Washable Workwear Wednesday: Dinora Notch Collar Double Knit Jacket

A man (whom I presume was mentally ill) spit on my face and yelled mean things at me on my walk from the train to work today. It startled me and I did not like it.

Help! need an awesome present for 6-year old nephew. I know he likes math, reading, and Curious George. Any ideas? Needs to be Amazoned like yesterday!

Anyone have first- or second-hand experience with the Dockatot? It is difficult to find objective reviews online and it is a spendy product….. Found a used one on local mom’s listserve for $90. worth it? Thank you!

I recently found out that out of 12 babies in my son’s daycare class we are the only parents who make and send his food (we didn’t realize they provided food until they mentioned to us that we were the only parents who didn’t use their food). I looked over the menu for the food the daycare provides and there is a lot of fruit loops for breakfast, cereal bars for snacks, etc. It is heavily sugary processed foods with some fruit and almost no vegetables (nothing is organic and there is no effort to use whole grains/wheat). For reference, this is the older baby room, so the kids are 8 months to 15 months. Am I crazy to keep making and sending his food? It is one more thing to do, but my husband helps with it and we don’t particularly mind doing it. I can get over the non-organic part but am having a harder time dealing with 50% of my one-year-olds meal being high sugar and processed. We are moving him to a different daycare at 18 months, at which point this will be moot – is he likely to become aware/care that he is getting different food than the other kids before that point?

My husband and I started couples counseling this fall. Most things were good but when we fight, it gets really nasty. I also felt like I buried things and had lots of things that never got really aired, plus my husband felt like there were things in the past that he also felt had never really been resolved. We thought it would just be a few sessions on how to communicate better (isn’t that what every couple thinks?) but here we are, three months in and only a faint hint of an end in sight. My husband has finally come to grips with how bad his depression is (he had gotten treatment before, but never realized that his constant dread, guilt, self-loathing, etc. were not at all normal — he recently said “I think I might be manic-depressive” and I said “no, what you think are manic days are days when you’re just normal; most people feel like that every day” and he said “oh, wow! Life is great for people like you!”).

It’s also come up that I probably am kind of walled up, have trouble being vulnerable, and default to assuming I have to handle everything myself. My husband reinforced this in some ways by not being great about doing his share of housework and child care, but I also took any hint of him not picking up the slack as “well, guess it’s on me then!” and then being resentful, acting like a martyr, and deciding he must not really care about me.

Anyway, this is a long way of coming to the point, which is that we all — husband, couples counselor, and me — thought it would be helpful for me to also see someone on my own (therapy for everyone!). I had seen a therapist a few times last summer and kind of stopped because I felt like “why am I here?” I saw her this week and it really felt like her view was “yeah, your husband has problems, but you’re fine!” Is that normal? I feel kind of disoriented. I mean, I grew up with a single mom who had the view that the world was against us and it was on us to fight back and survive. She also, while always keeping things together, seemed worried that everything wasn’t going to work out so at a young age I became really responsible for handling as much of the household stuff as I could (e.g., balancing the family check book when I was 14). And I can see how that affected me. And it seems to be having a negative effect on my marriage. My husband feels like I don’t think about him enough and am too quick to take care of my own needs and only realize that he and the family have needs as an afterthought (not that I neglect the kids, but I think he feels that on the whole I often don’t put the family’s needs high enough on my priority list). Some of this is clearly his depression. He’ll admit as much. But it seems like some of it is me, too. But now I’m second-guessing that, given this therapist’s apparent viewpoint. But it also seems like, if I’m doing things that are having a bad impact on my marriage, that’s a problem, right? Not sure what my question is. I guess has anyone had an experience like this? I think I’ll look for a new therapist, but I both don’t want to shrug off actual maladaptive behavior but don’t want to pathologize something that’s actually fine.