Some of her rom coms were terrible. Just Like Heaven was a weird pro-life bizarre cringe fest. And I still hate Sweet Home Alabama. 

I’ve had that similar experience with kid therapy. My youngest has a temper and is prone to tantrums when he is sad and frustrated. So his play therapist has done so many things - draw your feelings, draw an angry monster that you can yell at when you’re angry, figure out how to use fidgets to keep your temper from…

It reminds me of the “pay your age” debacle at Build-a-Bear. A nice idea but there’s no way they had the volume of product to keep up with the demand. 

Yeah, I will generally eat anything now except I’m not crazy about raw tomatoes. So when I order a salad or a sandwich, I’ll ask them to hold the tomatoes. But if the whole table wants guac, I’ll just eat around them or abstain. I don’t make a big deal about it.

Yeah, my mom was very much “This is what we’re having. Everyone is getting the same thing. If you don’t like it. Don’t eat it but I’m not making you anything else” but she was also good at separating things. I could get naked spaghetti. I could get the sauce on the side. Like if she did make sloppy joe’s she probably…

I have a very distinct childhood memory of being small and going to another family’s house for dinner. They were friends with my parents and had two small kids. They served steaks to the adults and for the kids, sloppy joes. I hated sloppy joe’s as a kid. I hated how wet the bread got. I hated how mushy and messy they…

In my son’s early days of school (k-3 grade) his resource teacher would start off the meeting by going around in a circle and talking about his strengths. I loved this. It put everyone in a friendly mood and it really made me feel great to hear good things about my son. When you have a child in the special school…

The Target & Walmart ones are huge. I have a niece with an American Girl doll but all of her accessories and clothes are from Target. 

Absolutely. My mom taught 3rd grade for decades and in the heyday of the dolls she kept her classroom stocked with the American Girl books. Most teachers did. Scholastic did. So the kids would read the books because they were approved and encouraged and then they wanted the dolls. 

Another thing to be aware of is that sexual predators are not the only risk. I work at a university and one of our professors talks frequently about how hate groups recruit heavily in a lot of video games. So in general it is probably a good idea to teach your kid to be extra cautious of someone who is pushing the…

Yes. Me too. When I tried to transition from journalism to public relations I had about 5 years of professional journalism experience. So I wasn’t making a lot of money but I had an annual salary and health coverage. I’d meet constantly with PR agencies - gigantic global PR agencies with huge budgets and fancy offices…

I’m sorry, did you say no one was wearing an obvious wig?

For real. I live in the Midwest and I have two coats I wear all winter. One is a nicer wool coat which I can use for work. The other is a puffer coat I use when it gets deadly cold or it’s snowing. I have worn the same wool coat for 7 years and only upgraded this year because I gained some weight and it isn’t as…

God’s like “Nah, I’m busy. I’m sure it will work itself out.”

Sorry - I should have said the Tina Fey/John Slattery one. That’s based on a column written by Ann Leary, his wife. So “Denis Tennis” was an invention of Denis Leary and that was about their marriage. 

I love the column and read it every week and I liked the series but in some cases, I found the column infinitely superior to the episode. There are two episodes that I hated - the one with the girl who has daddy issues and then the one about Denis Leary’s marriage. In both of those episodes I found the characters…

Agreed about solo/single difference. I have custody of my kids 1/2 the week. I run no errands for myself when they’re around. Usually. They’re getting older so I’m starting to run to the store for 20 minutes if I need to. But otherwise, I do grocery store & Target trips on my own when I don’t have the kids in the…

The Ellen monologue is being shared by every single one of my rabid Republican facebook friends. It’s being shared as some sort of pre-cursor to the election racism they’ll spend the next few months posting as if it’s their special way of saying “See? We’re different but you can still be nice to me like Ellen is being…

Having gone through a divorce in the past few years, I honestly don’t know how anyone could deal with all of this unless they’re seeing a therapist. In talking to friends going through the same thing, those who had the easiest post-divorce path were seeing a therapist. Even if you know that divorce is the right…

That’s the truth! You truly don’t know what you’ll get and what you’ll have to deal with. My oldest is on the autism spectrum and I dealt with a great deal of stress and depression in the early years because of that. Having a child is already hard but when you have to do weekly PT appointments and speech therapy…