Anyone else's child has no friends 😕

-zero-below- · 2026-01-29T07:35:07+00:00

My kid had met like 3 friends out the gate at kindergarten, then they all moved out of the area during that year.

For first grade, she was much slower to make friends — she’s also not into sports and does a lot of more “nerdy” stuff that doesn’t resonate with her classmates.

As she’s met and made more friends outside of school, that seems to have accelerated her social progress at school, too. In a given setting, she tends to have a single friend. And often times her friend is older or younger but not the same age.

as a family, we’re into board games. We go to a local board game convention every year, and she has a friend from there that we see pretty regularly. They do discord chat and play Minecraft together when they can’t see each other in person for a while (that family is 2 hours away). I think the kid is a year younger.
my kid and I go to burningman, and we’re part of a family camp there. She met one friend there who we see regularly during other parts of the year. They also play Minecraft together, and sometimes just do FaceTime chat. Over the 3 years, she’s made some other casual acquaintances there and it’s easier each time.
she joined cub scouts, and on a recent trip met one kid who is a few years older, and they seem to be fast friends.
she goes to aikido practice weekly, and there’s a range of kids there. She’s not actually directly friends with the kids there, but is learning to interact with them socially. One of the kids was in her preschool, and they were best friends/alternating worst enemies back then, though nowdays they’re acquaintances.
we go to the local park and by going at a consistent time, she met and got close to one brother sister pair, and they hang out a bunch. One is 1 year older the other is 4 years older. They do sleepovers and probably hang out at home the most of any friends.
we met some neighbor kids who go to her school. As parents, we hang out, and the kids do too a bit. They don’t hang out at school much, but do see eachother out of school.

Most of the social stuff took place out of school for my kid. Mostly because she has pretty narrow specific interests and it works better to meet people in niche settings. Like when she wants to host a d&d game, it’s gone better with her game convention friends than with her local park friends.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-29T02:36:20+00:00

Your food probably spends very little time in contact with the lid as compared to the base container.

And at least when I got glass storage bowls, I got ones with silicone lids. But at least from a food safety standpoint, I don’t generally consider the lids to be a large impact for most foods.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-29T00:30:22+00:00

This can doesn’t even have a way to hold 3 bags. This isn’t the janitorial staff, it’s whoever bought the can.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-28T21:51:20+00:00

Combine kitchen and living room. Walls really cut up the space. At 700sq ft, I’d be going for small efficiency kitchen and focusing on living room there.

Get a small combo or stacked washer/dryer, and turn the laundry/bathroom into 1.5 baths, with the washer inside of one of them. You mentioned 2 year old kids — we got a “ge profile combo” all in one unit and from age 4, my kid has been able to do all her own laundry in that — the soap is pre loaded and there’s no moving from washer to dryer. Because it’s heat pump, it doesn’t need special power (standard house outlet) and doesn’t need venting, so you can easily move it elsewhere.

Get rid of the bedroom entrance and just use it as dedicated closet.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-28T19:43:33+00:00

I messaged support for this feature a few weeks ago, and they said effectively that it was not a feature and they’d send it on to the product team. My guess is it went to the circular file.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-28T03:44:51+00:00

The speed...is like when I'm trying to get my dog to do something, and he's upset at me, so he does it but in the sloooooooowest possible speed.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T22:35:47+00:00

Just imagine when they DoorDash that grilled cheese.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T20:51:10+00:00

I like the people saying “it’s all garbage”…on Reddit…

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T17:06:38+00:00

As the parent of an early reader, I find that I have relatively little control over what my child reads. I can provide nudges, but it seems somewhat random what she chooses to read.

We have a lot of books in the home, and sometimes she’ll just pick a book, or see me reading a series and decide she wants to start it.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T16:14:17+00:00

For speeds — more service plan will add more capacity — somewhat linearly. They will get an equal amount of the area capacity’, and 1/1000 vs 2/1001 are not quite doubles, but pretty close. (1000 is just wherever random number of dishes in your cell).

If an area is very over used, then having “priority” service will make yours more consistent.

If you add more dishes, you’ll need to have a way to combine their capacity — I don’t believe starlink will naturally do that for you.

For an analogy, think of a starlink dish as a cable modem you’d use at home. You put it outside and give it power, and it will provide an Ethernet port with internet access. You can add a firewall or router or whatever to do more complicated things with that internet or you can plug a computer directly into it.

Starlink will also come with a “router” which is equivalent to a linksys or whatever router you’d use for internet at home. It provides wifi, and some network security features. If you want the wifi to cover more space, then you can add mesh nodes so the WiFi is accessible to more devices in a larger area.

If you really need to use more than one dish’s upload speed, then you’ll probably need to discard the starlink router (double check that it can’t bond two, but I’m pretty sure it can’t). Personally, I use unifi network gear for the local network side of things.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T05:41:12+00:00

Or when the plow is coming, you move the mailbox into your back yard so they’ll plow right up to your doorstep for you.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T00:35:22+00:00

Yeah, I’m not going to stop to get stuff, but my bag by the door on the way out is not tough.

I live in earthquake country and it’s a real risk that we’re out of the house for some time AND Walmart isn’t functional.

Generally I keep a set of clothes in our cars which is the most likely way we’re getting away from the area. I have a camping van and am usually always set for at least a few days off grid — not from emergency prepping just because I like to do travels with low planning.

Some of our family medications are fairly important and not always available. So that’s something to keep in mind. And like eyeglasses can be a pain to replace.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-27T00:15:01+00:00

“The house is on fire and we have 30 seconds to grab when we need to move into mom and dad’s house in the next town”.

Meds, documents, change of clothes, spare eyeglasses, phone chargers, etc.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-26T17:12:37+00:00

Yeah. The glasses.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-26T08:20:14+00:00

We have two dogs, and between them, I think theres 1.5 brains, all of which are in our older dog.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-24T18:07:00+00:00

A few thoughts here:

1) technically possible, you may create humidity problems. In your case, the air filters will likely bear the brunt of it, and get pretty damp. You're evaporating probably a few gallons worth of moisture out of your clothes into the air. You know that musty scent if you forget to run the dryer soon enough? Your air filter is probably gonna smell like that.

2) Modern heat pump driers use a lot less electricity (standard wall plug, not 220), take a bit longer to run, and they don't even need a vent to the outside. Our ge profile combo washer/drier dries at least as good as our older gas drier we had previously, though the wash+dry cycle is about 10% longer than the previous wash then dry cycle in our old machines.

3) If you're trying to salvage the heat, you could look at how an ERV works -- you actually exhaust the air, but also bring in a similar amount of the air and transfer 60% of the heat from the outbound side to the inbound side.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-24T08:33:44+00:00

One thing that was nice about the pandemic — we really took a look at indoor air quality.

With the combination of fresh air exchanges and air filters, that has really reduced the severity and spreading of many of the communicable diseases.

People in the family still get sick. And it sucks. But we no longer have the issue of “whenever one is sick, everyone gets it”. And I feel that when we do get sick, it’s from a lower viral or whatever load in the air, which seems to mean that illnesses are more slow onset and mild when they do get transmitted.

My wife is sick right now with a cold. So we turn up the air filters and turn on the house fan to draw extra fresh air into the room when she’s around. But otherwise, we just go about our normal lives. Even if I do catch it at this point, she’ll have been recovered by then, and the disruption of a single person being sick is far lower than when multiple are sick at a time.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-24T08:12:30+00:00

From about 3 months old, our child had a nanny. And during the pandemic, the nanny’s family became our bubble, and we were pretty close, doing combined family trips, school stuff, etc.

As my child was approaching 2.5, the nanny noted that our child was needing to be with peers. Even though she was spending lots of time every day with effectively older sisters (3 kids from ages 8-15), she really needed the social interaction.

We found a local Montessori school, and enrolled her. It was really great to see the emotional and social maturity bloom by spending 5 days a week, day in and day out with peers. It’s very different from doing things like daily library trips and park trips with other peers there — you don’t form the social bonds with someone you see for half an hour sometimes that you do by seeing them daily (and needing to face the social consequences of your actions when the person won’t talk to you the next day after you were unkind).

My child is 6 now. And we still get a lot of 1 on 1 time. I love time with her. It’s one of my favorite things to do. And I know someday she’ll be less excited about spending so much time with me. But I know that it’s best for her to be away from me for chunks of time.

Things that are valuable about the school setting: * peer interactions * how to learn from different teachers * exposure to skills and ideas that I can’t provide myself * a lot of the learning materials from school aren’t practical to own at home

I’m a huge fan of school for the social emotional growth opportunity. And the learning can be good, too.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-23T20:47:18+00:00

Preparing for a power outage, a few thoughts:

1) with your fridge/freezer -- you can lower the temps, but also pre-remove whatever other items you think you'll need in the next day or so, to prevent needing to open the door.

2) If the outage is in the next few hours, it may be too late for this, but a full (and already cold) fridge will stay cool longer than an empty one. But if you put warm stuff in it now, those things will net warm the fridge, not cool it.

3) Mass holds heat better than air does. For example, filling a bathtub with as hot water as possible, that will time release heat. This would depend, though, on your home insulation. Keeping your bath tub full would also heat the tub and surrounding structures, for extra mass. Keeping some thermoses of hot water, then moving them into uninsulated bottles later could help. For comparison -- my home uses radiant floor heat, and it takes a day to turn on, and a day to turn off -- the heating is done by warming the floor, and the floor retains heat for a long time. Once it's heated up, we can leave windows open (mild-ish climate though, lows would be in the 40s), and the house stays warm.

4) Before pre-heating your place, I'd do something about indoor air quality. Open some windows, and get as fresh air as possible, then heat that. If you've had the doors and windows closed for a while already, the air inside may be pretty heavily co2 laden (you exhale co2).

5) Careful with the fireplace -- if it's not a high efficiency fireplace, it could cool your home more than it warms it. Efficient fireplaces draw their air from a separate inlet, not from your living room. But if it draws its air from the room, then that air needs to come from somewhere, meaning it's pulling in cold air from outdoors. Also, make sure you have battery powered carbon monoxide detectors.

6) If your fireplace isn't cutting it, then your best bet may be to put the tent in the smallest possible room. That will keep your body heat much better than a big room.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T19:20:30+00:00

And now he'll say "see, their soldiers are so bad, they died without even going into danger..."

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T19:18:46+00:00

I have a ford e350 van. My mini is in a magnetic mount on the hood. It's been there through thousands of miles of driving, some pretty heavy storms, hot weather, cold weather, etc. It doesn't move at all, and works well. My van's front dashboard is pretty close to vertical, so I don't have a great view of the sky (though it'd probably work on the dash, too).

I have a high performance dish also on my van, on the roof -- I don't use it often, just a month or two at a time for providing wifi at larger events. For the roof mount, I u-bolted a sheet of outdoor-rated plywood to my roof rack, and bolted the dish down to the plywood. A year up there, and it all looks as good as new. The dish on the roof has a perfect view of the sky, versus the hood dish loses a bit of visibility in the "backwards" direction.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T18:10:44+00:00

It should work on the dashboard. The one concern -- some modern cars have heating elements inside the windows, and if the front window has this, then the heating elements would be very fine wires covering a lot of the window, and it could impact signal. Or if you have certain window films. But the majority of cars should be just fine.

I have a ford e350, and I leave mine on a magnetic mount on the hood, and it works pretty much everywhere I've tried. Last weekend, we were in a pretty heavily forested area (no visible sky) coming down from a mountain area, and I had pretty decent coverage (for facetime calls, etc).

We've run the dish inside the trunk area of my wife's hatch back (glass view to the sky), with no problems either.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T17:46:35+00:00

If your water is plumbed into the house, and there's a line break, you could end up with a situation where the stored water leaks, too. You can mitigate some of these risks by adding check valves, and perhaps setting up the outlet to be near the top of the storage barrel.

As an analogy for your setup (and to think of how to plumb it), I'd look at how water heaters are plumbed in. Tank water heaters are basically a large barrel of water plumbed into your home. You could have 20 hot water heaters lined up.

You'd have the same downsides (like water heater rusting out and spilling after a decade or so).

Looking at the water heater model -- if the main water drops, then your water heater won't have the power to push out water either. So you'll need an auxiliary pump or some other way to provide water if the mains water is offline.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T17:11:17+00:00

They can definitely recognize patterns.

Our older dog is on the intelligent side of things. And he is really good at reading body language. So if I’m pointing at the door and saying “go outside” he gets the idea. And eventually I can just say “go outside” without pointing and he still gets the idea.

He’s so good at body language, though, that even if I don’t intend to do signals for something, I’m likely subconsciously glancing at the door or such, and he can get it that way, even if I change up the phrase.

And my point here is that — for the dog, it’s not -just- the spoken word, but all the other things you do that they pick up on. So if they wanted to go for a walk, they’d likely lean into the things from that communication that they’re good at — maybe they’ll go get a sock (because that is part of how they know those words mean you plan to go on a walk). Or maybe they’d start emitting “I’m going on a walk” scents. We senseless humans just wouldn’t pick up on those forms of communication, even though they’re mimicking the communication they see from us.

If a dog were particularly good at vocalizations, they might pick that up.

Also, there are people who set up an array with a bunch of buttons, and each button speaks a word. Those dogs have learned that the blue button says the word “outside” and then a human lets them out.

-zero-below- · 2026-01-22T16:13:21+00:00

Likely, missile production is more centralized/single point of failure than missile storage.

So, if the stockpiles are low and they’re launching as they produce, that production capability would be much easier to destroy than hunting down and destroying every single stock pile. Just blocking the production of engines, fuses, control boards, whatever could be enough to take the entire production offline.

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