Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I (also female) want to start a family. The plan is for me to be the one to be pregnant this first time. We are very excited about this prospect but there is one dark cloud forming overhead.
My wife’s parents have been divorced for 20 years, and they both have had new partners for at least a decade. While things have always been a little tense on occasions when everyone is present, it was manageable until grandchildren entered the picture. Both of my wife’s siblings now have children, and my mother-in-law, “Nancy,” is insecure around/jealous of “Joyce,” the wife of her ex-husband, especially when it comes to interaction with the grandchildren. It drives her especially crazy that one set of grandchildren refer to Joyce as “Grandma Joyce,” rather than just Joyce, as she feels “Grandma” should be reserved only for her. She even asked one of my brothers-in-law to take down a picture of her ex and his “new” wife, because i
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We’ve been in remote schooling since we went home last March. In November, our sixth grade son started to develop a vocal tic. He makes repetitive sounds like “buh guh luh ruh.” This happens randomly, although we’ve noticed it happens more when he’s feeling stressed out or when he’s doing something passive like listening to music or watching a video.
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Since Tourette’s syndrome runs in my family, I grew up with physical and vocal tics, and we’ve been able to normalize them for our son. He understands they are not something he’s doing voluntarily and that it’s best to relax and let them happen instead of trying to suppress them. Instead, we’ve worked with our 7-year-old to get her noise-canceling earphones when the noise is bothering her, and ear plugs for her to wear at night (they share a room).
Dear Care and Feeding,
My second grade son has been called a bully by two classmates and their parents. Yet nobody, including his teacher, says that he has ever laid a hand on anyone, because we don’t condone violence in our household. My son is known to tease other kids, but that’s what every second grader does! Have we become so sensitive as a society that kids can’t poke fun at each other without being labeled bullies? If these kids can’t handle that, then the real world will eat them alive. How can I tell these parents that their kids need to toughen up?
Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband, 3-year-old son, and I live in an area with moderate to high COVID rates and have been pretty strict with COVID precautions since the beginning of the pandemic we have not hosted any guests inside our house or traveled to family since March. My husband is high risk, and since we had to return our son to day care in June, we feel like that is already enough of an exposure risk. All of our extended family is a plane ride or 8+ hour drive away, so we are coming up on a year of not seeing family. It has been really hard on all of us to have Zoom and FaceTime as the only means of connection. Most of our extended family has been more lenient and done some traveling/visiting, and I know they have been disappointed we’re not comfortable with seeing folks, but it’s been a respectful “everyone has their own risk tolerance, and every region has its own positivity rate” situation.