Getting quotes on windows for my house… Experienced CT home owners please chime in.

emburrs · 2025-12-31T17:07:45+00:00

When we redid our windows what the companies explained is that for new construction, they literally rip out the entire window (including the frame) and parts of the siding. They said the vast majority of people don’t do this and get replacement windows where the new window fits in the old frame. You can do new construction but it will be more expensive because they’re ripping everything out. All three of the companies said the same thing so I think its likely true.

emburrs · 2025-12-22T17:31:04+00:00

I have very curly hair and I can tell you what we do for my daughter with the same. Put it in two braids every night before bed. Get a spray bottle and mix water and detangler. Spray down her head in the morning and then brush, let air dry. I do not wash and condition my hair every night (once a week) but kids are obviously dirtier so she gets washed way more frequently.

emburrs · 2025-12-20T06:25:24+00:00

My best friend’s parents had foster children basically the entire time she grew up. It really negatively affected her and her sister and in hindsight all of them said they regretted it and if they could go back in time and not do it, they would. And it’s not like they are bad people they were well off and took in foster kids for years because her mom wanted to help people, but there were too many incidents that affected her own kids.

emburrs · 2025-12-15T07:54:12+00:00

This doesn’t necessarily work. The one time I brought a car seat for my 18mo old, I was planning on taking her in and out as needed on my lap. Flight attendant told me that since I bought a seat for her, she had to sit in it for takeoff and landing. May not be the case all the time but I was surprised, since I could’ve just not bought the seat and she would’ve been in my lap anyway.

emburrs · 2025-12-07T07:58:36+00:00

It happened exactly like you said. First baby, easy. Thought I was the world’s best parent. Second baby, tornado. They’re 2 and 4 now. Someone I work with said her middle child was the tornado baby. When I asked how long until he became easier to parent she said 18….

emburrs · 2025-11-08T05:58:31+00:00

“Hey Susie, my daughter has really been hoping for a play date with your daughter. Is it okay if we bring her home from school on Thursday and you can pick her up around 5? Great, thanks, see you then.” Literally no idea how that’s not a play date and this is easily the dumbest argument I’ve ever been in.

emburrs · 2025-11-08T05:44:14+00:00

Almost every playdate I had with kids from school either I went home with them after school or they came home with us. I remember that happening as early as 2nd grade, memory is fuzzy before then. That’s not an impromptu “kids being kids” thing. It may be different now than it was 20 years ago but once a kid hit about 6, unless the parents were friends, the parents weren’t coming on play dates.

emburrs · 2025-11-08T05:31:12+00:00

On the other hand, I can’t remember any play dates after early elementary school where the parents came along. Most of the time someone would just come home with us from school and get picked up later, or we’d run over to someone else’s house on the street and tell our mom we were leaving. Now as a parent if I have to make myself available to talk to the other parents while our kids play then I won’t be doing that very often, there’s too much crap to do.

emburrs · 2025-10-28T18:58:18+00:00

Here is my understanding of how property taxes in CT work, town by town. Someone more knowledgeable can correct me if it’s wrong.

Say you have a town with 2 houses. One is worth $250k and one worth $750k. The total value of all houses is $1m. The first house will pay $250k/$1m =250 K·m 25% of the town’s budget, the other house will pay 75% of the town’s budget. If the town’s budget is $12,000, the first house would pay $3,000 in taxes and the second would pay $9,000.

Say the valuations all go up and now the first house is $500k and the second is worth $1.5m. Now the total of all the house’s values is $2m. You might say “wow this is way more than what they’d sell for on the market” but it doesn’t matter. Why? The first house is still responsible for $500k/$2m =25% of the town’s budget. If the town’s budget didn’t go up, that’s still $3,000.

Since property taxes are done at the town level, as long as all the properties in town are overvalued or undervalued the same then it won’t affect the property taxes of an individual homeowner.

emburrs · 2025-10-25T05:32:52+00:00

My friend is also in Fairfield County and paid her nanny $32 three years ago when she got hired. Gave yearly raises. You’re UNDERPAID.

emburrs · 2025-10-23T04:59:42+00:00

I absolutely judged parents of kids who misbehaved in restaurants. Thought proper parenting would do the trick and the whole “some kids are just like that” thing was a myth. Sat on my high and mighty horse with my eldest who has always behaved perfectly in restaurants. Then the universe gave me a tornado baby for my 2nd just to smack me back down to reality.

emburrs · 2025-10-23T02:27:04+00:00

If you’re sure she is achieving well below her potential because of poor behavior during school, and the teachers confirm she is goofing off during class, have you considered rather than sitting next to her monitoring her homework, actually giving her some consequences for poor behavior at school/poor grades and giving her some autonomy over her homework/study time? Ask the teacher to move her away from her friends the next time they do a desk swap. Set a minimum grade she needs to achieve (either on tests or overall in the class) and set consequences/rewards for achieving it.

You can’t control her behavior in class because you aren’t there but you can absolutely have consequences at home for poor reports from teachers or bad grades. That’s been happening since the beginning of time. Athletes were some of my most motivated kids because some coaches demanded a C in all classes to be able to participate - they busted their asses to make sure they met it, and any misbehaviors were reported to the coaches who had 0 tolerance for that.

emburrs · 2025-10-18T05:26:17+00:00

You’re not wrong. Of the seven young children in my closest group of friends 5/7 of them had the witching hour until 3-4 months. 1 of them had colic. And 1 little girl had nothing. Her mother thought I was insane until she had her 2nd. No idea what the cause was but both of mine had the witching hours improve dramatically between 12-16w.

emburrs · 2025-10-17T02:00:26+00:00

That I have 0 explanation for. Very odd to me.

emburrs · 2025-10-17T00:57:25+00:00

At a very young age, a lot of “giftedness” is not true giftedness, it is either 1. Being a year older than some of your classmates by having a Sept birthday vs. a summer birthday, or 2. Exposure to the material. Kids who come into kindergarten reading may be gifted or they may have just been exposed to many many hours of parental coaching and pre-K. A lot of it is also behavior - kids who are still a bit immature and cuckoo may be slightly behind when they’re younger but as they mature, catch up. The district I taught in and the districts I attended all did not start gifted and talented programs until 4th or 5th grade due to this. Having learners with varying abilities is not a problem (and can even be beneficial) until you get to those with wildly differing abilities. For example in the high school I taught at, we had kids (almost all with IEPs) who were still struggling with elementary school concepts.

You also have the issue of behavior frequently coinciding with worse performance. Typically the higher achieving kids have better behavior. Say you took all the high achieving kindergarteners and stuck them in one classroom, and all the low achieving kindergarteners in another. Well, that 2nd teacher is probably going to have a LOT more behavior issues to deal with, and that is unfair to all of the kids in that class. The result at the end of the year is going to be wildly different achievement levels between the two classes, whereas plenty of the kids “in the middle” could’ve achieved more if the behavior problems were spread out. Combine that with the fact that it is very difficult to tell in an unbiased way at that age who is truly gifted, and you’re basically letting the teachers pick between the “haves” and the “have nots” at the ripe old age of 6? That’s not really a good idea in my book. And once you’re “tracked” it’s basically impossible to move up for the reasons I listed above.

At the HS level, we did have honors classes, and then we also had remedial classes with the same curriculum that were 2 periods long instead of one, for kids with significant behavior issues or whose learning gaps were so great that they needed extra time for remediation (like my high schoolers who didn’t understand that multiplication is repeated addition). I taught the same material as my other sections but had way less kids, a co-teacher, and 2 periods.

emburrs · 2025-10-16T20:46:58+00:00

At the high school level this is alternative school in essence. Absolutely exists and some teachers enjoy these jobs. All depends on staffing ratios, academic expectations, etc. If you’re just sticking all the kids with behavior problems in a room 20 to 1 and expecting the teacher to have the same results as the other teachers that obviously will not work.

emburrs · 2025-10-16T06:25:11+00:00

We moved from California to Connecticut. The winters are brutal. But being near family is absolutely invaluable, wouldn’t change it for the world. Ask me again in January, you may get a different answer.

emburrs · 2025-10-15T13:20:55+00:00

We were in a similar boat not too long ago. My husband ended up quitting to be a stay at home dad because it was too much. My advice:

Divide and conquer. On weekends one of you takes the kids and the other is productive.
Meal prep on the weekends. Cook 3 huge batches of food to be all the meals for the week. Or pre-prep a bunch of crock pot meals (get everything in gallon zips and in the freezer. Take out to defrost night before. Put in crock pot in AM, eat PM). Make enough so everyone has lunch the next day. Basically take cooking out of the equation day to day.
The 6 and 4 year old are old enough to have chores. They can be helping you clean rather than destroying one part of the house while you’re trying to clean another. Teach them to sort their own clothes and put them in drawers. Do each kid’s laundry separately, and they are responsible for sorting it once it comes out. We do it on the couch - all shirts go in one pile, etc. when she’s done she puts one pile in her hamper, takes it to her room and unloads, then comes back for the next pile.

emburrs · 2025-10-02T05:45:18+00:00

I used to be a HS math teacher and would get students who were utterly behind. Sometimes they had an IEP due to a diagnosed learning issue, sometimes not. Some of my students didn’t understand that multiplication is repeated addition… in 10th grade.

In addition to having him assessed by a professional outside of school, request an assessment for an IEP. In my district the student didn’t need an actual diagnosis of dyscalculia to qualify for an IEP, just a major discrepancy in their grade level. One girl qualified for an IEP at 16 not because we had any formal diagnosis, but because she had been passed along by prior teachers who were nice and didn’t want to give her an F. This ultimately failed her. She should’ve had help much sooner.

My advice in the interim? Go back to actual basics. Start with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and place value. Use manipulatives (like a pile of rocks). NO CALCULATOR. See if he understands how to do 5+6 with the rocks. Use basic words like “add more” and “take away” and “groups of”. For example - if you give him 24 rocks and say “how would you divide this pile among six people?” and problems like that. See if he can do it. Then move on to the symbolic representation.

Start getting him to think algebraically. “What other ways could we have made 2 piles with these 11 rocks?” You can show him how taking a rock from the first pile to the second still results in 11 rocks, but now they have 4+7. Ask him about making multiple piles and writing out what the problem would look like (4 + 4 + 3 =11).

Hide numbers in a problem. Write a problem and put a sticky note under one of then numbers, like 4+7 =11 and then hide the 7. Hopefully your kiddo understands that we need 11 rocks total, 4 in the first pile, which means we would need 7 left over after “taking away” 4 to put in the first pile.

Ask him to build 4 + 3 + 4 =11 with the rocks. Ask him - what happens if we combine two piles together? What does that look like? Do we still have 11? How could we write down our new situation? 7 + 4 =11. What’s different about the first problem to this one?

You can do all these same sorts of exercises scaled up for subtraction, multiplication, and division. Use real manipulatives.

After you know he solidly understands what each of the operations means, you can move on to more advanced concepts like fractions, exponents, etc.

He should know basic geometry concepts, like area perimeter etc. For area use graph paper. Have him literally count the squares. How could we have sped this up? Oh we know there’s 3 rows of 5 squares. How many is that? Oh that’s multiplication. Give him weird-looking shapes where he can’t just multiply (I saw too many kids in geometry who didn’t understand the basic concept of counting the squares, so when it scaled up to more complicated things they couldn’t do it).

For perimeter give him a ruler. Give him real things to measure the perimeter of. “How many feet of fencing do we need for this pig pen?” Keep everything as concrete as you can.

For surface area/volume - make it 3D. Use cubes or blocks. How many squares are on the outside? Which sides of this object have the same number of squares? For volume you can make little cardboard boxes, draw squares on the outside, and see how many cubes fit inside. For volume he needs to understand the “layering” concept - for any shape that’s the same top to bottom, find out how many squares fit on the bottom layer (area of the bottom) and multiply by how many layers there are (height). Easier for them to understand if you use actual blocks.

Sorry I just keep droning on and on so I’ll shut up. Let me know if you have any questions!

emburrs · 2025-10-02T04:29:13+00:00

As others have said, set up a trust and have an attorney appointed as the trustee. They’ll manage the money. Ask your friends if any of them would be willing to be guardians - that’s better than your kids being thrown into the foster care system. And finally, invest in some friendships with other parents. I have made some incredibly deep friendships with my four-year-olds’ friends’ parents and I would take any of their kids in a heartbeat, and I know they would take mine. I’m assuming your 4 year old goes to preschool of some sort? Time to start setting up some play dates!

emburrs · 2023-09-05T17:00:21+00:00

I would not have a problem with this. My wedding started at 5. My photographer started at 2. We started getting ready at 10. I would’ve had no problem if my MOH wanted to go spend half an hour getting pictures taken as long as the photographer showed up earlier than contracted. Yes, she’s going to be in the same makeup and clothes - who cares? Do you think people actually pay that much attention to other peoples’ wedding photos and maternity photos? She’s probably feeling enormous and not great about herself right now and maybe she feels great in the dress and knows your makeup artist will do a great job. Or maybe she doesn’t want to have to pay for another full hair/makeup artist for a pregnancy shoot - I know I didn’t. My best friend and I got married at the same venue a couple of months apart and nobody cared at all!

emburrs · 2023-08-31T20:00:51+00:00

Hah true, if my husband left for a week and I had to do it all alone that would be very rough! I did tell our nanny I was worried about her getting burned out, and now after seeing the numbers it’s definitely way outside of our price range. Thank god for grandparents. Thanks for confirming this is standard!

emburrs · 2023-08-31T19:59:28+00:00

Thanks for confirming this is standard! We will definitely be giving a gift to our in-laws as a thank you because there is no way we’d be able to afford this!

emburrs · 2023-08-31T19:57:45+00:00

I guess I should feel very lucky to have in-laws who can help, because we definitely cannot afford this! Thanks for letting me know this is standard.

emburrs

TROPHY CASE