From the diagnosing dh has done, it seems like the compressor is going. I didn't think 11 years is old either, but this fridge is not built extremely well. I think we've replaced every shelf and drawer at least once! Grrr . . .

Yes, I would love your model number! Seems like Samsung should be avoided. So funny though--my friend whose LG caused all the flooding then got a Samsung, I think . . . Thanks for all the advice, everyone!

It looks like we are in the market for a new fridge for our kitchen. Our old one is a side-by-side Frigidaire that is 11 years old, but the freezer is just not staying cold enough. We have tried every youtube DIY trick we can find, but nothing has helped. Now the space is just serving as a "second fridge" while we research. I can't get a good feel from reading reviews what brands are better than others, if any. We're contemplating getting a French door/freezer on the bottom one, since that seems to be the big thing now. I LOVE ice, so we definitely need an ice maker, but I don't care if we have an ice dispenser. We have another (side-by-side) fridge in our garage, as well as a big freezer, so I have a lot of storage options and can be flexible with space in the inside fridge. There are 12 of us (4 teenage boys!!), and I shop at both Costco and Sams, so we definitely need all the fridge/freezer space we have! My good friends had a dreadful experience with their fairly new french door LG, where the ice maker broke and flooded their kitchen and basement, so I'm gunshy about LG, but that seems to be what Costco and Sams primarily carry. I hate buying appliances! SO much money, and it seems to be such a crapshoot, as to whether or not you get a good one or a lemon!

My sons have just used a real simple $1.00 calculator. No exponent. I just asked one son, and he said the school provided them (and they were really crappy, lol). But he had come prepared with his cheapo one.

Yeah, me too. That is really weird, and I can't ever imagine being like that with anyone, especially a prospective spouse!

I don't have any idea what is going on in the OP's situation, but this post really spoke to me! After reading MIL posts on these boards for awhile (and dealing with a rather difficult MIL myself for going on 24 years), I am really dreading my older kids getting into serious relationships, especially with girls from small families. I *am* stretched thin. I *am* introverted, and it takes a lot out of me to deal with everyone all the time, much less initiating get-togethers! I definitely worry that a girlfriend will feel overwhelmed with all the other people around--or that my older boys will feel overwhelmed on their behalf, and just not want to bring a serious girlfriend home. I am definitely not a clingy or controlling person, and I am eager for my sons to find mates--but at this point, I just don't have tons of extra emotional energy left over to devote to girlfriends. :( It is helpful, I think, to read about the really rude things--I know I won't do those things, lol. My future MIL wrote my then-fiance a letter basically telling him I was a gold-digger, and our marriage would never succeed because we didn't have anything in common, since I neither skied or played tennis! Somehow, we have overcome . . . and actually, I've become fairly friendly with my MIL as well--although we never lived closer than 4 hours away, which definitely helped! My instinct is to get along with people, so hopefully that will help in the daughter-in-law department--but boy, it is something I've started worrying about a lot more since my boys have gotten older!

Boy, I feel for you. My second son went to a Christmas dance that a somewhat local homeschool group put on (further west, though,so not really our exact neck of the woods). Some of the kids on his mock trial team are in this group, so the whole team went. He had fun, but when he went to leave, he realized someone had taken his suit coat. At the end of the dance, there was an extra coat left over, although it was pin-striped and only had a single slit in the back, whereas my son's was solid black and had a double slit. Plus, it just didn't fit him right, lol. The dance organizer had sent out an evite, so we emailed her to get her to send out a message to all the participants. She did, but it wasn't very detailed--something like "Missing black suit coat. Found pin striped suit coat." Eventually someone did get back to her, and so we arranged to pick up the wrong suit coat this boy had--except it also was not my son's. Grrrrr. So 2 boys picked up the wrong suit coats! The organizer sent out another text, and I had a friend send out a very detailed message with a plea to the homeschool email loop for the western group ("Moms, PLEASE make your sons check their suit coats!!"), but no luck. No one else ever came forward. My son needed a matching suit for the state mock trial tournament, so we ended up having to buy a whole different suit for him. I was NOT happy. I'm sure some random boy came home, threw his (our) suit coat in the closet, and never bothered to check it. And then, when he needs it next summer for Great-Aunt Gertrude's funeral, it will be too small anyway, so he'll never even notice he was the unobservant loser who wouldn't bother checking whether or not he got the right coat in the first place! Grrrrr. I did tell my son that before he goes to any more homeschool dances, I am buying him an enormous pink and purple boutonierre so that nobody mistakes his coat for their own! This last dance ended up being a very expensive dance, to say the least, for us anyway!

I laughed at this article about college tours! (ETA: Some language) The Hair-Pulling Madness of the College Tour "I was a tour guide in college. I worked in admissions. I’ve consulted with students applying to college. I know campus tours. I believe in campus tours. My advice has long been to take official campus tours. Get a feel for the school when students are on campus. See a variety of settings and sizes. It’s good advice. Only now that I’m a parent of a junior applying to college attending campus tours, I’m here to say, what in god’s name is this madness?..."

And while we're on the topic of AP biology, let me put in a plug for my favorite test review book: Preparing for the AP Biology Exam (School Edition) (Pearson Education Test Prep) It also reviews the labs, and the concepts you need to know from those labs. Here is my amazon review of it: I teach AP biology for our homeschool co-op, and I have been looking for a good AP biology review book since the test was redesigned a few years ago. Barrons, et al, didn't seem to have questions that really prepared the kids for the questions on the actual exam, and all those review books definitely focused on lots of nit-picky details that were no longer required things to memorize. This book is clearly head and shoulders above the rest. It is written by the Holtzclaws, who also write guided reading questions to go along with the Campbell biology book. There are 10 topics, or chapters, that review content, and they include boxes called "You Must Know" that state bullet points that you should be able to explain to yourself. If not, some more time spent on that topic with your book is probably in order. Then there are several types of questions at the end of each chapter. Level one contains knowledge/comprehension questions that "review essential content knowledge but don't represent the type of question you will see on the AP exam. Level 2, application/synthesis, questions are similar to those you will see on the exam." Based on the questions I have seen on the practice exams released to approved AP bio teachers, these questions *do* look like the ones on the exam, unlike the questions in the other review books. Very good practice, and worth its weight in gold right there! Then there are at least 2 grid-in questions for each chapter, which again, the other books don't really focus on at all, and one free response question. You may need your textbook or whatever to review the topics more in depth, but this review book will help you figure out what areas you don't know well but should, and it will give you lots of practice in the kinds of problems you will actually encounter on the exam.

Other than some Arizona university, I don't think I've heard an actual name of another school that cares about exactly what labs you do? In our small co-op, where I teach all the junior high and high school science classes, we've had graduates be accepted to 2 military academies, UVA, Cornell, Virginia Tech, and several other well-regarded schools. Not one of them has asked a single thing about how we did labs, not for our regular science classes, nor for our AP ones. They have been very impressed with our scores, though, and the students have all been very well-prepared for college science classes, so I really don't think this is a big thing to worry about now. For what it's worth, dissections have sort of fallen out of favor in most intro biology classes, because the emphasis is much more on cellular biology and genetics, as opposed to taxonomy or body systems, like it used to be. You can certainly do a full year of bio labs without a single dissection and not feel like you are slacking or missing anything in the lab department. And I definitely agree--Bozeman AP bio videos are very, very helpful!

For AP bio, I do use a few of the labs from Illustrated Guide. You will need to buy the AP Biology Investigative Labs book from the College Board though. Even if you don't physically do these labs, the exam expects that the student is familiar with the concepts in the labs. Some concepts really aren't mentioned in detail or explained practically in the text book, but the lab manual explains them. One example is calculating transformation efficiency for bacteria, and another is calculating the sizes of restriction fragment length polymorphisms from an electrophoresis gel, but there are others as well. If you don't physically do the labs from the AP manual, search for virtual stimulations and dry lab numbers to work with, so the student can practice the calculations and know the steps of the procedures. Also, a huge focus of the AP course is thinking scientifically, so the lab book helps students think through other questions they could answer using these techniques, and those sorts of things. Also, don't feel bad about not doing all the labs! I felt very guilty about this, but for some labs, I just couldn't get the materials, or they were prohibitively expensive. But after spending some time on the AP bio teachers forum, I discovered that actual teachers are also not doing all the labs! They do virtual labs, or dry-lab some experiments, or use reworked ones that are easier to set up, or . . . There are a lot of poor, overworked AP bio teachers that don't have the resources for all this fancy stuff either!

My oldest son started an audible account last year. He downloads stuff to his phone at college and listens, which is great. We had some extra credits, so I picked out some books for us to listen to and dowloaded them onto my computer. We don't have an ipad or anything like that, and my phone doesn't have enough space for audiobooks. So my question is--how do we listen to them? Just crowd around the computer?? If we were to get some other device to use with them, what should we get? And would we be able to put these books we've already gotten onto it? How can we listen to things in the car? We are spoiled by a library system with a fairly good collection of audiobooks on cd, so that is what we usually get before a long car trip or whatever. But there were some great books on audible that our library doesn't have. I'm just stuck on how to actually listen to them!

I just spent a great deal of time, after searching "Wilson" on this board, reading threads that mention WHA, and I read through a great one that compared Jann's classes with WHA! I ended up signing up my son with WHA because it seemed to be more of what I think my son needs, with the more interactive format of the class. Also, I've heard good things about the Dolciani they use. Your concerns with MUS were exactly my concerns, so I didn't have a peaceful sense about the co-op. After reading your message last night, I looked more closely at WHA (and read threads about it), and I remembered realized earlier that I actually know Eric Reini, because we were math classmates in college! That really sealed the deal for me, and so I signed DS up. I am excited about it! Thanks so much for your input, everyone! It was very helpful!

This would be for my rising 10th grader. I had been planning on putting him in a local co-op for this next year, because a friend of mine teaches the course. She uses Math-U-See, and honestly I was a bit leery because I'm pretty positive this child will be going into computer engineering, and math is one of his strong areas. After reading some threads on here, though, I felt like it would do the job, and that it would be worth it to have a live teacher. He has been doing math with another friend, but she's just been overwhelmed and doesn't want to teach it next year because of some other classes she'll be teaching. I totally get that--I have a degree in math myself, but I also am totally overwhelmed and don't want to teach it, lol. (I teach high school and junior high science classes instead, since I also have a biology degree.) So now I'm looking at online classes. I will say this is not one of my more motivated kids, so I am afraid that he won't engage in an online class. He is taking English at Potters this year. He's doing fine, but he doesn't enjoy it. Is there an algebra 2 online class out there that has an engaging teacher, and even a somewhat engaging format??

I like to spiralize zucchini to use in place of spaghetti with sauce over it. At first I tried sauteing blanching it briefly, but I thought it was too mushy. Then I tried sauteing it, but I still thought it was too mushy. Then someone on facebook recommended just putting the sauce on it without cooking it at all, so I tried that. I actually heated it up just a few seconds in the microwave, so it wasn't cold. That was just right! More like "al dente" pasta than anything else I have tried. My spiralizer has a few different blades, and the smallest one makes the zucchini the perfect size--definitely not too thick. I also like to spiralize sweet potatoes and roast them with some garlic, paprika, salt, and olive oil. Delicious! My kids would spiralize and eat apples the entire day if I let them, lol. There's something about playing with your food, I guess!

DS#2--University of Alabama-Huntsville, majoring in engineering. He received their "Charger Excellence" scholarship, which pays for 100% of tuition plus housing. He also was awarded a 4 year type 1 AFROTC scholarship (100% tuition plus fees and books, and a monthly stipend), but he really didn't want to follow his older brother to VA Tech and be an engineering major in the Corps, just like oldest DS, (and he didn't want any other VA school, esp. not UVA). So getting this scholarship from UAH is allowing him to go somewhere else and forge his own path, which was really important to him. We both felt like he would be well-positioned to get a good job there without serving in the Air Force, so he'll be turing down the ROTC scholarship. That hasn't been his life-time dream, like it was for his brother. We visited there back in January, and he really liked the school. It's the right size for him, and everyone was very friendly. We have good friends who retired from the AF down there, so we can stay with them when we visit, and they've already said they are happy to pick up DS whenever he wants and take him back to their house or shopping or church or wherever so that is really nice. Also, he decided to do the Honors program there, so he'll be in the honors dorm.

Wow, the Writing ER course looks like it may be exactly what I am looking for! I know I have seen Big River Academy mentioned on here, but I have never looked into it. Thank you so much for mentioning it!

First of all, we're not a particularly writing-centric family. My degrees are in biology and math, and dh is an astronautical engineer. Writing is something I dislike, both doing and teaching, and so it's always been more of a git-r-done sort of subject, where I'm happy if they're turning out something They also did a little bit of writing in a co-op for a few years. So for this current year, I signed up ds#3 and ds#4 for Potter's English 1. Ds#3 (who is currently in 9th grade) probably could have gone into Eng. 2, but I knew his writing skills were not super strong, and it is not an area he likes at all, so I figured Eng. 1 would be a safer bet. He is also doing a lit class through our co-op, so he is reading and discussing more than in just the Eng. 1 class anyway, so I figured it would be okay all together for 9th grade. He's doing fine in the class. My ds#4 (in 8th grade this current year) is also in that same Eng 1 class. He enjoys writing, but honestly, just isn't very good at it, at least at really structured writing. He loves to ramble on and have a good time with it instead of paying attention to details and structure (which describes his personality all around, actually--he's a ton of fun, but not detail-oriented at all!). All this year, he has only rarely asked me for any help with any of his compositions, unlike his older brother, who always wants to talk things through with me, have me proof-read, etc. And since I was busy with college applications for ds#2, teaching high school and junior high science classes for our co-op, and dealing with all 6 of the younger kids, I just assumed ds#4 was doing fine. Of course, it is bad to assume, and as it turns out his grade has dipped under the 80% needed to be placed automatically in Eng. 2, which I found out when I enrolled him this week. I had put the boys with a different teacher (class timing was better) for next year, and she emailed, asking for a placement test for ds#4. I asked her what she would recommend if he didn't place into Eng. 2, and she must have passed on my email to his current teacher, who apologized for not emailing us earlier, but said it was recently that ds#4 had gone under the line, and she just hadn't caught it before. I knew he was in the lower 80's at Christmas--but then I never thought to check his grade the past 2 months, which is completely my fault. Dropping balls here! So one thing she said might be an option would be to put ds#4 in the Journey to Narnia class at Potters. I have no experience with any of these writing classes, and so I'm hoping someone could give feedback on if that would be a good plan for a 9th grader? I know he will be older than everyone else, but he's not a particularly mature boy, and obviously he doesn't have mature writing skills. Is there something else that would be better that you could recommend? He will also still be taking a lit class in our co-op, so again, more reading (of high school level books) and discussion (and some writing, but the teacher doesn't want to be responsible for grading their papers/doesn't feel comfortable critiquing their papers, which is why we have outsourced the writing to Potters). Thanks for any advice you can give. Each year I think I've got it all figured out--and then something happens to throw a wrench in the plans for the next year! Sigh . . .

I don't know. My oldest goes to VA Tech, which is a big school, and I remember how strongly they stood for academic integrity in orientation. My son was worried about accidentally stringing together a few words that might be the same as someone else and being investigated! I don't think that would happen (and so far it hasn't, and he's a sophomore, lol), but it didn't sound at all like they weren't going to worry about it! VT has quite a detailed honor code manual with definitions for plagarism and academic dishonesty, plus penalties, found here.

I wrote up a mad lib style generic "birth story", and I go around the circle, asking people for nouns, adjectives, etc. (or "things" or "describing words", etc., if that works better, lol). That is always funny. I also made up a game where you have to match the famous children's book that goes with the line I wrote. For example, "And then something went BUMP! How that bump made us jump!" is from The Cat in the Hat. These games at least don't involve me microwaving candy bars in diapers or anything, lol.

Yeah, we have (conservative) friends whose daughter is there (in engineering). She's been happy there, and my friends have been happy with the school. Its engineering department is definitely good!

We have quite a few AF friends who are VMI grads. I can say that all of them are phenomenal men, men of integrity, and excellent leaders. I'm sure there are bad apples (there always are, human nature being what it is!), but in general, VMI produces excellent people and military officers. They also will pretty much all say that while it is an excellent place to be from, it can be a miserable place to be, lol. It is tough, and I think kids need to really be prepared for that going in. I think it can be more difficult, psychologically, than the military academies are *right now*, because it seems from what I've been reading/seeing that (some of) the academies have swung to the less intense end of the spectrum currently. DS#1 got an appointment to VMI and turned it down because he couldn't see going there and paying for the privilege, lol. (Also he thought the food was terrible, and that really made a strong negative impression, lol. He also did an overnight both at VT and at VMI.)) But a good friend of his from CAP (a female) is there at VMI right now, and she is thriving. I think that visiting all the schools, but especially the military ones, is the best way to make sure what your son is getting into is really what he wants. It takes a lot of internal motivation to make it through, and for some kids, it really isn't worth it.

I just flew from DC to Oregon this past weekend for a funeral, so not anywhere near as long as you. I packed a ziploc baggie of rotisserie chicken (just the meat, no bone!), a baggie of raw veggies, and one of those mini guacamole tubs you can get a ton of at Costco, plus some oranges. No one batted an eye at the guac. I've packed sandwiches many times before for flights too. I didn't think they worried about the spreads if they were already on a sandwich? On my way back, my flights were all messed up because of all the rain in CA, and I ended up getting switched to an earlier flight somewhere else. I didn't have time to grab dinner like I had planned, so I was very thankful I still had some cheese sticks and an orange packed for the way home!

Well, guess what showed up in our mailbox this afternoon? Our fourth (4th!!!) set of mailed PSAT scores for DS#3! We are just shaking our heads and laughing! What a waste though. Good grief!

That is kind! Little Caesar's is great for traveling for big families like us. If the weather is nice, we will find one and buy a bunch (4-5) of their $5 pizzas, then stop at a park to eat and let the little ones run around. It's so cheap to feed us all, even all the teen boys! DS17 was traveling back 2 weekends ago from a Civil Air Patrol training weekend several hours away with other members of his squadron. He was in a hurry to get back because he needed to play in a basketball game, so he suggested this option for lunch (well, not the park, lol). So the van gassed up and everyone used the bathroom, then they stopped at Little Caesar's and bought pizzas and ate them in the van. Not anywhere near as complicated as making a big McDonald's order or other fast food!