Splurge or Save Thursday: Vegan Leather Bucket Bag

Do you ever just want to throw in the towel and walk away from your family? I am so effing sick of being the dumping ground for everyone else’s issues, of not being allowed to sleep or work or do what I need to get done without being interrupted, of being expected to fill everyone else’s needs without having needs of my own.

I’m expecting an October baby but I still want to keep our family Halloween tradition of trick-r-treating plus professional photos. I’m supposed to dress up as a fox, which I think will be a dress plus ears and tail, but I’m really struggling to find a flattering dress.

Obviously, I need something that will accommodate chest and tummy. The bigger issue is that I am very cool-toned and look like death warmed over in orange, which is not helpful when I’m already going to be a sleep-deprived zombie. I was thinking some kind of blue and orange print?

Suggestions please?

Podcast recs that will appeal to kids in grades 2-5? Carpool with sensitive younger kids and too-cool-for-school older kids is driving me nuts!

Have any of you struggled with postpartum intrusive thoughts that started after one year? No depression or anything, and I don’t feel particularly anxious. It seems to have come out of nowhere and it’s pretty distressing.

I know to see a doctor, etc., but I wanted to see other people’s experiences with this.

The question about phones on the main page has me thinking about this. How do you deal with teaching kids to dial 911 in an emergency?

As an 80s baby, it was easy – a landline was in every major room in the house basically, and you learned to dial it. Now with cell phones, really little kids and a lock screen on the iphone…. it’s not as straight forward. Plus, if I can’t find my iphone on an average day around the house, how can I expect my 5 year old to? The beauty of the landline was that it was always in the same place.

Do people have landlines for this? We do actually have one that is on mute and sits in a dark corner of a closet – I was a spectator of the Boston Marathon bom bing and will never forget the immense fear of not being able to connect with immediate family because the cell circuits were down/jammed, so I’m a landline for life person. So, for me I suppose the answer is easy – move the phone to a more obvious place and teach kids how to dial… but is that what everyone else is doing? I feel like I’m in the super minority still having a landline.

What’s the current thinking on kids BMI? I have 3 kids, with 3 different builds, and they all have basically the same BMi, which is just over the line between normal and overweight.

Kid 1 is what I’d call just between normal and overweight- she’s always been a little squishy, and this BMI makes sense to me.

Kid 2 eats like an elite athlete (by choice; she’s 8!), is a very active kid with rock solid arm and leg muscles- she doesn’t do team sports but does girls on the run, climbs, dances, ergs during DH’a CrossFit class for fun- and in a bathing suit she has a very lean figure. She is, however, heavy!

Kid 3 has always been like this but it’s like her bones are made of lead. She is in great shape, looks as fit as all her sporty friends, but somehow is like 30lbs heavier. Her doctor has messaged to her from like kindergarten that bmi doesn’t apply to some kids.

I suspect they get this from their dad, who is in excellent shape but weighs 200lbs at 6’. My brother in contrast is 6’3” and 195lbs and is pudgy with a little gut.

This came up because my 8 year old saw that she was registering as overweight while playing around on our old Wii fit and was absurdly incensed. And I checked her stats and, well, technically she is but nobody would look at her and think that.

Anyway, it’s tricky and I’m confused since I have one kiddo that likely does fit into that category, and two that don’t, but they all have a similar height tonight ratio. And my 11 year old weighs 108lbs, and her friend that visually looks like she weighs significantly more weighs 92lbs! This came up when they were discussing life jackets on a recent boating trip; the recommended weight for a kids jacket is <90 and nobody could believe my oldest weighted more than that.

Curious for feedback if you would have handled this differently. A few weeks ago, my kids (3 and 1) were having a particularly rough post-dinner evening and behaving very poorly during a time when DH was swamped and stressed at work. I was putting the screaming 1 YO to bed and DH just put the 3YO in bed, still whining and yelling from his room. When DH returned to the kitchen, he was trying to shut a cabinet door that kept getting stuck on a kid’s plastic plate. DH threw the plate, which hit and exploded the glass on our china cabinet. I was furious, but that wasn’t the time to scold DH, and he dutifully cleaned it up. It took about two months for him to get the glass fixed on the cabinet. I’ve asked him to pay to fix the glass out of his pocket money. (We’re on a tight budget, so all money goes into a big pot, then divided out for bills, daycare, etc. and we each have a chunk of pocket money to spend on clothes, books, coffee, etc for ourselves.) DH thinks I’m punishing him like a child by insisting he pay for the broken glass. I’m mad that he thinks we should treat the broken glass as a common expense when it’s due to his poor control of his anger. I don’t blame him for being angry, but he should take responsibility for the resulting action of physically breaking something. For context, I generally have low tolerance for anger (I’m working on acknowledging that feeling angry is okay, I’m still uncomfortable with most expressions of it though) and DH has had a lot of pent up anger the past year due a move that I wanted and he did not. I suspect this dynamic is at play in the background.