pboae

Did you do that or was it a coincidence? It let me send a present but now they want me to pay $1 for another one

I want to buy a fish! How do I do that?

Please could someone look and see if my phone number/email are visible?? I don't know if I have done it right :-( Edit: and what does it mean if I bite someone and make them a zombie?

He looks lovely

I am new to facebook We need a Refuge network, but I don't know how to make one.

Oops I forgot all about this auction, I'm still waiting for my elephant shaped watering can!

She is so pretty, I am so glad she's with you now.

I had a PetStep II, Sully wouldn't walk on it. I spent months trying to train him (on the flat, gentle slope, etc, it came with instructions on training too) but he hated it. I gave it to my MiL for her boxer, and he wouldn't walk on it either. I don't know where it ended up after that.

Oooh a blue moon, that'll do for me

Ooh... do I get a wish for being first??? I wish for a dry July.

It is a collar you put on your dog which gives them an electric shock, either automatically (when it goes near a fence, or barks) or when you press a remote control handset. It is supposed to be a training aid, you use them to punish the dog for whatever it was it was doing when it got the shock. Absolutely barbaric. Edit: if you do an image search in google there are lots of pictures and you can see the prongs/electrodes that stick into the dog's neck. I just had a quick look through, but I don't want to link to any of those sites.

Paid (and a little bit extra).

These are two seperate things Ian, 1) Child 1 grabs a pan and pours boiling water all over themself, the parent was there and watching, but wasn't quick enough to stop them. Child 2 does the same thing, but the parent had left them unattended for a few minutes, or turned their back for a moment, or thought the child was elsewhere. Child 3 gets scalded because their parent deliberatley poured boiling water over them to punish the child. I can see a difference in culpability in those situations. Also, the first two could happen to anyone, or at least most people, under the right circumstances. The last one requires something which I don't think (hope?) most people have in them. 2) Of course there is no legislation that says it's OK to leave a child in a car all day, but as a general rule parents get exceptionally mild punishments for hurting/killing their own child when compared with the sentence that a stranger who does the same would get. It seems to me that the judgement that a parent has suffered is not based on anything objective and rational. With regards the other comments, I've not read anything here to convince me that childcare arrangements are anything other than a red herring. A SAHM can be just as stressed, depressed and exhausted as one who works.

I'm not sure where you are going with that. Assuming it was simply an error and not deliberate neglect, then it would still 'just' be an error, regardless of my perception of it or feelings about it. The law ought to be objective, even if those connected to the incident can't. People are human and they make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes have desperately tragic consequences. Sometimes society feels it has to punish mistakes, other times they think people have 'suffered enough' already. I don't understand exactly how that works, but that's how it seems to be. Just because I can understand how something happened, and even have sympathy for the person who did it, doesn't mean I think they should be absolved from any blame or punishment. But to portray something like this as extreme and unimaginable behaviour is completely unrealistic. As it trying to blame it on working mothers, as if they are automatically worse parents or more likely to be neglectful. I think it is the sort of thing that anyone could do, under the right set of unfortunate circumstances.

When I was a tiny baby, my Mum forgot me and left me outside a shop (obviously I don't remember this). It was inside a shopping mall, she went into a store with my older sister who was an extremely difficult/demanding child, she played up in the shop, Mum went out a different door and took her straight home. I was there for a few hours, before my Dad came home and asked where I was. Mum ran back in a panic, and I was still there, asleep. No-one else had even noticed. Mum *may* have had PND at the time, she was almost certainly exhausted as sis barely slept, and then she had me to deal with too. She was a SAHM (and didn't go back to work until I was about 10, and then not until my Gran came to live with us). OK, the situation isn't quite the same, we didn't have a car, and who would leave a baby on it's own outside a shop now? But that's because times of changed, the basic mistake was still the same. She forgot she had me with her. I know she still feels guilty about it now, although it has become a bit of a running joke in our family. It's all very well saying 'how could she?' but people do make mistakes like this, but luckily most of the time there is no harm done. I've shut a dog out in the garden by accident before now, is that so different? I've accidentally left the hob on and gone out as well. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have done those things in my life, but it only takes 1 occasion for it to turn into a tragedy. Being a working mother has nothing to do with it, it's just human fallibility.

£5.00 I neeeed that elephant!

I'm with M&S, but I have also heard good things about NFU.

Sully trying to sneak out of the compost bin without being noticed ( the day after going to the groomers, grrr) and looking innocent with mashed potato smeared all over his face, which was in no way connected with my cottage pie dissappearing from the kitchen.

Cephalexin is good for skin infections, and dogs are very prone to getting infections when they have a rash or sore. The bacteria (particularly Staph) live on their skin all the time, but once there is a break in the skin, including a burst blister, they get under the skin and infection takes hold. Your description of the patches turning dark and skin flaking off sounds very much like there was some infection there, at least, that's what happens when one of Sully's hot spots get infected. It's not that odd that they haven't prescribed anti histamine either, if the rash was already on the way out an anti histamine wouldn't really help a great deal, you need to get them in early to stop the reaction in the first place (as hay fever sufferers will know, if you wait till the symptoms start before you take the meds, they don't help nearly as much). Which is probably why the vet opted for Malaseb instead, it's topical and it treats the symptoms (i.e. itchiness) when it is too late to tackle the cause. So all in all it seems like a pretty reasonable prescription to me. I hope Aggie is feeling better soon though.

It happens more often than you'd think, 30-40 kids die that way every year in USA.

My old dog had cancer in one eye, and when it started to show it looked like a small splodgy bruise on the white of his eyeball. Other than that his eye looked completely normal, it never weeped or bothered him. I would definitley get it checked out, and by someone who knows about eye cancers if possible. Our vet was an oncologist, but he still got a second opinion off an eye specialist because they can be hard to diagnose.

Those are 'real' Sally Lunns, round here it is a slang term for an iced finger.

That's a Sally Lunn round here, and they are eaten buttered. EDIT: forgot to say what I came in here for Sully loves goosegrass, he breaks into the greenhouse to eat it. The vet said it won't do him any harm even thought it makes him sick sometimes. I don't use weedkiller on it just in case he finds some and eats it.

I will be going to Liverpool from Sheffield on Friday, if anyone can get it up here before then (assuming it isn't huge and will fit on the back seat of my car!)

That's the sort of reply I wouldn't think of until hours later, having been completely tongue tied at the time! Well done you for standing up to him.