Jynnan tonnix

Not to defend them at all, and I haven't seen the video yet, but my grandson, who is just a few weeks younger than Nemo, seems to be interested more in making sounds than in talking. He will bark, meow, imitate the smoke alarm, and such, but, at least up until the last month or so, has not had any real words in his repertoire. He is saying three or four words now, which is still a bit behind, but my daughter has an appointment to have him tested. He has also been babbling all along, so there's that. He actually reminds me a lot of my younger son, who didn't talk until he was two, and also liked barking and meowing. He turned out to be very intelligent, and very musical, and, at 33, still delights in mimicking things, and finding different ways to produce sound. Maybe Nemo just has his own way of interacting with the world at the moment. Then again, he may be getting little in the way of interaction and nurturing. I do hope its not that. Trying to be positive...

My daughter is just a hair taller than 5'4", and very short waisted as well. She carried her first child (daughter) quite small for most of the pregnancy, and popped out at the very end. She went about a week and a half past her due date, and went into labor the morning they were going to induce her. Baby turned out to be about eight and a half pounds. Her second pregnancy, she carried all out in front from the beginning, and they were projecting a really large baby. Around seven months, they started talking about C-sections because they thought the baby was already upwards of eight pounds, but as her due date got closer, the estimated size kept getting smaller. She went into labor a day before her due date, and the baby (boy) was just a hair under seven and a half pounds. I guess sometimes it's just hard to say.

I tend to have problems telling time whether it's analog or digital. I think it's got something to do with my difficulty in telling left from right. I get it correct about 80% of the time, but, even if I am paying attention, there are times that I think carefully about which is which and still manage to get it wrong. And the same things happen with time, especially when it's quarter to, or quarter past the hour. I'll look at it, and whether it's a matter of geometry or numerals, I'll just interpret it backwards. I have no hint of dyslexia, and can read with good speed and accuracy, but shapes, numbers and directions tend to thwart me. Weird. I'd guess probably most of us have our own little glitches in the way our minds work, though.

brought over from Jill & Derick thread: I worked in a pharmacy for about four years back in the early 80's. We did everything by hand, from typing out the labels (on a big ol', black typewriter of the sort which was completely obsolete even back then) to having all the prescriptions in filing cabinets, and recording all the new prescriptions and refills by hand in log books. I got really good at deciphering doctor's handwriting, and could almost always figure out the medication and dosage correctly, even sometimes better than the pharmacist. Of course, we would call the office to verify if there was any question at all, but, as I said, it would far more often than not turn out that I was right. I actually loved doing everything that way, and when, a few years later I got a job at another pharmacy where everything was computerized, I just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. As far as the issue of kids being taught cursive, my three were still taught that at school, but I have seen all their "signatures", and they are all just a squiggle with no real resemblance to letters. My youngest is 33, and I was just visiting him in the past few days. He was showing me a note of appreciation written by one of his superiors in the Marine Corps. Mostly he has kept it because while the guy who wrote it had good things to say he also called him by a completely different name 😄 Anyway, we were talking about it because it's written in cursive, and my son was saying that anyone even a couple of years younger than he is seems to have no clue as to how to read cursive. Seems kind of odd to me, as most of the individual letters are close enough to their printed counterparts that one should be able to make out enough of it to at least get the basic gist, but apparently they really cannot read it. My handwriting has always been pretty bad, which also seems weird to me, as I have excellent eye-hand coordination when it comes to drawing things in great detail, yet I scrawl when I write. Must go through some completely different part of the brain.

Taking to small talk

Is it just me, or was anyone else's first impression that a thin stream of bilge was squirting/spewing from his mouth...? Could almost serve as an analogy for whatever the sermon might have been

I used the "fire" response to this in the sense of "kill it with...!", Because brain bleach alone might not be enough!

Yup, perfect description. I saw the comment before I actually saw a photo of the shoes, and that's exactly how I pictured them!

And all anyone really needs is one of them anyway... If you stick to a single spelling, everyone will still know what you mean, and at least it will be spelled correctly a third of the time. I swear it seems as though way too many people seem to use that logic.

I honestly thought -at first and second glance- that it was some 18 year old cosplaying Jill, because it looks almost nothing like her outside of the makeup and the earrings front and center that way. That is one industrial strength filter! The sausage fingers didn't really register.

I wonder whether he made a Stepford wife sound like a bad thing? I could imagine certain stripes of fundie finding that to be the ideal (well, as long as it was steeped in the Je-sauce).

Yeah, I know the driving itself isn't that difficult - we were actually stationed in Scotland for a couple of years back around 1990-91, and had our American car over there with us, which made it even trickier, but I never really drove anywhere except in the immediate vicinity, where I knew everything well. If we ventured any further, Mr. Jyn always drove. I get nervous driving in unfamiliar places at the best of times, so the thought of driving in England doesn't thrill me.

Yes, I really love the English countryside more than anything. London is a nice city, as cities go, but since I have a few cousins in the London suburbs, I feel as though I've seen it enough. To be honest, I'm sure there is a vast amount there that I've never seen at all, which is probably fascinating, but I'm just not a city person. I also have a cousin out in the countryside around Sheffield, and I could meander around there forever and not get bored. My childhood, up until the age of 10, when we moved to the USA, was mostly spent in a small village in the Mendips, between Bristol and Bath, and that's my happy place. Pity it's kind of hard to get to places out in that neck of the woods without a car these days, but I'm totally not brave enough to tackle that!

I was in London this past September, and though I had the holder for an Oyster card, I hadn't actually found the card since I got back from the previous trip (about 7 years before). It always seems I go there rarely enough to get really nervous about managing to navigate the train and underground system in between, and the contactless system was certainly new and different from the previous time I was there. I actually had a little bit of money left over from that older trip, and found, to my chagrin, that I was unable to use it when I tried to pay for a pub meal (I had gone for an evening out with my cousin and a few of her friends) because they had changed all the paper bills in the interim. They told me a bank would still be able to change them, but since it was only about 20 pounds, I left them as a donation to a BA charity on the way home. They were going to be worth significantly less in dollars by then than they had been when I arrived LOL. Bad timing. I really feel as though I need to go back there sooner rather than later now that I have gotten a bit more comfortable with the transit system once again, though. Maybe I'll try to go again in another year or so.

I also took the "to the men" as a reminder that the man is the only one who could, would or should ever have a female spouse.

I'm 64, and get the same thing from my mom. She cannot come to grips with the fact that I don't tend to feel the cold, and hate the feeling of layers of clothing, so I almost never wear a coat just to go to the store or something where my actual time outside will be pretty minimal. For me, if it's not too windy, I'm fine in a long-sleeved blouse or light sweater until it's getting well below 40, and a heavier sweater until it gets below 20. I wore my coat for the first time this winter last weekend when we were seeing below 0 temps with major wind chill

Yeah, me too. I have never felt bad after any of the vaccines I've had in the past few years, except when I got both a Covid booster and my first shingles shot together last year. I still didn't feel horrible or anything, but was so tired the next day that every time I tried getting out of bed, I just ended up crawling right back in and slept most of the day. Which made for a very long night.

In one way, I am glad I saw it, because I don't think I would have conjured up just how disturbing that image is just off a description. But, that being said, I vote for deleting it, because although obviously it is out there, and that ship has sailed, the less places it shows up, the better.

Could be a number of things, and not all of them necessarily negative. I don't follow all their circumstances as closely as some here, so I may be off track, but wasn't there talk of the area they were in not having great school systems? Maybe the house they are in now is something they hope to upgrade from in another couple of years, and thought that the homeschooling in the interim would be less disruptive? I don't know that that would be true, for the record...We were a military family, and moved around every couple of years as a matter of course. When our kids were just a year or so older than theirs, we were stationed in Guam, whose public school system (at the time, anyway) was abysmal, but private school would have been a huge stretch for us, so we chose to send them to the public schools anyway, as they were young enough and bright enough that we figured any holes in their education could easily be made up for by simply paying attention to what they were being taught, and supplementing. Also, knowing myself, I just didn't think I had the necessarily discipline to home-school effectively for the longer term. They are all fully functioning adults now, all having gotten into their first choice of colleges, and all homeowners with good jobs and rich social lives, so I guess it worked out. I hope that jill and Derick do eventually choose to put their kids back in school, and that they are also still both young and bright enough that the disruption will not have a long term effect. Of course, if the SOTDRT is it for the long haul, I'm less optimistic.

Quick story about how sometimes you never realize that certain words sound alike until a toddler's input. Anyway, grandson, at 14 months, is not really saying words yet (as opposed to his sister, who was starting to put together sentences at the same age - they are all so different from one another), but he does have a range of gestures and other responses to certain things, like throwing his arms up in the air at the mention of a touchdown when football is being watched or discussed. Daughter and son-in-law were over with the kids today, and I was making stewed chicken. We were talking about it, and son-in-law was blanking out on what the big pot was called that I was cooking in, so I said, "Dutch oven", and Milo immediately raised his hands over his head in triumph!

Wouldn't doing that risk the results come back showing turkey ancestry 😆?

Names can have multiple diminutives. Just look at all the possibilities in Elizabeth...Liza, Lisa, Eliza, Beth, Betsy, etc...William can spawn Will, Bill, and Liam. Many other examples.

Aren't Malinois and other Belgian shepherds pretty closely related to German shepherds?

I was raised on Cheddar cheese, and we actually lived some ten miles away from Cheddar in England, so I guess you can't get more authentic than that. I love cheese of pretty much any sort, and agree that there are also solid places in the cheese universe for processed cheese. Even after we moved to the USA when I was 10, a grilled cheese sandwich basically meant open-faced, melted cheddar cheese on toast, though I have learned to appreciate a gooey American style grilled cheese made with Kraft singles as well. I have always used Kraft singles to make mac & cheese, and my kids, though they can be foodies, actually prefer that to versions made with mixtures of real cheeses.

Hope you feel better soon!! I was also feeling somewhat crappy in the couple of weeks before all our company arrived but I have been taking Covid tests every couple of days, since my immune system seems to keep fighting whatever I have, then letting it gain a slight foothold again, over and over, but no sign of Covid, and I'm mostly just feeling as though I have a slight cold off and on. No one seems to have caught anything from me, at any rate. I think I'm just getting bits of the colds and viruses that the grands have been picking up from daycare over and over when I babysit. I have been trying to keep my distance from everyone as much as I can, and wash my hands a lot. As I said, so far, after a little over a week of having had a houseful of guests, everyone else seems to have avoided it, so hopefully luck holds out.