u/Aromatic_Ad9200

Hi everyone — for starters, apologies if I’m duplicating a recent thread. I didn’t find anything in my cursory searches.

We are getting close to having our second child and this time it‘a a boy! While we’re thrilled, we are now faced with the imminent decision on if we should circumcise him or not.

As some very general background, I sort of always assumed we would as I’m half Jewish and even though we weren’t going to be doing a bris it still just seemed like the appropriate next step. However, as I’ve gotten older I’ve become much more inclined towards not circumcising. My husband shares a similar belief despite being circumcised himself.

The thing that is almost throwing us for a loop the most is that our friends that have voiced similar opinions to ours, and in some instances taken an even firmer viewpoint… still wind up circumcising their sons? I almost wonder if I’m missing something that all these people who say at minimum “yeah we dont really see the benefit” all the way to “it’s genetic mutalation” all seemingly come to the same conclusion to go through with the procedure regardless.

I also just want to be sure I’m not missing anything regarding health benefit. From what my research has shown me, there might be a slight increase in UTI risk and potentially STI risk, with the latter probably giving me the most pause though further readings have sort of framed that as an issue for countries with a higher STI transmission rate.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts/opinions/insights. Obviously this is a very personal decision we’ll ultimately have to make on our own but I’d value some additional perspective. Thank you!!

hi! we have been looking to move but have been unable to find anything suitable, and are now considering renovating our existing home, with particular emphasis on the main floor.

Our current issues that we are looking to solve:

the entire floor is open, and there’s no designated foyer.
we’d like a bathroom on the main floor
we’d also like a small playroom on the main floor
we want a designated dining room
we have outgrown our kitchen and need something substantially larger

Our tentative solution is that we’d like to blow out the back of the house (the wall that currently runs across the kitchen, living room, and mud room by approx 20 ft). From there, I’m sort of inclined to just start over with the layout and rearrange entirely. That being said, I don’t actually know what to do. A couple key considerations:

We probably have to keep the staircase where it is
the living room is currently two stories, and could stay as such if it suits the new layout. We’ve also considered doing an additional expansion over the living room so we have an extra room on the top floor.
the living room has a fireplace which we’d like to keep, but we’re also open to adding another within the addition.
the garage can’t move so that needs to stay there.

I’ve attached our existing layout and would greatly appreciate any thoughts on how we might reconfigure the floor with the addition. Of note, is everything to the right of the stairs is a flight up and we won’t be touching.

Circumcision