Family Friday: Long-Sleeve Ruffle-Trim Bubble Romper
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Fall is finally here, so it’s time for cute photos of the kids with cuddly farm animals, colorful pumpkins, and gooey caramel apples.
Here’s a darling romper that’s perfect for those photo ops. This smocked bubble romper is made from 100% cotton and comes in several seasonal plaids and rich floral prints. Add some wooly tights or leggings and make some fall magic!
This romper from Ruffle Butts is $38.00.
P.S. Happy Rosh Hashanah to those who celebrate!
Sales of note for 4/16/25
(See all of the latest workwear sales at Corporette!)
- Nordstrom – 5,521 new markdowns for women!
- Ann Taylor – 40% off your entire purchase + 50% off one full-price item
- Banana Republic Factory – 50%-70% off everything + extra 20% off
- Eloquii – $29+ select styles + extra 40% off all sale
- J.Crew – Spring Event: 40% off sitewide + extra 40% off all sale
- J.Crew Factory – 40%-70% off everything + 60%-70% off spring faves
- M.M.LaFleur – New collection just dropped! Use code CORPORETTE15 for 15%
- Spanx – Lots of workwear on sale, some up to 70% off
- Talbots – 40% off select tops + 30% off dresses, skirts, shoes & accessories + 40% off all markdowns
Guys, I’m afraid that my daycare is at risk of closing.
This is a highly regarded daycare who serves a bunch of professionals in a high demand downtown area. It’s been around for 30+ years. They’ve had staffing issues in the past and ups and downs, but… the director left, the interim director just resigned, and now there’s just some weirdness.
Selfishly, I have one kid with one year left and I just need this place to stay open until we can get to Pre-K…
Attention Kat/Kate: I am getting giant pop-up ads for Verizon Wireless in Spanish that cover the whole page and can’t be closed.
Had a very bad daycare drop-off this morning. Please share your stories of how it gets better.
Friday vent (said from an extremely privileged position and meant to be largely tongue in cheek) – I selfishly wish the following services existed: (1) returns service where they would take all of my Amazon, target and other in store returns (with the code or receipt so you don’t have to pack them up for shipping) and return them for me; (2) a “snack store” in my building at work/nearby that had snack options like a small portion of crackers and cheese or veggies and hummus (and when you haven’t restocked the snacks in your desk). The ones near me only have chips and candy, and I’ve had a few days over the past weeks where my packed lunch has not been enough food for some reason and I am ravenous around 3:00; (3) a service that could take all of my Amex points, my husbands Amex points, and our collective airline miles and design a vacation from them without us having to pick a destination and just giving them dates. (The ones I’ve found will only do this if you provide a destination for them and we just don’t know! We’re terrible at travel planning)
What services do you wish existed?
For those of you who went through fertility treatments or did egg freezing, I am curious about how you feel after the fact about the conversations you had with your doctors about side effects and likely success.
I did an IUI and two rounds of IVF, both unsuccessful. While I would not suggest that my doctors failed to meet the legal standard for informed consent (I’m sure that all of this information was somewhere in the lengthy packet of papers I signed), I definitely don’t feel like I had a meaningful understanding of the likely success rate in my specific circumstances. My doctor told us that there was a 75% chance of success with a single transfer of a euploid embryo, which was a very reassuring stat, but we never really talked about the odds of a successful retrieval process. I know we did not have a straightforward conversation about the fact that a person with my combination of factors (age – I was 40/41 – and diminished ovarian reserve) had quite low odds of success with IVF, and that the failure was likely to be at the stimulation/retrieval stage, not the transfer stage. (And then I turned out to be a poor responder to stimulation on top of all of that.)
After my second cycle failed again failed at the retrieval stage (poor response to stim, only 5 eggs matured, only 3 retrievable, only 1 made it to Day 5 and it was aneuploid), I talked to a different doctor who was covering my primary doctor’s vacation – he was straightforward that my odds of success the first time had been quite low and that after a poor response to stim in the first cycle, he wouldn’t have encouraged a second cycle. He told me expressly that there was no reason to think that a third cycle would be different given my situation (age, DOR, poor stim response), and that there wasn’t a research-backed alternative stim protocol that would make a difference. Even though that was hard news, I was also grateful because it felt like the first time someone was actually explaining how the science applied to my situation.
I feel like the stories of women for whom IVF doesn’t work are rarely seen in the media – I know that I (foolishly) went into it with the assumption that IVF sucked but that if you were willing to deal with the unpleasantness and spend the money, it was usually successful. I didn’t realize how much that varied across different demographic groups and how much the basis of infertility mattered.
I’m not bitter or angry about this, and again, I am sure that my clinic met their legal obligations from an informed consent perspective. But it has made me think about that process of translating the legal standard into real-life conversations with doctors and patients – I think that many of us rely a lot more on the discussion with the doctor than the disclosures in the packet. I wonder how much training (any?) doctors get on how to have plain-English discussions with non-specialists about complex issues like this – how to talk about odds of success, likely impacts, etc. and make that intelligible to patients who have to make decisions about their care. (This feels especially significant in the context of something like IVF where there is a *ton* of media coverage about it, especially in the context of celebrities, but almost all of that is focused on success stories.) And I’m curious about how others who went through this feel about how much they understood about the likelihood of success, and side effects, etc. going into it.
(Ultimately, after a bunch of losses, we naturally conceived a child – I’m now 6 months pregnant, which still feels unreal – but I know for many women whose IVFs fail, that does not happen.)
Feeling like a crummy mom today because I forgot to take one of my kids to an activity last night. I was solo parenting, both kids had activities, plus my work schedule was a bit wonky yesterday, so I was out of rhythm and off my game. I could’ve made it work, although it would’ve been hard due to timing and location. It was on the family calendar and I just spaced. Kid didn’t remember said activity until it was over and was mildly disappointed. It’s a dumb thing for me to be upset about, but it is a reminder of how I often feel like I’m trying to do too many things at work and at home. Also, I am very dependent on the “divide and conquer” approach that DH and I have, which works great until it doesn’t.
Cross posted in main forum. My daughter is on a swim team, swimming 3+ days a week. She is having dry feet/skin breaking due to the chlorine. We have been working with a dermatologist, but also hoping for any other advice if anyone else has swimmers with this issue. We are wondering if she should keep swimming at this point.
i found yesterday’s discussion about schools and what we expect from schools to be really interesting to hear everyone’s perspective. But (and I’m someone who just dropped my kids off at public school) can we please not refer to people who attend private school as “elitist aholes.” there are people who attend private schools for a myriad of reasons. One factor that i thought people assumed/took as a given in yesterday’s discussion was safety. We are in elementary school right now but i know our public middle school has daily physical fights and there have been shootings involving the high school students and metal detectors at school. The other factor that also wasn’t discussed as much was size- there is a difference between a high school with 1500 students and one with 3200 since unfortunately resources tend not yo correlate exactly with size.
And Shanah Tovah to all who celebrate!