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zejh

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About zejh

  • Birthday 11/18/1977

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    Female
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    Boston

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  1. My daughter can do mental math easily, while struggling with writing numbers, but she'll draw the numbers different sizes and have stories about them. (My big regret this past year (kindergarten) was that I gave in to the once-a-week nanny wanting to "help teach" while I was out running errands. She would ride on DD to write the numbers exactly right, which kind of made for a big set-back in willingness to do almost any academic work for a while... *sigh* Said nanny is moving away this fall...)
  2. So, if I waited a few months til my daughter is reading, would it matter that she is still way behind with fine motor? Or is the reading the important part for online?
  3. How important is it with Beast Academy that a child be able to read (and write!) independently? I was looking at the 2A pretest, and my not-quite-7-year-old could probably answer everything if questions are read out loud--she's learning to read, but isn't a precocious reader by any measure, but very verbal otherwise, and arithmetic is pretty easy for her at this point, as long as her attention holds. She also easily gets fatigued writing numbers (I'm actually considering getting her evaluated for OT) though she can do it. So, does anyone have experience with using Beast Academy this "2e" kind of situation?
  4. I had a blast when I went to NW CTD the summer after 7th grade, and went back 3 more summers. Of course, that was 25 years ago, so I'm probably not the most useful source!
  5. Re: labels, does anyone besides me have trouble getting other *adults* to follow the labels?
  6. I was going to say exactly this. I used to get distracted from just tidying up the house (and this was before kids, and I was even at home most of the time) by things like the bathroom sink having a bit of toothpaste residue, which, sure, is nice to clean up and you don't want it accumulating, but I'd get bogged down in details like that. With my older daughter, I was so exhausted during the first few months of pregnancy, my mom was able to convince me and my husband to splurge on hiring cleaners every other week. It doesn't solve everything, but being able leave scrubbing the bathroom and mopping or dusting or vacuuming to them lets me avoid at least those distractions. (My husband doesn't have any diagnosed disabilities, but I can't rely on him for regular household or yard work, since I'm pretty sure he does have some executive functioning or ADHD issues. He will do heavy lifting when asked and doesn't complain about doing disgusting tasks, but I can't expect him to remember to put away the cereal boxes after fixing breakfast, and if he sets to doing something like weeding, he'll take a half hour and pull up maybe a half dozen weeds, and not dispose of them... It's hard to find advice that doesn't automatically assume the husband is being a bad person, or that I'm some kind of idiot for putting up with him.)
  7. At first, I misread that as $5k/week, and I was thinking, I'd take that gig! $25/hour is probably my minimum for tutoring one kid if I have no other connection... (We aren't quite enough in need of money for me to put up with the "just do my kid's algebra homework" jobs, or to sift those out from the ones who really want to learn, especially when I can spend my time teaching dd arithmetic, which is fun...)
  8. My grandmother used to tell about how she got her master's degree in education with a papier mache rooster. This would have been 60 years ago or so. The capstone course, for whatever reason, had that as a final project. She was a kindergarten teacher, but she had been a top student back in college and found the graduate coursework considerably easier, though not necessarily ridiculous aside from the rooster. I guess it's not that new a thing?
  9. I've gone *extremely* slowly with pre-level 1, that is, she had just turned 4 when we started, and we're almost 2/3's the way through and she'll be 6 in a few months. She enjoys it, and we stop any time it's in any way not fun, and, admittedly, when I started I wasn't 100% sure she'd be homeschooled even for kindergarten, so I wanted to get something phonetic started before they started trying to push memorizing sight words. Now that we've settled on homeschooling (at least for kindergarten), I can actually relax a bit more.
  10. My dd also had trouble with the rhyming games when she'd just turned 4. I dropped it for a month or so, not entirely intentionally, but by the time we picked it back up, she was spontaneously rhyming correctly for fun. Sometimes, I'll just have her watch me and the zebra play a game together, and the next week, she gets the idea easily. (Usual caveat that every kid is different...)
  11. That's sort of how I feel about telling my husband to do things. The other thing is he will accept lists, but then I have to check to make sure things get done and get done correctly and completely... (For example, I was visiting my parents with my kids recently, and he told me he did some of the laundry while I was gone. But. He. Didn't. Fold. Anything. So I came home to several loads of laundry piled up to fold, and nothing got put away. Except some but not all of the towels. And I'm particular about how towels are folded and put away. And he didn't do it right. Sigh.) Anyhow, if I have to check each item on the list to make sure it gets done, that's a large part of the effort to just plain doing it. In my mind, if he's agreed to do a task that pretty obviously needs to be done daily, like taking out the kitchen trash, I shouldn't have to remind him daily.
  12. I've been on several transatlantic cruises, and will be going again. All Disney. I'm not a good food critic (dh and I go for the cheapest possible coffee, for starters, and we really can't tell the difference!) but they had interesting entertainment, I thought (they have always brought on a guest lecturer. One time it was a historian specializing on Columbus when we were essentially following the same route, and another time it was one of the people who worked on the movie Moana.) It was great for our kids, since the crew really have time to get to know everyone, and if you're not big on crowds, it's much less stressful. They tend to use the smaller ships, so it doesn't feel empty, either. Also, I've found that the captains generally do a good job steering the ship to the best possible weather, though that might mean several days listening to the fog horn every ten minutes. But foggy waters are very calm. I'd say the one downside is that if you're on a cruise from Florida to northern Europe, it requires a really wide range of clothes, even in late spring. That said, with determined kids and a heated pool, it has to get really cold before it's not swimming weather! The Disney cruises from the US to Europe usually depart in May, and the ones from Europe back to the US are in September. I think for the next few years, the east bound cruises are going to Barcelona or other points south, and the westbound cruises come from northern Europe. How far in advance are you thinking?
  13. Hi, I'm not sure if I have a specific question... My almost-3-year-old DS has a speech delay and was just given a (mild) ASD diagnosis. He's got an IEP for the speech delay which involves 4-day-a-week preschool in the fall. This should actually help with my almost-6-year-old DD whom I'm planning on officially homeschooling this year, since it'll be 4 mornings a week when I don't have to worry about her brother. She qualified to go to a nearby gifted school, but for other reasons I decided that's not the best choice at this time. Anyhow, with the ASD diagnosis we'll be adding in ABA therapy in home plus the private speech therapy he already has. I should mention that there's also a baby who will be turning 1 soon. I don't know if I have a specific question yet, but I'm hoping just to hear perspectives from anyone who's been there and done something like this and not gone completely crazy? Thanks!
  14. My mother retired a little earlier than she might have otherwise because of time off (or lack thereof) at her job, but to be fair, she was already over 60, her own mother was needing to move into assisted living, and I (her only child) had some non-trivial health problems at the time (and now she has grandchildren to visit several times a year)... That said, before she was at a plausible retirement age, she had to cancel a cruise because her work canceled all vacation time at the last minute, and several other vacations were dicy til the last minute...
  15. My grandmother actually lived in her first air-conditioned house during WWII, when her husband was stationed in Nevada, which I'd guess is fairly similar in terms of temperature.
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