I recently read this incredibly inspiring article about a doctor, Kari Nadeau, who does pioneering research about OIT. She sounds like an amazing person who has helped so many people so selflessly.

We are an interesting case study because we have so many kids (10). I've eaten the same diet with each pregnancy (including lots and lots of peanut butter and other nuts, because I love them), and my kids have the same diet. My 3rd DS reacted with hives all over his face from chewing on my fork, which I had used to eat coffee cake (which had walnuts, milk, and eggs), when he was 6 months old. He also had a terrible, terrible case of eczema. Those 2 things got him a referral to the base allergist by the time he was 7 months, at which point he tested positive to peanuts, milk, eggs, and wheat (and later to walnuts and pecans). He never reacted to wheat, he outgrew eggs at 3, and milk (finally!) at 9. He is still allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. He also has asthma and seasonal allergies. Two other kids have had slight allergies to milk that they outgrew by 2. No one else has any nut allergies. No one else has asthma, although a few kids have some seasonal allergies. Obviously DS 3 hit some kind of genetic allergy jackpot. There's no way giving him peanuts at . . . .4 months? . . . or something would have prevented his allergies. And also it can't be all environment, since no one else in our family has allergies like he has. We're not a peanut-free house by any means, so peanut butter is still around (DS doesn't react to airborne peanuts), just as it was for him when he was a baby. Allergies are weird. Like many others have said on this thread, we're still a long, long way off from understanding them. I really enjoyed reading Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. He had some really interesting theories regarding inflammation, parasites, worms, etc., and their relationship to allergies.

Someone gave me a triple-beam balance, and I only use it to show my kids what we had to use back in the dinosaur days, LOL. It's big, heavy, and takes a while to get an accurate weight. I LOVE the new digital scales, and I have 2 of them, one for heavier stuff, and one for smaller amounts. I got the bigger one from Home Science Tools, and the smaller pocket one from Amazon.

Interesting that all this talk of magnets has come up . . . We had been talking about what we could possibly do, and of course we thought of magnets. Dh brought home a bunch of magnets from some old hard drives at his work. Ds has been wriggling the stack of magnets over where the needle went in, making sure to always have the same side of the magnet up. I am happy to report that now it seems like he can feel a little painful lump which he thinks is the needle under the skin! Before the needle was in the muscle, and he couldn't bend his knee at all without feeling a lot of pain. Now he can bend his knee some (very gingerly--he's very cautious!), and there's no pain. So this is a tremendous development! We're actually thinking he and dh might head back into the Bethesda ER tomorrow to see if they can make a small incision and get it out, since it seems so close tot he surface now. That would be a lot better than surgery, for sure. Maybe he could even play basketball again before the season is over!

Yes, they do.

No, we are Tricare Prime, so we have to use the military treatment facility, unless Tricare authorizes something (like an ER visit, which they did previously). But they wouldn't authorize a non-emergency surgery somewhere else. What can I say--it's the government. It is a nightmare though, for sure. I am highly irritated!!

Ortho doc couldn't get it out. And there are no OR slots for a non-emergency surgery tomorrow, so the surgery isn't going to be until next week. He's coming home with his leg in a big immobilizing brace so he can't move it, so that should be fun. He's bummed about missing basketball practice/game, as well as rugby practice, and the next CAP meeting, since it's a PT night, and he's the cadet in charge of PT. I still can't believe this has turned into such an ordeal, and now it's lingering on into next week!

An orthopedic surgeon was in the ER, so he is going to take a "stab" (haha, I crack myself up) at getting the needle fragment. If he can't get it out right away, then it looks like they will schedule ds for surgery tomorrow in the actual operating room. All for a piece of needle. I don't think it's under the patella though--I'm pretty sure it is just down in the thigh muscle above the patella. Lots of blood vessels and nerves there though . . . gah . . .

Well, this whole thing has definitely not been easily remedied! Urgent care couldn't deal with it, so they sent him to a local ER. That ER doc didn't feel comfortable attempting to get it out, so he consulted with an ortho surgeon. They wanted to admit him and do something tomorrow, but dh decided we would rather ds be at Bethesda, so they left, came home and picked up food and a bag for ds, and they headed off to Bethesda, since rush hour was over and the snow had passed. They are there now, and I guess we'll see what they want to do. I suppose doctors there are experienced at getting tiny pieces of metal out, since that's where wounded warriors go? Such a crazy, freak accident . . who would ever have thought doing push-ups would be so hazardous to one's health?!

Okay, we went ahead and got Tricare authorization to go to a civilian urgent care. Dh was on his way home, so as soon as he got here, he picked up ds and they are there now. Poor kid--such a totally random thing! I am praying it comes out easily! He was pretty freaked out.

So my almost 16-year-old son was doing pushups on the floor. He came down hard on his knees when he was done, landed on a needle (?Not sure how it got on the floor?!), which jabbed into his thigh right above his knee and broke off. The broken off part (a few mms, we think) is in his skin, fairly deeply. Soooo . . . any ideas? We can't see it. It is somewhat painful, and he can't bend his knee fully. Going to our (military) ER is not an option right now because in rush hour traffic it would take forever, plus we are expecting a "snow squall" in the next 2 hours, with bad driving conditions. We thought about soaking it, although he'd have to be in a full bath, since it's on the front of his leg. I will take him in tomorrow for sure, if nothing happens before then, since I have to go for a well-baby appointment for the 4 month old anyway. Never a dull moment . . .

I just read a thoughtful take on the new APUSH exam by a Texas teacher. I thought she had some good suggestions and well-thought-out critiques. Confessions of an AP Teacher

This is so how I am going to be as a grandma! Gift-giving is NOT my love language, and it causes such incredible stress for me. I have 10 kids, so I'm pretty sure I'll at least have a goodly amount of grandkids. "The grandparent who sends things randomly"--I love this! Our oldest is just going off to college next year, but I expect I'll be that same kind of random parent there too. And my ds would expect me to wait until after Valentine's Day to buy candy that is on sale anyway, LOL.

Absolutely. My oldest ds took (regular) US history at Potters School last year (and thought it was an easy A, but enjoyed it). He self-studied for AP government (and by that I mean he did some reading in the textbook, and then went through some of a test prep book--the REA Crash Course one, I believe). He got a 5 on the test, which astounded both of us, because he really do not do too much in the way of prep. The court cases definitely overlapped with US history, which helped. I think AP gov. has to be one of the easiest tests.

Ds received an appointment to West Point (USMA) today! He was pretty excited--it is definitely a "big fat envelope" that comes! We were surprised because we weren't expecting to hear from them until after Feb. 28, since that was the date they said in a general email admissions sent out a few weeks ago. Ds only had a Presidential nomination there. So--exciting! Now we are anxiously waiting to hear from his first choice, USAFA--where he has 3 nominations! Radio silence from them though . . . Ds was also awarded a 4 year full Army ROTC scholarship yesterday, so it has been a big Army weekend here!

We're waiting here too. Ds has been awarded a 4-year, type-1 ROTC scholarship that will cover all of his tuition wherever he ends up going, but he really wants to go to VA Tech, and he hasn't heard from them yet (most likely the end of March/beginning of April). With his scores and classes, I wouldn't worry about admission--except that we live in Northern VA, and I have heard that VT does not admit everyone who is qualified from this area, because then they wouldn't have very much diversity from across the state in their student body. So we'll see. We're also waiting to hear from the Air Force Academy. Ds has a Presidential nomination (from Dh's service), plus nominations from our Representative as well as one of our Senators, but I know people with 3 nominations who have not been offered appointments. So we're anxiously waiting there too. Appointments can go out any time until the report date of June 25, so we could potentially be on pins and needles for awhile! I think USAFA would be Ds's first choice. He's already been accepted at VMI as well as Cedarville, my alma mater, but those are not really where he's hoping to go. Good thing we have plenty of other things going on to distract us . . .

Boy, I agree with this. Whenever I am preparing an AP syllabus, and I am looking at syllabi from other teachers (not the AP examples, just random ones on the internet), I am always astounded at how many extra group projects and other posters/presentations/collages/etc. there are, as if they have to assign all this extra stuff to be taken seriously or something. Also, in our small co-op this year, we are having AP world history taught by a friend of ours from church. She teaches the class at a local public (highly regarded) high school part-time, since she has a 1 year old (and taught full-time for several years before she had her baby). When she first started out with us, she had all these incredibly detailed instructions on how to take notes for chapters and so on that were SO time-consuming. She requires this of her public-schooled students, but I told my boys that basically it's a lot of hand-holding to make SURE everyone reads and gets *something* out of the chapter. After the first few weeks, she realized the co-op kids (just 4 of them) were very well-prepared without all this extra stuff, and so she hasn't required them to hand anything in regarding their notes. I told the boys that should be more how college is--you figure out how to get the information out of the text, rather than the teacher holding your hand and spoon-feeding it to you.

Peel it and smell it. It smells more . . sulfur-y when it is going bad. I hard-boil 18 eggs at a time because I eat one every morning for breakfast, but sometimes other kids eat them too. If no one helps me eat any, then I usually am throwing the last 2 or 3 away because they smell off, but that's rare for us. In other words, they don't last 18 days for me, but close to 2 weeks is usually okay.

We've had our bunny for almost a year now. We got him from a young newly-married couple that were moving into a smaller apartment and couldn't keep both their bunnies. Bruno is *such* a sweetheart, and we all love him to pieces. Our friends gave us his cage and also a wire dog-pen thing and an old rug. We hooked the dog pen onto his cage and put the rug under the pen, and now Bruno can go in and out of his cage and run around this pen as well. He lives in our schoolroom, and when kids are in there doing schoolwork, we let Bruno run around the room (as soon as we make sure all the computer charging cords are up high, LOL), which he loves. He likes to be held. He also is not neutered (we just haven't gotten around to it), but he is litter-trained, and he doesn't spray. Bruno is a dwarf Rex, and he is the softest thing ever--like the Velveteen Rabbit! We take him to Petsmart (the Banfield Hospital that is associated with Petsmart) to get his nails clipped. They're the dark ones, and I just don't want to fool with it. The girls that work there love to pet him and also exclaim over what a sweet bunny he is! I personally love that he is a silent pet. I absolutely could not have stood for one more living creature that makes noise to be in our house!

Our tree came with a huge bag thing for storage--it is a tarplike material, like you would store a tent or something in. Maybe look for a bag instead? We always kept ours in the box because then we could stack stuff on top of it, so I can see why you would want something hard though.

Well, I can see the possibility of being punished, so I think my friend made the right call too. Part of the problem is that we are in a *very* competitive part of Virginia, with school systems that spend more that some entire states. (We're not in Fairfax, but a neighboring county). The schools are full of students who do very well--excellent grades, hard classes, high test scores, all sorts of esoteric extra-curricular activities they have been doing since they were 2, etc.--and yet some still get turned away from UVa and VT because those schools can't admit too many from one part of VA. So I can see the counselor wanting to turn away some of the "competition" for those slots. Several years ago (about 8, I think), I was involved in trying to get a homeschool science fair together that would funnel into the state science fair, like I had been involved with in other states. Here in our county, however, the schools had a monopoly on the district qualifying fair, and they absolutely would not let any homeschoolers participate, even if if was just one student, and he or she had "won" our science fair. The reason was that a homeschooler might take away a winning position in the district fair from a public school student, and they just couldn't let that happen. The people I talked to in the school system were not very pleasant. Unlike the experiences of people on other threads, at least our high schools are very accepting of homeschoolers taking AP classes there, and the high schools offer pretty much every single AP class. We really don't want to do anything that will possibly mess up a good deal, especially when there are others within the school system that are somewhat resentful of homeschoolers and any successes they might achieve.

My good friend, who we do all our co-op stuff with, went to her local high school a few days ago to register her oldest kids for AP exams. While she was there, she started chatting about colleges with one of the counselors. Then the head of the guidance department for the high school came out to join the conversation, and she said, "Ohhh, you're homeschooling . . . I'm so sorry, but college isn't an option if you're homeschooled. You have to be able to count Carnegie hours, and homeschoolers can't do that. Without an accredited diploma, there simply is no way your son can get accepted at any college, no matter if you do AP classes or not." So I just thought I'd let everyone on here know you are completely wasting your time, since college isn't an option for any of your children . . . Haha! That would be funny except that this is a large high school in Northern Virginia, not some rural school that doesn't deal much with colleges or homeschoolers! But my friend just smiled sweetly and said, "Thanks, I had no idea; I'll get on that." . . . Because she is completely at the mercy of this guidance department! Her kids take AP tests there, and in fact her oldest son is being allowed to take one on the make-up day, since he will be at a mock trial tournament on the regularly-scheduled exam day. People who so confidently spout off such complete falsehoods do not usually take kindly to being set straight, and my friend did not want to ruin anything for her kids or any other homeschoolers by making the guidance head be antagonistic to homeschoolers! We've had lots of discussion at our house as to whether this lady was really just ignorant, which is hard to believe, or if she had some other motive? Although we live really close to our friends, they are assigned to a different high school. Our school has never said anything of this sort. Surely in this day and age, you would think people in education would at least be familiar with successful homeschooled kids who have done well in college? At least to know that most universities have policies in place to deal with homeschoolers? So weird.

You are a rock star to type all the instructions out in your original post! Thank you!! I remember how it all made total sense when I did it (having called them and being walked through each step), but then later I could not remember the process at all. Now everyone can just refer back to this thread!

Boy, I can not for the life of me remember how I did it, and I've done it twice now. I do remember that I ran into that same problem, and I ended up calling--both times, LOL. They were so nice and helpful, and whatever it was they said to do worked like a charm. If only I could remember what it was! Sorry!

We used BJU last year (I taught it). I had my 2 oldest sons take the chem SAT 2 afterward, and they did okay, I guess. Oldest ds (11th grade last year) got 710, and 2nd ds (9th grade last year) got a 650, I think--I can't remember exactly. It was lower than I had thought he would get, but he was young, and it was his first SAT 2. There are just so many problems in such a short amount of time! He might take AP chem at some time, although I don't feel comfortable teaching it! We did a lot of test prep, especially for those tricky relationship analysis questions.