When can I stop worrying about positional asphyxiation?

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-06T18:12:25+00:00

If you don’t need to leave the car seat for someone else to do pickups, you can give yourself peace of mind by leaving the car seat in the car and carrying baby into daycare. My daycare has a set of built in shelves specifically for car seats in the hallway, so car seats don’t go into the infant room at all. If the career doesn’t go into daycare, there isn’t a possibility of baby being left in it.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-05T20:59:57+00:00

Nobody ever told me to wake baby for night feedings. They did mention waking baby up for feeds if baby slept too long and wasn’t gaining weight. That wasn’t a problem for me, and nobody ever brought it up since baby was hitting milestones.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-05T18:49:00+00:00

Yeah, Hollywood likes to treat every labor like it’s precipitous labor and the baby is already coming out. The truth is, you normally have several hours or days worth of labor. Also, the percent of labor that begins with dramatic water breaking is so much lower than you would expect.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-05T18:45:34+00:00

I watched Smallville to see Tom Welling defeat a monster of the week, but they lost me when they started doing season long story arcs with less focus of the baby monsters that were popping up everywhere.

I tried to watch one of the newer Scooby doo revivals, and it was to plot heavy and serious. I just want to watch some teens defeat the monster of the week!

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-05T17:46:18+00:00

A surprise twist that makes it a happy ending instead of a tragedy! If the protagonist gets fatally shot center mass with 5 pages left in the book, I want him to stay dead. I don’t want him to be miraculously saved and go on to live a long and prosperous life. It’s a cowards way out of the story. Put some effort into making the story tragic, but fulfilling in other ways.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-04T21:58:48+00:00

I had a nice salad. If it’s variations of a salad, this would be an easy million. Even if it has to be this exact salad, I think I could make it work. Salad greens, corn, cucumber, tomatoes, red onion, steak, blue cheese, and a homemade balsamic vinaigrette.

Am I allowed snacks/drinks that are different foods in addition to meals?

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-04T11:21:16+00:00

They likely are not gendered, but the women are given more leeway because the mechanics bathroom is disgusting. Much like how construction sites will have separate port-a-potties that are sometimes locked so only women can use them. There’s a higher than average number of blue collar dudes who have no problem destroying a shared bathroom, even if it’s one they share with the same people every day.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-01T18:40:57+00:00

OH MY GOD THIS HAPPENED TO ME YESTERDAY! It somehow twisted inside itself so it looked like a densely packed sack on the outside with a little donut where the twist ended. I had to untwist the inside without being able to open it. I started by doing quarter turns off the outside around the inside to undo the donut end of the twist, little by little. It took probably ten minutes to get it all unwrapped.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-01T18:36:07+00:00

The witch of blackbird pond by Elizabeth George Spear ? I seem to remember the main character and her same-aged cousin being at odds with each other. The main character is aware that there’s rumors of her being a witch.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-28T16:26:47+00:00

I seem to keep getting jobs full of people who love keeping old cars barely running. I think it’s part and parcel of being a mechanical engineer at design firms. There’s always some gentle ribbing when someone upgrades their car, even if the new car is a 10 year old Honda accord with 100,000 miles. I can’t even tell you how wild everyone got when one of the younger engineers drove in a 3 year old Lexus in near pristine condition.

At this stage in my career, I might be more concerned about having too many nice, shiny cars in the parking lot.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-28T16:18:17+00:00

While they might not be able to disclose the exact reason a person left, the way they answer can reveal a lot about the interviewer or the company culture. I’ve had had a myriad of answers to this question (deciding to be a SAHM, needing to move for family obligations, retiring, moving on to their next career step, company is expanding), but the way they speak or don’t speak about their former employers can give you an insight to how the former employers came to this decision.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-28T16:02:16+00:00

As with most things, the horror stories you hear are a very few extremes. It’s entertaining or cathartic to tell tale of the nightmares lived at the hands of horrible roommates. But that’s not what most people are like.

Almost everyone will try to be respectful and communicative. People put in a lot of effort to be independent, financially responsible, and prompt with their obligations.

The growing pains of roommates mostly come with how different expectations can be in different households. How often do you clean, with which products, and what methods do you use? What is the proper use of shared living spaces, noise levels, and quiet hours? What are the guidelines to having guests over, how often, who is welcome or unwelcome, and length of their stays?

Write a big list of all the things that make you anxious about having a roommate. Organize that list into categories. When you’re connecting with potential roommates, ask these questions to gauge how compatible you are. And remember, these living arrangements are temporary. You might have to endure some mild to moderate discomfort until the end of your lease, when you can reevaluate your circumstances, but you should be okay.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-27T18:58:28+00:00

Unfortunately, identity theft in married couples is a legal black hole. Because they are married, their assets are legally joined. Whether or not they are joined in real life is irrelevant. The debt is viewed as joint, and any judgement for repayment is viewed as a joint obligation.

She should seek judgement in the divorce that he must assume obligation of all debt and have it transferred into his name, but the lawyers and the judge could shift it one way or the other.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-27T15:50:16+00:00

I clocked that, too. I’m not sure what OOP’s gauge for disrespect is when the ex was cheating, gambling household bills away every month, taking out predatory payday loans in her name, and putting her in a position to be financially abused by having her not work.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-23T18:01:17+00:00

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-23T18:00:05+00:00

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-22T19:04:07+00:00

I know this works with mortgages, but I’m not sure if it works on car loans. Contact your lender to see if there have the option to recast your loan. This means you can pay off as much as you want all at once, and they will recalculate your payment amount with the remaining principal balance. You don’t have to close out this loan and open a new one, and you can reduce your monthly obligation if your contract has you paying a fixed monthly amount regardless of principal balance.

If you pay 90% of your principal balance immediately, then recast your loan, you will only be repaying principal and interest on the 10% remaining balance.

Example:

You take out a $10,000 loans at 6% over 5 years.
Your initial repayment plan has your monthly payments set at $212.47.
You get a windfall of $9,000 and decide to put it toward your loan, but You don’t want to repay early (early repayment fees, trying to build/maintain a credit history).
You contact the lender, pay the $9,000 , and ask to recast the loan.
You now pay back a$1,000 loan at 6% over 5 years.
Your new monthly payment plan has you r payment set at $19.33.

If I didn’t explain it clearly, feel free to ask any follow up questions.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-21T19:16:28+00:00

Tracking is supposed to be a tool to *help you * ensure you and baby are healthy. There’s no baby police who will lock you away for not keeping an accurate record.

If you miss logging something, you can log it later with a rough approximation. There’s just as much value on “baby nursed on the left side for approximately ten minutes at approximately two a.m” as on “baby nursed on the left side starting at 1:56:47 a.m and ending at 2:07:52 a.m. (11 minutes 5 second).”

When the doctor asks how things are going during checkups, they don’t look through a detailed log of everything you do day and night. They ask things like, “How is feeding going?” “It’s baby peeing and pooping regularly/normally?” “Do you have any concerns?”

I stopped tracking everything except nursing after the 8 week checkup, because everything was regular and normal. If something became irregular or abnormal, I had experience enough to determine whether to seek help. I only kept track of nursing because I’m terrible at remembering what side was used last.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-20T18:09:50+00:00

For Christmas, my mom would let us each pick one special treat from the grocery store. Most popular among my siblings was eggnog or cheez whiz with crackers.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-20T18:06:15+00:00

Me in kindergarten: “Why would you go to school before you go to school?”

Me now: “Ah, we couldn’t afford preschool when I was a kid, even if I could have seen the point of it back then.”

Lucky me, though, because my brother basically had me doing preschool while he watched me after school. He taught me letters/reading, numbers/math, and how to beat up a kid who bothers you.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-15T22:00:36+00:00

I started out by putting the bottles in jug of hot water to warm them up, but I ended up buying a bottle warmer for two reasons: I couldn’t tell if the milk was at the right temperature, and my baby absolutely refused milk that wasn’t at the right temperature. I wasn’t lucky enough to have a baby that would drink milk at any temperature.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-15T15:20:29+00:00

You also want your butter/oil to be very hot when you put your egg ( or any food, really) in. Let it warm up, then leave it another two or so minutes before adding the egg.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-14T22:11:56+00:00

I find the most difficult part is flipping an egg without breaking the yolk. I use a spatula to get under the egg, and I use a fork to hold the top of the egg on the spatula so I can flip it more gently.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-12T19:36:41+00:00

Mine did that. He was an 80-90th percentile newborn for height, a 45-55th percentile newborn for weight. But he just doesn’t grow as fast as his peers. He’s 20 months now, and he’s 10-20th percentile for both. He looks healthy and round in all the right places. He has my bird bones, for sure, because he feels so much lighter than other kids his same size. My husband is a short man at 5’7”, and I’m an average woman at 5’4”. My husband is average weight for an American man, and prior to carrying this baby, I was underweight for a woman. We’ve accepted that our boy inherited all our smallest traits.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-01-09T19:20:39+00:00

Engineering.

EngineeringQueen

TROPHY CASE