I don't think there's any connection. I just meant that I'm a person who has had serious reactions to mosquito bites, which are not really a common allergen, but who doesn't have a ton of other allergies.

Just to throw it out there, I have twice had anaphylactic reactions to mosquito bites. I try hard to avoid them, and I have not had a bad reaction in decades now, but it is a thing that can happen. I don’t have many other things I’m allergic to, though I have a “sensitivity” to sulfa meds.

My oldest was fed through exclusive pumping, and honestly, my boobs were big enough and saggy enough that I could "drink from the tap." So I had experiences with both. We also lived in an apartment and didn't have a great freezer with my oldest, so any milk that she didn't drink before it would go bad, we were trying to use up, so I drank a fair amount of breast milk in different forms. I never had it taste soapy, but it would separate, and it definitely tasted very different depending on when it was pumped. So foremilk tastes very different from hindmilk, for instance, and when I had mastitis, it was very salty. It definitely changed in taste a lot from time to time.

After our experience starting a charity focused on asylum seekers and refugees, I totally understand how donations can definitely be the second wave of any disaster. The amount of time it required to sort through donations and what was useful was a LOT. It was pretty overwhelming.

We had a housemate who lived in the basement when my kids were little (early elementary age), which fulfilled the “adult on premises” law, but he mostly didn’t interact with my kids if I wasn’t home. I’d they needed something in particular, they felt comfortable going to him for help. I worked two mornings a week when my oldest was elementary aged, and usually they went to my mother in law’s, but occasionally they wanted to sleep in or something and I left them at home with a list of schoolwork to accomplish. Even at seven ish, my kid was capable of doing a couple hours worth of work that didn’t require assistance (reading, handwriting practice, some math), once in awhile.

Yeah, some babies are just like that. In an absolute emergency, you do what you have to to get milk in (syringe, cup, whatever), but mostly I just didn’t leave that baby hardly ever.

Yes, of course. My kids stayed home alone by themselves if I had to work and they were not feeling well in 7th grade. They passed the "couple hours in the morning" bar pretty early in elementary school. When I was in 7th grade, I was routinely babysitting infants for 8 hours plus. I wouldn't think twice about leaving a 12 year old home alone for a couple hours.

Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, VA is very nice.

Phones do not keep kids safe from violence. But they do allow panicked kids an opportunity to text with someone who loves them, and they also allow kids to contact loved ones and tell them they're okay after the fact. Or for people to pinpoint location.

Also…some locks are objectively harder than others. I do not have an essential tremor, unlike my husband and both of my kids. I have tons of experience opening a variety of combination locks and rarely have had issues, though I definitely remember the process of learning how to use one in junior high. However, *I* could not open the locker my kid was assigned in seventh grade. I had the combination correctly. The locker was old and slightly misaligned and the lock was particularly tricky. It is entirely possible my kid is in fact capable of operating a combination lock (but also completely possible she’s not), but being able to do one or two locks does not equal being able to do all of them.

I brought pumpkin and chocolate pies to preschool to celebrate Pi Day. Not that they have any understanding of what pi is. I told them it was a special number that goes on and on forever and starts with 3.14159. I also took two knives to school to cut said pies and put them somewhere safe and now they’ve traveled to another dimension and are missing. Grr. I am not sure how to celebrate Ides of March at preschool. I have a Tshirt I will wear but not sure I should tell them the story of Ides of March. (I did tell them the story of Odysseus and Nobody earlier this week, which they found hilarious.).

Well, it depends. I mean, I want my kid to have a phone for safety reasons at school. There have been a few times the school was locked down and SWAT was there, and fortunately she was absent both times that happened, but if not, I'd really want her to have a phone. But also, our district is talking about banning phones during the school day, and my main argument is that doing so is stupid because there is so little education happening at school that phones are the least of the problem. If they want to truly have a school day that doesn't involve kids being on chrome books (screens) all day and go back to having textbooks and working with paper and pencil, I would 100% support that. But we're not going to do that. We're also not going to transform class periods into being mostly educational. We aren't going to stop showing dozens of Disney movies during the school day to kill time. If we're just killing time and holding kids until they graduate, which is what we are doing, even in AP classes, then why not allow kids to choose their distraction of choice. I want her to be able to text me to pick her up when the disaster movie the teacher is showing in class so the teacher can grade tests is giving her a panic attack. I also do generally think that teens need to learn to self regulate and manage electronic distractions, but my biggest argument is that phone use is no worse than anything else not happening at school. Heck, when my kid was in tenth grade, they didn't have an algebra 2 teacher. They had a long term sub who didn't know algebra 2 material, and they just assigned the work given by another actual algebra 2 teacher. So my kid texted my husband the math problems; he explained how to do them via text message, and my kid taught the class how to do the math. If cell phones were banned, absolutely nobody would have learned any algebra. My husband had that period blocked on his work calendar as "teach algebra 2 via text message."