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Thursday's Most Active Threads
The topics with the most engagement yesterday included a mother-in-law buying her own baby items, more about the MCPS principal controversy, the political party preference of Jewish voters, and colleges that don't match the stature of a child's high school.
The Hamas-Israel thread continued to be the most active yesterday, but with only 600 some new posts. This is almost half of what we saw for the first few days, but still several times more than the next most active thread. I also wrote a Special Edition blog post based on my observations from moderating that thread. The next most active thread was titled, "MIL buying items on my baby registry for herself" and posted in the "Family Relationships" forum. The original poster says, as the title states, that her mother-in-law has been buying items that are on the original poster's baby registry but keeping them for herself. The original poster says that she has no plans to leave her baby with her mother-in-law for any length of time so she doesn't know the reason for these purchases. Posters assume that the mother-in-law is simply preparing for visits after the baby is born. The original poster clarified in a subsequent post that the mother-in-law is not marking the items as "complete" on the registry, so most of those responding don't think there is a problem. I didn't read very many of the posts in this thread because, frankly, the topic bored me. But, as best I can tell, this is a battle between those who think the original poster is being overly-sensitive and those convinced that this is a sign of a domineering mother-in-law. In the first group's view, the original poster is being ridiculous. According to them, it is not the original poster's business what her mother-in-law buys and, in any case, she can't predict what will happen after the baby is born and she might end up being happy that her in-laws' home is well-equipped for the baby. The second group thinks the mother-in-law is being controlling and will use the baby items as an excuse to demand more visits than the original poster prefers. The original poster was fairly diligent about identifying herself as the original poster in her replies through much of the thread. But, eventually she began to sock puppet a bit. It appears that the real issue here is that the original poster already has issues with her mother-in-law not respecting boundaries and, therefore, her buying baby items feeds that preexisting frustration. Personally, I can think of a hundred more important issues that commonly face new parents so I can't imagine giving this one a second's thought.