Suit of the Week

99 Comments

1. If you live in NYC do you have a nice getaway spot? North fork? Hamptons? Do tell

   1. If you mean owning a place, no. But I go to Martha’s Vineyard every summer.

   2. my parents have a place in connecticut, lots of nice options. my cousins had a house on the jersey shore where i grew up going. lots of options depending on your priority.

      1. Any CT recommendations? I love the Maine coast, but the trip up there is just killing me.

         1. Essex and Saybrook are both lovely.

         2. I’m biased as a Maine summer resident but nowhere in Connecticut compares to the Maine coast. Where in Maine do you go? Do you drive or fly? If you drive, can you travel at off-peak times (Tuesday through Thursday) or late at night? I feel ya, the weekend summer traffic is brutal.

2. Assume you’re single/divorced, and have 3 or 4 adult children in their 30s (plus multiple grandkids), not all of them local but all of whom you see at least once a month. In what context would you feel like you were being excluded/rejected if your adult children chose to hang out or take a short vacation and you were not invited? I’m not talking about the over the holidays, or a long vacation, more like a long weekend where two of the siblings and their families want to hang out and do not invite the grandparent. The grandparent is invited to plenty of other vacations/hangouts. Just trying to figure out how unreasonable my MIL is being. I think very, but I am an only child so I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.

   1. I don’t know, but when my sister and I arrange a quick trip, we always tell my parents and invite them to come, even when we know they probably can’t. We try to be mindful of them.

   2. She’s being unreasonable.

      1. Agreed.

         1. +1 – people are allowed to have their own relationships.

      2. We don’t know this at all—did she just say she’d like to be included or something else?

         1. She threw a fit when she was not invited.

            1. Haha, unreasonable in any adult. But then I stopped speaking to two of my friends when they met up an hour away from me to go snowboarding from out of town and didn’t bother to tell me. It was unnecessarily thoughtless and rude. So I get mom being hurt. But you can’t cut off kids for being thoughtless and rude.

            2. It’s not thoughtless and rude to not invite someone to a vacation. Maybe thoughtless to talk about it to them? But just because you know someone doesnt mean you are entitled to join all of their plans

            3. Yup, no adult should be throwing a fit.

               But it’s totally reasonable to feel some combination of emotion: happiness that your kids are getting together, wistfulness about wanting to be with them, a sting from being excluded, or even a feeling of being rejected

               Hopefully an adult will work through those emotions without dumping them on their kids, but totally normal to feel them.

            4. In my view, you only get to be hurt if you’re the only one in your line left out. So of all grandparents except you were invited, absolutely hurt. If it’s not your line, as here where it’s grandkids, absolutely unreasonable and rather crazy. Of course different generations are going to hang out without you. This is nothing like a friend group exclusion.

            5. There’s multiple levels of unreasonable here. No adult should be throwing a fit about anything, no matter how justified their feelings are. But I don’t even think her feelings are justified here. If you were never inviting her to travel with you, traveling to a place that’s been atop her bucket list for years and not inviting her, or rubbing the trip in her face, then I’d see her point. But simply not being invited to an occasional trip? She needs to get over herself. This is life. Nobody is invited to every event they’d like to be at.

   3. as the mother of teenage boys i really think i would love it if they enjoyed eachother and were friends enough to go away together when they were older with their kids. we have been away with my brother and his family without my parents (and without my other brother whose kids don’t match our’s in age or interests)

      1. I have tween girls who are at each other’s throats a lot right now, same. I would love it if they grew up to be close enough to want to travel with each other’s spouses and kids. I can see being hurt if they never invited me on any of their joint vacations. But as an occasional thing I can’t imagine feeling anything other than joy that they get along so well.

   4. it’s interesting. I think on one side of my divorced/ remarried parents there would be hurt feeling. but on the other side there would be some delight that adult kids enjoyed each other enough to get together on their own. The sibling relationship is probably going to survive the parent relationship and fostering. that seems pretty important.

   5. Your MIL is being unreasonable. It’s great when adult kids want to hang out independent of you, the parent!

      Source: I’m one of four siblings, and we have get-togethers without our parents and have occasionally traveled together. My parents think it’s great!

      1. Same here. This is bananas.

   6. She’s being very unreasonable. My mom wants to join all our vacations and while I love her and she has some valid reasons (my dad is disabled and basically can’t travel except on a cruise or to a beach resort and that’s get boring for an active person like my mom) it’s been *such* a bad thing for our relationship. I feel so suffocated and simultaneously like an ahole for trying to set the boundary that I want a nuclear family vacation once in a while.

      We vacation with my husband’s sister periodically (low key local/ish trips, not like 2 weeks in the Galapagos) and my in-laws have never pushed to be invited. I agree that it’s a goal for most parents of 2+ kids to have the kids like each other and want to spend time together as adults and she should be happy, not hurt.

      1. Ah, I get why that boundary would be hurtful to her with the limitations you describe. I never liked the nuclear family trips as a child, they were too stifling and I appreciated other people to minimize focus on me. Do your kids prefer trips with or without grandma?

         1. Kids love traveling with grandma but also love trips just us. I’ve never heard anyone describe a nuclear family trip as “stifling,” and I think wanting an occasional trip with just your husband and kids is very normal.

            1. Just telling you my experience (which was stifling.) Extra adults meant you could go for walks to different places, had more options for things to do, and weren’t totally at the mercy of mom and dad’s itinerary.

               Hopefully your kids have fonder memories.

            2. My mom comes on 70-80% of our vacations and we also travel fairly regularly with my in-laws and our friends. It’s probably 1 in 10 vacations that’s just our nuclear family. My kids adore my mom (and my in-laws) but have expressed that they enjoy having some vacations just us the 4 of us. But thanks for your concern tr0ling. 🙄

   7. We started hiding things from the ILs because they would get jealous they weren’t invited. (There are valid reasons they aren’t invited, they make snide comments at any activity they don’t want to do and their palates limit restaurant options to the extreme)

   8. I get where your MIL is coming from, but I feel like this is a communication thing that her son needed to have with her. Why it was just the 2 families and not all 4 families + mom. Why you went to X.

   9. I am absolutely delighted when my adult children do things with each other. I love just hearing that they text each other occasionally. I do not get upset that I am not invited on those outings or included in the text exchanges.

      1. “I’m not a regular mom!”

         1. It’s not a bad thing. I wish my parents would go out with their siblings and not invite me once in a while!

         2. What? Heaven forbid she can regulate her emotions

            1. Seriously. Some of these commenters are going to be discussed on JustNoMIL some day.

      2. This is what we do with my in-laws. They love receiving updates and photos when we’re hanging out with my SIL’s family. They especially love photos that have all their grandkids in them. My kids are still living at home but I expect to feel this way when they’re grown.

      3. My kids are teenagers and I really, really want them to do stuff with each other as adults and not have their parents as their only connection! I tell them all the time (in jest) they need to be friends, their parents are their mutual enemies, and their parents are very wily so they will have to work hard to trap us and take us to the old folks home!

      4. Seriously, this is what I’d expect. I met up with my brother at a conference we were both attending and my parents were thrilled we’d been able to have dinner and catch up.

   10. My brother and I (and now our families) have taken numerous trips without our mom, who we are close with. She always gets a little jealous and would like to be invited, but they are generally trips she couldn’t physically handle.

       For longer trips (like 2 weeks abroad), we tell her and just explain why it’s not appropriate for her to come. For shorter trips (like a long weekend domestically), we just don’t tell her. It’s easier to not have to deal with her feelings about it and desire to come along. However, I think her feelings are pretty unreasonable given her physical restrictions and the fact that we do occasionally take extended family trips with her.

   11. If it were *all* of the kids and spouses and grandkids, I think many grandparents would be hurt or feel excluded not to be invited – then it’s feeling like a family reunion everyone but you was invited to! If it were just the adult siblings (ie. not an “and families!” trip) that would be less likely to hurt feelings. If it were something like “we took all our small kids to a waterpark and didn’t invite my 80 year old mother because why in the world would she have wanted to spend a 100 deg day surrounded by shrieking and chlorine”, you just apologize and explain briefly.

   12. Unreasonable but it is exactly the unreasonable something my mom would do. Only reason in your scenario I’d give your MIL grace is if the location of the trip was somewhere with significance to her or on her bucket list of places she wanted to go.

       1. Agree with every word of this.

   13. Very unreasonable. But my MIL would 100% be offended if we’d done that sort of thing, there’s a certain kind of family member that feels they have to be included in everything no matter what the circumstances.

   14. I can understand hurt but throwing a fit is unreasonable.

       My sister took all the other siblings, my parents, a few of our cousins and their kids and a couple of aunts on holidays but didn’t invite me. I was super hurt but I didn’t say a thing.

       1. That sounds super hurtful, but is very different than what OP is describing. Her MIL isn’t the only one left out.

3. For the time change debate, could we not just split the difference and decide that the time is now X:30?

   Or create a new slogan and say, “As Arizona goes, so goes the nation” and we all just switch to whichever one they’re permanently on.

   Switching time is ridiculous, I hope it’s permanently fixed soon!

   1. This issue is a prime example of how our government is incredibly dysfunctional and ineffectual. Everyone (~90% of the population) wants the clocks to stop switching and yet nothing changes.

      1. They just don’t work for us. There are monied interests that like the status quo, so they get their way instead.

         1. I don’t understand what monied interests benefit from its getting dark at 4:00 p.m. in the winter.

            1. I dunno. My employer gets an hour earlier out of me most days thanks to an east coast office. I’m sure a lot of companies benefit from that sort of thing (and no I can’t leave early due to many of my clients being local to me).

      2. But lots of debate about which way to change it, with vested financial and health interests on both sides. I’m opposed to the structure moving through congress, which takes away morning light in the winter to give extra light summer evenings. Research shows it’s not as lined up with our circadian rhythms, and as a morning runner I like morning light! But golf courses, for example, prefer the light layer in the day.

         1. I prefer lighter evenings but I’ll compromise if we can just. stop. changing. the. stupid. clocks.

         2. Leave the actual time alone. If businesses want to adjust hours, that is their business.

         3. Ironic because as a morning runner, I prefer DST for myself in the summers because I prefer running in the dark. (I’m making no commentary on where this entire system will or should end up)

      3. Everyone wants them to stop switching, but they can’t agree on which way is the problem! (I am team permanent daylight savings, but I get why someone would prefer it the other way. I think it all comes down to when you prefer your outdoor activities. I want daylight after work in the winter and don’t care if it’s dark in the mornings. I see people complaining about kids having to wait for buses in the dark, but they already do that here because some of our schools start at 7:15. Which is way too early, but that’s a whole other discussion)

         1. I think if we switched it to real, standard time, hours would adjust.

            1. In most places this is about bus schedules. If you don’t want some schools starting at 7:30, other schools couldn’t start until 10 or 10:30, which I think most parents would hate.

            2. Hire more bus drivers.

            3. Public schools don’t have enough funds to have a separate set of bus drivers for every school. In theory “hire more bus drivers” is an easy solution, but in reality that money would have to come away from other important things like funds for art/music, teacher raises, etc.

            4. Then deal with unfavorable school start times?

               USA spends a lot per student on public education. Maybe we should start spending more on child friendly communities that are less car centric.

         2. It also comes down to where you live within your time zone. I’m on the eastern edge of mine. If we shift winter time forward an hour it will be dark during my morning commute (and during AM school bus pickup) and then dark by 5:20pm. The sun will go down before I even get home from work so there’s zero benefit.

      4. I don’t think this is as simple as “everyone wants it but ineffective politicians can’t get it done” – although I agree that’s a thing that happens in general.
         We had year round DST in the 1970s and it was a disaster and public opinion swung strongly back the other way. No one who is currently under the age of about 60 remembers that time period clearly, but the people in charge of making these decisions are well aware of all the problems it caused before.

         1. This is just the reason why it should be year round standard time. That is what other countries returned to and it was fine.

            1. Yes I agree – personally I would much rather have year-round standard time. But the point is that public opinion isn’t as settled on this as the previous poster is suggesting, and the lawmakers know that.

   2. +1 Arizona for the win on this

      1. Yes. They don’t switch. One of the reasons is to extend the cooler part of the day in the summer, which is the morning. Landscape crews and other outdoor workers start at 5:30 AM or 6:00 AM and go until 2:00 PM, at which time it gets too hot to be outside. So having it light early makes sense. As the climate gets warmer, more of us are going to want light in the early, cooler hours of the day.

   3. The only thing worse than switching clocks is having the sun rise at 9 am or set at 3:30. If we can’t change our schedules seasonally to match the day length, and have to run businesses and schools on clock time, then daylight savings time is a very reasonable compromise.

      1. It’s unsafe for the vulnerable populations that no one cared about when it was first proposed.

         1. But it’s also unsafe to make kids go to and from school in the dark and increase the number of people driving to and from work in the dark or dim light or the glare of the setting or rising sun. There’s no perfect solution to the fact that the day length changes significantly between winter and summer but we want to operate uniformly throughout the year, so anything you pick is a compromise with different winners and losers.

            1. Car violence needs to be addressed anyway. School starts too early anyway.

               Why does everything have to run on clock time anyway? 99% of people have smart phones that could calculate sundial hours just fine. Why do we want to operate uniformly throughout the year anyway?

            2. To me it genuinely feels like a hubristic fight against reality to expect days to be the same length all year in Michigan, or to see it as a problem that must be solved. It’s planet earth; we’ve been living here all along. Everyone would be better off if we’d stop trying to put round pegs in square holes and if we recognized the canaries in the coal mines for what they are.

   4. I live on the western edge of a time zone and the sun would rise at 9 am in the winter if this goes through. I hope my state will change timezones if this happens. I would much prefer year-round standard time than year-round daylight. Our sunsets are 9:30 pm in June which is rough with little kids.

   5. I just read an article in the WaPo about how they did this in the 1970s and everyone hated so much that they changed it back right away. So I think this is one of those things where people should be careful what they wish for- what they really want is summer all year round, but keeping daylight savings time all year won’t actually get you that, it will just mean really dark mornings.

      1. I don’t care about dark mornings if I don’t have to change the clocks.

      2. Just go back to standard time. Most of the rest of the world already did!

4. the link to the suit takes you to pajamas

   1. What is the difference these days, really?

      1. Lol

5. What’s your dream handbag, and why?

   1. Mulberry Bayswater. Such a classic without being trendy or logoed. TBH I should just buy one they aren’t that expensive, I spend more on long weekends.

      1. They are nice. More than I want to spend, but probably something I’ll think about for the next year 😂

      2. Love them. Buy the bag!

      3. I just got one! a long over due gift to myself. Truth be told I bought it then it sat on my dresser for 2 weeks as I argued with myself over the price point. But, ya know what, I could afford it and it brings me joy! I also take reallyyyy good care of my accessories – my now retired Cuyana tote was purchased in 2016! So… buy the damn bag!

      4. They are very very heavy. Got rid of mine.

   2. Guess I’ll answer…in my dreams, I carry a Bottega Veneta Andiamo. I love the look and the craftsmanship. Unfortunately, in reality I think I’d trash the detailing, so I would settle for a BV Ciao Ciao if the universe were to provide me with a spare $6,000.

   3. I got my dream bag! MiuMiu Nappa in chocolate. The way I stalked resale sites for the right color, and sighed dreamily at listings for so long. No regrets.

      The color is beautiful and the style fits my wardrobe so well. It’s the perfect under the shoulder size for me. I love the outside pockets that give it a casual utility feel. The logo is embossed on the leather, but only on one side so it’s subtle.

      1. I was not familiar with her game, but she’s gorgeous.

   4. Another vote for the Bottega Veneta Andiamo. I like the idea of an Hermes Kelly, but the closure seems really impractical.

   5. Pockets. Lots of them a decent sized.

6. Curious if anyone has ordered custom length curtains online? I want natural fabric (cotton or linen), solid ivory. Already have the rods mounted from prior house owner. Were you happy with the vendor?

   1. It’s easier to buy curtains from a store then get them hemmed by a seamstress. Hang them to mark the hem length then bring them in.

      1. I did this—I got them from piglet in bed, got them hemmed and they work, but are on the more casual side.

   2. If you want them to kiss the floor, the measurement is going to be nearly impossible to do without hanging them first. You are going to have to move your rods (easier) or hem (or lengthen) your curtains. The weight pulls down the rods; a deep windowstill makes them not touch the floor even though the measurements said they would 50 times; the fabric stretches with its own weight; the different ways to hang them (rod with loops, pole top, rings, hooks) make them hang differently. If you have multiple windows, the rods are mounted at different heights from the floor. It’s so frustrating. But if you’re letting them pool, you’re golden. Disregard all of the above.

      1. I am convinced pooling just became a trend because people are lazy. It’s an awful look and the curtains get disgustingly dirty

      2. Haha, a frustrated voice of experience!! And I hear all of that!

   3. This sounds like a good job for someone on Etsy. They might be able to send you swatches so you can see which color you want.

      Way back before the days of online shopping, I once hired someone to do custom ivory curtains for me. He showed up with yellow curtains, said they were “eggshell” and that eggshell was close enough to ivory. I refused to pay for the curtains, he threatened to sue me, and eventually brought me beautiful ivory curtains that I still have even though I’ve long since moved on from that house and my current house has lower ceilings so I can’t use the curtains. I refuse to get rid of those curtains after all the stress they caused me!

      Oh god I’ve become my mother.

   4. I used Two Pages on recommendation of a friend who also has them in multiple places in her house. I would use them again. I think I got the Liz Linen? And despite being expensive (high hundreds for floor length for 2 windows once it factored in my sizing and pleat choices) it was much less expensive than basically every other option I considered – non-custom options from mall brands, other custom vendors, in-person fabric shop etc.

   5. The easiest thing to do in that situation is go to your local fabric or upholstery store and have them do it. They will have samples in house you can choose from (so you see the quality and price in advance).

   6. Curtains are much more widely used in the UK and more options are available. Take a look at next, John Lewis and eBay.

      I had a pair made at homebase in the UK years ago and flew them back in the suitcase. They were £350, which was about $700 at the time. They were a cream damask, fully lined and hung beautifully. The lowest quote I had for similar here was $2500.

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