Money Management: Building Up an Investment Portfolio

This is a contributed post and therefore doesn't necessarily reflect the views and opinions of this blog or its author. Photo Credit If you are a financial novice, you may well be intimidated by the idea of building up an investment portfolio. But don’t let some jargon put you off making your money work harder for you. In this blog post, we are going to talk you through a few of the basics involved so that you can get started upgrading your lifestyle. Of course, you will have to do more in-depth research in the future, but this should set you off down the right path. Do Your Research and Decide on Objectives There is so much information available online these days that this is the best place to start.…

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Here’s a massive update on my Facebook stalker

What's Been Happening As you may or may not already know, I've been experiencing ongoing issues with Facebook since the beginning of the year. Someone has been reporting all links back to my blog as offensive or malicious. This results in Facebook pulling all posts or blog updates that I've shared with my personal timeline or community page. I only post my blog updates to my own page and timeline. People typically share it from there. Unfortunately, Facebook also bans my blog URL https://www.theautismdad.com from Facebook completely. This means that no one is able to Like or Share anything that originates from The Autism Dad blog. My only recourse is to appeal each and every report, and I do. Facebook will then put human eyes on each report, determine that…

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Never Underestimate the Power of a Chicken

Never Underestimate the Power of a Chicken by Kristin Jarvis Adams (Based on an article originally published in the Washington Post) When my son was in the third grade, he brought home a baby chick. That day Andrew, who has autism, had his first real conversation. But it wasn’t with me. It was with the little-mottled chick he named Frightful. “You are my new friend,” he told her. “You know my heart.” For the first time, he was able to string words together that revealed his hopes and dreams, and all the scary feelings that had no name. Stuffed into his jacket and zippered up to her beak, the scrappy little hen went everywhere.  It was clear that I was no longer the most important chick in town. When I…

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Will you accept my #Autism Awareness month challenge?

It's Autism Awareness month once again. I see the Blue lights going up, the Memes spreading across the Internet but I want to make a suggestion to all of you out there. I believe Autism Awareness month has been around since 1970 and it seems that each year we pretty much do the same things. Autism organizations use the month to raise funds for whatever they actually do, some people protest these organizations and others do whatever they feel is right. It's not perfect but the world's still spinning. This year I want to issue a challenge to you and the rest of the Autism community. I want to challenge you to focus on self-care. I know that focusing on yourself can be very difficult, especially if you're a single…

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Something cool happened in our tank today

I wanted to take a minute and share this because the boys really thought it was cool and frankly, it kinda was. We're all about our fish tank and we have lots of interesting creatures living in our aquatic ecosystem. We also have two small crayfish in there as well. There aren't any predators and the water is warm, they are growing like crazy. This is the closest I've come to actually catching one of the crayfish shedding its shell. We know they do it and we find the empty shells all the time but we've yet to witness this happening. I was pretty close today and I wanted to share the pictures. Click the image to see the gallery [foogallery id="76838"]  

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I’ve been off #Paxil for a month and the nausea is still a problem

It's been about a month since I took my final dose of Paxil. To say it's been an easy process would be a boldface lie. Frankly, it's been an absolute nightmare. Slowly lowering my dose over 90 days was rough but it didn't truly suck until the Paxil was completely out of my system. Having taken my last dose about 30 days ago, the medication has been out of my system for about the last 25 or 26 days. It's a very short half life and that's one of the reasons it's so hard to come off of. For the first week or two, I was completely overcome by emotion. It was like Paxil had been functioning like a dam and when it was gone, the emotions it had kept…

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A MAJOR Victory flew under the radar yesterday

Yesterday was a rather challenging day for me personally, but I muddled my way through it. In all the frustration, stress and otherwise chaotic events of yesterday, something didn't get mentioned that should have. For years we've struggled with Elliott and homework. It didn't matter what it was or how much he had, it was a nightmare. There were plenty of times I was hanging on by a thread because the whole homework thing was too much. I don't know what happened or when it actually began but Elliott's attitude towards homework has changed. He does his homework right away and without issue. In fact, lately he's been working on his homework on the way home from school, like you see in the picture above. This deserves to be mentioned…

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