Our 9 yo, 4th grade dd's transition to the new house has been a bit of a struggle and it has caught us off guard. A little background: we moved from a 1000sf house in the boonies of Vermont to a 900 sf half assed winterized camp in the boonies of NY 3 years ago, when DD was in the first month of 1st grade. She missed one friend (who was not a neighbor, so she only saw her at school or occasionally on weekends), but seemed to do well. Last fall we tore down the camp and built a house, which we moved into in late July. During the winter we lived in another 900ish sf rental about 1/2 mile up the road, so we were at the site daily. She adapted seamlessly to the new school, camp we tore down and the rental house, which is why we were so surprised at what happened when we moved into the new house. Although she loves showing off her room to guests and being in there with us, she dreads being upstairs alone and for the first time ever, insists on having the nightlight in her room on all night. She keeps asking if we have ghosts in the house (sigh). We think part of it is that we now have a 2 story house, and she gets put to bed then we go downstairs, whereas we used to be just outside her door. We also more than doubled the size of our house to 2100sf, and I think the size of the house and the fact that she can't always see and hear us are factors. It does seem to be getting better, but it's been a little frustrating with the frequent "What was that?! It's a ghost!" exclaminations when, say, an acorn falls on the roof when we're tucking her in. We're hoping that with the advent of shorter days that she'll get used to being in her room when it's dark outside, we'll see. She spent the summer immersed in Harry Potter and Golden Compass books and that I think the content, i.e. magic et al, has stimulated her already-plenty-active imagination. sandyponder

Well we thought we were being unique with the first one. But it seems that it's a name that's been used in the Celtic cultures for some time. I thought I was sticking a K in front of Ian..His dad picked his middle name. They have to be D's..his is and his first three children are as well. The second one was going to be an A name..but my husband's youngest brother was left sterile from Cancer treatments at the age of 18, so we took part of his name and used it. Again middle name was chosen by Daddy. The last one we decided since the other two had the same initials, might as well keep with the program..We didn't like or couldn't agree on K names, so we started looking at C names we could swap out. We decided on Cameron..but the spelling we chose as Kamren (boy) or Kamryn (girl) and then we gave our oldest a short list of D middle names and he picked Dylan/Dillon..we chose to go with Dillon. However had he been a girl the name still would have been the same, just different spelling. Kamryn Dylan. My husband thought the name was picked out for his oldest son prior to him leaving for USMC bootcamp..however one day he got called into the Gunny's office and was told congratulations you have a son, his "specs" are xyz and it appears he's a Jr. Hubby never wanted a junior. Oh well.

I had chimed into sugarbreak's thread in the Conversations area but I'll add mine here, too. I've been "starpooh" for 11 years. It started when we were looking for a distinctive email address for our family. So we took a family vote. My vote was for "tearose" because I love the smell of roses. DH and my then 8-year-old DS voted for "roadkill" because they're both jokesters. My youngest DS voted for "no_nap" because, as a 2 year old, that was his favorite phrase. So I suggested "starpooh", named after a gorgeous desktop wallpaper that I had found. After much discussion (and whining from Mr. "no-nap"), we decided that starpooh fit our family. Starpooh wallpaper: I do love this pooh wallpaper but actually Classic Pooh is my favorite. Here is a link that might be useful: sugarbreak's User Names thread from 2006

Here's a totally opposing viewpoint: we couldn't have gotten anywhere walking around the stoneyard right off, we didn't have a clue. We weren't even 100% sure if we wanted Silestone or granite. We took our samples to our local kitchen store, comparable countertop selection to Lowe's. Looked at various shades and various materials with the cabinet door, the wall paint chip(s - we're narrowed down but not 100%), a couple of backsplash tiles we thought we liked. The question we were trying to answer was color family and overall look. I knew middle-tones wouldn't work, didn't like any of the light beige-tones but true-whites over to light grey was good. Liked chocolate-browns and charcoal-grays, but when grays started pushing over to black it was just too much. I liked the ones with blue flecks/accents in them. DH likes some with green flecks in them, and liked sparkles more than I did. Neither of us liked big splashy patterns, everything that appealed was more flecky/mottled than dramatic/stripes/swoops, but my tolerance was higher than his. Then, we went to the granite yard down the street and picked out our favorite light and our favorite dark in the showroom. Went out back, saw the slabs, and whaddaya know, the color we liked best inside was the one we liked best outside, too. We didn't decide for sure till we put them both into our 3D mockup at home, and dark was winning by miles. Then we found out the fabricators we were at didn't cut drainboards, so called up a ton of different places till we found two that did. The color we picked isn't one with a lot of slab variation, so that wasn't a big issue, any yard that sold Steel Gray would be just fine. We checked out the slabs at fabricator #2, brought the sample home, realized the polished finish was way too shiny for my taste, and found a different yard (#3 now) that sold the same color in a softer finish. Then we decided not to do drainboard runnels after all. See, isn't deciding things easy? Hooray for fickle. (end result - Leathered Steel Gray)