If you can find all the videos you want accessible during school time, then you can make a playlist on ViewPure. I like it because you don't have that ever tempting list that may have videos that relate to your viewing outside of school work. When I put school videos on ViewPure playlist, I don't have to worry about the latest cartoon video that has nothing to do with the school work Youtube video we are watching popping up on the side and distracting my kids from what I want them to learn. It's just an easy tool to have in your tool belt.

I'm working on putting something together because it occurred to me that I don't think I've seen a full tutorial. I used to be Windows certified about 10 years ago and even though I'm not certified anymore (because it costs too much) I still know a lot about the windows version I run on all my computers (Windows 7). I know some about Windows 10, enough that I know I don't want to run it on my computers lol but if you want to know how to do it on Windows 10, I might not be much help. Your dh is not wrong, it can cause functionality issues to lock down access on a computer, but that is the whole point. If you want fine grain control of what a user has access to and what they can manipulate, you are going to spend a lot of time tweaking until it is setup and completely functional for that specific user. If you want a computer to always work no matter what the user does, the trade off is that you lose the fine grain control. If you want fine grain control, the trade off is that you are going to spend some time making sure everything works as expected. Let me know if you are interested in how to setup white list parental controls on Windows 7. I'm sure there is someone much more experienced and qualified than me to walk you through it on Windows 10. I know it has Windows parental controls but I'm not familiar with how exactly they work on Windows 10.

We don't have a specific policy for internet use during school time in our home as we use the internet a lot for looking up things, watching video clips, etc. but my son's computer is setup with parental controls on a white list basis, meaning that only applications and websites I approve can be accessed. I could setup time limits and off limits hours if I wanted to but I haven't had the need to. This is a second hand Windows PC using the built in Windows parental controls. I'm sure Macs have something similar I just have more experience with Windows. It's a pain in the butt for me sometimes when I install something new or want to use a website that I haven't previously approved but it just takes a few minutes to go in and white list it. We also keep our computer in a public area of the house, no phones, tablets or laptops in the bedrooms and start explaining from a young age that the internet is like having a drive through window in our house and that anyone can pretend to be anyone or anything on the internet and that stranger danger on the internet is just as real as stranger danger in any public setting and that's why we keep computers in the public areas of our home and not in bedrooms. It also helps that I don't care for online classes that require being logged in at a particular time and I have no problem taking away computer privileges, even for school work, and making them do the work by hand in the most boring way possible for breaking our family rules on computer use. ;-)

That Cosmic Kids Yoga looks fantastic! Thanks for mentioning it, my 6 year old will love it!

Similar to what was suggested above, my son loves to take turns making up silly word problems featuring his favorite book, cartoon and movie characters. We skip count various ways. The Singing Walrus and Scratch Garden on Youtube have math related songs that we sing when the mood strikes. You could play Guess My Number or Nim orally.

I was looking for some fun notebook covers and came across these. Since it is that time of year, I thought some others would like them too. Classroom Doodles Subject Coloring Pages / Notebook Covers You can either have your kids color them or do what I did and just print it on colored paper. Hmmm... maybe some gel pens or opaque markers on colored paper would be fun... must go find the gel pens...

Definitely some real tools of their own and some things to use them on. Harbor Freight can be a good place to find some lightweight and cheap tools for kids. Last time we were there, ds(6) informed me that he needs a megaphone to go with his tool set lol. They often have smaller light weight hammers, screw driver sets and the like for fairly good prices. Dollar Tree is another place to get kid tools. Hack saws, levels, sanding blocks and paper, paint brushes and rollers, duct tape, masking tape, tape measures... if it gets left out or misused or ruined or broken, it's not a huge deal to replace them. Our local farm and ranch store, Atwoods, has kid gardening tools that are really nice. Ds has a really nice kid size shovel and now he wants the rake and the hoe to go with it lol. I imagine Tractor Supply or any other farm and ranch type store probably has similar kid tools. I also let him use my pruning shears and limb trimmers with supervision. He likes to cut down the little volunteer tree saplings that pop up everywhere on our property lol.

I remember growing up in Phoenix and standing at the bus stop shivering in the "winter" when it was about 60 degrees in my "winter coat" which most people would call a wind breaker jacket lol. Ive lived quite a few places since then including places where it doesn't get out of the negative numbers on the farenheit scale during the day for weeks at a time. Some of the schools my kids went to regularly sent home letters in the winter reminding parents that children still had outdoor recess until daytime temperatures stayed below 20 degrees farenheit so children needed to wear full snow gear to school. My kids were ready to break out shorts at 40 degrees lol. We live in a much milder climate now and grandma would harass them to put on a jacket when it was 50 degrees outside but that wasnt even cold to them lol. Personally, I put on a light jacket or sweatshirt around the mid to lower 30s. I feel like I need a coat when the airtemp or windchill reach the lower twenties. A far cry from the "60 degrees is freezing!" from when I was a kid. Lol

If any of my young adult children lived at home with me still, I would not put a curfew on them any more than I would put a curfew on any other adult that was staying overnight in our home. I would however expect common courtesy such as not being loud when coming in late or having friends spend the night. I would appreciate my children to let me know when they will be back or if they plan to stay out all night but I don't expect it. I'm not going to be angry if they don't tell me but I would probably explain to them that while I respect their right to privacy I would like a heads up so that if I'm waiting for them for some reason or have something going on at home that I wasn't expecting them home for, we all have an idea of when and who will be home at what time so everyone is on the same page. If it becomes a problem for either one of us, they can find their own place or it they want me to treat them like a tenant where I have no right to know what is going on in their lives, then I will treat them like a tenant and charge the rent. You can either be a kind and decent human being like I raised you to be or you can take your chances out in the real world, it's their choice. I am a big believer in natural consequences. The natural consequence of staying out all night once you are an adult is still having to be an adult while being exhausted. Having to still attend to the duties and responsibilities of being an adult after making the poor decision to stay out all night the night before teaching far more in my opinion than my nagging to enforce arbitrary rules. I don't know how much my belief in natural consequences has to do with it but so far none of my young adult children have been the type to stay out all night just because they can. They handle the duties and responsibilities of being young adults just fine and while they might not make the same choices I would make for them, they down own their decisions, for better or for worse. I'd like to think it is because I've let them make mistakes and learn from them since they were still in the safety net of my home, but I can't prove it but I am proud of who they have become and the decisions they made for themselves.

When dh and I first met, he had a well groomed goatee. Since IIH has taken more of his freedom to do things, he often sports a full mountain man beard until it drives him crazy enough to sit still long enough to have me trim it off for him. We tried special dipilatory cream for men's facial hair but he has crazy sensitive skin and it looked (and according to dh felt) like he stuck a hot iron to his face. I can use the exact same cream to help trim up down south on me and it doesn't burn at all, so we know it is just his skin issues and not the product itself. I love when we get the chance to shave him, he has such a baby face to look at and feel lol. But until we get his brain shunt to alleviate the pressure and pain, we both have to put with his beard for now. :-(

All hard floors here, no carpet, no rugs except dirt catcher rugs by the doors. Dh tries to brush the bassett hound weekly since she is our worst offender. We also have a pitt bull mix but she doesn't shed much and dh's grandma's chihuahua stays with us whenever grandma has to go anywhere for a few days. The bassett though... we find giant tumble weeds of her hair everywhere.... So my routine is... Sweep main living areas with a regular broom every day. Vacuum around the dog bed corner daily. Once a week I get under everything with this dust mop. I use a lint roller to get the hair off the mop head and only wash the mop head about once a month or when it needs it, which ever comes first. Once a month or so, I will move furniture and vacuum with a shop vac but I'm really wanting to get one of these to save my back. Then I mop with a damp rag on the end of an old swiffer in the rooms with plank flooring. I use my steam mop in rooms that have sheet laminate where I'm not worried about the steam getting down between the planks. The bathrooms and kitchen have sheet laminate so the rooms I really prefer to have super clean floors I can steam mop. Other than that, I turn a blind eye most of the time to the bassett hound dust bunnies because my son absolutely loves that dog. Sigh.

When we lived in base housing, the floors were always some kind of hard flooring, tiles or linoleum or concrete. Most people bought room size pieces of carpet or carpet remnants for the rooms they wanted carpet in. Personally, I preferred the hard floors for clean-ability but we did have a carpet remnant in he living room of one of the houses we had. I bought the plastic edging to go along the edge and it looked like it was meant to be there and kept it from being a tripping hazard. Double stick carpet tape kept the carpet and the edging stuck to the floor.

Have you had your thyroid ruled out? I only ask because in addition to all the other symptoms you mentioned heat and humidity intolerance. When my thyroid is untreated or undertreated I am never comfortable in my own body. Cold physically hurts all the way to my bones and heat is just miserable. Mind you I grew up in Phoenix, I've always had a great tolerance for heat until my thyroid started really acting up. I have passed out from heat on an 85 - 90 degree day before when my thyroid wasn't being monitored closely enough. Thyroid imbalance can also cause the headache symptoms you describe. My husband has intracranial hypertension, also called pseudotumor cerebrii. Long story short, he has too much cerebral spinal fluid and it is not draining properly causing him pain and headaches on the level of a brain tumor daily. He also has sensitivity to light and had no idea how bad it was until we started getting him therapuetic spinal taps this year. He didn't realize how sensitive he was until he wasn't sensitive for a couple of weeks until the fluid built up again. It's a pretty rare ailment and even more rare for a man to have it. I have migraines from stress and they feel like typical migraines, pain across the top of my head and behind my eyes, nausea, vomiting, even someone touching my skin hurts. Sensitivity to light and sound. The only thing that works for me is to lay down immediately and take 800mg of ibuprofen with caffeine as directed by my doctor. If I catch it quick enough, I can head it off. Otherwise it lasts up to a week and decapitation seems like a reasonable option to stop the pain. We are a caffeine free family as well but migraines and as a remedy for dh is his spinal tap injection sight starts to leak, caffeine is then a medication so we deal with it. Luckily, I rarely get migraines (once a year anymore I used to get them more often) and dh hasn't had to use the caffeine after any of his spinal taps.

I looked it up quickly and Louisiana doesn't seem to have a problem with finalizing a divorce while the wife is pregnant so long as the 365 day waiting period for couples with children has been met. So your dd at least has that in her favor. But Louisiana does presume the husband to be the father of any child born within 300 days of termination of the marriage. So that could be a bit of a paperwork problem but she should be able to get everything straighten out after the fact. Just a bridge she will have to cross when she gets there. A family law lawyer definitely needs to be consulted at the very least, if not retained, even if it is an amicable divorce. Just to make sure all the proper paperwork gets to the right people if nothing else. Hopefully she can work everything out insurance-wise and logistics wise with her stbx and it will be a smooth transition hopefully.

I read the article and just...wow, just wow. I do think there is a point where sparking joy in education crosses over into the realm of silly and pointless but to say that all children should view all learning as serious business and that basically there is no room for fun in an education that strives for excellence... children are not little adults. There is nothing wrong with having some fun while striving for excellence. I have one child out of my six who would thrive in a school like the author of the article runs. This would be my child that sincerely asked for more school books and curriculum for her 6th birthday lol! My other five children would be on the edge of rebellion at that school within a week.

Me too lol.

Yes, his insurance paid for what they covered and since it was him that didn't remove me from his insurance and I had proof that he had been told multiple times by lawyers and the judge to remove me before I was ever pregnant and it had been almost 2 years since the first time he had been told, I didn't do anything wrong. He still tells everyone who will listen that I committed insurance fraud and screwed him and his new wife out of thousands and even tried to claim in court that since his insurance paid for our baby's birth that he had paid too much child support because his negligence caused his insurance to pay for the prenatal care and delivery for a baby that wasn't his. He really is something else, that's for sure. No one ever believes me how often he drags me to court over every little thing. Still. To this day. Almost ten years later and both of us are remarried. But he will drag me to court, I think just because he is bored sometimes. Did I mention that he is the one who initiated the divorce proceedings to "teach me a lesson"...

Haven't read the other responses but kinda funny in hindsight story to share.... My ex-husband and I divorced in 2011. At the final divorce hearing he was told to remove me from his insurance so I could obtain my own without problems. Of course, being the prick he was choosing to be during and since the divorce, he wouldn't do anything the court said unless he was threatened with jail time. He was told over and over again by the judge, my lawyer, his lawyer, his mother and everyone else to remove me from his insurance. He ignored everyone since the court worded it as he needed to do it so I wouldn't have any problems getting insurance. Since it was worded as he needed to do me that favor, he refused to do it. I started seeing someone after the divorce and so did he. I got pregnant by my now-husband a year and a half after the divorce. My lawyer warned my ex again to remove me from his insurance. I needed to apply for medicaid because while my now-husband had been dating for over a year and lived together, we weren't married so his insurance at the time wouldn't pick me up. The only answer I got from ex about removing me from his insurance was "Yeah, ok." So I went ahead and applied for Medicaid and told them I had no other insurance. If you've ever dealt with Medicaid, you know that Medicaid is ALWAYS second payor after any other insurance has paid for what they will pay for. I didn't even have a card with my name on it anymore for the insurance my ex has. Oh and I could not remove myself from his plan because I was not the primary on the plan, I tried that. And he works on a military base (contracted civilian) so it's not like I could just walk in to his HR department and raise hell until everything was fixed. Everything is going along hunky dory until ex decides he is going to marry the chick he has been dating for a whole 6 months. They get married and he finds out that not only can he not have more than one wife on his plan but that they cannot take me off his plan to add his new wife at the moment because of my pregnancy. He got married the same month I delivered my youngest son. Apparently, he never took me off his insurance and Medicaid found out I had insurance other than them so the OB was submitting the bills to Medicaid and Medicaid was submitting the bill to his insurance before paying the remaining bill. I had no idea this was what was going on until I got a lawsuit from my ex and his new wife saying that I was committing insurance fraud on their insurance and that I should pay them damages and give up custody of our children since I was now being pursued for insurance fraud by their insurance company. I called Aetna directly and told them what I received and asked them why I was being told that I was being pursued for fraud. They told me that they were not at all pursuing me for fraud, that at the time of my pregnancy I was covered by them since my ex had not removed me and that they were bound to cover me to the end of my pregnancy. That it was his fault for not removing me before he tried to add his new wife. They also backed me up that I never once submitted a bill to them for reimbursement, which is what I would have had to do to use the insurance since I didn't have a card. All the bills for my pregnancy that they received were from Medicaid. I got it all in writing to give the court. So all that to say, I hope your dd and her stbx can both handle this like adults and do the right thing. It is so easy to get caught up in the drama that often surrounds a divorce. If she hasn't seen the doctor yet, she should be able to get her stbx to remove her before she goes in. As for the divorce, many states will not finalize a divorce if the woman is pregnant until the identity of the father is confirmed after birth by dna test. Even if both partners testify that they are 100% sure of the baby's parentage and agree on what will happen money wise with the cost of the baby. Just throwing that out there in case your dd lives in one of those states.

Windows that swing out (or in) to open them are called casement windows. They can be oriented vertically or horizontally. The picture shared above has casement windows that are oriented horizontally so the window swings out left or right instead of pushing the window up and out like you would for a vertically oriented casement window. Military housing often has casement windows with bug screens on the inside that have to be removed to open the window and then replaced once the window is open.

Thanks but Memoria Press isn't it. This company only did music education and music theory in particular. It's driving me nuts that I can't remember, lol.

I don't remember a whole lot of "too sick to do school" days when my oldest kids were growing up. If they did enough school-y things to count as a school day, then it counted. Even institutional schools have days that aren't all educational all the time. The schools here have all kinds of special days, field days, guest assemblies, a certain number of snow days that are already accounted for in the calendar and not made up at the end of the year, etc. The school district we lived in before this one seemed like the kids were out of school more than in. There was always a half day here, a teacher's in service there there were always one or two days every month that were school holidays. If I had to count days, I would probably just put 2 or 3 extra weeks in the calendar to account for sick days and other things that pre empt a school day. If all the sick days get used up, you start pushing the end date out for any additional school days missed. If you don't use them all, you get to have "ditch days" at the end of the year for all the sick days you didn't use once the requisite number of school days was met.

I don't like freezing cooked meat unless it is in a casserole or something. It tastes funny to me when it is just cooked and frozen to use later without it being in like spaghetti sauce or a frozen homemade chicken pot pie. It doesn't taste funny enough to not eat it but I much prefer the taste of it being freshly cooked. I do buy and big case of ground beef and split it up into meal size portions and wrap and freeze it. I don't even thaw it, it goes straight in my cast iron skillet from the freezer when I'm ready to use it. It only adds a couple of minutes to the cook time vs using meat that hasn't been frozen. I just let the meat brown on one side, then flip it over and scrape the cooked meat off while it browns on the other side and keep doing that until it is all cooked. Takes 5 - 10 minutes maybe. For shredded chicken, I throw frozen chicken in the crock pot. Same for roasts and country ribs in the crockpot. I thaw chicken for homemade chicken nuggets, fried chicken and grilled chicken since it has to be breaded or marinaded. I also thaw porkchops prior to cooking.

Same here. I married young and while I don't regret it in and of itself, even though I have since divorced, I hope my children have plenty of time to be adults before they even think about getting married or settling down. My oldest children are 21, 19 and 18. None are in a serious enough relationship to even think about marriage and I'm so glad. When my oldest was 13/14 he was "dating" a girl and his father and I both remarried about the same time. His father had a big wedding and I had a little justice of the peace ceremony in the park with just my kids and dh's grandma present. Oldest ds told me at the time that he told his girlfriend that when he got married, he wanted a little ceremony like I had, not a big wedding like his dad had. At the time I cringed because my teenager was thinking about marriage but he's in his early 20's now, still single, has dated a few different girls over the years and has no plans to get married anytime soon and I'm happy with where he is in the romance/dating/marriage department and so is he. Second oldest son says he doesn't want to get married or have kids, which I'm fine with if that is what makes him happy but I really kinda hope he softens up and finds someone. Since he was little, he is the one that I thought could go either way in what he would look for gender wise. If he's happy, I'm happy. Oldest dd has a steady boyfriend but she's pretty career focused for now. She's going to start college in the fall, don't know about her boyfriend. I don't think they are serious enough to be considering marriage yet though. All the rest of the kids are too young to really think about it yet. Since I was pressured to marry my first husband by family, I want nothing to do with choosing or hoping for a certain spouse for my children so that probably has a lot to do with why I don't think about it at all.

I thought so too but in interest of full disclosure, we live in an older house in the country (read "lots of dirt gets tracked in even if you wipe your feet well"). It is a never ending battle around here trying to keep the dirt outside lol. And the air circulation isn't what it could be so dust gets stirred up a lot instead of filtered out as much as I would like. It could be that my house is extra dusty because of all these factors. They are gorgeous, I just don't have the patience to keep them as clean as I would like in my environment which includes little boys and dogs and lots and lots of dirt tracked in daily lol

I'm looking for a music theory curriculum that I'm pretty sure I heard about on these boards. It was mostly aimed at younger children (as young as K4 I believe but up through elementary and maybe even middle school) It had flashcards or a card game of some sort that you reviewed daily, that was one component, and there were also other activities for learning music theory. It wasn't instrument specific that I remember. Just general theory. On a weird side note, I remember the website was predominantly red but that of course could have changed by now. And if I'm not confusing this curriculum with another curriculum, it was made by two moms who had music backgrounds. Anyone recognize this curriculum?