nd293
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Posts posted by nd293
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The Proclick/Ibiclick/Clickbind punch and filing system. I LOVE that machine.
My laminator and a decent printer-copier.
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I'd agree with Impish and Joanne - unless there's a reason not to trust FIL, there should be no reason he should provide personal care to your dc. It sounds as though this is important for the grandparents, and I do think there are aspects of a child-grandparent relationship that can't develop when Mom and Dad are there. Dd has a relationship with my mother that is separate from her relationship with me, and as dd gets older I see more and more how important that one-on-one relationship with an older family member will be in her development. I am so incredibly grateful that they have been able to develop a close relationship.
More generally - dd was 3yrs when she first slept over with my mother. The "right" age depends on the child and the relationship with the grandparents, I think. Dd was used to my mother providing care for her at our home during visits. Still, it was a big deal, as we are a hands-on, co-sleeping family.
Having said that, I wouldn't jump straight in with a sleepover, especially with the younger ones. If it were me, I'd do a few full-day visits: you drop the kids off, then head out with dh to enjoy a day to yourselves. After you've done that a few times, you extend it to after dinner and bathtime. If everyone is at ease, you could leave them for an overnight visit, or possibly just leave your oldest two.
Nikki
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If your ds is nervous, and you have time and resources, consider a paediatric dentist. Ours deals with children and special needs adults, and they have the skills and experience in how to calm patients. My ds was 2.5yrs when he needed his first filling (poor enamel development on his molars). This child wouldn't let a doctor touch him, and the dentist had him sit through 1 filling the first appointment, and 2 fillings the next appointment. It was amazing. They pre-explained every step in terms he could manage ("ticking the bugs") and showed him the instruments, let him touch them etc.
Good luck!
Nikki
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I would reccomend going to Lowes/Home Depot and figuring out the wall colors first. Find one of those pre-matched room ideas they have in the brochures, pick one, and then coordinate all of the inexpensive accesories with those colors in mind.
:iagree:
The brochures often describe "rules" about colours, in a away that helps you match accessory colours to a dominant colour.
Our new house has black slate-look vinyl tiles and four black walls. I see a lot of paint brochures in my future!
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MCT and Mosdos for English.
Singapore for Maths.
Those have greatly increased the depth at which we tackle the respective subjects.
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I am about to use a similar idea (but with Ikea angled magazine display shelves) for my dd9. The idea though is to display the books she needs to work on that day - a visual reminder of what she needs to schedule.
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Ikea always gets my vote!
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My dd9 loves the Roman Mysteries series by Catherine Lawrence.
Also The Minivers (think there are also a couple of books) by Natalie Jane Prior.
There is another series that has been likened to Ramona. It is by Judy Delton and is about a girl named Angel (Angel spreads her wings, Angel's mother's wedding, Angel bites the bullet). We've only read one, but really enjoyed it.
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I'd probably make a habit of excusing myself with a "Oh, I can't talk with all these interuptions - I'll call you later" and hope she catches on. Or you could try to put the ball in her court by saying "I can't talk with these interuptions. Do you want to send the kids off, or should we chat some other time?". That way she has to make an active choice between her children's behavior or your company...
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If you are traveling alone with kids that age I would strongly recommend against the car seat option. I would look into the CARES child restraint system that Erin recommends - it is FAA approved. Then keep a set of car seats at both ends of your flight. Apart from the bulk issue, I think that the CARES seatbelt might actually allow the child to recline more fully when asleep (I doubt the carseat will have much room to tilt backwards once attached to the plane seat).
I'd agree with Sebastian and Laura that flights home every three months would be highly disruptive, not only for you, but also for the children.
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We use Mosdos. Great programme.
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We moved house 4 days ago. It's a 10 minute drive from our old house, but I feel completely wiped out. I swear this is just as difficult as moving country (which I've done twice in the last decade). We took the past two weeks off and where supposed to get back to school this week, but it seems highly unlikely. We've moved into a much smaller house, it needs some work, and we don't have the storage we need. The books are all in boxes in what was supposed to be our schoolroom, and we don't even have a desk or table to work on yet.
Liz, your advise is great. I have managed to get #1 sorted out. I was just going to assign some sort of history research to cover #2, but dd9 is really not motivated enough to be left to her own devises. Right now she is sobbing in her bedroom because I have told her she is not to come out until she sorts her room out (all my polite requests have been ignored, and not always respectfully).
And we have a visitor coming for a week in 1 months time.
Nikki
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Thanks everyone for responding, and sorry for the delay in replying - we just moved house.
Thanks for all the specific recommendations. I will have a look into them, although one of the wierd quirks of getting books shipped to Australia is that it often works out cheaper to buy new books that second hand, out-of-print ones.
Hearing that MCT recommends against anthologies was interesting, but is impractical for us right now, I think. We'll start with an anthology, and work from there!
On the plus side, I picked up a poertry book for myself from the libary, and am so enjoying it - I don't think I've read poetry since high school.
Nikki (off to see if I can find the box I packed the MCT books in)
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Do you get up before the kids or with them? Although I am never keen to get up (ds3 is still a terribly restless co-sleeper), I find that actually facing the day is immeasurably easier if I wake up first, and have time to have coffee, tidy up a little and perhaps check e-mails and eat before people start talking to me and making endless demands on me.
Nikki
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When we lived in the Middle East, I could note the change of seasons by my coffee habits before I really noticed the weather changing. Winter - latte's. Summer - nothing less than a frappe with ice crystals could get me outdoors. When I shifted to iced latte - ah, the seasons, they are a changing!
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I save all the lessons and answer sheets in individual folders, print out lessons as needed, and check answers from the pdf. We don't do the history, so I only print out the other pages. I give dd9 2-3 pages a day, usually giving the vocab-type pages separately from grammar. I file them separately too, once completed.
Lively Latin is very easy to use, but I agree with the person who say the mistakes can drive you nuts - there are a lot of errors.
(We also use Lingua Latina for reading practice, without doing any of the grammar exercises at all. that is a big hit here.)
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In theory I can do it. In truth, the jack scares me!
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Well if he's self-educated, then The Well-Trained Mind was a good book to have!
And you should send him a copy of The Well-Educated Mind!
Although it's sounds like it's something he'd already have read.
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If you believe in letting kids choose what they believe, at what age do you do this?
The wording is difficult. Belief, by it's nature, is not permitted or forbidden. It just is.
That quibble aside, I would allow my dd9 to read whatever she wanted about any religion she wanted at any age she was interested enough to ask for information. On the other hand, I would not allow her to sign up for a religious holiday camp (that's just come up, actually) because I do not think she is old enough to know when she'd being manipulated into accepting other people's views. In WTM terms, she's not accomplished enough in logic to identify emotive language in arguments etc.
I am more ambivalent about another scenario: what if she came home and said "X is such a fantastic person, and her parents are so kind. I know she is Y religion. Could I go with her to a service?"? I don't know...
I was raised in a religious environment, and I know how as a child I responded on a purely emotional level to religious ideas. It was only in my mid-teens that I started to questions beliefs and values on an intellectual level, and find my own path.
Nikki
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We are enjoying MCT's Island level books, and would like to follow his suggestion of reading poetry daily. I am looking for a poetry anthology that moves beyond the standard children's poems to include the sort of classic poetry that MCT uses as examples in his works.
A quick browse on Amazon and I have shortlisted the following:
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children
Classic Poetry: Candlewick Illustrated Classic
Those are marked for children at Amazon. The first seems to have more "children's poetry" than I am strictly looking for, but with 500 poems, it might be worth getting. The second might be a bit slim for my purposes.
Then there are a couple of books not strictly identified as being for children that look promising:
Anyone want to weigh in with a recommendation?
Thanks,
Nikki
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My dd seems to have very active sweat glands. She is young, and I would certainly like to avoid anti-perspirant, but the option (an overpowering body odour that soon entered into the fabric of all her clothing so that they smelled even after a strong wash, and so that she smelled as soon as she got dressed) was simply not acceptable to me. "Clinical grade, proven 48hr protection" anti-persirant it is.
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I have (mostly) done it, wished I've done it, and wondered WHY I've done it!
We moved from South Africa for expat work with very little - no furniture, just books and toys, some kitchen stuff and some ornaments. We sold some furniture, but gave away most of it, either to family or to charitable organisations.
We emigrated to Australia with most of our stuff - now, after 18 months, we are moving into our own home, and lots of things will be replaced for various reasons.
My thoughts:
1) Starting over without stuff really brings home how unimportant things are. Even a few things we thought were sentimentally important and left with my mother have now mostly been discarded.
2) Think carefully before discarding books - I have so many books I wish I had kept. Now that we are settled (we have a home-country, even if we move again) I want to start collecting some titles I remember leaving behind.
3) Make sure everyone is onboard. I think moving is hard enough for kids without leaving ALL their stuff. And 6 years, 2 countries and 5 houses later, dh and I still occasionally get snappy about the move from SA when he failed to sort his stuff out prior to the move, so I did it, and got rid of stuff he wanted!
4) I wish I'd more assiduously kept something special to represent each place we've lived. Less stuff is good, yes, but sometimes stuff can be a physical link to memories (good and bad, I suppose).
5) Don't underestimate how overwhelming it is to shop, especially when you're under pressure to get it done, and don't know the shops. Our first move was to a furnished unit where we lived for one year. In that time we were slowly able to replace some things, so when we moved into an unfurnished place, it was much easier. We also knew the shops by then - where to find what, and where to get the best deals.
6) The younger your kids, and the less support you have, the more I'd think this through carefully. When we moved to Australia I took most things, but still found that I was at the shops frequently replacing items I thought "too silly" to bring to another continent. Brooms and toilet brushes may be silly, but they are necessary! My ds, then 2yrs, did not cope well with the frequent, chaotic shopping expeditions. He entered a period of massive "tantrums" and "meltdowns", and I still feel very badly about how hard it was on him.
I hope to slowly buy up some furniture I really really love now, and then if we move overseas again we will store furniture, rather than get rid of it.
Good luck with it all!
Nikki (moving into her very own home next week)
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My son is the same age as yours, and like yours has no interest in weaning. If I could explain the concept to him, he'd just fall off his chair laughing at such a ridiculous notion.
I have stopped night feeds though. That was hard enough! I just said no. And I said it the next night, and the next, and the next, and ... for a couple of months (not kidding) before he stopped throwing an all-out nighttime fit. I just tell him Mommy's not awake yet. But sometimes at 4am I give in, or I have no chance of getting any further sleep...
Dd stopped nursing at 2.5yrs. The difference, I think, as that she had both a pacifier and a bottle that she drew comfort from, and I was able to encourage those over and above nursing so that demand decreased and supply dropped until she lost interest.
It's not going to work with ds whose blanket does not substitute in the same way.
I look forward to the responses.
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I'd agree that if they are retellings, you can start anywhere. Dd9 had been listening to retellings for some years, with no adverse effects on her development ;-)
At school we started with comedies - that was aged 13yrs, I think. Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night's Dream both have lovely film versions, so I would choose one of those. At school we read Othello, Macbeth and Merchant of Venice in later years.
Prehistory? Would this be confusing?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
I think it's a great plan. SOTW does little more than give a nod to prehistory, so there's plenty of room there for expansion.
As secular homeschoolers we covered creation myths from around the world, then read a few beautiful picture books on evolution. We covered archeology (as per SOTW) and did a "dig" in the backyard (I broke a plate and she found (some of) the pieces and re-assembled it. We read about dinosaurs and made a paper mache model of a dinosaur (using a balloon for the body). We read about prehistoric people, and read "The First Dog" and "The Cave Twins" as supporting fiction.
My dd was probably the same age as yours, and I guess we spread that over 6 months, doing it very casually.
Nikki