I love the Screwtape Letters. It has so many fascinating insights into human nature and thought. And I especially love how it gradually adjusts my perspective until the ending affects me exactly the opposite of how I would normally respond.

Actually, I love that this is his response to the prompt "Falling". Starting out flying with that prompt makes you think of a physical fall, but the real falling is the turtle's emotion when he understands what is happening.

We are having some glimpses of progress and some good moments, even a whole good day on Wednesday. I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yes. There is a world of difference between having a physical problem that looks scary and intentionally harming/risking your body to make yourself scary. Also a world of difference between having a person with a scary-looking physical issue in a position of a role model to your child, vs. having a person who engages in body harming/risking pursuits in a position of a role model to your child.

I have been trying and trying to get her assigned (by DHS) counselor to set up appointments with her. She finally set an appointment for her family counseling she is supposed to have with her bio mom. Which is all well and good, but why won’t they make time for the individual counseling she needs? I will look into that group and book, thank you.

The best and worst moments seem to be linked. It’s like a part of her wants to be close to us, and a part of her feels threatened by that desire and wants to drive us off because of it. So the other day when she was wanting to be held and cuddled and play, and called us Mom and Dad for the first times, was during other parts of the day the worst day we have ever had with her. As in, I couldn’t leave the room she was in without her finding another child to go after. And her defiance towards me seems to swing with her desire to be close to me, too. I do think it is defiance, not a dis

To be clear, when I said think vs. regurgitate words, I am not talking about complicated, logic level stuff. I am talking about answering a review question of things she was doing handily a few weeks ago before the defiance set in vs. just repeating the words of the other kids while refusing to look at the paper. For example, “Read this sentence and look for a word that is a thing” and she is refusing to actually turn her head towards the sentence, and instead repeats whatever word the others say. Or if she’s answering alone so there’s no one to repeat after, she will throw out random gram

Thank you all for your suggestions. I am sorry I haven’t had time to answer in detail. I am working my way through all the suggestions, and I’m currently leaning towards Growing With Grammar, but haven’t compared them all yet. A religious curriculum is allowed, but we would have to pay for it out of pocket, so I would prefer to go that way only if there isn’t a secular option that would work as well for her.

Our paper goods and cleaning supplies are short again. I was wondering if people are predicting problems when the Senate votes on the new Supreme Court justice.

We added our foster girls’ two sisters in August, and the seven-year-old is going through a very difficult time. After working to get permission to enroll them in my kids’ homeschooling charter rather than doing their unsatisfactory public school’s distance learning, and carefully preparing and planning to be able to manage homeschooling seven kids, I think I basically need to scrap everything for dfd7. I like fun, interactive, rigorous curricula, but the more interactive the work is, the more opportunity she sees to fight me on it. She is eating up huge chunks of my schooling time and ruin

A couple of my Asian friends with immigrant parents didn't really have toys. Art supplies, books, games, but not toys. I would hesitate to gift her a toy without knowing if her parents were okay with that.

We do around 1 to 2 dollars -ish, based on what we have around and if the tooth came out in a tough way--also on condition. One tooth with a HUGE cavity only got 50 cents. It came out shortly after we discovered our son had, for some time, thought it was hilarious to go "brush" his teeth with the handle end of his toothbrush, without toothpaste, and then tell us he had brushed. The tooth fairy often takes a few nights to get here at our house. The kids don't necessarily expect the tooth to be gone the first morning. She is, after all, a very busy fairy.

I interpreted it as the time, not the money, she wasn't interested in using for this.

Natal plums are edible and fairly tasty. They are commonly used as an ornamental shrub in Southern California where I grew up, and a number of times strange adults would want to intervene when my siblings and I were eating them on public property, because people generally assume they aren’t edible.

Oh, they're not gone! I was wrong. They don't have them on the website I used to buy them from, but you can still get them direct from publisher!