I have a preschooler. I love watching her grow and learn. I like sharing in her successes. Ever since she was little when she would do something she was proud of, she would look to us for our smiles and claps. She’s become so much more independent lately: picking out her clothes and getting dressed herself, doing small chores like feeding the dogs and cleaning up her toys, and buckling herself in her car seat. She’s started doing activities/classes/sports on her own so it’s been great to watch her develop her personality without mom or dad being right with her. She started reading in the past few months and I like sitting with her and hearing her read. I like the ridiculous things she says, especially when she doesn’t have the proper vocabulary (like calling ankles “feet-wrists” and saying her “shirt is trying to be a hood” when she couldn’t get it over her head). I like when she wants to sit and cuddle or when she asks me to play with her.

My mother would go through my things looking for reasons to get me in trouble. She’d go though my phone. It’s not normal. It’s not okay. Kids are entitled to privacy and all it did was make me better at hiding things, give me anxiety, and develop self-harm habits and an eating disorder.

Similar situation to us, but even worse, we had a fantastic group of friends in our apartment complex and then everybody moved in a short period of time (including us). Then Covid. Then having a kid. Most of our friends have kids now, and we still keep in touch, but we’re all in different states. We haven’t really found the same kid of group, kids or not, since moving away.

Can’t speak for your friends but early this year I tried to start a monthly “mom brunch”. I made a chat and invited all the mom friends I knew from work and from my toddler’s activities. I gave up after 6 months of nobody or only one or two showing up. I’ve had better success with setting up play dates (going to a playground and just sending everybody a text that they can show up if they’re free). It’s ends up being a little bit of talking and socializing and a lot of watching your kid. But I miss the old social things we used to do. Game nights. Going to dinner. Everything changes when there’s a group of kids. And yes, I knew that going in and I don’t regret anything. Sometimes it just gets lonely.

I started on literature.cafe. I used it for awhile but there was an outage so I switched to lemm.ee. After they folded I joined lemmy.zip. I still use my account on literature.cafe, mostly at work because lemmy.zip is blocked for some reason. But literature.cafe doesn’t, or at least didn’t, federate with piefed and some of my communities I follow are there.

I’m super sentimental with stuff like this. I collect magnets from places so I try to grab a few on a vacation from different places we visit. I get a postcard that I put in a photo album with the dates and a short blurb. I get something for my daughter’s scrapbook/smash book. Each year I have a page with her picture and notes from her teachers, then a page of memories. There’s stickers, patches, tickets, wristbands, keychains, and medals in there. I like things that are small but meaningful

Which we do. But it’s not our first choice

Right. They could basically name their price. We want to do stuff the “right” way. There’s just no way.

Our struggle has been the enshittifcation of streaming the games. We don’t live in the market of our hockey team we like to watch. In order to actually get (legally) 95% of the games we would need to subscribe to about 5 different services and still be blacked out for the games against the “local” team, which is 4 hours away from us, unless we also pay for cable/satellite television as well. We used to legitimately pay for the service that the NHL offered where we could get just our team, or all of the games, for one season price. Then they split everything to all the different networks so now we’d need sling, TNT, espn+ (and the highest tier of it), nhl network, prime, Apple TV +, and a cable subscription