We looked at what was available to us when we got our first real jobs after grad school (in our late 20s). For full coverage, it was going to be $300/month/person. It would be a huge help if somebody started needing long term care at a relatively young age, but if we were needing a more typical amount we wouldn't see a benefit relative to just saving the money, and of course as with any sort of insurance there's always the possibility that you don't need it at all. We decided to instead put as much money as possible in a health spending account and then not use the account for anything else. The HSA is acting as savings for long term care if needed but has the benefit of being available if there is another major medical need. But, all of this is part of an overall insurance strategy - we are fortunate that nobody has chronic high medical costs, so we have chosen a high deductible health care plan. That's what allows us to have the HSA. So, this plan may not work for a family for a lot of different reasons but I wanted to post in case it would work for somebody else.

Yes, yes, yes! There are things that are cool - if you do good dissections, they can be informative. Getting a feel for metric measurement is useful. My students use bulbs, a micropipet, and balances to learn to work with volume and mass. It's not an actual experiment, but it's good to help them see metric scale. I love the egg osmosis lab because it makes it so easy to visualize what is happening - it works! And it's a great tool for teaching graphing, independent vs dependent variables, etc. For a lab that only costs 3 eggs, a bottle of vinegar, and a bottle of karo syrup - it punches way above it's pay grade. For chem labs, it always felt like if you've done one titration you've done them all. Don't add too fast or your measurement will be wrong. Then do math. I always said that the most useful thing that i learned in labs in K-12 was that hot glass looks the same as cold glass. Our teacher told us at the time that it was the most important thing that we'd learn that year, and having burned my hands on hot flasks many times over the years that I worked in labs...it's true. 🙂 I took oodles of labs as a biochem major, but nothing really prepares you for lab work. We were required to do senior research in a lab, and I probably did 15+ hours/week at a minimum.

One of my kids had speech therapy (they just worked on speech) but I saw bits of sessions with other kids and some definitely had more of an OT interaction. Between that and dealing with possible frustration, I could see it making a difference. When my older started biting and was trying to get to my hand to bite when mad one day, I pushed kid's own hand to their mouth. Kid only bit themselves twice over the course of a day or 2 before they quit. My thinking was that they needed to know what their biting felt like to the person being bitten - they could do the act of biting, but other people didn't need to be on the receiving end.

When we bought our current home we looked at a house like that - very open, large, lovely, and very little storage. Could you have a bookcase built that you could back up your couch to, such that it could be a room divider? Could you replace most occasional tables/coffee tables/nightstands with trunks, chests, and small dressers? Is there a spare room that could just be used for storage? Can you get underbed//undercouch bins? Could you have custom shelving built low under windows, like bench seats all along a wall, or have a few walls in halls, around the headboards of beds, etc filled with custom bookcases?

For whatever reason, homeschoolers do a ton of labs. In my experience, a full year of college (to go along wtih 2 credits' worth of lecture) would not do more than 30 labs. There are only 18 weeks in a standard college semester, and labs don't necessarily meet every week (often they didn't meet during short weeks like Thanksgiving - it was school dependent). At some places, they don't meet during the first or last week of the semester. There is often a midterm and/or a final. Some labs take multiple weeks in some classes. The first day may be mostly introduction and lab safety. I don't remember ever doing or teaching 18 real labs in a semester - it was usually more like 12 at the most. As somebody who spent years working in a lab (a year of undergrad research, 5 1/2 years of grad school, a couple of years as a postdoc) lab classes don't do a ton to prepare you for actual research. Have your student do a reasonable number of labs, learn how to do the important calculations and how to lay out a lab report, and make sure that they can explain and calculate error. Then move on if you want to. When my kid did chem at home (and got a 4 on the AP), I think we did 8-10 real labs. It's enough for kid to understand how they work, and the calculations are the same as the calculations that kid was doing in the problem sets. We walked about error and mistakes and I let kid do the work alone so that kid could learn the importance of reading over the procedure and following directions. It's similar to cooking in that respect. 🙂

If the problem is that he is being easily frustrated, don't try AoPS. It's a great fix for kids who are bored but it requires a high frustration tolerance.

Empty rooms always look bland. We just had to replace our fridge yesterday and in preparation had to empty the counters and move the floor rugs and it was surprising what a difference that made. I would definitely put a piece of trim above the cabinets - either wood or ceiling color would be fine. It would be fine to paint the cabinets (both or just the lowers) but before making plans I'd think about how it would look with the other stuff that goes in your kitchen. This is family-specific - are there colored canisters, or a brightly colored stand mixer or coffeemaker or toaster that stay out, or curtains and throw rugs that add color, or... I wouldn't be in any rush to change things other than the trim because it's not bad, just bland. After living with it for a bit, I might go with my preference for farmhouse and paint the cabinets white, or do white on top and a color on the bottom. I love color - we don't have white walls anywhere - but I'd be fine with the neutral backsplash and counter because it lets me change the colors of other things.

I had joint pain that got a lot better when my allergies were under control. My allergist said that I had a ton of general inflammation because they were really bad. Recently I've had pain in my hips. For other reasons, I started taking the probiotic Provitalize and also fish oil and the pain is much better. It kind of irritates me that I started both at the same time so that I don't know which helped the pain. That's not why I started taking them so I hadn't been expecting that as a result, and now I'm stuck taking both. 🙂 But, I don't hurt much any more, so I can't complain. I hope that you figure it out.

I saw Ezzo being used as a guide with a friend and also a relative. Both were in mainline churches - one Presbyterian, the other Methodist. I don't know that it was a big church-wide push - in both cases, I think that maybe a small group/Sunday School class read the book and the families did it. I don't know how strictly the families followed all of it the beginning, and for various reasons neither family continued with this approach as the kids got older. Their kids are now mostly grown and their families seem to be in a very different place. It didn't seem to correlate with political ideology - one of these is fairly conservative, while the other had 'resist' posted the day after the 2016 election. Both worked part-time from the time that their kids were fairly young (maybe 6 months - 1 year?) so they had some day care or mothers helper/sitter interactions so there's no way that they could have followed all of it strictly. But, with that being said, I had never heard of Gothard, IBLP, Ezzo, etc from my own circles (relative and friend were not in the same state as me) until I saw criticisms on message boards when I was pregnant. I had heard of Dobson but hadn't read much. Churches that I was involved in (multiple states) were more likely to be 'Love and Logic' places. I never got into any particular philosophy. I was fortunate to be in a church where I was adopted by a lot of grandparent-age people, and I took whatever snippets of advice seemed applicable. Some of the best advice that I ever got was 'Unless it's a safety issue, don't invest much time in dealing with a behavior that they'll outgrow quickly'. In other words, limit how much time you spend teaching them to not pull out all of the tupperward, since that phase will be over in a few months. Focus on not running into the road - that's both a safety problem and a long-term issue.

I lived in GA for 5 years and have lived in GA-adjacent states for another 25 and have never heard of this. I wouldn't be surprised that people don't necessarily crawl around on the ground to find a dropped chicken bone, but I've never seen anybody intentionally throw food scraps of any kind on the ground.

My mom and I both had it and found that what helped was very individualized, likely due to the specific shapes of people's feet. For her, she wore one brand of tennis shoes almost continuously for over a year. At one point she slept in them because it kept her feet from pointing at night. I wore birkenstocks every day, all day. When I got it a second time I wore oofos in the house and birks out of the house. Once the pain eased off, after months, we were able to add other styles of shoes occasionally. We would occasionally find other shoes that worked - usally vionic or clarks. If it makes you feel more optimistic, it's been at least 5 years since either of us has had any problem, and I'm back to wearing my flip flops and being barefoot all summer. The biggest help was staying off our feet when possible and stretching multiple times each day.

We know people with names like Max, Jake, and Betsy as their given names. It's what their family planned to call them, so they skipped naming them Jacob or Elizabeth and just went with the nickname. They are related, and since it happened over generations they seem to feel like it keeps things simple.

I think that rhetoric did a lot of damage to how people view each other. In many instances, instead of the discussion being 'I don't think the cost-benefit on this policy makes this a worthwhile policy' and the response being 'I think that the policy is worthwhile for reason X, supported by data Y' with similar back and forth, it devolved to 'you're killing people' and 'you don't care about people'. These can be applied to both sides of many policies - this isn't meant to be partisan. But, statements like these are hard to come back from on a relationship level, and ultimately relationships are what makes society work. I know people who left organizations that they had been a part of for decades, not over disagreement, but over how people talked to each other. People also lost the ability to 'work in groups' and some seem to be unable to turn off the 'must protect my family' mentality that they developed. With covid policy being less of an issue, that intensity is being directed at anybody who disagrees with them on anything, anywhere. People who run groups locally are struggling to deal with the extent to which people want everything individualized. It's been interesting to watch. Here, the least disrupted thing was kids athletics. And, the place where I'm seeing the least change in behavior is kid athletics. It's like...people never got out of the groove of how to do this, so they're trucking along like it's 2019, while other aspects of life that were more disrupted are struggling more. I think we also developed an understanding that the fact that our various groups and activities don't just spontaneously happen. I think that people have been shocked at how hard it has been to rebuild groups that were once very important to people. All it takes is a little turnover and you have an entirely different thing. I think we're going to see odd effects in the future because different places handled things so differently. The learning gaps aren't just going to be economic, they'll be geographic. Schools in some areas were closed for 2 months in spring of 2020, while others were closed for a year. Even within some states there were huge differences. I don't know how that will affect future college classes and employment situations. I think we're in a weird situation where we simultaneously realized that we need to get healthier while instead we got less healthy. We aren't good at fixing this long-term problem, but hopefully as individuals people will try to move towards better health.

It's hard to have strict lines, but for me there are some indicators that I consider to be more cult-like. First, is there secrecy - are there hidden rules or special knowledge only available to the 'elite' within the group or are the beliefs or rules clearly laid out for everybody to see? Most mainstream religions have texts or teachings that are available to anybody, and in earlier times had public teaching or letters that circulated. Is there room for question and debate? Can people disagree or have doubt? The Old Testament has stories of people who 'wrestled with God' and it's portrayed as an OK thing to do. Can people leave? Obviously people may think you are wrong, but do they prevent you from leaving or threaten you? Do you have control over how you participate? This is made more complicated by the fact that small groups can do weird things to a more mainstream belief system. And, anything that is important to people may take a lot of their time and resources, and that can make people uncomfortable. Like, nobody thinks twice if you spend time and $ on a kid's extracurricular or the local theater company or if a wealthy person donates huge sums to build a museum, but if somebody does the same thing with a religious group then people may wonder if it's a cult. But, on the other hand, people clearly do end up in cults and unhealthy religious groups that take over their lives in negative ways. Other people happily spend many hours working with their religious group to study in a way that benefits their life or volunteer in ways that serve others. But, I tend to think that in a healthy group people are free to choose when, where, and how to participate.

I had an emergency C-section after many hours of labor. When they finally wheeled me into a room, there was a breakfast plate - bacon, eggs, pancakes. I'm not sure I was supposed to have eaten so soon after surgery, but I did, and it was good. For the second, it was a semi-scheduled C-section (one of those 'if you haven't had a baby by 10 days past your due date' situations). They didn't bring breakfast that time - it was a different hospital. I'm not sure if my first real meal was lunch or if they gave me jello and didn't let me eat a real meal until dinner. At any rate, that hospital was big on feeding women beef post-birth - steak for dinner, steak sandwiches for lunch, so whatever meal it was, I had beef. Baby and I were in the hospital 5 days the first time, and the best meal was when my mom brought chicken salad sandwiches. They are a multipurpose food for my family - we eat the on the beach, at weddings, at funerals, at showers and luncheons - and it was the ultimate comfort food.

Under these circumstance, I'd likely be hesitant to continue to spend money on college, too. I know that there were challenges at each school, but there are always going to be challenges - this isn't a case of one poor grade due to a messed up assignment. I think that a break from school, coupled with independence, would probably be a huge help. Much of the issue could be due to the dad's control issues, but I think that the best path forward is to get some successes - a certification, a job, an apartment or sublet room, and some autonomy would give her some space. There is unlikely to be a direct path to nursing with those grades, but there are many other health care fields - EMT, radiology tech, phlebotomist - that could be starting points. I agree that she's unlikely to know how to make this happen, and mom scaffolding - looking for programs, helping her to sign up, looking for a sublet, etc - needs to happen. If mom can't get $, she might be able to help daughter find a regular job to help fund things while working out how to do a certification in something medical. Meanwhile, the interactions with dad are not good. Feeling like a parent would be angry or disappointed or frustrated is normal - parents experience all of those things - and it's natural enough to dread having those conversations. Feeling like they would despise the child, and actually fearing the parent, is not. Counseling seems like a good idea for anybody in that situation.

When I was in school 30 years ago there weren't activities planned by RAs in the dorms. We kept our doors open or sat in the halls or lounge areas or outside on benches so that people spoke (which didn't necessarily lead anywhere, but sometimes they chatted, which sometimes led to getting to know each other better). Even if he doesn't make a friend, are there things that would occupy his time - going to the gym/rec center/pool, for instance, would take an hour or more and if he sees the same people day after day he might get to know them. Or could he get a job? It would fill some time and he'd have coworkers to get to know. Even a job like dishwasher in a lab would put him around people. I spent 2 summers working at camps on my undergrad campus, and summer was definitely calmer...which is fine once you know people. Even with that, both summers were times when I spent an hour solo walking for exercise - I explored nearby neighborhoods and took different routes just for something to do. And the most lonely stretch of time I ever spent was the summer that I had an internship at UVA. A friend from high school who went there (but wasn't there over the summer) said that, unlike my alma mater, it was a place where people didn't really talk unles they were introduced. So, I worked but was mostly alone nights and weekends. It wasn't fun, but it also had an end, as will summer school. But, at my undergrad school, people were very friendly and the school still has that reputation. But, even then, I met people in part because I made an effort to do things - I ate and worked out with coworkers when I worked at camp, went to dollar movies that I didn't care about with hallmates, asked neighbors or classmates if they were going to the ball game, etc.

Playing around with Life of Fred can help keep the algebra skills sharp. Kids either love it or hate it, but if he likes it then I'd go for it. It does make a good review. Number Theory is a different kind of math. He might also like something like Mathematics, a human endeavor - it never lined up for my kids to use it, but it covers some different material. If he doesn't like math, don't use AoPS for the normal subjects - it's a lot of challenge.

Different choices will lead to different outcomes, and you can't know what the outcome will be. And if one doesn't turn out like you had hoped, you can't know that making a different choice would have led to a better outcome. But, unless there is more that we don't know, the choices won't be wrong, just different. We know people who choose to go out of town every weekend. They drift away from the church because they don't feel connected...which they won't, because they don't actually go there routinely except during the winter. But, they have other relationships where they go on the weekends. It's not really possible to be close to 2 groups if you're only interacting with one of them. But it's not right or wrong, better or worse, it's just a different set of relationships.

8th grade won't be on a high school transcript so nobody will see what he did. My kid's transcripts just list 'high school courses taken prior to 9th grade' without listing the grade in which they were taken. A couple of thoughts - will your student do algebra 1, algebra 2, gap year, geometry, and then precalc? Our local STEM school either swapped geometry back to being between the algebras or added significant review because the kids forgot a lot of algebra during geometry, so I wondered if it might be an issue for there to be 2 years between algebra 2 and precal. With my older, kid simultaneously worked through Life of Fred algebra while doing geometry (between the 2 algebras) to keep it fresh. We were doing AoPS in middle and spent 1.5 years on some courses, so we chose to do AoPS Number Theory and Counting and Probabiility to fill in some gap semesters. Kid really liked Number Theory, in case it would be a good fit for your student. At any rate, I would not assign 3 algebra credits for algebra done in middle school - multiple credits are sometimes given for high schoolers who need more than a year to cover the standard material, but for a student taking them in middle school I think it would look strange.

I teach many classes myself, and we do others at co-op. The only online providers that we've used are Derek Owens, Fundafunda (full transparency - I teach there, and many of the teachers are local people who teach at our co-op - we take their classes live, but if the co-op schedule doesn't work, we sometimes take them online), and the community college for DE. All of our online classes have been reasonably taught. But, the experience and independence vary by kid. Some have tight deadlines and others are more self-paced. Kids interact with those differently. One of my kids was able to be very independent by sometime in middle school, and the occasional 'Is your work done?' was enough to keep kid on track. My other does very little with a self-paced class unless there are parent-set deadlines and check-ins to make sure that the work is done every week. Kid doesn't do a great job of managing time when there are multiple deadlines, so I have to help kid think through things like 'you can't do a week's worth of math and read 1/2 of a book for English in one day'. I don't think either of my kids could have been fully independent when starting middle school, but I started working towards autonomy in elementary and hand over control gradually as the kids get older and are ready for it.

Lots of public school kids come from schools that have block schedules, which, like college schedules, have 4ish classes each semester. Plenty of homeschool and public/private school kids take DE classes. I'd expect that colleges are used to seeing students with courses in the spring of their senior year because they can't take everything in the fall, either for sequencing or scheduling reasons. If you choose to add another science class, I'd pick something other than physics since that would be repetitive - geology or something like that. Not that you need to, but if you decided that you want another science I'd pick something where your student would actually learn something new.

We don't have anything exciting going on, but it will be busy. Older will be a senior next year and will likely start on college application essays and SRAR stuff. Kid is taking an online DE class and is working on a homegrown computing class (spouse is a computer engineer and directs this) and possibly reading books that I'll turn into a history 1/2 credit elective. Kid will start working on his Eagle project and will have workouts for baseball 2x/week at the school and probably some independent ones at a local sports club. If the weather is good we'll have 7 weekends of summer baseball tournaments. Kid has told the high school coach to let him know if local tournaments need paid scorekeepers on days that there isn't a conflict with his games, so he may pick up some cash doing that. The high school is hosting a few days of baseball camp for younger kids so the team will probably be working at that as a fundraiser. We live on a couple of acres and have a huge garden, so we may pay kid to do some yard stuff. Kid also likes to go to the open gym at church every Thursday night and play a few hours of basketball - it conflicts with baseball during the school year but is a summer favorite. We had debated encouraging kid to get a summer job, but between AP and DE kid is on track to be able to do college in 3 years (or work towards a masters if he stays longer). Since kid is interested and able it makes more sense to let kid keep working on academics. Younger has karate 2 hrs/day 2-3 days most weeks and will have volleyball practice 2 evenings a week most of the summer. There's one jiu jitsu competition on the calendar so there will probably be some extra practice for that. Violin lessons will continue most weeks so there should be some practice. I'll start counting hours towards high school PE and fine arts credits - kid will be doing extra conditioning to prepare for a karate blackbelt test in the fall so we may do some bike rides together to get in some extra cardio that isn't hard on my not-a teenager joints. 🙂 This kid will also be a crew leader at VBS one week. Sleepovers and fun with friends are priorities, so kid has already done work converting the playroom into more of a teen space. We will likely do a couple of day trips to a water park that is a little over an hour away - there are closer ones, but this one is small and only $15 per person so I'm happy to go and take a friend a few times. There may be some stuff with the youth group at church - we're getting a new director so the schedule is still not out. Between morning karate, evening volleyball, and weekend baseball, we aren't traveling much. We have a family trip to the beach but otherwise we'll mostly spend the summer hitting and throwing things. 🙂 At one time I would have hated the thought of being so tied down with sports, but somewhere along the line I came to love it as much as the kids do and I'm cherishing these years of getting to enjoy it with them.

I'll admit that I never wrote long research papers for humanities classes when I was in college. I AP'ed out of freshman comp and took 2 lit classes that required essays and papers but no long 10 page research papers. Like many biology students, I took as much psychology as possible to fulfill social science/humanities requirements because classes like developmental psych are biology-adjacent. But, I wrote a lot. We had a group major research paper in a biochem class (we all researched different hypotheses about the biochemical causes of schizophrenia and then had to work them into a single long paper). I wrote lab reports, most 3ish pages but some 10-15 pages long, frequently. Then I went on to grad school. I wrote 3 published papers and a dissertation. Had I desired, I could have filled my humanities/social science requirement and electives with lit or philosophy classes that involved more writing but I chose psychology and various music classes (marching and symphonic band) because I enjoyed them. But, the ability to analyze and write clearly and concisely was still something that I used every week. Even for test-based classes, I often needed to analyze and quickly be able to dash off a compare/contrast or explain how/why. It's always seemed to me that, while literature can be enjoyable and stretching on it's own, part of why we teach kids to write about lit is because we can teach them something and then teach them to write about what they know. The goal of that isn't necessarily for them to write about literature, but to be abe to write about whatever interests them - lit, science, politics, history, philosophy, or any other subject. My sibling works in college athletics and says that one of the most useful skills is being able to read a stat page and quickly convert it into a recap article. It's another case of using good writing combined with expertise in another field.

That looks great! There's enough variety that a picky eater can eat something bland (just rice), eat something that is familiar (egg roll, chicken fried rice) or have a choice of meats, fruit, or veggie. People can be picky in unexpected ways, but this seems like it would accommodate most tastes - there are even noodles with the pork if somebody doesn't want rice.