Fun....
 

Thanks all for your sympathy. Not sure what I can do. My invoice simply has one number at the bottom: the total for a sofa, armchair and ottoman at the bottom of the page, so if I say the pricing included the sofa SLEEPER (it totally did - even Mom was there) he can place goosey goosey with the numbers of various items to "show" he was only charging me for the non-sleeper sofa. For now, I'm thinking I could have my Mom (who is irate as she was with me when we were sold the sofa) hound him on the phone from Florida preaching to him about morals and stuff. That would be funny. The guy is really busy and hates answering the phone. Maybe I could simply put out the word for everyone to call him once to say he is unfair. How he'd hate his phone ringing so much.

Vegas
 

Never taken a kid to Vegas. Took a dog, who slept in the car, but even Vegas probably isn't laissez faire enough for that to work, and the counselling in a few years would be expensive. I would stick to the cheap slots and the tiger show, and avoid Video Poker, the shows with nekkid chicks, and TNG weddings. NTTAWWT. The Grand Canyon is spectacular if you stand up on the edge by the parking lot with all the other people who get out of their cars to look down at it, much more so if you take the time to find a way to get away from the asphalt. Given that the trials can be steep, this may be tough with a 4 y.o., but you're not going to be in Northern Arizona all that often, so give it a try.

Fun....
 

Did you pay with a credit or debit card? You may have more luck challenging the charge through the bank that issued your card than you'll have with this turkey.

Vegas
 

Don't do it. We were there with kids a few years back when LV was pushing itself as a "for family" place. Our kids first learned about prostitution from the blanket of stripper/hooker ads that cover the strip sidewalks.

To do? Well every theme hotel has a ride/ theme attraction. That'll kill a few hours, but mostly Vegas is there for the gambling and the kids don't fit- we would walk around and occasionally see other families and the looks we shared were "You got fooled too, huh?"

MGM did have the best day care room our kids ever saw- but really Attiucs, unless you're there free for a few days, it might not be a good idea.

Vegas
 

Fucking litigators

Vegas
 

I was taken to Vegas as a kid. I think I was 6 or 7. It sucked. We stayed at Circus Circus and it still sucked. No matter how much (ostensible) kid-stuff there is, parents in Vegas will still want to go off and drink, gamble and take in a lewd show (in my parents' case, front row seats for Liberace) and generally don't want the kids wandering the hotels unattended, so either the kids are stuck in a room with pay per view and maybe a hotel sitter, or the parents end up doing boring kid stuff with the kids, in which case you might as well go to Chuck E Cheese.

This was back in the mid '70s, of course, when Vegas was still ... well, Vegas. I haven't been back in a while, so past performance does not ensure blah blah blah.

At least if you take them on a cruise you can actually abandon them to do their own thing secure in the knowledge that a pedophile kidnapper can't actually get them off the boat, and you can usually tag them with those nifty "house arrest" ankle bands that let you pinpoint your sprogs' location at all times. Parent's I've spoken to seem to LOOOVE kiddie cruises, and claim you can basically get on the boat, set them loose and pretend you don't have kids for a few days while you drink by the pool, secure in the knowledge that, somewhere out there, they are semi-supervised and have access to food and a bed but not alcohol, porn or your credit cards.

eta: We did do the grand canyon, as well. It was pretty cool, but would have been cooler had my parents let us take the mule ride down into the canyon. (I think their slogan, "we've never lost a mule yet," is no longer true, but at the time my parents took it to heart.) Still: it was cooler than Vegas. Even cooler was the final leg of that trip, however, which was to visit my mom's college friend in San Diego, which involved a trip to the zoo and to Tijuana. Tijuana was crowded, dirty, loud, smelly, and generally a BLAST.

Fun....
 

Don't cave! I like the cc idea Ty had.

No need to raise his defenses for him, in any case. Besides - I'd argue that he wrote the wrong thing down on purpose never intending to send the right sofa. Fraud, baby. Besides, if you send a letter, at the least you are costing him a fee to have his lawyer to look at it. Bwahahaha.

Vegas
 

Hey, I meant parenthood. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of LWK.

Vegas
 

Parenting is steep? "Steep" is not a word I think of as synonymous with "difficult."

Nice try. Well, not that nice. D for effort.

Vegas
 

I haven't done this yet, but once the Flintette and impending Flintessa are old enough to help me count cards, I'm buying them wigs, dresses and makeup and passing them off as midget relatives. Oh sorry, little people.

Wow, it's quiet around here.

The Lexling is definitely getting a brother - yay, hand-me-downs!

OK, so just to say something:

The Trepidation Kid has discovered the joys of blowing raspberries with a mouth full of mush. He comes somewhat late to this knowledge, but we've been trying to avoid encouraging excessive messiness. Unfortunately, now that he does it his father and I can't stop laughing. He is destroying my rugs. He is about to walk (he's taking his time, though: for 2 months he's cruised all over the place, pushed furniture around as makeshift walkers, and now he loves walking around while you hold his hands), and once he does he will be a mobile food-spitting machine and move on to destroy my curtains and beding as well. Oh, and everything inside any drawers he can find. Hurrah!

However, he has a new favorite toy: a green plastic plant hanger.

I also bought him a kilt! Yea! I just need to convince Trepidation Dad to wear his out at the same time, so no one will think he's a girl.

Question: at what point do you stop measuring a kid's height lying down and measure him standing up? He's still is a bit of a monster - we had brunch the other day next to a girl who was reportedly 2, and the Trepidation Kid looked like he could eat her for breakfast (if only he could figure out how the spoon goes in the mouth) - but I was trying to figure out how much of a monster. He weighs in at 25.5 pounds, but his standing height is 28 1/2, which is more than 40 percentiles away from his weight. He looks quite slim, so unless he's got a lead foot I'm pretty sure something's out of wack. (Besides, you try getting a not-quite-10-month-old to stand still with his feet together while mommy gets the tape measure.) Lying down he was 30 inches, which seemed to make more sense.

don't feed him outside his chair. strap him in and you can confine the damage. Get a plastic mat if necessary. Our girl likes to throw stuff. She also likes to say "I'm finished" by using a sweeping motion to clear off all the food from the high chair tray. Good times.

As for height, I think there's no point measuring standing up until they're walking and their posture is decent. The way I got a bead on our daughter's height was to measure her relative to our table. She goes about 2.5" above it, so I just added the height of the table. Came out about the same as teh doctor's office.

As for %-iles, ours is 30 points different (90h/60w). The spread was even bigger before that. Some kids are stocky/some are lanky. Such is life.

As I recall, they measure them lying down until at least age 2. We had shifts in Magnus's percentiles both at the switch from lying down to standing up, and at the switch (at the age 4 visit) from the toddler charts to the kid charts.

tm

He often eats more quickly and neatly if we let him run around the table and chase him with a spoon. Breeding bad habits, I know - he'll become one of those "eat on the run" kids with lousy table manners if we don't get some discipline. And we try, but he HATES being confined.

On that note, we recently got one of those baby-sling things. (I got sick of lugging the stroller around when we took him out, and he hates being latched into the thing.) He looooves it. And I can carry him a long time without killing my back, unlike the baby bjorn (I gave that up 4 months ago - he was outgrowing it anyway, but it was really bad on my back). I'd like to say I look like one of those cool, young, granola-crunchy-hippy moms, particularly given all the "wear your baby - it's natural!" literature that came with the thing, but I got the sling in basic black so I just look like a sort of urban mail carrier. However, Trepidation Dad now wants one, too - he was jealous of me running around wearing the Kid all weekend.