If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

I have no quarrel with people who lack the skill or temperament to care for small children.

All of us assign different values to things, and not all of those values are going to line up with others'.

Separating is not divorcing. Please keep that in mind. It is, instead, the second step in seeing if there's a better way to manage your family.

First group impressions can mask a lot of individual variations in the members.

Moving is hard. Staying is easy. Logistically speaking, at least. And this is true whether you're doing or undoing something.

Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.