grrliz's Profile

Children only expect too much if you've trained them to expect to much by buying them everything they want and succumbing to their every whim. It usually only takes one lesson for kids to figure out they can't always get what you want.

We have a rule in our family where only one present gets opened at a time. You have to be polite, wait your turn, and watch as others open and enjoy the gifts they've received. It really slows down the process and stops it from being a free-for-all about how much stuff you get and instead focuses it more on the actual giving and receiving.

When we were kids (and still now, actually!) my parents set a limit as to how much they would spend on gifts. This was a good way of teaching us how to budget that money: do you ask for several smaller things or one big thing? There couldn't be any jealousy on Christmas morning because even if you'd received fewer presents than your siblings, you knew it was because you made the choice to ask for something more expensive.

There's no gift-giving amongst extended family, which I also think helps a lot. We get together for the holidays, but it's so much easier not to have to pick out gifts for relatives you see once a year.

Am I the only one concerned that the bookends would get knocked off the shelf? My regular book ends never stay in place when I move books; these have much more weight to them, but only takes one overly enthusiastic book grab before they go crashing to the ground.

When I was a kid, the decor would go up on or after December 1 but we wouldn't get our tree until December 20th-ish, since my mom wanted to make sure it lasted until at least January 6.

Now that I have my own place and a fake tree, I tend to aim for mid-November because I'm impatient. I admit I got a little too excited my first Christmas in my own place that I put the tree up before Halloween.

Not pricing items for sale is for high end stores where they're trying to alienate anyone but serious buyers. Yard sales should not take the same approach.

My mom works at a store that sells wine and the wine boxes are a great size for moving because they're all pretty uniform in size which makes stacking easy. Plus they're small enough that you're never in danger of overloading a single box with so much heavy stuff that you can't carry it.

I always associate black toilet seats with schools and other similar institutions. If I had one, I'd probably want a sink with a foot pedal to turn the water on as well.

These solutions call attention to the problems rather than disguise them.

"Or place a teaspoon or two of the ground spices on a cookie sheet and place it in a 200°F (93°C) oven with the door ajar for 30 minutes."

This seems like an egregious waste of energy.

I like the idea of an adjustable table but I don't like the colouring of the screw itself and the base is kind of ugly. In a different articulation of this idea, I could get behind this.

I didn't feel like most of these were actually hung all that low; they seemed well placed in context with the furniture they were situated near.