Hi Blutarski, This is a high light plant in my experience. I grew it in a west-facing window in zone 6a and it did spectacularly well. I don't think it would do well in a windowless office unless you can change all your lighting in there to plant-specific grow lights. You might want to consider heading into the office later in the evening to achieve this change! If you can't do this, I would change its environment. It really does need a lot of light to do as well as you would want it to. However, if you have children or pets, keep it out of reach. It has toxic sap. Good luck. And yes, do a search on the pachypodium lamereii, its proper name - you will find information about its culture and care.

If the puppy is 5 weeks old you are at an age that he should be fine. He may or may not have been weaned, so you have options there depending on if he is eating or not. Puppy milk, or goats milk are fine, karo is great to add, chicken broth. At 4-5 weeks they are usually eating puppy mush, which is a mix of soft foods in a bowl. If he's never eaten out of a bowl before the first times will be messy. If he will eat fine out of a bowl you don't have to worry about that. They can eat kibble too at that age. Potty training will be the same as if you got an 8 week old, they can potty train at this age. Since you work and this is too young to expect a puppy to be able to hold it, you can get a head start if you build a puppy area, small, with a bed area (crate like, box like, with a blanket and soft bed), and then a food and water area, and a potty area, line it all with newspaper and stick a paper towel between two pages of newspaper that had been used to clean up a potty accident, put that that in the potty area, and most puppies as soon as they are of walking age, given a designated potty area, will use that because they do not like to go in their food or sleep areas. I've raised newborns from the shelter for rescue, and had 0 ever go in their bed area, and it was much much easier to potty train them this way. Mom likely had not started to discipline the puppies. If you have pets, great, that will help a lot with socializing. The issues with a dog this young are going to be behavioral. Teething, mouthing, acting obnoxious. You can mimic a yelp when the pup mouths you so he will learn to not do that. A stuffed animal, or hot water bottle that is warm but not hot, or heck my husband is military too and I've used a canteen with warm water wrapped in a blanket, for the puppy to cuddle with because they like to sleep in piles together. Everything else is basically the same as having an 8 week old puppy. Now health issues, worms, but any stray should be dewormed and all puppies normally get dewormed at this age and again at 8 weeks. Parasites like gardia, are common with strays and a vet can tell you if he has that but you would know. If he has no current health issue he can just follow regular vaccinations.

This is a very tough situation to be in. It is very disturbing to hear of the sexual abuse and the dead puppy. If I were you I'd be very concerned this boy doesnt have alot of contact with your young daughter. Unfortunately many abused victims do in turn become "abusers". Seeing as though you have tried counseling and everything and nothing is getting better,I can understand how you feel about wanting him in foster care. Can I ask...did it come out in counseling that his mom sexually abused him? If so,then have charges been pressed against her? It sounds as though she has had alot of men around too,and any of them could have abused the boy also. Of course your husband may blame himself.He feels he should have protected the boy from this ever happening. Still,my number one priority at this point would be making sure this does not happen to your daughter. You never said how old the boy is? I also do not see how DFS can tell you that you cant spank your kid. As far as I know spanking is not illegal. I'm so sorry that being a stepmom has turned out this way for you. I think for our own biological kids to do things like this is bad enough,but when step kids do it we feel more powerless in the situation. Is there a grand parent,or a aunt or uncle the boy could stay with? One that maybe does not have children who wouldnt mind being a sort of MENTOR? Hopefully you will get some more great advice from others in the forum. I can mainly only offer my sympathy...

Cori Ann, I was able to root other roses, not florist roses. I only ever got one florist rose to root. And yes I understand there is something they treat the roses with that probably does inhibit the rooting process. But I know it can be done. There was a lady on the Forums several yrs ago who rooted lots of them. I haven't seen her on here in a long time. Ya know, last night I looked at that video you posted about growing roses from seed. It's funny, I kept watching all sorts of rose propagating videos on YouTube. Some are hilarious. And some are very informative. And some are interesting, but incomplete. They don't show the end results. Anyway, in one of the videos, I saw a rooting product that intrigued me, and I ordered some from Amazon last night. It's called "Clonex gel." It's a super-concentrated rooting hormone that seals the end of the cutting. The reviews sounded great. Most people got well over 90% success. That's of course many other types of plants, but some that were difficult to root otherwise. I can't wait to try it now!