Thank you, everyone. After reading the suggestions and talking to DH about features he would like, I ordered a Cuisinart. Don’t remember the model, but one of the more basic ones.

We do have hard water but not just in winter. We gave been using the same coffee as usual. i mean, I could probably try harder to descale it, but I never wanted this particular coffee maker. It was given to us right when I was thinking about buying a new one a few years ago, and was not what I would have chosen. So now I’m going to take this opportunity to get one that I choose, hopefully a better one. My old one was a Mr. Coffee that had been going strong for almost two decades. Like many other things, they don’t make them like they used to and the new Mr.Coffee is very inferior.

So we have a Mr. Coffee drip coffee maker, it was given to us and I never liked it, but it has begun brewing unbearably slowly. Today DH had to leave for work without “enough” coffee (whether this would be “enough” for anyone else is another matter) and It’s the last straw for me. We’ve run vinegar through it, and it didn’t help much. So with a budget of no more than $150, what’s the best drip coffee maker? DH likes his coffee very hot. We need 12 cups for when we have company. Fancy things like automatic shut off and timer to start brewing before we get up in the morning would be nice but are not strictly necessary. Longevity is important to me. Nothing that will need replaced every year. thank you!

Oh wow! All your feelings are understandable! i had a very dear friend who became pregnant at 49 and had her youngest son shortly before her 50th birthday. That son was born healthy, with no complications. He is 18 now, making plans to leave home and go to college.

Haven’t read everyone’s suggestions but my kids loved A Bear Called Paddington. Also Mr. Popper’s Penguins was a hit.

Thank you.

I’m so glad you got it done even though you were nervous. This weekend I lost a dear friend to colon cancer. It was such a long hard fight, and if you can do anything to prevent that f for yourself and your family, it’s worth it.

Dry beans last a long time. Rice, maybe, depending on how often you eat it. Sugar never goes bad if it isn’t allowed to get wet. I’d look at what shelf stable items you use most and buy those.

I’m Rh - and definitely had the shot, but was never given a card. That must vary by provider.

I store mine much as you store yours, in an untidy jumble the cabinet. But if I had the counter space, I would love something like this organizer.

I do have an aunt and uncle who got a divorce and then after a year or two remarried and have stayed remarried for more than ten years now. I don’t know all of the story. I suspect that there were issues caused by PTSD he had/has from his job.

So sad, and I agree w if you entirely. Our neighbors are on their third or fourth dog. All the previous ones have been run over because they chase cars and the neighbors won’t build them a fence. I drive so carefully by that house. I know it’s only a matter of time before the dog gets hit, I just really, really don’t want it to be me that hits him. Why do people do this?

You’re right, context is everything. The comments you heard came from someone who had seen presumably a lot of what you’ve dealt with and how . Their judgement of your character and how what you’ve done has benefitted your kids is based in experience and fact. I’ve only heard these sorts of comments from strangers and near-strangers when it first comes up that my kids are adopted.

I still have dreams about being in high school and unable to find my locker, or in college and lost on campus trying to find my class. I graduated college 20 years ago.

Yes this. I cringe every time anytime says these things.

I think some of the problem here is an inherent unfairness of life: the choices a parent makes affect a child who is powerless to do anything about it. Whether that choice is to not vaccinate, to place for closed adoption, to stay in an abusive relationship, or even to homeschool. clearly some of those choices have more traumatic consequences than others, but all leave a door open for the child to be hurt and feel resentment later. We can legislate to reduce the chances of harm, but we cannot legislate away every opportunity for a parent to cause trauma, nor IMHO should we. One of the problems with foster care in my experience is that because of the legal necessity of giving biological family preference, relationships with family members known to be unstable and unsuitable are encouraged only to be cut off when the plan changes, leaving another loss trauma. We were told, in fact, that we should never contact either side of that family for safety reasons, when up until that point visitation had been encouraged. The rules are given more weight than the best interests of the child. More rules to check off on a list are not going to help. Better rules would, but the quintessential problem with the government is that they do things first and data accrues later. Witness the salt cedar eradication program going in this century to eradicate invasive plants planted by government programs in the last century to prevent erosion. We’re getting better at making sure these things are evidence based, but much of the rhetoric for eliminating adoption seems emotion based and anecdotal to me.

Yes, I think that as a society we have a lot of changes to make that have nothing to do with laws. Legislation can’t fix attitudes and ideas.

I would say that the vast majority of adopted adults I know have felt that the adoption was a positive in their lives. I know one adopted teen who feels it wasn’t, but she also has other problems that would exist regardless of adoption and so it’s hard to believe that she would feel happy about her family situation in that case either. I’m glad you don’t feel traumatized by adoption. If my statements offended you, I’m sorry. I read a book, years ago, the title of which I can’t remember, which argued that newborns who are adopted are traumatized even if they can’t remember it later. It rang true to me, but perhaps mostly because of my experiences with foster care, which color all of my feelings about adoption.

That did occur to me later. I mean, many children don’t want a sensitive personal history dragged out and discussed to do the normal things that other kids get to do without comment. And some of that might be alleviated by having an amended birth certificate that indicates adoption but leaves the names of the birth parents while also including the names of the adoptive parents, but some of it wouldn’t. i think in a family with a healthy attitude of openness toward the adoption, what name is on the BC is a minor detail. I know an older woman who was adopted decades ago for whom finding the original birth certificate was a very big deal, but things are not handled the same now in many ways.

I definitely don’t think handing this over to an overworked state bureaucracy is as good idea. and if it becomes the law for voluntary adoptions that family must have priority, and they must be open, I think we would be looking at a certain percent of women who would choose abortion instead.

There is trauma in all adoptees to varying extents. I think a lot of the question is whether that trauma would be greater or less if they had never been adopted, or had been adopted but in a different way. And we don’t have a crystal ball to say that for certainty about any particular individual, but we do have statistical evidence about what works best for most kids, and so that’s what “best practices” are based off of, which in my state at least, include priority for family members in foster care adoption, and making sure kids have a scrapbook of their life and the people who have been part of it, both birth and foster parents, to give them continuity. But there are some things lacking. Getting a good medical history of both sides of the family had been impossible, for one. In voluntary adoptions, though, when a birth parent has the choice, there are going to be some who choose to have closed adoptions. There are going to be some who choose to place their child with a non-family member even if a family member would adopt the child. In those situations, what do you think should be done?

I think many people don’t have wills, especially in working class and poor families. They cost money, and many people have assumptions about how the law works and assume they wouldn’t need a will. In my experience, more money/assets you have, the more likely you are to have a will.

I think there are modifications that could/should be made to how adoptions are done in this country, no question, in newborn adoptions and foster care. I think we should offer more support to people who want to parent their biological children but can’t, but that support has to be based on the interest of the child first, and the interests of the biological parent second. There comes a point when yes, the parent May get off drugs if given enough time, but the need of the child for permanence must take priority, especially since it is not a guarantee that the biological parent will ever be capable of actually parenting safely. but getting changes made is hard, and getting the right ones made is even harder. I think if we were to do away with adoption entirely we would end up throwing the baby out with the bath water, though.

Well okay, I’ve never had that situation, so that could be a problem. But it still seems like some amendment to the birth certificate could be made that isn’t just a lie, or that an adoption decree would be accepted as proof, or something.

As an adoptive parent I think that putting my name on the bc as if I birthed these children physically is dumb. I think it is a holdover from when adoptions were supposed to be some big secret, and that this practice doesn’t really have any place in the modern world.