I never considered age to be that important. My youngest started high school at 12 and graduated soon after turning sixteen. My middle has done high school at regular times (though young in many circles today) because she started right around the time she was 14 but she had medical issues and so we couldn't accelerate her. She will turn 18 within a few days of starting college and she will graduate at 17.75. Now I will have my youngest graduate at 17.5. I don't think that is a big difference between the two girls graduation dates. If number three ends up having medical issues that slow her down, so be it and we will slow down. I don't like the trend of delaying adulthood. If you look back through history, many people were working in their fields of endeavor much earlier than 22.

I saw the news about the 6.5 earhtquake near Eureka. Anyone here from that area? Are you all okay? Prayers for all there.

Well my youngest has the maturity for next year, has the math and science, reads well, and is so gungho about getting up to speed that she was bothering me this afternoon to produce punctuation sentences for her. She has already worked on a science fair project completely on her own and researching on her own two years ago. The one thing she was reluctant to do was write because of her perfectionism. But now she is writing every day because she has decided she has to get better and just do it. I am telling her she needs to learn to type (her sister did the keyboarding course at FLVS and went from hint and peck typing to 50 wpm and I would like her to do the same course but am letting her choose whether to do that or Mavis Beacon). She has done public speaking and is comfortable with that. She is also a very practical child with great common sense and understands complex things easily and thoroughly. I originally thought that I should keep the girls (3.25 years apart) 4 years apart because it would be easier for college financing and for doing the WTm rotation. But older isn't doing that in high school and younger will be concentrating more on science anyway. I think going through the 4 year cycle 2 1/2 times will be sufficient. And in terms of college financing, we will have almost all to all of number 2's college paid and whatever we have left to pay will help us diminish how much we pay for 3rd's first year. We will be changing states or countries at least once and most likely twice during number three's high school years so we can always slow it back down again, if needed.

Well maybe your bathrooms have more bars than the hotel bathroom. The hotel bathrooms typically have one bar over the tub while many home bathrooms have additional bars in other areas. If we are all taking showers, there is nowhere to hang an additional towel while the second person is taking a shower, let alone two or three more. I am asthmatic and others in my family are sensitive to mildew also so we prefer quickly dried towels and other wet things. We also have never lived in a one bathroom home since we had a child, let alone three. We are used to that and have been for 20 years.

I want to start a discussion as to what level work a child should be doing before high school. My ideas so far are: 1. Done with pre-algebra and either starting algebra or have finished it. 2. Ability to read most things thrown at them. Be able to read and comprehend textbooks written at high school or higher level. 3. Be able to write a well written paragraph and able to write a paper, though may not be as well written. 4. Type What else do you require? I know many of us do think of these things since some decide their child is not ready for high school and others graduate early. If you use any other criteria than age, please join this discussion.

We don't have tattoos, don't have piercings, and did have our son circumscribed. THis was 20 years ago and it was the thing to do. After that, we had girls. Then I started reading reports about penile cancer, HPV transmission, etc. and was quite happy we had it done. Then a few years ago, my FIL had prostate cancer. Somehow this necissitated him having a circumsion at age 84. That was the worst part of the prostate cancer for him since it wasn't healing well. At that point, I was so happy that both my dh and my ds had had it done at birth. What a horrible thing to go through along with cancer surgery. My dd's and I don't have piercings and can't have them. Both older dd and I are keloid formers and having pierced ears would just mean we would get scars. Then younger dd has eczema and that is a no no too. I watched my younger sister deal with pierced ears and eczema and that wasn't a pretty sight.

I took a sociology class on the military back in the 80's. I remember reading a large scale study of the officers of the different branches. The Navy was most liberal and the Air Force was the most conservative. It wasn't why my dh joined the AF but having spent 23 years moving place to place with him, I would have to agree that my experience with the military has been that we have felt completely comfortable in the community and we are conservatives. The few Navy people we did meet (at NATO) were more liberal than the typical AF person. I tend to have met mostly officer and upper enlisted members and their spouses just because of the places where my dh worked (technical areas) tended to be officer dominated and the enlisted were usually better educated than the average and also older.

Although we don't wash towels after each use at home, we often have them do that at hotels. Why? Because at home, we don't have four or five people using one bathroom. If we all did use one bathroom, we also wouldn't have space to hand all those towels up to dry. Dh take shampoo bottles when he travels if he has shampoo left. He normally doesn't take the soap, especially if he used it but they often throw out the slightly used soap each day. I haven't gotten sick at a hotel. I did get very sick from food at a museum once but nothing has happened to us at a hotel. Someone mentioned cruises. The cruise lines we have been on have hand sanitizers at the entrances to the dining areas. We make liberal use of those and haven't had any problems on a cruise.

I bought very inexpensive silk ones from Campmor. They don't itch at all.

I believe we should be looking for suspicious people rather than suspicious objects. There is a lot of reasons to believe that the full body scanners wouldn't be able to detect the bombs. How can they tell Depends or feminine products versus bombs? How about bombs that are placed in body cavities? IF they are blurring the private areas, that is exactly where the bomb was. I wish we would start following El Al's example. Israel has bombs gong off frequently in their marketplaces, buses, discos, etc. but none on their airline. Ohand these machines are very expensive so maybe we should get more bomb sniffing dogs and handlers and get some kind of program to have military, law enforcement, rugby players, etc. get signed up for screening and then give a few a free flight on each flight. We can scan people all we want but how often are the airport workers bribed or fellow travelers of the terrorists? I think full body scanners are a smart idea of one step in the security process for a secondary screening. But that sceondary screening should not be random. Our threat is 75 yo grandma travelling to FL for a cruise. It isn't the mom of three travelling with little ones. It is the guy travelling from equatorial Africa to frigid Detroit in winter with only a small carryon not big enough to hold a winter coat and paying cash for his ticket.

We are trying to decide which, if any SAT subject tests to do. Since none of the colleges she is right now interested in don't require them, this will happen only if she does decide that she likes come colleges that do want them. BUt my question is prepatory- is there a way to guestimate SAT subject test scores based on ACT math score? She is scoring okay in math but not fantastically.

May I suggest Life of Fred math for you? I am currently using it to help me learn trigonometry. (Yes I had it a long time ago but boy did I hate it and basically forgot it almost immediately except for once when I needed it to build a window seat).

Is there any reason not to accelerate her at some point if that is what you need to do. My youngest may or may not be accelerated next year. We will decide either this summer or next year. I am already planning to count her Algebra I for high school credit. I don't know if she will finish by May and I will probably slow her down a tiny bit so it goes on 8th grade if we do that. I know she really wants to go to college as an nearly 18 yo rather than a nearly 19 yo and it would help us with financial aid too so it is a lot to consider.

My middle doesn't really have any friends though she does have acquaintances. She plays soccer in Fall and Spring, is in an adult choir and youth choir (the youth only for Christmas and Easter), is in a youth group (which she doesn't like very much), goes to co-op, is in the Honor Society, and probably most importantly is in debater. She also was on a dive team in the summer and did movie nights with the other divers and swimmers. This is how much socialization she needs. She will make friends in college. She is friendly enough to her soccer partner but I wouldn't call her a real friend since they are so different.

Yes, there are some options to get medical school paid for by promising to work in Indian Reservations, Remote US areas with lack of doctors, inner cities, or for the Military. I am not sure about this but I do believe that most medical school scholarships have clauses to them like service later or research or something of this sort.

Praying for both families at this time. Christina

WE are using LOF as a stand alone problem for my mathy girl. We also have the extra homework book which has the course scheduled for 104 lessons or maybe 102? ANyway, dd is in chapter three of Algebra and finding it easy. WE haven't gotten to the infamous chapter 4 but the program works very well for her as a stand alone program at this time. If she ever needs extra, I have plenty of books with problems to supplement.

I found it not useful at all. My middle got middling cogat scores but gets high regular scores and it looks like she will be getting fairly high ACT scores. It doesn't test things she does well in. My youngest got lower COgat scores on math sections and higher on verbal but everyone she meets and her other test scores show that her area of talent is not verbal but rather math/engineering.

The only nationality we had a problem with while traveling was Russian. We had two seperate incidents where we were almost knowcked down by Russians pushing. The first was on a platform at a Belgian flower show and they pushed me, causing me to stumble on the short staircase. The second time was worse: we were eating in a Parisian cafe and I was taking my youngest to the ladies down a long flight of stairs. The Russian women barrels trough ( basically a one and half person stairwell) and almost knocks my dd down this very long flight of stairs. Fortunately I was able to steady her. We were pushed by Russians in other places but those instances are memorable. Oh and Asta, the clerk wasn't reacting because he was speaking French (we knew not to speak Frenk in Vlanderan areas) but rather because she thought he was Flemmish. He has light strawberry blond hair and could pass for one of them easily.

We lived for three years in Europe. We mostly listed to AFN there and they screened music. No Crazy B songs there. Then we came back to the US. Wow- had the standards of what was played on the radio changed. WE quickly found that we needed to listen to oldies channels so that the lyrics wouldn't be so bad.

We are military and were stationed in Belgium. We traveled a lot in Europe in our three years there. We never had anyone treat us badly as Americans. We did have someone get very angry at my husband at an IKEA because she thought he was Flemmish and a complete dunce for not listening to her. (Not only he wasn't Flemmish, we lived in Wallonia so he was somewhat able to communicate in French but not at all in Flemmish). But that was just funny to us and we managed to tease dh about it for a long time.

I have to agree with Nan's post. I think it is really important to use the teen years and particularly the later teen years to slowly foster independence in the child. Some won't make the transition well even with that but it does work better to make some adjustments in the family dynamic to allow the teen some independence and group activities, regardless if that is a high priority for them or not. I think the group activities have been more important to my introverts than to my extrovert. They needed the interactio with others to become more comfortable. Things like mission projects, camps, etc. can help with the separation process. I think it is better to do it in steps rather than have the kids separated for a long time and then out to college or military or work life they go. Those are huge transitions and having some familiarity with doing things with others not with the family can help greatly.

I am a big reader of mysteries. The libraries get these and I already read a lot. The other thing I read is new non fiction. Those are usually not in high demand at the library so I get those. I don't tend to read classics very often- except what I consider classic mysteries:001_smile:.

My dd is doing the HIstory of the US and now she is remembering the facts.

We had my oldest in a private school for first. It was a good school as far as they go, but we we going to move and while they had three first grade rooms, they only had two second grade. I didn't think it was right of us to take a space away when we were supposed to be moving less than a month into the year. So we started homeschooling. NOw while I thought the school situation was good, I didn't know until I started how much better homeschooling was. My son really relaxed a lot and our family dynamics became much better. He had done fairly well in the school but apparently it stressed him quite a bit. Once he was home, things were much more smooth.