Yes, do not use low fat cottage cheese in lasagna! Use full fat or whole milk or 4% cottage cheese! Lasagna is not suppose to be healthy lol! It is suppose to be ooey gooey delicious and full of calories that can be written off because it is comfort food lol!

Not understanding what is tacky about it either. It's still dated for 5 days before Christmas. Christmas presents can still be bought in time. But it is probably fair to add that I am one of those people that believes Christmas is not an emergency. It comes the same day every year. You can plan for it, or not, but not planning for it or having an emergency that blows up your Christmas plan does not make Christmas presents an emergency. I never count on bonuses of any kind. Including tips when I worked jobs where I was allowed to accept tips. It gets put into savings or a little extra in the "fun money" category. Or used to pay off a debt faster. But never ever counted on to pay for something, that practice has never worked out well for me or anyone I know.

My husband made the pioneer woman lasagna recipe for my birthday years ago. It was really good but I don't think he used spicy sausage, just regular sausage that we like. I will admit that before I was we identified tomato as one of my biggest food allergens, we would have Stouffer's lasagna about once a month during the winter. So that is the taste and texture we prefer. Unrefined and totally American? Probably. But that's what we like so that's what I aim for when I make tomato free lasagna for us now. I use cottage cheese instead of ricotta. I tried several different brands of ricotta before conceding that we just prefer the texture and taste of cottage cheese in lasagna. I definitely think that you could substitute one for the other in any lasagna recipe based on your families preferences. I rarely use sausage in lasagna. Yes it adds a wonderful flavor but it just isn't something I keep around. I usually use just ground beef with whatever Italian herbs strike my fancy at the time I'm making the sauce. I use no cook noodles because my family prefers the firmer texture they provide. Whenever I've used cooked noodles, they are almost soggy textured by the time the lasagna's done. It could just be something I'm doing wrong but we like the no cook noodles so that's what I use. Again, I think you could use either in any recipe and it would be fine. Of course, my lasagna has no tomatoes so my lasagna is never going to be exactly like tomato-based lasagna but plenty of people have eaten my lasagna and been shocked to learn that there was not any tomato in it. Now I've got a craving for skillet lasagna. Too late in the day to start regular lasagna lol. Guess I know what is for dinner now lol.

We've bought used washers and dryers many times. More than once, they ended up being great machines that lasted longer than expected (5 years or more in some cases). Where I live, used electric dryers that are in good working order run between $75 - $150 depending on age and/or cosmetic damage that doesn't affect how the unit runs. Used top loading washers in good working order run about $100 - $150 again depending on age and cosmetic damage. I have no idea on front loaders, never had one, don't want one, so I've never really priced them.' I also agree with the posters above that said don't worry too much about your old washer/dryer. Post an ad stating that they are free to whoever hauls them off. Someone will snatch them up. Normally, if we have an issue with a used appliance, when the repair would cost more than another used appliance, that is when we have either got another used one if we just weren't the position to buy new or go ahead and just buy new if we are in the position to get new ones. I've had a pump replaced for $100 or so on $150 washer, but when replacing the transmission would cost over $200 just in parts, that's where I draw the line and decide it is not worth it. YMMV.

If you didn't create the password back up disk (this is different from the install disk or bootable media), do you know if you enabled the administrator account? Can you get into that account? Yes, it is possible to get into a Windows 7 computer without the password backup disk or the administrator account (or if the account that is locked is the admin account) but you need to be at least a little bit computer savvy because at that point the only way to get in is to hack your own computer. I had to do it on a computer I bought from Sam's Club years ago that was a floor model they were clearancing. No one in the electronics department could remember the password to the admin account so that I could get into more than just the guest account they use so customers can play with the floor model computers in the store. It took me several hours and multiple methods of hacking my own computer before I finally found a hack that worked. I was able to strip the password from the original install and then re-install Windows 7 with my own passwords. It required going to safe mode and using the command line. If you aren't comfortable with doing those sorts of things, you will probably need to get a computer repair shop or Geek Squad to do it for you.

Yes, just a smear. You want them to have to thoroughly investigate the trap to get it, not play chicken with it. Too much PB is usually the issue when they are obviously around but not springing the traps. On the the cheapie traps that we get, I try to get as much of the pb as I can inside the little curl of metal at the end of the trigger. They can smell it but they can't just carefully swipe it and try not to set off the trap. It's very likely they never get to eat the pb before they set off the trap looking for it.

No rhyme or reason as to what month I got married either time. First marriage was in March at the justice of the peace office. We separated in March 13 years later but the divorce wasn't final until August of that year. My current marriage we got married in December. We had not planned to get married, it just wasn't high on our list of priorities and a piece of paper didn't change anything about our relationship. It was just a formality really. We will have been married for 7 years this Sunday. We don't celebrate, half the time both of us forget until a few weeks after the fact lol. We will see if I remember since I just now realized that our anniversary is the day after tomorrow lol. Didn't have a wedding or anything either time. I decided when I was a teenager that I did not want a wedding. Ever. They just aren't my kind of thing.

I don't pamper the mice and rats we have around here. They get whatever the Dollar Tree has for their last meal. Or if they are really stubborn, they get d-Con mouse block baits. When we use them in the house, we have the little traps that make it so curious pets and children can't get to the poison but mice can squeeze their way in to get it. We've sealed up most of the ways they can get in the house so we don't see them in the house much any more. Steel wool and caulk are great for that.

I'm frugal to a fault sometimes but I don't see this as money spent on the neighbors. It was money spent on my children who chose to give their efforts to someone else out of kindness. I provided my children with the money to do a fun project that they enjoyed, what they decide do with the finished project is irrelevant to what I spent. If it makes them feel good to be kind to someone else with the finished product, it was still money well spent in my book. Even if giving the cookies to the neighbors was the plan from the beginning. Now if this project was my idea and I was having to nag them to get it done the same way I have to nag them to clean their rooms, that is when my frugality streak would set in and wonder why I wasted money on a project they obviously were not interested in or enjoying. As to whether we would eat it if we were on the receiving end, I have to be careful due to food allergies and my experiences with people having a flippant attitude about cross-contamination but dh and ds love treats no matter who made them. Dh's grandmother, who is also our landlord and next door neighbor, is a rural letter carrier. She gets all kinds of treats and gifts this time of year from her customers on her route. She accepts them all graciously, but sometimes she doesn't like it or can't eat it herself. She gives those items to dh and ds. It all gets eaten one way or another. She gave us some homemade chocolate covered pretzels the other day that someone on her route gave her. She said it bothers her dentures to eat hard pretzels so she gave them to us. I have no earthly idea who made them but dh and ds enjoyed them lol.

I know this might not be the most popular way to handle it but I found, by 7th grade, that it worked much better to work through a writing handbook with them and address things one issue at a time in their writing. I want to say we used a combination of Writer's Inc. Student Handbook and one my old writer's handbooks from college and the Purdue Online Writing Lab for the most up-to-date guidelines for citing sources. Things like where to place punctuation and such don't change much so my old college writing handbook and I think Writer's Inc had some info like that too if I remember right but citing sources was evolving at the time because the internet was becoming and acceptable source back then but not everyone fully agreed how to cite it yet. Anyways, I would pick their most glaring error and we would look it up in the handbooks or on the Purdue website and they would make notes for their writing notebook about it and we would work on only that error for a while until they were about 90% competent at catching their own mistakes or not making the mistake at all. Then I would pick the next most glaring error and we would repeat the process. All my kids who have reached or passed high school age did great with starting this type of "learn by doing" sort of informal approach to mechanics and grammar in 7th grade. Yes, sometimes I wanted to rip my hair out at some of their consistent mistakes and say "You learned this and have used this skill since elementary school, when did it fall out of your head, kid?!?" but I kept all that to myself and kept just calmly and consistently reminding them to look for "X" mistake until they found all the offenses. I can say three have grown up to be competent writers into adulthood who can sound educated and polished in writing and one still enjoys writing fiction for fun in his free time as an adult despite their seeming lack of intuitive grammar and mechanics in 7th grade.

I just wanted to comment on the medication part. Among other things, I am diagnosed with severe chronic depression and anxiety, PTSD/C-PTSD and a whole lot of other suspected but not confirmed yet mental issues. This most recent and onoing round with medications we started with Zoloft. Zoloft definitely helped no question about it but it was like taking a regular dose of tylenol for a migraine. Maybe it took a little bit of an edge off the pain for a little while but it definitely doesn't make you feel completely better, KWIM? We messed around with increasing the dose of Zoloft for a while to see if we could increase the good effect for before the side effects became unbearable. But ultimately, there was a ceiling to the good effects and the high doses were making me zombie like. I wasn't living anymore, I was just existing. The Zoloft was helping mask or suppress some of the troublesome emotions I was experiencing but it also kept me from experiencing excitement and pleasure and other "good" or mostly good emotions. My husband often described me as "a Zoloft zombie", lol. Since I was at the max dose of Zoloft and things still weren't "right", definitely better than they were pre-medication but still not right, it was suggested I try an snri for while. I've been on different anti-depressants over the years so I wasn't really expecting a huge change. I'd never seen a huge difference between taking Lexapro vs Zoloft vs Wellbutrin vs all the other antidepressants I've tried so why would this new class of anti-depressant be any different? I. Was. So. Wrong. The difference was night and day. I've been on Effexor for a couple years now and it is definitely what I personally need for my mental health conditions. When I went back for the first med check after starting Effexor, I remember telling the doctor that I only thought I was doing better on Zoloft. I had no idea how much difference a medication could make until I was on the right class of drug for me. Has it "cured" my laundry list of mental health conditions? No, but it definitely makes them a ton easier to manage most days. Long story short, don't accept that "helping some" is as good as it gets with mental health medications. I accepted that "helping some" is all mental health medication was good for, for a long time. Far too long to be completely honest. If she has been taking it for more than a few months (2 - 3 I would say roughly) and she's not getting progressively better as the weeks go by, try a different medication. Preferably a different class of medication as there are a fair few classes of anti-depressant. Why try more of the same by trying another drug from the same class? It might help, but chances are it will give pretty close to the same results. Since everyone is different, what works for me might not work for your dd and what works for your dd probably won't work for me but if she's not steadily improving each week for the first 8 - 12 weeks of taking an anti-depressant, then IMO it is time to try something else until you do see improvement each week. Chances are, there IS an anti-depressant out there that will help make a difference between "just surviving" and "successfully managing" mental health issues. Good luck finding what works for her!

I would take this month off from anything that looks or smells like math curriculum to her at the very least! She's still little! She can and will make it to high school and college math without any trouble related to taking a month off of math right now! After taking a break, do some sneaky math like the competition you set up with her and her brother. Read some of the Danica McKellar books about math for girls with her. Play games. Observe consumer math that is used every day (Don't make her do it! Just point out and talk about the math as it is used everyday). I wouldn't even try to push curriculum on her until she is feeling a little more confident in her math abilities. I had typed a bunch more but I realized it was a bit of a long winded diatribe. Long story short, you absolutely can do a "hodge-podge" as you call it and just have fun with numbers all the way through middleschool in my opinion. None of my adult kids were math geniuses, but one was great at math and she went on to take honors math courses in high school even though she had nothing but "hodge podge" math all the way through middle school! They all have, at minimum, the math skills needed to be a competent adult.

My thoughts on Teaching Textbooks... yes, many homeschoolers look down their nose at it. It's not rigorous. It's too easy. Kids can skate through it without actually learning anything... etc. I honestly think those are all dependent on the situation. Some kids need rigorous, but some kids wilt under rigorous instruction. Some kids need a slow and steady pace that doesn't try to push them beyond the basics too soon. And there is nothing wrong with that. Why frustrate these kids who are challenged enough just to learn the new material? Yes, the kids who need rigor and challenge will be bored out of their minds with TT but not all kids. The child I see that would do well with TT is the child who isn't really "into" math. The child who would rather paint or draw or write or do just about anything creative rather than do math is the type of child who would appreciate the approach in TT. These are not the kids who will be competing in the Math Olympiad or looking at S.T.E.M. careers most likely. In my opinion, it is perfectly ok to have just a working knowledge of math if your passions lie elsewhere. If Teaching Textbooks will get them to that level (and I believe it will) then why worry about what parents of children who are great at math say about the program? If your child is skating through TT, personally I don't see that as a problem with the program. I see that as either a maturity issue, a supervision issue or an integrity issue. I do not believe it is wise or helpful to put a kid of less than about 12yo in front of a screen and expect them to learn without close supervision. Yes I do use screens with my younger children but I am also right there next to them making sure they are learning the objectives and answering any questions they have. Unsupervised practice of a previous learned concept on the computer can be a great tool but a computer cannot gauge if the learner is engaged or not nor can it tell if the concept is truly understood. In my opinion, human interaction is needed for a child to learn. Whether it is a computer lesson, video lesson or an educational tv show, without human interaction it will always be a crapshoot of whether or not a child actually learns the objective. Some children acquire the maturity and integrity to utilize computer lessons before the age of 12 and that is great for them. But some will not have those thing until they are 12 or so and some will never have that maturity and integrity. One supervisory position I held required that I do the final training for new employees. Their initial training, to teach the basics, was done on a computer simulation. Once they passed all the simulations, they came to me for doing the things they learned for real while I supervised and helped when needed. More than once I had new employees who I could see on paper had taken and passed all the simulations but seemed like they had not learned a thing because I was basically teaching them everything from the beginning. Some I would imagine it was simply that they were kinesthetic learners and no amount of computer simulation would ever work for them to learn something. Others though it was definitely a maturity and/or integrity issue. They never outgrew the child-like mentality of "How can I do as little work as possible to get what I want?" My point here is that the idea of delegating all the teaching to a computer is not the best choice for every student but that doesn't make computerized lessons a bad choice for everyone nor does it make the lessons themselves bad. If you are stressed about everything else in life, your children can sense it. It's hard to learn new things when you are stressed. If there is nothing new in TT6 for her and she is math-phobic to begin with, perhaps an easy year of review will be a good thing for her that will boost her confidence and help her do even better the following year. It is a common myth in our society that things have to be hard in order for us to learn. I do not believe that to be true at all. I believe that a balance between confidence building and challenge, in appropriate proportions for each individual student, is the key to successful learning. To me, it sounds like your older needs to lean more toward confidence building in her math lessons and your younger daughter probably could do with leaning more toward challenging or perhaps just an equal mix of both.

My gut reaction is "no don't eat it" because it is fruit cake. lol But it is unlikely you contracted the stomach bug on baking day. It is much more likely that you either contracted it a day or two before hand or were possibly already contagious a day or two before. By my calendar that would have been Thanksgiving Day. So you probably either got it from family you visited on or the day after Thanksgiving. Or from food that was mishandled or undercooked on Thanksgiving. How often do we eat food prepared in restaurants or delis or bakeries were we have no idea if the person preparing the food has been exposed to something contagious or possibly even came to work sick because they can't afford to miss work so they take some Dayquil and go to work anyways? Or maybe they have kids at home with something contagious but had to leave them with a sitter because they can't afford to miss work. Gross to think about but it happens every single day. The majority of the time we eat food prepared by others and never get sick. And we don't worry about it because we would be perceived as crazy if we questioned everyone who came into contact with our food if they had been around someone contagious within the last 48 hours before preparing our meal. Unless your dd sneezed or puked in the batter bowl or on the cake, I'm sure it is fine. As someone suggested, you could try warming it before serving or you could try freezing it for a week or so to kill anything that might be there. But if you don't want to go to that trouble, I'm sure just eating it as is will be fine too.

Yes, I do believe it is trendy at the moment to claim one's family is dysfunctional just as it is trendy to claim you have PTSD for a normal reaction to uncomfortable situations and claim you have OCD when you like having things done a certain way. There is family drama that happens in every family and then there is family drama that results in children with bona fide mental issues like chronic depression and anxiety, personality disorders and an inability to form healthy relationships with anyone. It is normal to feel anxious sometimes and not want to do something because of it. It is not normal to have fight or flight reactions to normal everyday things like running normal errands and the human interaction that is required to do them. Its's normal to want things done your own way, it is not normal to have a full blown panic attack when something is not done in a particular way or if someone prevents you from preforming your ritualistic habits. These examples may sound like I'm exaggerating to make a point, and if you feel that way, you are, in fact, very lucky. It means that it is unlikely that you or someone you know is afflicted with mental illness. Social acceptance for mental illness and normalization of mental illness are not the same thing. Social acceptance means we don't ignore or deny mental illness as something that causes suffering and are real maladies that need treatment. Social acceptance is a good thing. Normalization of mental illness is when we try to say that situations like I described above are normal and everyone experiences them. Not only does trying to normalize mental illness not help anyone but it also trivializes the real problems and issues that those who really do have debilitating mental illness symptoms they have to deal with every day.

I didn't like Mr. Rogers as a kid and I'm still not a fan. I've shown my kids clips of Mr. Rogers, like the clip of how they make crayons, and my youngest likes Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and I have no problem with that. But, please don't shoot me, Mr. Rogers himself always felt creepy to me. Like if I met him in person as a kid, I would have been afraid of him. Now, I imagine that is because he was genuinely a nice person with no agenda. I still have trouble as an adult understanding that not everyone who is nice to me has an agenda or is trying to manipulate me in someway because I had to learn to survive in a house as a child with emotionally abusive parents. I also agree with everyone about one of the benefits of homeschooling is getting to let them be kids longer and watch PBS and other kids shows that are wholesome and good without fear of being teased. My almost 7 year old son was watching Little Bear this morning by his own choice. And he was talking about how he would like to go on a fishing trip with Father Bear and Little Bear. He loves Wild Kratts and Curious George and Clifford and Paw Patrol and Puppy Dog Pals. I love that homeschooled kids don't feel they have to choose their interests based on their peers interests. I saw the same thing when my older kids were youngest ds's age and I loved it then too.

I'm going to say yes, based on my experience. My parents were abusive but I never realized how abusive until I was able to get out from under their control and see that not everyone lived the way I did as a child. In order to keep us under their control, they had to keep us extremely sheltered. We weren't allowed to go to friend's houses to play. There were quite a few kids we weren't even allowed to be caught talking to because, I realize now, it was a threat to the dysfunctional level of control my parents wanted to have over our lives. It was only once I was able to get out of their grip as an adult that I realized that my parents weren't just super strict, they were controlling and abusive in ways I didn't even realize because I didn't know until then that most parents don't do the things my parents did. When I was an older teen/young adult, I would have told you my parents were strict bordering on abusive and I didn't want to be anything like them as a parent. Now, as a middle aged/older adult, I would tell you my FOO is/was very dysfunctional and abusive because I've now had enough time to experience the world and see how other people do things without my parents constantly hovering over me and realize just how abnormal my childhood was.

Mmmm... I almost forgot. One year when my oldest two boys were both teenagers, their big gift was their own World of Warcraft accounts. They were perfectly fine with receiving what looked like a gift card but it actually had their login credentials for their new accounts. They were pleased as punch with that gift even though it wasn't big in size or completely tangible.

The schools are the only "therapy places" within a two hour drive in our very rural area. I was very pleased with the SLP he had through Early Intervention at the public school when he was a toddler/preschooler/kindergartener. She did use some PROMPT techniques with him, her master's thesis was actually about childhood apraxia. The problem with fully implementing PROMPT with him goes back to the autism-like traits he displays. He is super friendly, but he does not like people touching him without his express consent. Once ds finally warmed up to her, he did make amazing progress but as the PROMPT therapy requires a lot of touching, he would become "touched out" and melt down quickly. He went from completely non-verbal when he started to "getting him to shut up is the trick" (lol) so despite the difficulties of using PROMPT with him and having to use other avenues in addition to PROMPT, I think she did an amazing job with him. He wears us out with how verbal he is now. This dysfluency issue does not affect his speech volume, vocabulary acquisition, self monitoring for previously corrected speech or anything else in the least. I am going to get in touch with his former SLP, probably sometime during Christmas break since she is busy with mid year assessments up until Christmas break. She works with him still in the summer when she provides private services but if we pursued services through the schools again, she wouldn't be his SLP. I've met the ones who would be his SLP and I'm fine with them too. I will probably look into getting a full evaluation for him at the children's hospital three hours away. We've talked with them before and they are more than willing to assess him but being that it is a three hour drive and they don't have SLPs that come out to where we are on a regular basis, it would probably end up being for assessment only. Logistically, it would be pretty much impossible to go there on more than a monthly basis for therapy and even monthly might be pushing it. I'm fine with finding things on my own to do with him to help in the mean time. It is much easier to find useful information when I have a name for what it is I'm looking for. ;)

When I had kids in that age range, every fall I would have them write me a list of about ten things that they would like to have for Christmas. I would also have them label their top three most wanted items on that list. I tried to make sure they got at least one of their top three items and if I couldn't afford all three of the top three items, I would choose what I could afford from the rest of their list. I started "one from Santa, one from mom and one from dad" gift rules at Christmas when they were young. Since I wasn't trying to make sure there were lots of presents to open every year and I had a list of their most hoped for items, it made it fairly easy to make sure each child was well pleased with what they received. Sometimes "Santa" would bring a big group gift, like a game system, and they would each get a game in their stockings. Stockings were mostly candy and little items that I had picked up here and there for them. As they got older, presents were not as big size wise but they were just as happy since they were almost always getting exactly what they had told me they were hoping for. The lists also helped with relatives asking what items the kids wanted. I could easily make suggestions that each kid would be happy to receive and tell them what was already purchased for them. Something like the baseball gear, I would have probably bundled together and made it the "one gift from dad" most likely. One year, one of the kids' great grandmothers sent me $100 and told me to buy something for each of the kids from her. We had a record snowfall that year where we lived, so I bought $100 worth of sleds and snow toys for everyone with that money. It was bundled together as a gift for all of them from great grandma. It was a huge hit with the kids and they still talk about that Christmas to this day lol.

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to comment on this. Word-final atypical dysfluency ended up being the term that brought up the exact description of what my ds is experiencing. Why does this kid have to have the word "atypical" somewhere in every diagnosis/potential diagnosis he has? lol At least now I have a direction to go in my research and a term to describe what we are hearing. That always makes it so much easier when talking to professionals about him. Thanks so much!

I did the bolded when my oldest kids were in middle school and started whining that it was boring and that they knew this stuff already. If they could pass the end of chapter test with a score of 90 or better, they could skip the chapter and go on to the next. If they didn't score 90 or better, they had to do the entire chapter as scheduled. It was actually quite motivating to them for the most part to prove that they already knew the material and get to skip ahead. It was really the only thing I ever used tests for.

I cannot use crinkly, plastic-y pads like Always. The feel of it sets off texture issues for me. I use bladder control pads for the most part because I have to use them even when I'm not on my period (TMI sorry) Poise is my favorite brand but the generic ones that say compare to Poise work in a pinch. I know they say you shouldn't use bladder pads for periods or period pads for bladder issues but I find it to be a sales gimmick. Period pads don't always work for leaky bladders, that is true. But I've had zero issue with my heavier than most people flow (I can't use regular tampons at any point in my period, I have to change them every 15 minutes) using bladder control pads. I have them and would be wearing them anyways, leaky bladders don't stop just because you are having your period. I think Poise might have blue ink on them, but they aren't plastic-y feeling at all. They feel very similar to my cloth pads. But don't rule out bladder control pads when you are looking for an alternative for your current pads. They will work just fine for periods.

Something I don't think I saw mentioned (sorry if I missed it somewhere) is using touch points. It is a similar strategy to what TouchMath uses but you don't need to use that curriculum to use the idea of touch points. Basically, you learn where on the numbers to touch and in what order. You do it until it becomes automatic. Some numbers like six and nine have double touch points where you touch twice to get enough points to make the correct quantity. One of my kids despised using manipulatives but still needed something concrete. This was a great way to give him something concrete to work with but not manipulatives or fingers. Since each number has exactly the number of touch points it needs, you never "run out" of manipulatives or fingers to count. ;-) Here is a link with lots of different takes on touch points.

I don't remember what they were called but when my oldest dd started(she was 11 going on 12 if I remember right), there were tampons that were specifically marketed to teens. They were the perfect size for her at the time and the instructions were teen friendly (i.e. didn't look like a medical device instruction sheet). I want to say they were made by Always or maybe Tampax.