I hope there are PhDs out there doing long term studies of survivors. I know a Columbine survivor and his adult life has been plagued by PTSD, self medicating, substance abuse and eventually prison. He’s now a traumatized man in his 30s. It breaks my heart.

We are a fully insured family and have been on a wait list for over a year for certain evaluations for our son. His issues aren’t life threatening (thank God) but we pay an awful lot of money to just sit on a waitlist.

My screen name loves your screen name :)

But also - her books are so fun! I suspect a lot of us started reading them as kids (grabbing our mom’s copies) and they are just lovely reading that feels like home at this point. It is fun to chat with others that like them! The In Death series, in particular, has a million strong and diverse women characters.…

Great point! If you aren’t familiar with Pleasant Rowland (the creator of American Girl dolls) and Aurora NY, you might find it interesting reading. There was a NYT article several years ago, and a more recent one from Vogue. Similar to Roberts and Boonsboro, but Rowland has gotten a lot more push back (she seems to…

Also guys - I realized I’ve found a group of people to whom I can ask a burning question I’ve had! Did you all notice that a few (maybe half a dozen) books ago she had shortened “Analysis” to “Anal” ? She’d have Dallas hand Peabody some crime scene stuff and say something like “Anal, stat!” I giggled like 12 year old…

I want to highly recommend Boonsboro/Antietam as a day/weekend trip if you live within a couple of hours drive. My best friend’s husband grew up a couple of blocks from the book shop/Crawford’s and we’ve all made a weekend out of going there for the Antietam Memorial Illumination (23k candles to commemorate the lives…

Me too! I picked up a few of the earliest ones at a garage sale when I was 12 or 13. It is really weird to still be reading them and be older than Dallas now. Whatever - I love them and will keep reading them twice a year as they come out :)

Guys - I read Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep” last year and it no joke changed my life! READ IT! Sleep is so important!!!! He gives a million tips for getting better sleep and tons of data about all the horrible stuff that happens if you get less than 7 hours a night. The book took me from a habitual 5 hours a…

I’m in a really nice Ohio suburb and top 50 is basically an expectation here as well. I will say though - the expectation is merely that you get in to a top 50. A slightly lower rank school with a scholarship, or just admission of not wanting to pay a top 50 price tag is perfectly acceptable.

Mine also flipped around 32-33 weeks. I just bounced on a exercise ball non-stop on the advice of my midwife. 

I did midwife birth with both of mine and it was really awesome and I felt super safe (It was NOT a home birth). But I also thought that if I had a third I’d give hospital birth and an epidural a shot. There are a lot of good options :)

I’m pretty crunchy in a lot of ways, but when it comes to birth I’m generally a “you do you/as long as the baby is healthy” type o’ person - but man that last paragraph is troubling. For some reason I thought the C-Section rate in the US was dropping? But I haven’t given birth since 2011, so maybe the trend reversed…

That is a whole other can of worms! At the time Flint was under “emergency management” by the state and they were definitely cost cutting decisions. I have no knowledge of Flint’s current leaders, except that I believe they have now regained control back from the state gov? and I believe they are pretty hamstrung…

Thanks for the clarification! For some reason I had it in my head that the Flint river water would have been fine if they had done something chemical to it, which they opted not to do to save money. I must have dreamed that up!

Long story short - the water infrastructure around the Great Lakes Region is super old around the cities (Detroit, Toledo, etc). It all needs to be replaced and is a gazillion dollar project and governments aren’t tackling it since it is prohibitively expensive. Flint may have been okay for a while if they hadn’t…

We just found a video from a few years ago that we didn’t even know we had. Our 5 year old had grabbed an old flip and started filming our new puppy dog and narrating. It ended with “Getting this puppy was one of the best days of my life and I love mommy and daddy so much for giving me a puppy brother.” We broke down…

I want to say that it might be hard to get a B&B going in the neighborhood (though admittedly less hard for the Gainses, probably). We just spent a bit of time with a dude who lives close enough to see this property (he did not know who had recently purchased it, but told us the rumor was that they had just spent…

In Fixer Upper land I’m sure you can already buy a sign that says “My Home is My Castle” - and if those two were ironic at all, I would actually think that was cute. But they aren’t ironic and therefor it would be cloying.

I’ve been going through this for two years - and am putting off going back to the doctor because I hate being told I don’t handle stress well. Apparently stress makes eyes go blurry and fingers tingle and toes/feet go numb- and I get that - but I’m not particularly stressed right now? Anyways your post inspired me to…