It's none of your business.

I'm no expert, Anthony, and my kid is obviously not yours. We have, however, had a lot of luck with our 16-month-old by showing her alternative behaviors. For example, she loves to bang away on our cranky windows, so we've followed a two step approach: 1. When she bangs on the windows we make an exaggerated unhappy face and say very seriously, "Oh, we don't do that." Then we make a super happy face, bang our hands on the windowsill, and say, "We do this!" She'll tentatively whack the windowsill with a vaguely pensive look on her face, which we greet with ridiculous applause and praise. "That's how we do it!" She's then tremendously pleased with herself and joins in the applause.

We do have to repeat this sometimes, but it's worked really well to reduce the banging of windows and some other behaviors, like throwing her cup on the floor. I try to reserve it for big stuff, like safety, or stuff that drives me absolutely insane.

I also don't hold the unhappy face for very long, because her little face just collapses, her lower lip sticks out, and she starts to cry pathetically.

I have no idea if this is a good method or not, so maybe my daughter will end up blowing her college money on psychotherapy and spend her adult life in sackcloth and ashes.

Let's hope not, eh? Good luck to you!

When I was in maybe the second grade my aunt - childless and not too clear about "age appropriateness" - got me a stack of books. Most of them were well beyond my reading level at the time. Over the course of the next fifteen years I slowly worked my way through it: Oliver Twist, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights...I can't remember them all now, but they were all awesome. Only To Kill a Mockingbird was accessible to me at age eight, but the pleasure of returning to that stack over the course of half my life has been immeasurable. Bestest present ever.

You're not kidding when you say there are other people in the same boat. I think something like 46% of people are carriers for HPV, so don't feel like a freak. You have lots of company.

The treatment sucks ass (my friend had to have hers frozen off her cervix - egads), but it sounds like you're doing everything right. Hang in there.

A Freudian slip.

Give it up. Think of this as an exercise in anti-hoarding. One less object = liberation.

Also, you have a great excuse to get a new and improved George Foreman grill to replace this one. Woot!

Have you talked to your sister at length about the HPV vaccine? I had a coworker who was extremely reticent to let her 17 and 18 year old daughters get it, but when I explained that it was a gift to their future selves, she changed her mind. She honestly didn't know that almost half the population carries HPV, that many of those people are asymptomatic, and that it can cause cervical cancer.

I presented it to her like this: of course you don't want your daughters having sex right now, and they know that, right? You've made that really clear, right? But you also know that at some point they're going to meet someone, fall in love with him, and get sexual with him, right? It might still be a few years from now, I told her (knowing full well it won't), but by making sure they're vaccinated now you're ensuring their future health and well-being.

I wound up the pitch by telling her about a woman I interpreted for, a woman who'd had one sexual partner in her whole life who was also the father of her two children, ages 7 and 11. This woman had stage 4 cancer that started out as cervical cancer, and she was dying. The father of her kids had bailed, she was an illegal immigrant here and had no family support at all, and she was beside herself wondering what was going to happen to her children when she died. Had the HPV vaccine been available when she was younger, this tragedy could have been avoided. "She's had one sexual partner her whole life," I told my conservative friend, "Do you want this to happen to your daughters?"