CBD Research

Years ago, Katie was trying to come up with recommendations to help fix T's sleep schedule as well as deal with her anxiety and chronic pain, and was enthusiastic about a "CBD" sleep gummie. She was confident that it was better than other OTC sleep aids. I did some research because I was interested to find out if there had been any investigation of whether CBD was safe for kids. But what was funny was that the gummies that Katie thought were safe for kids because they were "non-prescription" in fact simply had a bunch of melatonin.

Here is a fairly stuffy report on CBD by the Mayo Clinic that just covers the basics without a lot of additional info: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health/expert-answers/is-cbd-safe-and-effective/faq-20446700

Not sure if this site is MSM or a cleverly disguised alternate health promoter. The big takeaway from this site are a list of things it seems to be good at treating, and mention that any treatment mechanism is not actuallly known: https://www.verywellhealth.com/cbd-oil-benefits-uses-side-effects-4174562

This article claims to be a roundup of "evidenced-backed" health effects and also side effects: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cbd-oil-benefits?c=206704570355

This "Harvard" article promises to explain "what we know and what we don't." But it's from 2018 back before legalization. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/cannabidiol-cbd-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont-2018082414476

A compelling lead line from this NYT (i.e. paywalled) articles asks "Does it help?": https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/style/self-care/cbd-oil-benefits.html

Sticker Club

Just to save some links from my research, some links about the curse of Sticker Club. This is an insideous attempt to use children as an excuse for chain letters. Who thinks chain letters would be a good idea? It would be all in fun except that the text of the letter is so shitty. We got this from treasured friends, but I was so temptmpted to alter the letter befor forwarding it that we never finished the project. I hope that N's friend at least got some stickers from more compentent parents.

I think this is a reprint of the article from a parent whose sympathetic atitude for the sticker club dilema convinced me to give it a try. https://indyschild.com/the-first-rule-of-sticker-club/

This is the now-dead link to the original artilce, I think: https://www.npnparents.org/posts/36,1st-rule-of-sticker-club-smile-just-do-it

Rachel Ray of all people is promoting this abomination. This is probably something that helped this take off: https://rachaelray.com/blogs/news/the-sticker-club

Another parent who hated this as much as I did: https://mumturnedmom.com/2014/03/26/welcome-to-sticker-club/

And finally another resistor: https://community.babycenter.com/post/a76223195/i-thought-i-was-done-with-chain-letters-in-1989

The google search turned up all kinds of variations in the letters which seemed to hint at the trail that this fad evolved through. I was looking for a nicer version of the letter and where it went so toxic.

Can I contribute to a 401k and an IRA?

Short answer: No because my 401k contributions are high enough that it wipes out any headroom for tax-deductable IRA contributions. Slightly longer answer but you can still do Roth (pfft!). Some links:

This is a basic regurgitation of the rules, which admittedly are complex enough to require a review. https://www.personalcapital.com/blog/retirement-planning/can-contribute-401k-ira/

This article explains a little bit better what's hinted in the first article, namely that you can contribute to a traditional IRA up to the limit, just won't get the tax deduction, and that you have more personal freedom to chose the investments with IRAs. Also give some examples that point out when being in a lower tax bracket helps on either end.https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/07/401(k)_ira.asp

HSA forms

This horribly formatted link is to an explainer page by an HSA-specialized bank for what all the tax forms are that are associated with HSAs. Accessed via a google search when I was working on the 2020 taxes.

Low-dose naltrexone

LDN is an alternative medicine idea for chronic inflamation. We tried it, it didn't seem to have an effect. Looks great on paper though. Here are a couple of links from typing what is low dose latrexone into Google:

A high-level explainer. From "The LDN Research Trust" so a bit biased: https://ldnresearchtrust.org/what-is-low-dose-naltrexone-ldn

A paper published on the NIH website, so somebody respectable seems to have taken a look into it (discaimer: no real clinical tests done yet): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962576/

Inflatable Pools

Some links from a research on large inflatable pools:

A nice pictorial summary of some different inflatable pool products "for adults": https://www.pinterest.com/pin/464011567839765743/

The main thing I learned was to search for brand H2OGO on eBay. Interestingly this search no longer produces links for the big deep rectangular one that we got; everything is back to normal now and inflatable pools are for kids again: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=h2ogo+pool&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_PrefLoc=1

It seems that Amazon no longer sells the big hexagon pool that was available in 2020 either: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=h2ogo+hexagon+family+pool&crid=1IHGRFU4F6Y6O&sprefix=h2o+go+hexagon%2Caps%2C183

Parental controls for a chromebook

I swear that I wrote up a gigantic post about attempting to lock down a chromebook but I can't find all that stuff I wrote. Maybe it was in text only and I never uploaded it. Bottom line, there are only two things you can do. First of all, there is only one single parental control product for chromebook, Mobicip. Mobicip has a lot of good features; it monitors websurfing and makes reports, and has some remote locking capability. But oddly access to the app store is completely unrestricted and can't be turned off. The other option, which I had to go with is to install FamilyLink, which did everything I wanted but is such a beast to install and has some things which are too tightly controlled (only YouTubeKids allowed for example).

Mobicip: https://www.mobicip.com/