The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ledasmom:

When I had an infant and a five-year-old I'd pretty much have to walk all around the car anyway, since for a good bit of the children's younger years they both had child locks activated on their doors.
I suppose there could be an extremely loud buzzer attached to the car seat that would go off when one opened the driver's door, which would both serve as a reminder and prod the baby into providing its own extremely audible reminder.

It occured to me that if the back doors of a car with a carseat in it automatically opened when the driver's door did, and the carseat slid out on a sort of shelf, it would be pretty damn hard to forget a baby in the car. This is not very practical. However, something that required a positive action to leave the baby, rather than a negative action (not taking the baby out), would probably help, but I can't quite figure out how that would work.
But what if it were impossible to lock the doors of a car without going around to each door and, say, touching the lock with the key? Wouldn't having to walk around the car tend to remind the driver about the existence of the back seat?

#308, regarding strep throat: I would add that it's important to remember that not all kids have the classic horrible sore throat, with strep. Older Son had strep two or three times: he had fever, bilateral earache and upset stomach, and never complained of throat pain at all, although apparently it was pretty clearly strep when the pediatrician had a look at his throat.
Weirdly, younger son has never had anything involving a fever of more than a degree or two (that I remember: I don't guarantee my memory is accurate for either child's younger days) and apparently didn't catch strep from his brother the one time that would have been possible, quite a relief to us: my brother and I passed strep back and forth a lot when we were young, which eventually resulted in my brother's having his tonsils removed.

There can be a cooling effect from any liquid put on an itchy rash, as I learned from my yearly poison-ivy case as a child (in one case, covering pretty much everything, head to toe). It can help, though not nearly enough.
#53: I seem to remember reading that in adults, whooping cough does not necessarily produce the characteristic whooping sound - that it is somewhat milder in adults than in children.
German measles was a murder motive in at least one classic mystery novel.
I wish I could find the book "The Horse and Buggy Doctor", which fell apart - I suspect pages have been lost, and the main part of the book is in two sections. It's a doctor's memoir, and the beginning describes a diphtheria epidemic when he was a child. One family lost something like ten out of eleven children, the last child being carried everywhere by her mother, who couldn't bear to put her down.

I can't think of anything much more fun than going to costume dramas with people who pick apart the costuming.
When I spent half-an-hour after the latest James Bond flick whingeing about the physics, it came to me that I may be too old for action movies. The whingeing, if you remove all the inappropriate words, boiled down to "I know it's James Bond but there - are - limits."

You better watch out
You better not lark
Around in your stocking feet in the dark
Santa Cat is soiling your rug.

He'll eat up all your turkey
He'll eat your tinsel too
And all he leaves on Christmas day
Is a pile of shiny poo.

(Children have been at home since the 12th. Today is the first day of Christmas vacation. I offer no other excuse)

I just picked up our giant orange cat and sang to him "Santa Cat is soiling your rug". I have no idea why.

We have those traction thingies to put on the boots so you don't slip on the ice. I don't wear them unless it's impossible to get up the hill without them, because I like sliding on ice. I especially like being able to move slowly down the sidewalk while standing completely still.
I've found that I'm most likely to lose my balance if I'm holding somebody's hand (children, usually).
Mittens for children: I forgot angora. Angora is expensive, yes, but if you get the real thing (not angora blend, but pure angora or angora with just enough nylon to help the yarn hold together) it takes very little angora to make a warm mitten - one knits it loosely. In general the hair-type animal fibers (angora, alpaca, llama and so forth) keep you warmer at a lighter weight than wool does, and also tend to turn into a more flexible felt.
Spinning kittens: Kitten didn't appreciate having hands plunged into her fur in an attempt to determine the staple length. It appears to be about two inches on the body, longer on the tail. At her age (about eight months), it's not baby-kitten fur, but it's beautifully soft.

We always make wool mittens extra-large here so they can be fulled before wearing; the ones I'm doing right now are extra-extra-big, meant to be seriously shrunk in the washer. As aficionados of wool mittens know, they shrink in any case and one ends up with a left and a right mitten from two that were identically knitted. If they're not knit generously they get too short and leave one's wrist exposed, not a comfortable situation for cold weather.
One of these days I'm going to knit myself a set of felted mittens with an inner knitted cuff, the outer cuff made very generous in size to go over the coat sleeve and the inner cuff keeping everything in place underneath. The cuff is knitted on after felting - the mittens I'm knitting now have a post-felting cuff knitted on but no outer cuff. They are considerably too big for my hand and will be shrunk to fit a six-year-old. When shrinking this much, it's advisable to use a pattern designed for it; columns of knitting shrink much more than the rows.
The great thing about felted knitting is that any minor flaws disappear into one lovely thick felted fabric.
One of our local yarn shops carries a Samoyed-mix yarn (that is, Samoyed mixed with other fibers, not Samoyed mixed with other dogs), in with a bunch of other stuff made from the most wonderful combinations of odd fibers. The hank of Samoyed yarn looks a lot like a Samoyed, if you squint at it.

#127: Two stories about walking children to school in Worcester on days when the ice was not bad enough to delay school; either that or we'd had lots of snow days already:
1) My mother, visiting from inland Washington, set off with my older boy to school. Our house is uphill of everything, including the school. They showed up again in fifteen minutes, having been unable to safely reach the bottom of our street.
2) Me, walking both children to school. We were only able to move by holding on to hedges, walls, etc.; that is, we would have been able to move without holding on to such things, but not stop. On parts of the sidewalk I would slide down about three feet, gracefully crash into a tree, and then have the kids slide down one at a time.
I don't remember how I got back up the hill.

#123: The only cure for snow balling up on wool mittens is to teach your toddler to shake the snow off frequently, and even that doesn't work very well. They do keep the hands warm, though. What you need is a knitter or crocheter; wool mittens are cheap as heck if homemade, since the amount of yarn that goes into toddler mittens is teeny. If you luck into a knitter who makes gloves and has leftover lightweight alpaca, I suspect that's the best for warmth combined with ease of movement, unless you're even luckier and find a knitter with leftover qiviut. I'm not sure there is such a thing as leftover qiviut, though.
My kids would never wear mittens until the temps dropped below freezing. Cold hands never bothered them much, possibly because, between them, they have as much common sense as the sort of housecat that runs into walls. Now that we have a longhaired kitten I wonder how well she'd spin up into yarn; there's at least two mittens' worth of fur on her already.

While I admit that it's probably wise to have something warmer than just pants at -10 Fahrenheit, I have been out in such temperatures for longer than a few minutes without anything on the lower half but pants, socks and boots (and underpants, you silly people). Around here we sort of get used to our thighs going numb during the winter.

I've been thinking of taking all my scraps of sock yarn and knitting myself a set of wildly-striped, but warm, long johns. The only real reason I haven't is the thought of all - that - ribbing, to allow them to fit gracefully in the upper regions.
Is there any such thing as a coat-equivalent for the legs? My problem with long underwear, in situations where I'm going to be changing between indoors and outdoors frequently, is the overheating legs. Can't really take your pants off except in the houses of people you know really well, and don't want to sweat into all your winter gear. Is someone out there selling leg parkas?

We're not sure how much snow we have here in Worcester, Massachusetts, since it's that lovely sort of light snow that drifts. Say knee-depth in some places, an inch in others (but not anywhere I've had to walk). I took our formerly-outdoor cat to the back door to show him the snow; he ran up two flights of stairs, and I had to carry him back down and into the warm part of the house and reassure him that we weren't making him go out in it.
We haven't really had to shovel the sidewalks, since they still have enormous branches on them from the ice storm back on the 12th. By the time winter vacation hits on Wednesday we will have had eight snow-and-ice days here in Worcester, which isn't good. On the plus side, we built our sledding ramp from one snowstorm (usually it takes a couple at least). Our back yard is roughly terraced, with a five-foot stone wall at the back of the driveway and a two-foot one about eight feet in back of that. We throw snow off the end of the driveway until the pile's as high as the wall, smooth it down, add more snow and push someone down it on a sled to test it. I was not able to persuade either of the children to test it this year, but now that it's reasonably safe they've been playing on it for hours. This is the only time I've had to myself in a week and a half.

I don't much care for eating with other people. Feeding them, no problem. Sitting down at a table with other people and eating? No. I really would rather not mix up food and socializing.

Congressman Dick Swett had a brother-in-law named Timber Dick, goodness knows why. I honestly can't comprehend how that can have seemed like a good idea.

Two quotes from children's books - young children's books:
The first, from one of the Tonka "Working Hard With" books, explains that the dispatcher "tells the driver where to go and how to get there".
The second, from "The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System": "Methane gas in its atmosphere makes Uranus look blue." Mind you, the whole page on Uranus had my mother and me laughing so hard we were crying. We are not clean-minded.

The version of that one that I've heard is: "I lost my cherry, but I still have the box it came in".
For double-entendre songs, there is, of course "My Big Ten Inch (Record)", and I confess to always giggling at the refrain to "My Ding-a-Ling".

At the Tuesday-night bar-trivia game that I frequent (our team has a two-week winning streak going at the moment) it often happens that teams name themselves after current news stories. At one game there was a team named "We Haven't Seen Britney Spears Wrestle, But We Have Seen Her Box".
That is not, by a long shot, the least-tasteful name that's ever been used. The least-tasteful one I can remember, again with reference to then-current happenings: "Astronauts In Diapers, Headed For Uranus".
And we were very, very sorry we hadn't come up with that one ourselves. Usually our names involve the latest dead celebrity, in several cases on the same day that the celebrity died.

I'm in Massachusetts, got a lot of New England, Connecticut, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee. I did give McCain a 5% chance of winning Massachusetts. It could happen. It's not actually impossible, just exceedingly unlikely. I cannot imagine the circumstances under which he would win, but I'm sure they exist.

Eh, honestly, the flying-while-pregnant thing doesn't sound like that big a deal. The general rule appears to be delivery within 24 hours of rupture to minimize the chance of infection, and if she was only leaking - not losing serious amounts of fluid - insufficient fluid wasn't likely to become a problem before she got home. The stuff keeps getting made; it's not as if there's only so much and no more. I don't think I would have done it, if only because having the airplane seatbelt on while any sort of contractions were going on sounds miserable, but she wasn't in frank labor, so no big deal. She may have felt quite strongly about delivering with her own doctor.
I never flew while significantly along, but did fly while a couple months pregnant with son #2.

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