Depends. I wouldn't be able to do it, I think (I mean, I could obviously do it for a few days... but I assume you're asking about weeks/months). When DW was roughly my age though, she worked 12 hours 4 days a week (and actually quite frequently a 5th day as well), and slept only a few hours per night... I want to say less than 4, but then she'd make up for that on the weekend (which meant she was asleep most of the weekend... sigh). You could keep an eye out on craigslist to see if you can find something decent used - maybe people who sold their house and are moving to a house without gas hookups or w/e. DW got our stove/oven for free when she saw it in someone's driveway when she was installing their satellite TV dish. They had been planning to get rid of it, so they said she could have it, and that they didn't even want any money for it... to consider it to be a tip. It worked fine for a couple of years, but shortly after we moved to NY the oven quit working - DW's hypothesis is that the gas line to that became clogged. All the burners still work though. Either way, I'm pretty sure that when we lived in TX you could find stoves/ovens for $50 on craigslist... though I don't know what condition they were in. We really lucked out with our fridge/freezer on craigslist though because someone had to move and their new place only had enough space for a normal fridge. It's was almost new, but since they had to sell it that day (they hadn't figured it our sooner), we got it for $150. Still works great. Anyway, point being, that if you don't need something *now*, just occasionally browsing craigslist might enable you to find some really good deals.

Ugh. Maybe tell her to answer Home Ec next time. :001_rolleyes: Either way it's time for French, no? If you got it wrong, maybe even more so...

I don't know which test this is referring to - PARCC or MSAA... I looked at the MSAA results, and Baltimore (city) overall has a higher percentage of high schoolers proficient in math than Maryland overall - about 27% vs about 20%: http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/MSAAHighResults.aspx?PV=192:11:30:AAAA:1:N:0:13:2:1:0:1:1:1:3 http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/MSAAHighResults.aspx?PV=192:11:99:AAAA:1:N:0:13:2:1:0:1:1:1:3 Not necessarily... I'd say schools with only 2 or 3% proficient should probably be considered to be failing as well... I don't know where I'd put the cut-off though (and I'm not going to look up the percentages for each individual school).

My Aldi is going downhill... :leaving: :willy_nilly: :svengo: :nopity:

I'd probably let him switch to violin next school year or something if he's really insistent... I'm not pure evil. More like, I dunno, practical?

Not going to work. They'd just whine that it's less terrible than the other stuff, but not good enough.

Oh, and Broccoli had his first violin lesson yesterday, and he's super enthusiastic. A bit too enthusiastic for my ears... there's a limit to how much time in a day I can listen to him play on that thing (and I kind of have to watch him to make sure he holds it correctly etc, so I can't just go hide). Celery had his first guitar lesson with this teacher (he did a little bit of guitar last year), and at first he said it was good, and then switched to his usual gloominess. Oh, and then yesterday evening when Broccoli was practicing violin at home, he wanted to try too, so I let him, and then he wanted to switch to violin. He's out of luck though... I just paid for his lessons, he'd probably change his mind after 2 more days anyway, and right now they have class at the same time in the same place, whereas if he switched to violin that might destroy their schedule (at best, it'd be back-to-back, but that's unlikely... and since it's a 16 min or w/e drive, and I do enough driving, no thanks).

I'm ketchupped. Now on to contemplating dinner.

Hey, I've heard that song before, I think!

:) Yeah, that.

Some suggestions: http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/disease-names.php Or if you prefer fancier names: http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/scientific-disease-names.php Or if you want to answer questions in order to get an answer: http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/ (I couldn't find one that generates random real diseases...)

I think the idea behind collapsing is that it doesn't matter if there's more to do still. Just like nervous breakdowns etc.

Aye.

Huh, I'd wondered where that word came from. When I was a kid, I'd always get the Pfirsich Maracuja yogurt cups while on vacation in Germany/Austria... but I didn't have a clue why they'd name it something that weird, given that in Dutch it's passievrucht, and in English passion fruit. So, it's Portuguese. When I was a truck driver, it was company policy to always have your headlights on while driving, for safety, so I started doing that in our normal car too (because I've experienced one or two situations in which I saw a car only just in time because they didn't have their lights on, while other cars were much more visible (you know, when it's gray and dreary, and maybe at a curve or something as well... headlights help, even when they're not legally required to be on). Most cars today even automatically turn off your lights when you get out of the car, so why not? (even our Kia Rio does, and we don't even have power locks or power windows or anything... but the headlights? The only times I have to turn those on is when I pick up the car from the garage, because those guys always turn the lights off. They also always leave the car in first gear when parked, giving me almost-whiplash every.single.time (WHY?!? the ground is perfectly flat. The car ain't going anywhere with the parking break on)).

No clue, but I thought you were talking about the coconut kind, and lavender coconut did NOT sound good. :lol: I'm not a huge fan of lavender (or coconut) in general though.

If I do the same thing every day, the kids whine they're bored. If I try something new, they whine that they want the stuff they're bored with. :banghead: #whydoibother?

I can't link to the exact table, but if you type in the name on the left, you can see the popularity of Matthew over the years: https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi So, Matthew has been in the top 100 since 1956, and in the top 10 since 1972 (except for the last few years, but those kids aren't reading emails). So, odds are it's just a random common name they're throwing at you and everyone else, including at a large number of actual Matthews. At some point in the future, you might get a bunch of emails for Michael. Or, it's possible that your email address appeared somewhere on some website or in some database that's been hacked near the name Matthew, and the program that harvested your email address attached the nearest name to it... not sure if they do this in practice, but it's quite possible.

I actually like the deranged Christmas tree... :leaving: So, if I wear this, you'll talk to me, right, I talk to the trees? When the kids were little, we called the pajama ones with feet footsies (sounds like the Dutch word for "gone, vanished"... foetsie), because it's quite handy to be able to specify if you want a onesie like you describe, or, well, a footsie. I also like the winter wonderland opposuit :leaving: ...but it's too expensive, and WNY is not very warm in December.

Two people paying question. Why would anyone pay a question, n/m two people?

Also, sometimes I won't let my kids do an activity simply because I either don't want to do the driving or don't want to spend the time sitting there waiting for them. And I think that that's perfectly fine. They have activities - they don't need to have every possible activity on the planet.

Oh, and another favorite of mine is to do schoolwork with my other kid. The other kid doesn't tend to be quite as enthusiastic about that option though, but last year I think I did the vast majority of Broccoli's schooling while Celery was at speech, or OT, or TKD, or etc.

Mostly the things you mentioned, sometimes play on my phone or read the boards. While I get bored with running errands, they're things that need to be done anyway, so, it doesn't matter how bored I am with them. Sometimes I just sit lost in thought. Or, I watch the kids (this only works at some activities, like soccer or TKD).

Continuing with numbers. There are roughly 73 million children in the US. So, 3.4 out of 73 is 4.7% of children are investigated in a single year. If there are no duplicates, you'd end up with an 84% chance of a kid being investigated at some point from 0-17. Now, obviously, there are many, many duplicates... I thought I'd found some figure a couple of years back that said that there's about a 15% chance you will be investigated by CPS at some point while your kids are minors, but I can't find it. Either way, it's certainly not rare.

BTDT, found to be unfounded. The CPS guys were nice, and one of them said I was a great parent. DW got told to not leave a bottle of cayenne pepper on her desk because one of the kids could potentially grab it (she ate at her desk very often, and puts cayenne on almost anything). The cayenne had nothing to do with the (unfounded) reason for investigating, but once they're investigating, they have to look into *everything* (at least in TX, or at least that's what the CPS guys said... I haven't checked the law on that), do a complete walkthrough of your house (even if your house has nothing to do with the reason they were called), etc. So, even if you're innocent of w/e someone reported you for, you could still get into trouble for something random unrelated (not that DW actually got in *trouble* for the cayenne... I'm just saying... once Pandora's box is opened, you don't know how nitpicky they're going to be about random unrelated stuff). For some numbers: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/canstats.pdf During FFY 2015, CPS agencies received an estimated 4.0 million referrals involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 7.2 million children. Of these referrals, approximately 2.2 million reports concerning approximately 4.1 million children (duplicate count) were screened in as “appropriate†for CPS response. Approximately 3.4 million children received either an investigation or alternative response, Approximately one-fifth (18.0 percent) of the children investigated were found to be victims of abuse or neglect The remainder of the children investigated (82.0 percent) were found to be nonvictims of maltreatment.

How do you scrub it? IME, the rod comes tumbling down way too easily, and there's nowhere near enough floor space in the bathroom to even begin to try bothering with that. I can try scrubbing a tiny part of it at a time, but that would a) take forever, and b) didn't even really seem to work when I tried it (I tried with vinegar... maybe I should've tried something else). All the people that are saying their curtains get nice and clean make me feel like we've either got some mutant soap scum, or that maybe I wait until it's too far gone... (I think water hardness does make a difference too... according to a map, we have "very hard" water) ETA: I haven't seen much in the way of mildew... mostly just soap scum buildup.