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Are there any eczema-safe ways to make my kids laundry smell nice?

My daughter has mild-moderate eczema (has improved a little since she was a baby). We follow ALL of the typical protocols to manage it while trying to limit / prevent the need for heavy steroid usage and avoid extreme flare ups by using unscented , sensitive formula soap/shampoo/hand soap etc . This includes using unscented, sensitive formula laundry detergent (“All” brand). We also line dry our clothing and linens (with a high powered fan, in the living room), because we’re in a walk up apartment with no dryer and are not close to a laundromat and we don’t have a car.

My daughter has started to notice that many of her friends and their parents clothes “smell nice” and she asks why don’t our clothes smell nice, which breaks my heart.

We dried our clothes on a line in the backyard when I was a kid which often gave them a musty backyard smell, and I remember noticing this difference when I was a kid which often made me feel insecure. I don’t think I smelled “bad”, but I didn’t smell good and my mom didn’t wear perfume or anything because she had asthma. So other peoples moms smelled better than her to me. I just want my kid to feel confident and clean, and as fresh as she views other kids. Any advice welcome.

NYC. Our HHI is 160k after taxes, and even ignoring the cost of childcare (1.5x our rent), both rent and the cost of any home (condo / coop / etc) larger than a studio seem to be climbing faster than we can reasonably save up a down payment. As we both work in person in the city, and depend on employer health insurance, and have zero family help, we cannot move farther than 2h from the city (and even those prices are crazy!).

At the same time, I keep meeting families who are getting into real estate and jacking the rent on their tenants so that they themselves can afford the mortgage their parents helped them finance which feels just evil tbh and like it’s perpetuating the whole problem.

What even is the point of trying to save anymore? I work 50h per week and barely get to see my 3yo anymore, salaries for my field (elite nonprofit humanities / education) haven’t increased by more than 2% on average over the past 10y and we have no possibility of ever building equity. I’m so sick of this whole thing and am really depressed.

I was at the playground on CPW and a group of 1st grade students accompanied by two or three chaperones were there for their recess / outdoor time. The kids were all respectfully playing, and then all of a sudden one of the male chaperones big booming and authoritarian voice broke the peace, and he began really badgering the kids in what I felt was a pretty disrespectful / hostile tone. The kids weren’t even really objecting to leaving (plus they’re only 6!), maybe they were doddling a little, and he snapped at them to stop wasting time arguing. I also found it odd that the kids had zero identifying clothing on - no pinafores / vest or anything to show they were with the group. Is that typical for K-5? I was considering ECFS for Kinder and now I’m a little turned off. Even with all the yelling the kids still did not seem organized when they left , just scattered and frazzled being hurried out of the park.

My kid broke her leg at preschool on the playground at age 2.5. She was in a full leg cast for almost 2 weeks (which turned out to have been unnecessary after a second opinion), then a boot for 6 weeks. In addition to ruining our hard won success with potty training (resulting in not being potty trained for another full year due to anxiety), this happened exactly when she was starting to learn how to climb, jump, run, etc.

It has been a year now, she’s 3.5, and only this month has she successfully climbed a ladder and did a full jump from a high step, while her peers are like little monkeys. Because of this she is constantly left behind by her friends who are running and biking faster and way more confident than she is. We’ve got her in martial arts and periodic gentle gymnastics, but she’s very timid and I don’t want to push her too hard and make her anxiety worse.

At this point it’s been so long that I’m not sure it’s related to the break, except mentally, but I’m not an OT, and the pediatric OT we saw for her follow up said she did not need PT. I’d appreciate any tips or reassurance from parents whose kids have broken limbs.

To be clear, it was a fairly minor break - a “toddler fracture” as they call it, along the ankle - more of a dent. We have been completely supportive, trying to balance encouragement with respecting her knowing her own limits. It’s really hard too because her 3.5/4yo “friends” (schoolmates) are already goating her and making fun of her all the time (“I can climb faster than you BABY” etc etc), and I try to teach her to ignore them and focus on her own strength and balance, but she gets really hurt and distracted by other kids, but also hates being at the playground alone.

I’m really at my wits end, I just want to help her build strength and courage.

I work on a non-IT data management team in a federal cultural sector. Our team is severely under resourced and I joined the org as a senior technical specialist mid-way through a big project, where one person (PO) had been basically running the show and everyone else was just tech support/ data entry.

My supervisor has vaguely assigned me as a scrum master (and “high level project manager”) to oversee workflows for two streams of data funneling into the same application.

I’ve established a number of valuable things (eg advocating for the project to have its own Jira project so we can more cleanly control use of advanced task management features and set up form-based ticketing etc for external users, and automate assignment and organization / labeling of issues/tasks/stories).

The problem is, I’m also expected to perform a lot of the data migration work and troubleshooting and testing for application issues, and the less senior staff are not helpful in training me to do these tasks - as a newish staff person, and neither is the PO. When I politely suggest that some are of work might need more documentation / workflow instructions to assist with onboarding new staff (me but also others), I basically get silence / non-engagement while they chatter away about some movie they watched or pizza they ate in the project Slack channel.

Meanwhile, the PO is always contradicting or negging my suggestions and then later on deciding that my suggesting was right but presenting it as his own conclusion after having failed at his counter suggestion. He leaves me out of important technical conversations and usurps my scrum master duties (basic things like running the board) if I don’t get onto a meeting 5m early to set up before him.

I’m getting pretty frustrated and I’m not sure if it’s just me or if the team dynamic is dysfunctional due to lack of management from my supervisor / the PO.

Any tips?