I absolutely envy every family that has you in their lives. Please never stop thinking that way because we desperately need people like you. Not as a free baby sitter or lunch provider, but as a role model and influence. We really cannot do it all by ourselves.

And may I add, you probably had more patience and more energy having had kids young.

I second that. The time when their interests bore you to death is so damn small. The time they need a diaper or breastfeed is so damn small. It is intense and hard, but then, just some steps down the road, you just sit there rewatching Sailor Moon instead of Peppa Pig and spending time together becomes actually cool and interesting and it feels like you have a great person around. You read great books together instead of looking at books that go like “this is a caterpillar. It likes apples. The caterpillar bites into an apple.” You make up stories. You draw together. You roughhouse. You just… hang out.

So if you ever get a random headache that is just a pinching pain in a random spot then try breathing there. I don’t mean breathe deep or breathe into that spot but actually concentrate super hard into that spot and imagine this is where your lungs are. Concentrate when you breathe and think about how the air goes exactly into that spot directly from your mouth cause this is where your lungs are now, and how you breathe out from there. Keep concentrating and breathing there.

I don’t know why it doesn’t work if I just take deep breaths but this is legit the only way I can stop the pulsating stabs until they are gone. Concentrate hard tho because once you stop the pain returns unless the attack is over.

I had a fight with a dude who stood next to his car and threw an empty vodka bottle in the bushes, across the street of a kindergarten and with the bushes being in a private house area. It was morning. I am still baffled that he somehow assumed he is in the right because he forgot his keys. Eventually his girlfriend came, equally aggressive towards me, and picked it up. I am to this day scared of running into them at night but man, wtf what excuse to litter in your own hood is this. Forgot your keys my ass.

We’re legally entitled to 10 days paid sick leave

Sorry but still not good enough. I don’t plan out when I am going to be sick in the coming year or how many days it’ll take me.

It’s unclear if you want to have a hobby on a laptop or whether that doesn’t matter.

If it doesn’t - mending is great. Some people have already recommended knitting and crotcheting, and while mending clothes is usually a mix of these two and sewing, I find it easier and faster paced than making something anew. Also regarding the sustainability aspect - buying new yarn and making something that you possibly might not need or enjoy vs repairing something you own and might otherwise throw out (and if you end up messing up you have hardly any losses. It was a try to save something from the landfill). It’s in a way a gateway to knitting, sewing, crotcheting, embroidery, but it is great on its own.

But it doesn’t have to be just clothes. Trying to figure out how you can make broken stuff last longer or adapt it as necessary is also great.

The only downside is that if you work a lot on your computer or something desktop-ish, then you might want to choose something outside to give your eyes a rest from focussing on something that is rather close.

I think there is quite a bunch of fabric missing but yes, this is an amazing project for someone who is into mending and not too complicated

I think Rei in Evangelion is named after Rei Hino in Sailor Moon

Wait what? Really? I didn’t know they worked that way. I ended up biting tiny pieces off and chewing them (often together with a normal gum) because I couldn’t handle their strength.

That is in a way correct. Washing cloth diapers was incredibly annoying and single use diapers have been a big relief. Before that, the need/urge/desire to get rid of diapers was a big factor in deciding when to approach potty training.

But maybe it is a good thing that kids aren’t being rushed anymore and are given the time they need to understand their bodies. Child led potty training is an incredible privilege and I can absolutely understand that 50 years ago this would have taken the strongest nerves to practice.

People really seem to think that children are just born with the knowledge inside of them and they will just figure it out cause we as adults know it.

In regards to potty training, that is actually quite the way it is. There is a reason you cannot teach a newborn to be potty trained and a reason why the vast majority of kids age 5 do not use diapers.

The “training” part of potty training - as in, sitting down, pooping/peeing, wiping, flushing, washing your hands - is a social necessity. This should absolutely be taught. But the feeling of “oh, something’s coming, I gotta go” is absolutely something that kids do figure out by themselves and cannot figure out before the right time has come. This is a neurological thing and rushing it won’t do any good and won’t work. You can help guide your child to listen to their bodies once the time comes. But at the end of the day, it is their body and their connection to what is happening in there. You can condition them to use the potty every time after X Y Z happens (after you get up, after you eat before we leave the house,…), but this is not the same as learning to feel their bladder, how full it is, how much time is left before they really gotta go, and so on. And the latter is so much more important - which is why there has been a push for later potty training.

This is to say - it is a good thing that potty training takes place later now as it is now much more child led and child focused. Not out of a societal need to function. As others have pointed out, this article is confusing because it doesn’t clearly state what school/age they are talking about and what “potty trained” entails. It makes you think that elementary school children get their shitty diapers changed. Are they “not potty trained” because they fail to wipe correctly or wash their hands? Do they do their business into diapers? Are we talking poop or pee? Are we talking more frequent accidents? And especially, what age group are we talking about exactly?

Like, believe me, even in a climate where kids are allowed to do this at their own pace, our kindergarten (ages 3-6/7) is not full with kids that have diapers on, especially past 4. Have you seen the reaction of a baby vs toddler vs preschooler when they poop their pants, even in diapers? A baby doesn’t realize it, a toddler might actually enjoy the warmth. A preschooler usually hates the feeling and starts to cry and wants a change immediately. When they are ready, they are ready, they don’t want to run around dirty or wet.

And last but not least - I assume we are talking about kids under 6, i.e. under elementary school age. In that case: What does it matter if a kid is potty trained at 33 or 39 months? We are making a big deal out of a couple of months or maybe a year, while this year might actually be incredibly beneficial for the kids in their bodily autonomy and body feel.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it is now the kindergartens that are advocating for this. While they of course prefer kids to be potty trained there is so much more awareness and understanding from the teachers’ side; every kid has their own pace and is an individual and should lead their own way. And they absolutely do in 99% of the cases.

Framing “late” potty training as some kind of societal failure is simplifying a very complex issue in a grotesque way. In some ways, it is a very big achievement in children’s rights.

Germany here. It is now not expected that your kid is fully potty trained when they start kindergarten at 3 years old anymore - at least not in the majority of kindergartens (“it would be nice, but it is not obligatory”). The reason is that there is a push to not start potty training before the kid shows signs of readiness. And this is often not the case before 2.5-3 years. Not in the majority of cases but some kids don’t have the necessary body feel (which is a neurological development) to do successful potty training.

Now, we also have to discuss how we define “potty training”. Over here, it is normal to keep a potty and offer to try it, but you don’t take away a toddler’s diaper and let it sit on a potty until stuff comes out. So I am talking about child led potty training where they take the incentive, but are offered the access regularly and obviously are then shown how to wipe and wash their hands.

If I remember correctly, research shows that earlier potty training takes longer until the kid is considered potty trained (i.e. few to no accidents during the daytime). Another reason for the push to do it later - besides bodily autonomy - is that potty training that is done too early often uses tactics such as putting the kid on the potty “just in case”, which is now considered not ideal, since the kid doesn’t learn to feel when the bladder is actually full.

Moreover, kids often change from early daycare to kindergarten at age 3, which is considered a major life event that often leads to a regression in potty training. Our kid was almost completely potty trained at 3 years old but when she started kindergarten (without having been to early daycare) she regressed immensely due to the stress and it took a couple of months until she was fully potty trained again. However, it was her teachers who advocated not to rush her and give her the time she needs and who reassured us that this is very normal, and I am grateful they did.

I find the article a bit misleading because it doesn’t clarify what age the kids are and what school we are talking about. Or how exactly they define potty training. It makes it sound like a quarter of seven year olds who are in first grade shit in their diapers. I mean, maybe they do, but it is unclear what they are talking about. Most kids will, at a certain age, absolutely lose it if they happen to poop or pee their pants (even in diapers). Apart from one autistic child I really don’t know any kid that regularly does its business in diapers at age 5. There is also a sense of societal norms and wanting to belong - also something that the teachers told us before we started kindergarten - so usually the diapers go away because the kids don’t want to wear them anymore. They want to be big.

I was never obese, but damn did I lose weight when I stopped smoking, drinking, and reduced my meat intake to about once a month. I even started drinking sodas and eating much fattier stuff, candy, carbs, but for my body it was the alcohol, meat and smoking that kept me fat.

I also wish I stopped drinking much sooner.

I hate to be cynical but I have to agree. From an outsider’s perspective - all of this is too far gone for some death, as gruesome as it sounds, to become a turning point. If the US wanted to rebel they would have had about two hundred equally pivotal moments in the last years and nothing happened

So I grew up in a country where alcohol is legal from age 16 and parents often allow a drink to their kids even earlier (I’ve seen 12 year olds with their non-trash parents at a beer tent with a beer-lemonade-mix. Bavarian people man).

So one evening my mom gave me a small glass of champagne and somehow put a small shot of vodka inside. I was probably 15.

The next day I woke up at 9:30 am, as early as never on a weekend, feeling well rested, and my chronic headache was gone. I was flabbergasted. My mom was flabbergasted.

Needless to say that memory of a perfect morning might have partly fueled my alcohol problem later on

I was doing an exchange high school year in Santa Clara, California. Nowadays I look back on this time and wonder how on earth I didn’t get shot. My daughter is definitely picking another country for an exchange year.

Also, I refused to get Facebook, but this bit me in the ass because it was the way to communicate and stay in touch back then, and I ended up losing all the contacts I made in that school.

There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.

That honestly sounds like the exposition of every character in a Wes Anderson movie

I agree so much with that! I love long distance travelling, but due to financial and, more importantly, environmental costs I hardly ever do it. During my early 20s I found a fondness for holidays close by. I am not a big fan of nature (I mean, I am, but I don’t need to be immersed in it if you know what I mean), but there are so many cities and towns to explore nearby. To be fair, we are kind of privileged in Europe, me in Germany even more so. Due to the history and Germany basically being a plethora of kingdoms sewn together in the mid 1800s, you really have so many different cultures within a single country and don’t need to cross borders to experience a different world. (However, growing up in Munich, it was faster to drive to Italy’s coast than to Germany’s.)

I agree with everything you’re saying. I just want to point out some caveats to trains (although I absolutely love them and prefer them to cars or planes as well). The obvious one is that few people have enough vacation days to spend multiple days traveling by train. Even if we aren’t talking about paid vacation, not every job/position lets you take unpaid time off. Some jobs don’t let you take more than one or two weeks in a row.

For families this can be additionally challenging since a lot of vacation days need to be taken when school or daycare is out, or the kid is sick, or the kid needs to go to some dentist appointment, leaving you with a total of a week of vacation.

Yeah, and kids in general. It is difficult to keep little children, who want to move and be loud, on a train for days. It’s not impossible, but most likely everyone will be a nerve wreck by the time of arrival. The other people on the train will hate you because you cannot “tame” your kid, or they will judge you because after one and a half days you decide to allow your kid to watch a movie on a tablet to have a break. The relaxing aspect of a train ride tends to vanish.

And last but not least, health conditions. Some people cannot sit for long periods of time and have to wear compression socks or even get heparin shots to prevent thrombosis. This is already the case for a 6 hour flight, but 6 days of minimal movement is difficult and not recommended. You can do it - there are ways to do it - but it is something that you need to keep in mind when travelling.

But nevertheless, I agree that long train rides and a break from the fast paced, information immersed world is great. Maybe this: as long as you can do so, do it! There might be a time in your life when this will be more difficult and you will have to pause and find a better suited alternative. But that doesn’t mean you can’t unpause when the time is right. Enjoy!