<p>LOL, kmc. Thanks for getting us off to a good holiday start.</p>
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<p>I love it!</p>
<p>km, thanks for the insight and laughs. You have my sympathy re border hell. I spent a fair amount of time doing the same thing at the Peace Bridge in my younger days. But enjoy once you get there!</p>
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<p>Love it!!! and actually think Asses fits perfectly as well!!</p>
<p>PRJ - one site that I’ve had luck with for travel is sidestep.com. Looks at a bunch of other sites and easy to use. Just a thought.</p>
<p>missypie, there will be no perfect fit, but the one you found sounds like it is below the line. One other thing that may apply to your son (though perhaps less to others): Age helps. It sounds to me like your son is a great kid who is really trying and finding an environment that works for him will make a big difference. And, as you enquired in another thread, finding a job/career path that can take advantage of his strengths and downplay his weaknesses will be key (it is to all of us, but is especially important to kids like yours and to a large extent mine). If he can train for that in college, life will be good. Best of luck. I wish I had more useful insights because you and he deserve it.</p>
<p>We are seeing such maturation in our kids. ShawD going off dutifully to do ACTs every day. Grumpy at the end of a full day the other day, said she didn’t want to talk about it and needed to chill for a bit, then came out and was charming. ShawSon came by with the male posse while we were cleaning up from dinner and asked if they could cook dinner after we were through. We said yes, but clean up. They started with a salad (we get a delivery every week from a local cooperative farm). He made a tomato sauce from scratch with onions, mushrooms and chicken sausages and then served it over spinach/ricotta ravioli. Then, after we were asleep, they cleaned the kitchen beautifully. [Hallelujah. Repeat many times. Never happened before]. We suggested that we’d find him some recipes he could try to do sophisticated cooking (his attitude has been it is easy to cook decently but hard to cook really well). He said, “Good idea. It might be good to have a few dishes I cook really well.”</p>
<p>On travel sites, the two I like the best are [Cheap</a> Flights, Hotels, Airline Tickets, Cheap Tickets, Travel Deals - KAYAK - Compare Hundreds of Travel Sites At Once](<a href=“http://www.kayak.com%5DCheap”>http://www.kayak.com) and [ITA</a> Software - Solving the Travel Industry’s Most Complex Problems](<a href=“http://www.itasoftware.com%5DITA”>http://www.itasoftware.com). The latter enables you to look at things graphically, which can be useful when you are changing planes. Sidestep was purchased by kayak, I suspect, because it became more or less the same as kayak with with a less elegant interface, so I stopped using it. It may be different now. We travel all the time and I haven’t found better sites. I use tripadvisor to find decent hotels.</p>
<p>Speaking from the husband’s point of view, I have been coaching ShawWife to be less intrusive. After a couple of times when she wasn’t happy with me, she sees that it is working well. She is pulling back and everyone is happier. ShawD and ShawWife are doing great together. </p>
<p>It helps that ShawD and ShawSon listen to my suggestions about what they should do (with respect to academics and to life, well mostly). ShawD asked for my opinion this morning about whether she could take AP Stats instead of Calculus A this spring if she were willing to take Calculus in summer school in the summer at the end of her gap year. ShawSon is thinking of making a change to his fall schedule and wanted to talk it over with me. So, ShawWife sees that my approach is working and she’s moving in my direction. Occasionally, husbands can do it OK. [Occasionally not. ShawD thought that my suggestion that she imagine that on each subway train in Toronto, there was one bad guy (e.g., rapist or robber) who might act if given the chance and that she should always be alert merited eyerolling].</p>
<p>We use Kayak and Trip Advisor to at least get us some viable options, and then winnow down from there.</p>
<p>If we paid S2 to cook, we’d be in the poorhouse! We actually looked into some serious cooking classes for S2, but they never coordinated with school stuff and summer activities. He likes creating his own recipes, and talks about changing X for Y or adding Z, and explains how changing one thing or another alters the chemistry of it all. Blows us away, but heaven forbid if you suggest he might take more chem!</p>
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<p>LOL…when we went to see the autism program, I used Trip Advisor to find a restaurant. The top rated restaurant was a seafood place which I didn’t like the sound of (being that it’s in nowhere-near-a-body-of-water northwest Texas). We went to the next ranked place which was supposed to have great barbeque and burgers…It was literally a bar…a smoky bar that you had to be 18 to enter…which we did. Who knows if Son thinks I’m cool or a nut for suggesting the place.</p>
<p>Shawbridge, you’re right about the school being “below the line.” If I had been more impressed with the school itself I’d have been more willing to bear the flaws in the program. But I’d rather have Son commute to the local branch of UT than to get a degree from a very undistinguished school. (When I read about the school online, I thought that maybe it was an undiscovered treasure…now I think not.)</p>
<p>Ah, DH does Zagat for restaurants, since sometimes he has to arrange dinners for folks in other cities. For overseas, we start with Frommers and Fodor’s and go from there. Sometimes he googles particular kinds of food and location and then looks for reviews, etc. from there.</p>
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That’s always been my complaint – the whole dinner thing is just too much work! (Although for $20/dinner, I could almost be persuaded it’s fun!)</p>
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sabaray – sounds great! If you change you mind and decide to let S prepare it, let us all know – we’ll have the bus swing by. :)</p>
<p>Analyst- I like that idea of paying for cooking. S has that $300 HP repair bill, he could work it off that way. D just likes to spend (my) money. I don’t like to cook.</p>
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<p>ROFL. Good thing I wasn’t drinking that margarita when I read this.</p>
<p>This is why I come her for support.</p>
<p>Much better day. D is at work, S went to a friend’s house and I am home alone!</p>
<p>H called and said that he was at the grocery store and saw a *Toy Story III *coloring book. He leafed through it and saw the ending, as depicted in the coloring book drawing. He said that he was standing there, sobbing the coloring book aisle! I told him that we simply can’t be allowed in a theatre to see that movie.</p>
<p>Oh dear. I cry at anything <em>vaguely</em> poignant in movies/TV shows. We had thought of going to see Toy Story III while D1 is home, before her wedding on the 10th. This might be not a good idea …</p>
<p>FallGirl, glad today is better and hope the cooking thing works for you. The $20 worked out to be fair compensation (probably two hours of real work). If it were too much, they would have been wanting to cook all the time and that did not happen. At the same time it was generous enough that like CBBBlinker they didn’t feel that badly about having to pay for a new game, clothes, trip, concert, or whatever, without eating into their summer job savings or trying to hit us up for money. </p>
<p>We are looking forward to seeing S2 this week-end. He is completely on his own in his house now until the end of August. He calls H and then calls me just to chat every day as he walks home from class. He sounds very happy. I think he is a bit of an introvert like me and gets energized by all the alone time. H wants me to cook all the meals while we are there (neither of us are much on restaurants). S2 is already warning me that I won’t like his kitchen, but he is trying to get it as clean as he can.</p>
<p>Love the cooking schemes (to pay or not to pay?). D1 is in the kitchen preparing dinner (I helped with the chopping). Homemade chocolate mousse (made with low fat ricotta cheese) for dessert - my share will have to be in lieu of breakfast tomorrow (or maybe not at all).</p>
<p>gosh I would have to buy new pots and pans, D1 cooks eggs everyday and you have to scrape the pan. I cringe!
Enjoy your fourth of July weekend. taking my kids to see Lady GaGa , who says I am not a good mom.
Watch Boston Med tonight!!!</p>
<p>I’m of the opinion that the kids should take on certain things as responsibilities. When they are in school, I don’t expect much other than doing the best they can in school and being respectful and taking care of their valuable belongings (this has taken a while to kick in but we’re now there). When they are not in school, I expect them to help with cooking and cleanup. There’s lots of stuff that gets done by others in our house (laundry, house cleaning). So, no money paid – that’s just their part of the deal of being in a family. Otherwise, they stop wanting to help when they are not getting paid. Both kids are fine with that, but ShawWife often wants to pay for stuff (and the kids tell her to keep the money).</p>
<p>DTE, thanks for the Boston Med reminder! I was going to check in here and then go to bed. Now I’ll have to stay up. I would like to go see Lady GaGa- unfortunately the tickets available for her show in September are astronomical in price- all the cheap seats went quick. You’ll have to give us a report. </p>
<p>Analyst, hope you have a great trip to see S2. Hopefully the kitchen won’t be too much of a surprise.</p>
<p>The purpose of paying them to cook wasn’t to get the cooking done (i.e. help with a family chore). The purpose was to have something they could do to earn extra money whenever needed. We wanted them to be able to decide for themselves what was worth spending money on rather than it always be our decision to give them money for x, but not for y. Anyway, it worked for us. Chores are a whole separate issue and they had those as well.</p>