My kid who didn’t have any obvious sensory issues used to take Lunchables to school half the time, because otherwise she’d just bring me back an untouched nutritionally balanced, lovingly packed lunch. Unless you’re sending him with a big bag of Takis and an energy drink every day, the teachers will think nothing of it.
They are EXTREMELY used to it. I got multiple comments on how normal my daughter’s lunches were and then, when it was time for school lunch, how it was awesome that she would eat school lunch. Now though, she’s getting more and more picky. I think it’s a control thing for her though because I can usually bribe her with a preferred food.
For school lunch he eats predominantly crackers fortified with protein (Kodiak) other kinds of crackers, an assortment of dried fruit, and sometimes beef jerky. He will only eat dry food so we can’t pack anything fresh, and we can’t pack his favorite banana nut bars because they have nuts. I know this is sad. I too want my son to have a nutritious diet. Lately he’s been pulling away even from his preferred foods, meaning for dinner, the days he eats three nuggets or fish sticks is a good day. He frequently just chooses not to eat. Which is why I’m concerned he has ARFID. I don’t believe he’s lost weight but I don’t think he’s gaining any, either. But I feel like there has been a definite regression and it wasn’t good in the first place. This is a kid who went without food at daycare for over six months because he wouldn’t eat the served meals. Now he at least eats a lunch.
It’s really tough. I got zero nutrition education growing up and have some pretty ingrained bad eating habits. I was hoping my kid would have a better opportunity to eat fresh, nutritious food. I had also hoped he would have an easier time socially than I did. Whelp.
On a non-ranty note, they took me back at the job! They were losing people.
Hurray! I mean that sincerely
Hopefully, not on The Graveyard Shift…
Where to start. Last year or early this year my son and his wife split up. The younger granddaughter (now 11) went to live with Mom, and the eldest (18) stayed with Dad. Fast forward to now, and I hear that there are knock down drag-outs at Mom’s and people are going to JAIL but Mom won’t give up custody to Dad.
Dad has no money to fight for custody or even get a divorce. I have tried to help many ways, but my son is useless and never follows through.
My poor younger granddaughter is stuck there, and the eldest is trying to help while trying to go to college and study and hold down a part-time job. She’s doing so well, but SO worried about her sister.
My son has not contacted me about any of this but my elder GD has. I finally spoke to her (what is it about kids and only texting?) and they are coming here on Friday night. (They both live out of town, about 2 hours away.)
Sigh.
The word is “averse”. Spellcheck is not your friend here. He reacts adversely to [whatevers] because he is averse to them. English is a PITA. 
I had to look up ARFID. Ouch! Seems you can’t buy a break. Good luck with all of this.
Yaay!!!
I don’t know if this is a rant or not, but it’s certainly judgmental, so here we go.
I witnessed the most hilarious bout of Dunning-Krugerism I’ve ever seen last night. It was a Dunning-Kruger hat on a hat situation. Dear readers may remember my past bitches about certain posers who are regulars at the place where I go for open jams four nights a week. One of them I’lI just refer to as The Butcher (name changed to protect the incompetent) who can only barely play an instrument and ruins almost every jam he plays on. On guitar he just wraps his hands around the neck in a proto-D-chord sort of things and just plays that up and down the neck at weird jerky times with fluttering fingering and the occasional straight up spazz-attack where he just slams all the strings at once and lets go of the instruments and lets it just whine out of the amp … like in the middle of a ballad or something. On bass, he starts off on the root note and within two bars he’s off on a free-form jazz odyssey of random notes at random times.
Another guy is Danny-Wa-Wa (named not changed because he’ll never see this). I feel for this guy. He’s my age, kind of down and out, schleps his guitar and wah peddle around without any sort of gig bag … and he thinks he’s Jimi Hendrix. He play precisely two notes. Over and over and over and over and over, while pumping his wah peddle like he’s pumping an old bike tire.
Both of them then come out to the hang and start critiquing their performance, whipping out a bunch of musical terms that have nothing to do with what they were just attempting. Danny’s main complaint on any jam that isn’t a straight out noise fest: “I can’t play jazz.”
It’s supposed to be an Open Jam, no judgment, do your best and no one will give you shit … and I try to stick by that policy as best as I can. So it’s completely possible that both of these guys just think I’m not very sociable as I can’t bring myself to strike up a conversation with either of them because I know it’ll be a workout for my eye rolling muscles. Also, I can’t bitch there, so I bitch here.
Anyway, back to Dunning-Kruger-Land. Last set of the night. I look up to the board to see that I’m scheduled to play with The Butcher on bass and Danny-Wa-Wa on the other guitar. Shit. This is going to be a trainwreck, but, whatever, I’ll try to have fun. Then The Butcher comes up to me and says, “Hey, is Danny even still here?”
“I’m not sure, I haven’t seen him since his last set about an hour ago.”
“Good. I’ll tell them he left. Maybe we can have a jam that has a chance at some melodic possibilities.”
I goddamned near did a spit take with my diet Coke. Not that he doesn’t have a point about Danny-Wa-Wa, but, “melodic possibilities?” Motherfucker wouldn’t know a melody if it crawled up his ass and tickled his prostate.
Anyway, Danny had indeed left. The other guitar player was really good and very generous in allowing me to solo. I just played as loud as I could so no one could hear the bass. It went pretty well.
Thank you for allowing me to air my pretentious musical bullshit. I’m going to have to start writing this shit down regularly … start a Jam Journal or something. There are some friggin’ characters there, that’s for damn sure.
Kid drama. The worst! I’m glad you’ll get a chance to talk to the grandkid yourself.
Thanks to my wife, I’ve learned that very few people want to hear about my life. And that’s okay…
…but only if I can control my desire to share.
So I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut and listen to other people’s stories (even though mine are funnier…).
.
Right, I was referring to small talk (with friends at the bar). HERE, we need to share MORE, especially traumas… and funny stories.
Ugh.
Well on the bright side my kid eats some things. There are some kids who have to be tube fed or subsist entirely on Ensure. It can get really bad.
Oversharing is exactly what the SDMB was invented for. Share forth oh mighty @digs.
Well, did I ever tell you about the time I almost blew up our house by playing with my “chemistry kit” in the basement? I don’t know how my parents didn’t notice I was getting tubs of sulphur and potassium perchlorate and powdered aluminium in the post… and how about the tree house we spent all summer building, but we had neither plans nor carpentry skills. So of course, one corner would get wet and warp a bit, to the point where the corner would spring up off the lone nail that was holding it down. Which would’ve been all right if we hadn’t added a “monorail” feature to our backyard retreat. Basically, a zip line with too much zip; a pair of pulleys with a handle hanging down. Before you launched yourself into the void, you’d have to stomp down on that corner to seat it on the nail. All perfectly normal for the work of fifth-grade architects… until it was my turn and I stomped, and the whole thing crashed to earth. With the corner of a two-by-four shoved into my knee, which was bleeding all over the wreckage. But wait, there’s more… I’m sure I’ve told this story here, but when I was right out of college in the mid-70s, I found a little hobbit house on a lake. Very hidden, very cool; a stone cottage with slate shingles. And the owner agreed to rent the attic room to me (a cute little 8x8’ cupola). But it was a hot summer with no A/C or screens, so I had to sleep with the windows open… and get used to bats. I had windows on the east and west sides of the tiny room, so the breezes came in the lake side and out the garden side… and so did the bats. At first I tried to swat them out the window, but then I thought “Hey, they’ve got echolocation, I’ll let them figure their own flight plan.” So I slept through a lot of bat flights, and only once had to wake up to help a little lost ‘batlet’ find the window.
We just leaned pieces of plywood against four trees growing close together, and buried the porn under a “secret trapdoor” in the middle.
But wait, what about comic books? Pretty much all I read as a kid, then my mom threw them all out (she did warn me “If you’re late one more time because you’re reading those comics…”). But I kept right on buying them (at 12c apiece), though I gave them up during the '70s… busy with college, but also I felt the quality of the writing had taken a nosedive. A specific comic (a Marshall Rogers/Roger Stern BATMAN) got me hooked again. Now that I’m retired, I read more than ever. I parked my bike outside my neighborhood comic shop, and mentioned to the owner that “there are some things you never outgrow. My favorite thing to do in grade school was to ride my bike to the drugstore, buy a couple of comics, roll them so they fit in my back jeans pocket, buy a soda and head down to the park to read… guess it’s still my favorite thing.”(As I rolled a couple of comics up, I did see him wince.) Okay, I’ll stop now.
*Try to remember
*The size of my member
*And swallow, swallow, swallow…
Sorry. The thread title reminds me.
Wait. This is The BBQ Pit. I said it! I’m glad I said it! I’d say it again!
Are you jamming in Joe’s Garage?
So this last summer, the heat wave hit us fairly hard. Our AC system, which usually works quite well, struggled to maintain 77. The AC ran constantly and I attributed this to the ambient temperature being over 105 or higher. Then on Monday evening, the AC stopped working completely. Fortunately, the temperatures dropped this Tuesday and today, with a bit of rain, so at least it was a good time to have no AC. Called the HVAC company, and they sent out two technicians today. The issue that caused the AC to stop was simple (though completely different than what the diagnostic code on the thermostat indicated), but I mentioned the lack of cooling for the last few months, so they checked the refrigerant pressures. Turns out that they had to add 2 pounds of refrigerant. I probably suffered this entire summer due to this, in addition to the electric bills being higher than normal. So I will just have the pressures checked every year from here on out. At any rate it’s back to normal now and the bill wasn’t to bad at $125. The vet bill for the cat yesterday was twice that (just vaccinations and senior cat tests, he’s fine).
My ancient MacBook suddenly went black and I spent a whole day trying to get it repaired (sorry, no vintage batteries or keyboards available). So then I switched to hunting for a recent model, new or refurb, for under a thousand. Those Apple Store folk were great, but I finally gave up. Got lunch and searched the used mac sites (Gazelle has ZERO), but nothing new enough. Everything south of $1400 had 256GB drives, and I need more.
So four hours ago I told my wife I was going to live without a computer, and wait.
“Wait for what?”
“Well, something could pop up if I keep my eyes open…”
I’m sure her eyeroll was due to my groundless optimism.
Well, just now, a refurb showed up on Amazon… a 2023 MBAir with an M2 chip, and 512GB (I’d been looking at 3 yr old MBA’s with M1 chips and half that much storage). So I bought it. And when I looked at the summary it said “Condition: New From Apple”!