Terri sometimes feels her life is a bad detective show. Catherine is stuck in a not-that-funny sitcom, and Nicole's family drama is exhaustingly dramatic. What TV show is your family inadvertently starring in?

On this week’s Roundabout Roundup: Terri is finding new uses for old technology, while Nicole is sprucing up old furniture and objects with peel-and-stick wallpaper [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VFLDTLP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1]. Catherine is making sure her college freshman won't be without her favorite snack with this collapsible popcorn popper that's perfect for dorm living [https://www.uncommongoods.com/product/collapsible-popcorn-popper].

Now that all three of us have reached the mid-century mark, we can obsess about the benefits of being older, wiser, and much more willing to wear comfortable shoes and stay home.

Parenting is hard no matter what age your kids are. This article calling out middle school as the toughest age to parent [https://parentingteensandtweens.com/middle-school-the-hardest-years-of-your-life-as-a-mom/] got us complaining about pretty much all the ages. Name an age or circumstance when parenting is easy!

On this week's entertainment-themed Round 2, a double dose of Veronica Mars, although both episodes were useless in their own ways. "One Angry Veronica" did nothing for the season-long arc, and "Donut Run" was based on a faulty premise (although Terri's theory about how and why that happened makes a lot of sense). Mentioned: the Veronica Mars Investigations podcast [https://www.veronicamarsinvestigations.com/]; a teaser about Veronica joining the FBI [https://veronicamars.fandom.com/wiki/Veronica_in_the_FBI]; and the two Magic Mountains (amusement park [https://www.sixflags.com/magicmountain] and book by Thomas Mann [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain]).

Need to use a leash/harness/tether on your kid? No judgment here; two of us have done it. A tweet from Today's Parent magazine about kids being either barnacles or bolters prompted us to talk about which kind of kids we had (and which kind we were).

Ah, sleep time, when the subconscious opens the door on every stupid thing you could possibly imagine worrying about or wondering about or thinking about, and these things parade across your consciousness. Meet some of our cast of thousands.

It’s supposed to be a positive thing when kids get more independent. But we're both happy and thrown into existential crisis.

On this week’s Roundabout Roundup: Nicole and her family are keeping germs away with the Clean Door Anti-Contact Tool [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BY3GGYT/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1], and on a related note, Catherine reports that Hanes makes comfortable, inexpensive face masks [https://www.hanes.com/masks.html]. Terri escaped into a history of the founding of Banana Republic with the book Wild Company by Mel and Patricia Ziegler [https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Company-Untold-Banana-Republic/dp/1451683502/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2SBV9HOPH2K2U&dchild=1&keywords=wild+company+the+untold+story+of+banana+republic&qid=1597422633&sprefix=wild+company%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-2]. Mentioned: Her past shout-out of Abandoned Republic on Facebook [https://www.parentingroundaboutpodcast.com/blog/roundabout-roundup-alex-ani-tiktok-abandoned-republic].

After hearing about an opportunity to sleep over at the last Blockbuster video store in the world [https://www.scarymommy.com/last-blockbuster-airbnb-bend-oregon/], we obsessed about cool slumber party venues, from malls, mattress stores, and museums to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia [https://taronga.org.au/sydney-zoo/accommodation].