I ripped out all the carpeting in our house. It was awful anyway.
I put cheap-o plastic one-piece potties in every room.
I had a stack of old worn out towels in every room, sorta near the potty. Not too near.
I tried to do as much of the potty-training during summer as possible, when it was warm and the kid had only diapers/training underwear to take off, with no other additional layers of clothing for the trainee to deal with.
I tried hard not punish failures or let disappointment show on my face.
I tried not to make a huge deal about success rates either.
I encouraged a lot of time outside for unreliable trainees. No pants. Extra potties. In our neighborhood, we are lucky, a half-naked baby wandering around isnāt going to cause much of a stir. Privacy fences are also a good thing. Fire ant mounds, which out here are many and huge, areā¦ something to teach about early and often, esp. to the pantsless.
I realize only now that a lot of my good luck stemmed from a very mellow neighborhood, good weather, zero devotion to interior decor aesthetics, and giving up being in a hurry.
How was work today?
Howās the gout?
Howāre thingsā¦?
Does this Robitussin Peak Cold formula mean youāre fighting a nasty rhinovirus?
Sheesh I missed the whole detox event from 19 March. Such an unpleasant process. Gaaaaah!
Hoping yer doing better, by some measurement, somehowā¦
Work has been pretty alright. I had a minor miracle with le goutāone of the side effects of a new drug my pusher-i-mean-doctor prescribed me makes 80%+ of the pain go away (chronic pain the last six seven years. When I woke up a few weeks ago and it was mostly gone I may have done a dance).
As for the tussin, Iām just saying I have Whooping Cough (which I might) to make all the smug bay area anti vaxxers uncomfortable. āYeah, really feeling the pertussis today. Good thing I got vaccinated against it so itās only really annoying and not life threateningā.
And yes, the joys of detoxing. And not the Gwyneth Paltrow kind. My hands still shake a little, but it will pass. Shoulda seen my handwriting on the 20th, it was bad enough to be posted on the fridge with a gold star and a note that said, " Good try!"
Dunno if this will help or not, but my cat-loving neighbor used to give her kidney-patient cats normal [feline] saline subcutaneously. Yep, a clear plastic bag, hung up on a nail/hook, a tube, a needle, and a cat wrapped up in a towel. Two-person job, IIRC.
She was trained to do this by her very understanding vet. Perhaps you have one of those too. Giving subcu fluids is not hard if the animal is already tired and weak and unlikely to fight off such an effort.
Iāve had some luck with salt-free chicken broth, salt-free beef broth, and a homemade fish broth of simmered fish bones/parts. Good luck.
Doubly confirmed. Did this for the exās cat, and itād get a huge, moderately gross lump of saline solution under the skin, like a fake bewb at the injection site. And that catā¦was not nice.
Today is Ivy admissions day. Itās going to be a fuck of a day. My daughter got her heart set on Brown, and I am pretty positive that either:
A) She didnāt get in, or
B) She got in and we canāt afford it.
Sure, they Ivies have cash out the wazoo, but we are consistently getting too little aid to afford any of the private schools she is getting admitted to. We have a couple that are hitting in our ballpark. Right now, Iām sadly praying she does not get into her dream school so we can just avoid the, āYou got in but we canāt afford itā conversation.
She has worked her *ss off to make herself appealing to these kinds of schools and it has been a heartbreak to not be able to send her to them. Fortunately, our state schools are excellent and affordable, so she still has great options. She sees the advantage of having mom and dad solvent when she graduates school.
I had my heart set on Brown, too. It was just exactly what sheād dreamed up for a school and I could see it was ideal for her.
Fuck today. Fuck today.
Hopefully there is a silver lining: This weekend the one private school thatās been really excited by her and has been really close with the aid package has a scholarship day where 300 kid come and out of those 2 will get full ride scholarships. Fingers crossed on that one. Itās a good shot at a full ride scholarship. I hope that works out and she can end up at a place that is perfect for her.
So Iāll just keep talking about this because Iām totally stressed today.
My daughter has an actual shot at Brown for one reason: she got a perfect score on her English SAT. If you go through the stats on their website, this is the one thing in the world that will give you a fighting chance at admission - 1 in 5 of the applicants with perfect scores get in, compared with the 8% admission rate overall.
The reason she likely wonāt get in: sheās not in the top 10% of her class. This is not due to the fact that she is a slacker. She has taken 8 AP courses; she has mostly all Aās; she has been in all honors. Her school is just SO crazy competitive that even a kid like her who eats and breathes academics doesnāt really stand out in a sea of Intel science award semi-finalists and star Lacrosse players.
Youāre probably thinking itās all about their reputation, but when we visited, what really hit us wasnāt their reputation but just how in love with learning the kids were. We loved how every telephone pole and surface in the whole town was covered with notices for poetry slams and people starting bands and discussion circles. Yeah, the traditions sounded really fun, but the whole vibe just fit her like a glove.
Jebus, one in five with a perfect English SAT? Btw, a perfect SAT (of any kind) goes in the victory thread. Thatās something to be damn proud of. But even 20% odds sounds disheartening based on that kind of stellar performance.
Welcome to the wonderful world of college admissions!
@ChickieD, Iām right there with you. Mine got into the top two schools she applied to (both of which are in the top 5, one on the university list and one on the college list), and NONE of the lower ranked schools, not even the one that accepts nearly half of all applicants. And sheās so stressed about what today is going to be like at school because of the tensions and emotions all of her friends are going to be experiencing.
Interesting coincidence: she kept waffling about applying to Brown, because she also thought it was a perfect fit but it has such a drastic acceptance rate (itās easier to get into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale) that she thought it would be a lesson in futility. She decided against it, and has been second-guessing that decision ever since.
So I guess Iām saying that ā'tis better to have loved and lostā than to chicken out and not even try. Also, that where students are accepted and where they are rejected does not seem to make any rational sense, so thereās no reason to take it personally.
Thanks for commiserating. I am so proud of her but her school is so brutally competitive. I used to love her school, but this year I have hated it. Itās made her feel so less than even though she has worked so hard.
My daughter got into some of the top tier schools and not into some of the smaller ones we thought would give her scholarships. The one where she is a quadruple legacy wait listed her. We cannot figure any rhyme or reason to the decisions, but it deflated her as she thought she would get into every one but the two ivies (Brown and Dartmouth).
Right now Iām mad I played the Ivy game. I bet her school today is going to be gruesome.
@japhroaig When she worked with a tutor for her SAT he told her that she would have gotten a plaque on the wall at his school for her perfect score. At the school she goes to, it barely got a mention. And yeah, the Ivy game, you figure itās like this: Is your dad Obama? No? chances are lower you will get in. Does your mom own a Fortune 500 company? No? chances are lower. Do you play a sport? No? chances are lower. Are you a Jewish girl from Long Island? probably they got a lot of these applicants - too bad you are not a Native American from Montana. So, perfect score is nice but then you factor in all the other little things and it makes you feel like you will never compete.
Itās like I recommend to parents of young children when theyāre thinking about what instrument to pick: choose the tuba, French horn, or viola, NOT the violin or piano, for heavenās sake!
If it makes you feel any better, my kid hits a lot of the diversity markers and that didnāt help AT ALL. In fact, cozy little New England colleges were definitely not interested, even the one where she has a (extended family, but substantial) legacy status.
Apparently the announcements will be at 4:00pm today (donāt know if that means Eastern time or our local Central time). Fingers crossed for your daughter!
Fucking patching compliance.
Oh hey here are yet more servers that if you donāt fix five minutes ago you are going to be on the report for end of month. We just decided to mark them that way this morning. Please drop everything and look into this.
fucking fuckity fuck
ETA one of which was just freaking built just over a week ago which means it should be all up to date because it gets latest patches as part of the new build.
I had to be on phone calls once a month (for 5 years) where I had to explain every discrepancy in results between our product and a competing vendor being used for compliance auditing in a network with over 300,000 seats. Every time I couldnāt figure out the differences from the code, I had to rebuild systems in my lab to simulate the exact vulnerability the report was pointing to, and occasionally dig through the customer network. Not exactly the same thing, but compliance can be a beast.
Oh and even better, the newly built one is a testing box and had a double check push out what is missing update done to it yesterday and now shows up as not compliant for some odd reason.
