The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, September 17th,

the Pandemic Friends Edition. I'm Dan Cois. I'm a writer for Slate. I'm the author of the book

How to Be a Family. I'm the dad of Lyra, who's 15, Harper, who's 13, and we all live in Arlington, Virginia. Hi, I'm Jamila Lemieux, a writer, contributor to Slate's Karen Feeding Parenting column. Host of the Kids Are Asleep Late Night Chat Show, and Mom to Naima, who is seven, and we live in Los Angeles, California. I'm Elizabeth New Camp. I write the homeschool and family travel blog, Dutch, Dutch

Goose. I'm the mom to three littles, Henry 8, Oliver 6, and Teddy 3. And my home is in Navar,

Florida, but I am currently in my closet in my childhood home in Atlanta, having evacuated from

Hurricane Sally. We're going to get a full hurricane update from Elizabeth during triumphs and fails.

However, we can say that as of right now, she is not underwater, so that's a great triumph in and of itself.

Today on the show, we've got a question about how to handle a grandmother's obvious alcoholism with regards to your kids.

We also have a follow-up question from a show we did last November about parents

making friends during the pandemic.

As always, we'll have triumphs, we'll have fails, we'll have recommendations, we'll

have business, we'll have ads, we'll have all the stuff we always have.

But let's start with triumphs and fails.

Jamila, do you have a triumph for a fail this week?

Well, I'll say this week's fail is a recurrent one. I've come to recognize that I

obsess over things, like when I have a new project or something I'm working on, like around the

house, I get tunnel vision. And I don't think I realize this about myself. And maybe this is something I'm developing or I've developed as an adult. But as I've mentioned before, we're moving at the end of the month. So I'm getting every room and the place painted. And there's a lot of walls. It's a two-bedroom apartment. It can only be but so big. But there's the way it's set up, there's just a lot of different walls, which leads space for accent walls. It's a two-bedroom apartment. It can only be, but so big, but there's the way it's set up.

There's just a lot of different walls, which leads space for accent walls and wallpaper.

And I have come to realize that I'm spending hours a day looking at wallpaper and paint.

It is all I want to do. I spent my whole weekend at Home Depot. I just bought four cans of paint

yesterday. That's not nearly all that I need. But I

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