We've done the local public school, yes. More thoughts here: https://juliawise.net/school-your-mileage-may-vary/

Generally they're opposed to using toys not as intended. It is kinda dicey given they can't easily see if anyone is at the bottom of the slide, but the worst that happens is someone gets knocked over.

Thanks, adding!

True. The "arm fracture" one on the Victoria chart seems pretty concrete, though.

I didn't read it all, but a couple thoughts:
Betadine is a brand name for a povidone iodine product - they're not different things.
Robitussin DM has both an expectorant (seems good) and a cough suppressant.  A cough suppressant might not be what you want if you want the gunk to get out of your lungs. If there's a "productive" cough I'd think it's better to just cough.

Apparently this was my husband's approach:

8-year-old:  Will humans go extinct in my lifetime?
Him: Definitely not
8-year-old: Why?
Him: If you're alive, humans aren't extinct yet
8-year-old: That doesn't make me feel better

I haven't had this conversation with my kids because they haven't asked, but I think the main things they disvalue about death are 1. their own death and 2. separation from people they love. I think the additional badness of "and everyone else would be dead too" is less salient to young kids. There might actually be some comfort in thinking we'd all go together instead of some people being left behind.

One of my kids got interested in asteroid strikes after learning about how dinosaurs went extinct, about age 4. She'd look out the window periodically to see if one was coming, but she didn't seem disturbed in the way that I would be if I thought there might be an asteroid outside the window.

Even if we'd had the conversation, I'd expect this to be a pretty small factor in their overall quality of life. Actual loss of someone they know is a bigger deal to them, but learning about death in general seem to result in some bedtime tears and not a lot of other obvious effects.

Thank you for adding this!

Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.

On how anybody would invent knitting - 
I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)

I wonder how much we know about the history of cat's cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it's just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piece of sinew. So I doubt we know much about how long ago people were first playing games with loops of string. But I could imagine the game and more practical fiber arts could have cross-pollinated.

I don't know what the supposed changes in growing and processing wheat are, but a lot of that will presumably have happened by the stage it's flour. So doing the mixing and baking yourself might not change anything.