have said to most people "We're not close" or something like that, something that can mean *anything*. My mother's mother grew up never meeting her own maternal grandparents, even though she walked by their house to get to school every day. Lots of people actually did know about this estrangement, but I get the impression hardly anybody knew the full story, which does involve the sort of serious abuse literally everybody here would agree is a "good reason". So maybe the neighbors thought that she just was being really weird, or that the husband was controlling, just like my neighbors growing up assumed without really thinking about it that *of course* my father spoke to his mother. I'm not saying that I think that anybody on this thread acted like my grandmother or my great-grandparents. But I am saying that as far as society trends go, you just don't know if maybe lots of people years ago acted just like people today - they just didn't talk about it. Well, this is all online, so can you link to a few examples where you think the estrangement was totally because of "a lot less than abuse" or that people piled on to say a simple disagreement should be "classified as abusive"? The estrangement or advised estrangement doesn't have to include totally cutting off contact, it just should be a clear example of what you consider a not good reason. You're asserting a positive claim ("this is a thing that really happens - a lot!") which is a heck of a lot easier than a negative claim ("no it's not"), so you're the one with the burden of proof. And if it's all online it should be easy to come up with a dozen or a hundred examples, or as many as you like - if it's really something common.

At one point, everybody in my family realized I'm willing to answer the phone for strangers, so all of them (including my mother and sister, who are definitely adults!) started using me as their contact number whenever they made appointments or signed up for things. I was not amused, but I still answer the phone.

Wait, I'm confused. Did those other people whom you think you should be more loyal to for "reasons" actually invite you over to their house?

KSera, I haven't seen it because it's not a thing. "Fad" implies something widespread. Are there maybe a few people who do this? Sure. There's always somebody, after all. But the existence of somebody somewhere does not a fad make - and even if it is a hasty decision made because of bad advice or abuse, in the end, the proper action by the parents is the same: respect your child and their right to make their own life choices. That means do NOT send them mean messages.

There is no "going no contact fad". That's absurd, and honestly, I give a serious side-eye to anybody who thinks that there *is* such a fad.

The only justification any adult needs for leaving a relationship with another adult is the desire to end or limit the relationship. I don't know what your daughter's reasons were. I don't need to. Her desire to limit contact with you is enough. You don't need to agree. I know this is blunt, but it's the truth. You do not need to agree with your daughter. She is the only person who can judge whether or not her reasons for her behavior are valid. You can't do that. I can't do that. A therapist can't do that. She is the only one who can do that. If you want her to consider the possibility of expanding contact in the future, I strongly recommend you take all your messy feelings to your therapist, and otherwise respect her desire to keep her distance for now.

Go to today's xkcd for the appropriate context: https://xkcd.com/2696/ and be sure to read the hovertext The Explain xkcd link isn't up yet, but when it is it should be here: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2696

Turkeys. We have one persistent turkey mama who keeps trying to raise her babies here. Most of them seem to get picked off by red tailed hawks and/or peregrine falcons, but she keeps trying. And then in the fall we see the enormous flock from I don't know where. Actually, they're kinda scary at that point! They do not back down when you come close! We also have raccoons and possums and corvids, plus a fairly impressive array of songbirds including, since my adulthood, mockingbirds. We can thank climate change for them! Oh, and we have bats! Literally living in a church belfry! Mid-island and the South Shore they have deer and rabbits and turkey vultures. I'm not sure that the deer live here, though. I think I heard that they commute from Jersey.

Lots of OTCs and also, um, I have spent many winters stealing my kids' inhalers. Or getting them from friends who somehow got too many, and their insurance was waaaaay more robust than ours, so their inhalers were costing them nothing.

I would not recommend a daily Zyrtec. Zyrtec is a powerful antihistimine medication, and many patients report a powerful rebound effect, which I only found out when I took it daily for a month and then, after stopping it, experienced several months of the worst hives I've ever had in my life. I kept them more or less kinda under control with Benadryl, but I didn't really want to do that either because long-term use of Benadryl is associated with dementia later in life. I prefer, therefore, to try not to use it every day.

So, two things. When I had covid in the spring - fully vaxxed and boosted! - it was "mild" by a medical definition, but it still completely wiped me out. Other family members who had it bounced back in a few days, but I couldn't talk for nearly two weeks, and I was somehow managing to cram 28.1 hours of sleep into every 24 hour day. The worst part is I couldn't see my mother for that time, nor even speak to her on the phone (no voice) or focus long enough to text her, and now that she's dead I really resent those lost two weeks. The second thing is this: It's two winters since March 2020, and both those winters I was able to breathe the *entire* winter. I would have said before that I usually only had a mild cold and a separate, serious cold every winter, and my asthma was caused by just the cold weather, but now I don't think that's true. I think those "mild" colds did a real number on my lungs, set me up for those more serious colds, and kept me from breathing and thinking clearly for a third of the year. I think it's very possible that starting in the fall I had "mild" colds that were pretty asymptomatic, but they still affected me in ways I passed off as normal. So now I'm going to try to avoid getting respiratory infections, even mild ones that I don't even notice, for the rest of my life. Because it turns out that being able to breathe is amazing.

It's not going to do any harm to try isolation, masking, open windows now - nor is it too late to go and get those booster shots.

If it turns out that there *is* no effective way to homeschool while getting him the social time with friends that he needs, both structured and unstructured, then you can always re-evaluate in a few months or at the end of the year.

Sure, but in her situation if somebody breaks in then the kids being on the second floor certainly isn't going to do any good. If you have an extra worry about break-ins then you should just put bars over the window and/or another set on the inside, and maybe get better door locks. The first floor, the second floor - if this is a viable risk, the location of the bedrooms is not the issue.

Nobody is going to break into your home. That's a non-issue. You might as well forbid them from sleeping on the second floor because you're worried about fire - which, now that I've said it, seems like it's probably much more common. As far as the rest of it, I don't make new discipline problems for myself. It'd be a lot easier to say "We'll try it out for now and see how it goes" and then simply not change my own schedule than to try to make the kids share a room when they already fought badly enough to not want to do that. A few days of inconvenience will have the same effect as putting your foot down, with a lot less effort on your part.

Brittany, I don't know what to tell you. You can keep saying the word "competitive" all you like, but if they can't get people to work for them then the wages aren't competitive, or the environment is bad, or everybody is already employed. The word "competitive" is not a magic charm that means "great".