I live in Somerville, roughly equidistant from Porter and Davis. It's nice! We don't have a car, and it is no problem. Slightly more trouble for our housemates, who have two small children, but approximately 100% of things seem like more trouble with small children, so. I think Davis is kind of a more fun area, but Porter is way more practical, because there is a good 24 hour grocery, and a hardware store, and those are way more useful to be close to than, like, a bunch of bars and cute shops, at least for my lifestyle.

Porter is actually in Cambridge, so if you're looking around there you might be in either town. I'm not sure this matters unless you're looking to buy and stay until your kid's in school, in which case there are probably school district issues about which I know nothing. (If you are looking to do that, maybe look to rent somewhere first; it seems like the real estate market around here is not really conducive to quick house searches.)

Boston and suburbs are laid out in a very pre-car kind of way, with lots of clear remnants of downtowns/town squares. This means there are tons of places that are nice walkable neighborhoods with a certain number of commercial establishments close by, so depending on your budget you might end up somewhere less dense but still very livable without a car (as long as transit is convenient for any regular commutes). For instance we stayed with our housemates' family in West Medford for a couple of months last summer due to our house becoming suddenly uninhabitable (happily fixed now), which felt much more suburban - but we were a short walk from commuter rail, a grocery store, and a commercial area with drugstores and so on. I think my husband's commute was shorter than it is now (though he had to time it more carefully).

On the other hand, I just bought sparkly gold eyeliner and this has given me the inspiration I need to try applying it to my eyebrows instead of my actual eyes. I bet that will look super cool, and also somewhere in between "gluing sequins to my face" (a thing I used to do semi-frequently) and "normal makeup" (a thing I guess I should learn to do at some point?).

Even just kitty anxiety medicine made our more anxious cat way more chill about the flight we took her on (cross-country move; would not do this for fun) than our normally calmer cat who refused to have any part of taking the damn pills. But it makes some cats more anxious, so a plane full of cats who had been given it for the first time would probably still be very un-fun.

Of course, about an hour from our destination they still both got very loud about how they needed a litter box which we could not supply. We'd gotten them to go before we left the house, but between the long flight and it having been delayed, it was not quite good enough and they were not at all pleased about that fact.

One of my housemates just turned two and she loves so many of these things with a surprising passion. One of her favorite games is singing the birthday song (to random objects) and pretending to blow out an LED candle leftover from some previous activity. On her birthday she wanted to sing Happy Birthday to her baby sister, her baby sister's ear, her baby sister's eyes, her mother's eyes, and her father's eyes. No doubt someday she will become jaded and develop high hopes which will never be fulfilled, but right now she would be super pleased to have a single balloon and it's suddenly very clear why we do all these inane things at children's parties.

Also she personally invited my husband and me to her family birthday party ( we were talking with her father about whether we would go, and she said very clearly that we should), which was a very future-oriented conversational move for her and makes me feel special. Although I'm pretty sure that she basically likes people in direct proportion to how much time she spends with them and how many of her requests they have therefore obeyed. (Except cats get a free pass on obedience, as is right and proper.)

If you've done the due diligence on the cause of the fainting and it's just vasovagal syncope, your kid will either not have it happen more or learn to recognize what's happening and deal with it. Make sure your highschooler knows what to do if he feels himself starting to faint, and everything will most likely be fine. I fainted on several occasions in childhood and my teenage years, and it wasn't great, but I did eventually learn when it was happening and now I can pretty much stop it from happening by pre-emptively sitting or lying down. ("Pretty much" only because once I fainted while giving blood, and in that context I probably couldn't stop a reoccurrence; I was already lying down, at the time. However, I don't give blood anymore, because they don't actually like you to go in there and faint on them.)

In fact, I can do better than that; these days I can identify some of the suspect situations early enough to avoid even the need to sit down. For me this mostly means making sure to drink a lot of water, especially if I'm doing anything physically demanding, and never suddenly stopping major physical activity without a cool-down. For example, I am always the person who takes water hiking even if we will be on the trail for only half an hour. In exercise classes we sometimes do a jogging warm-up followed by standing still and stretching, and when that happens I might end up seeking out excuses to walk across the room in the middle of the stretching, because using my leg muscles is a good way to keep my blood pressure up. Both of these things would have been embarrassing to me in high school, but they are a lot better than random fainting or near-miss cold sweats, so.

So much genre fiction by super specific authors! I like Charles de Lint, but, really?

It appears the Reader's List was compiled via poll (I'm guessing at least partially an internet poll) in 1998. That explains some stuff.

When I was around ten, some friends and I tried eating catnip to get high, because it worked on cats.

It didn't work, but we acted pretty suspicious about it, so the playground supervisor told us to knock it off.

This was my only experience with any kind of drug until college. I was super cool.

Ughhh. I am lucky in that my husband and I are in total agreement as to whose family we would want to live near if that were how we were deciding where to live (my family, my family is the best). But we live with roommates who have a kid and live near one of their (huge) extended families and not the other.

I think, honestly, that it is wearing on the not-near-her-family partner at times, but also maybe she doesn't have the huge differences with childrearing philosophy etc that you do? Because it seems like a lot of her conflict with his family is not an issue as long as they are not living in literally the same building (as we all were, this summer, due to issues with hazardous materials which were a Good Time For All).

Anyway, from watching that situation it seems like maybe the thing to ask yourself is just how surrounded you would be. Are they going to be in your house all the time without an invitation, or are you just going to be welcome to drop your kids off with grandparents or aunts and uncles for a morning when you want free childcare? Maybe your husband can have dinner at his parents' weekly on a night you're Very Busy With Other Things. Are they going to expect to be your best friends, or is it going to be fine if you want to develop a separate social life with people you do have stuff in common with? Are you the kind of person who can pretty easily do that in a new place, or is your current social circle something it would be really hard for you to replicate elsewhere? Are there any members of his family you aren't comfortable having around your kids on a regular basis? Etc.

Because some of the ways you might answer these questions are Really Good Reasons to stay away! And if you do decide to move, it might be nice to set some ground rules beforehand, so you don't have to confiscate the keys to your house your husband thought it was obvious you'd be happy for all his relatives to have.

Oh, Pseudonym. I've been on both sides of this one (one time, both sides at once, which was better in some ways and worse in others), and it is not easy.

I'm distractingly confused by the concept of not seeing shaved legs as a heavily gendered trait, especially on the part of someone who is attracted to "masculine men and feminine women". Is he really into hairlessness generally, or are some of those masculine men lumberjack types whom you could use to point out that he's also already seeing it as a gendered thing, on some level?

In your shoes, I might look for a compromise where I didn't shave my legs, but did do some other kind of personal grooming that would help him feel like I was putting in effort to be attractive to him. Well, okay, I don't really do "putting in effort so a romantic partner will find me attractive," and my husband is most likely to tell me I look sexy when I'm wearing flannel, so that works for us. But it seems like you might be up for some effort, so if you are, that's the direction I'd try to head in. What kind of dressing-up or using-scented-products or fancy-hairstyling or seductively-lighting-the-bedroom (etc) would be fun and comfortable for you, and also a plus for him? Talk about the possibilities, pick something, and make some extra effort in that direction and leave your legs alone. If all the things that are a plus for him strike you as more feminine than you can comfortably be, that's not a good sign, but better to know. And maybe he'll have some things that are more about knowing you care enough to make an effort, and less about you making an effort to look as feminine as possible.

I was like this, but now my cat, who is a sleep witch, sometimes puts me to sleep in the middle of the day and I have a little nap and wake up feeling fine.

Other than that, there will be no napping. But it sure was a relief to find that the particular variety of sleep she induces is actually positive even in midafternoon, because she is a very sleep-inducing sort of cat. Much more so than other cats I've lived with, or especially than her sister.