Sorry I didn't respond sooner. My dd actually loved BA, though it was a big challenge for her. She is dyslexic, and while she now reads quite well after years of working on it, it is work for her and grasping complicated concepts from text is difficult. I didn't think that AOPS's huge blocks of text with their wordy explanations would be a good fit for her at all. She also still frequently gets answers incorrect on topics she fully understands and knows how to solve due to inattention to detail or minor calculation mistakes, so I thought she could use a slower introduction to the next level while we spent time focusing on attention to detail, reading the questions carefully, organizing her work etc. The video lessons and visual/hands-on demonstration of concepts work well for her. We're still quite early in the Math-U-See Prealgebra book, and everything she has done so far has been review, but I am wondering if I should have gone straight to Algebra. I knew MUS was too easy for a full Prealgebra course, but I didn't expect it to be so far below the level of Beast Academy.

These ones are humane. A cheaper option is the glue traps. If you take the glue trap with the mouse on it a few miles away from your home and spray some vegetable oil on the sticky surface, the mouse will come loose and can just run away. Just check the glue traps frequently, so a mouse can't get left stuck there for too long.

It looks like the Baby Trend Ultra is going to be the winner, as it appears to have the most sitting room in the back with a car seat in. (Also I saw on their website that the back seat is good for up to 60 lbs, while most are up to 50 lbs, so that will be nice if/when ds7 ever gains some weight.) Thank you all for your help!

So cute! It looks like the reviews say it's a tight fit for 4-year-olds' legs, though, so probably not for ds.

This looks like a really nice one, but outside my price range.

Ds gets so worn out by his chemo sometimes. By the end of a long day of dr. appointments he is often dragging, stumbling along with me half-carrying him out to the car, so I'm really hoping for one where he can sit vs. just stand with the baby in.

The problem with putting older ds in the front seat, even though he could probably fit in some of them, is that at 7.5 he is not going to want to sit in a stroller seat. The back seats don't look as "babyish".

He doesn't have to, but I really want to find one that can. I am going to be toting him back and forth to so many of his brother's appointments as a tiny baby, I would really like to be able to do it without having to wake him up every time he's fallen asleep and I need to transfer him in or out of the car.

Can you recommend one that allows a bigger kid to sit on the back seat while an infant car seat is in the front? Many seats I have looked at allow car seats in the front or back, but when you look carefully at the pictures, the back seat doesn't really have room for a kid to sit when a car seat is in the front. I found one model that did, but then couldn't find it for sale anywhere. (It seems to have been replaced by a newer Graco model that does not have room with the car seat in.) Other models don't seem to have any photos for their products online at an angle so that you can see whether there is room to sit with the car seat in or not. The idea is to be able to let ds7 sit down and take a break on the big kid seat at the back when he needs to without having to wrangle his wheelchair as well as an infant, and to be able to keep baby in his car seat transferring between the car and the stroller. Ds7 is older than intended for those seats, but he is under the weight limit for most models still.

My husband trades board games we don't use anymore, I think it's through the boardgamegeek website. He is way into board games, so I don't know for sure if they do more kiddy ones like those above, but it means we have been able to rotate through a lot of different, normally expensive board games for the cost of shipping.

Ri's latest MRI results show no tumor growth! Six months of chemo down! Twenty-one more to go.

We got lucky and now have the main presents for our kids. My nephew received a used Nintendo Switch plus game and spare controller for his birthday, but his family doesn't allow video games, so we bought it from him. We have a little handheld switch for ds7 to use during waiting for doctor's appointments and as an incentive for doing all his physical therapies and meds. This one will be ds9's gift, and ds7 will get the controller and new game, so they can play together. My mom had a surprise for me, too. She saved a doll sized cast-iron stove of my grandma's that I loved when I saw it years ago, and arranged to have it brought across the country when my aunt moved. (It would have cost an incredible amount to ship. It certainly weighs more than ds7.) It needs some cleaning, but will be the most awesome present for my girls to go with their American Girl dolls. It has some dishes with it, but I am thinking it needs something more. Not sure what, yet.

You may remember I mentioned months ago that dd10 was angry with me for planning on not using AOPS for her for Prealgebra. She has been upset about it all this time, certain that my choice is sure to be inferior in every way, because her big sister used AOPS. My explanation that I chose a curriculum for dd12 that I thought would work well for her learning style and I wasn't going to do differently for dd10 did not help. Well, the Math-U-See curriculum arrived today. Dd10 is in love, exulting that she "gets to play legos for math". Months of sulking, and now she adores it at first sight. Ds9 and ds7 have been doing math all morning. Ds9 is about halfway through BA5 and decided to do extra because he's excitied to get to Prealgebra. Ds7 tells me he is doing the same thing because he wants to be allowed on the AOPS boards because he wants to play a Warriors game on there "while it is still in fashion" (???). He is only at the beginning of BA4.

I did at one time resort to telling kid "these requirements must be done before lunch" (making sure they were very basic and would require far less time than that) and then sticking to it. Child was horrified when lunch time came, their plate of food was sitting out, and I still insisted that they finish up that work before coming to eat (it had been stubbornly stared at and left blank for three hours at that point). An hour and a half later, kid finally did the work (in 20 minutes), and ate lunch at two instead of noon, and after that I usually got some grudging work before lunchtime. I guess this wouldn't work with a kid who is stubborn enough to skip a meal to win the point, but it worked with this kid.

I'm still in the thick of things, now, so we'll see how I feel about having homeschooled the kids down the road, but I can't imagine regretting homeschooling their earlier years. We had so much fun together. But then, I never intended to be a working mom. I married a sports reporter, but upon examining what kind of family life we wanted, we made changes and planned ahead so that I could be a stay-at-home-mom. I supported us through dh's time in law school so that he could have a career that would support a large family on one income. Motherhood is my career, and homeschooling has just been an extension of that. I do wonder about now, though. I am so tired. We don't have time for most of the fun parts of homeschooling anymore. The creative parts that fill me up, along with my personal side-projects and hobbies, are beyond my capacity. It's medical care, provide for everyone's physical and emotional needs, reach academic goals. There's not time or energy for anything else. If I took academics off my plate, maybe there would be a little time and energy to refill sometimes. I have been running on empty for so long, and somehow keep finding more and more to give when I think I have nothing left. On the other hand, ds7 would be constantly in and out of school if he were attending, and unable to adjust his daily workload like we do at home to how well he is feeling from day to day. He would be at greater risk with his weakened immune system. And if we sent the others and not him, they would still be bringing germs home, and he would be so lonely. And they would be basically learning nothing. The scope and sequence of the schools they would attend shows they have already covered almost everything in their grade levels. The schools do not offer their levels of math at any grade level. I keep coming back to the conclusion that academically and medically, this less-fun homeschooling we are doing now is still definitely best for them. They are lonely, though, particularly the girls. I have managed a few social things, but we are not getting out to the extracurriculars and social activities that we used to do. There is only so much I can fit in around medical appointments. We may send dd12 to school next year, or the year after, though.

Another vote for "it's the age". My girls, their friends, and my nieces all went through a very difficult phase around that age. My dd10 seems to be finally coming out of it (knock on wood!). It's like we get a little preview of teenage drama, then a few years' respite before it's back in force.

Well, I was recently at an auction where some items were sold for some crazy prices (a life-size cardboard cutout of a person for $8,000, a pair of rifles for $70K) but it was actually kind of expected because it was a cancer research charity event where participants cheer each other on as they wildly overpay.

I know one person who has died of Covid, just a couple weeks ago. I am so sad for their family; she left four kids behind. She was still in the hospital but no longer in the ICU and they were expecting she would be released soon when she had a heart attack, due to covid damage to her heart. I also know of a distant relative I have never met who died of covid last year, and of three other acquaintances who were hospitalized with it. You would expect things to follow like Sneezyone said, with those in covid-cautious communities knowing fewer losses, but oddly that doesn't seem to be the case among those I know.

No, I haven't heard that. My hispanic family members who have had it were fairly mild cases.

Except that all deaths with a positive covid test are being logged as covid deaths. So while it's still scary that the numbers have gotten that high, the official numbers in the U.S. cannot be accurately relied upon to represent deaths from covid. (I totally thought this was misinformation the first x number of times I heard it. I really thought it was ridiculous for anyone to claim the government was logging any obviously-not-caused-by-covid deaths in that count. But the county D.A. is required to check out all unattended deaths and sign off on releasing the body to the morgue. He is a personal friend of ours and has attended several of these deaths. Our county's first "covid death" was a man quarantining at home with mild symptoms when he hit his head falling off a ladder. I get that they don't want to miss any deaths in the statistics where there may be multiple factors involved, but it frustrates me that the government has adopted a reporting policy like this that undermines the public's trust in their information.)

This has been a very interesting discussion. It seems pretty obvious to me that genetics, environment, hard work, and individuals’ personalities all play a role in their level of achievement. My extremely musical cello boy both grasps new techniques and skills faster with less repetition and has an intensely focused, slightly obsessive aspect to his personality that has him working at his practice more intensely and longer than them. It is no surprise that his skill quickly overtook that of both his sister who took many, many repetitions to advance in music, and the one who also gains new musical skills quickly and easily, but lacks his driven/obsessive, focused personality. With the same environment and good instruction, my less musical daughter has to work at least 5 times longer to gain the same new skill. I have also had the experience of taking kids who came from an impoverished, neglected, anti-educational home environment into my home and teaching and raising them in my home environment for a time. They all three made great gains, but the rate of gains between kids was not the same. With each kid, I just worked with them at their own level and pace. Middle sister (7/8) made about 1.5 grade levels of progress in both reading and math over 10 months with me. Oldest sister (10/11) made about 5 grade levels of progress in reading (coming up to her grade level from dramatically behind) and about half a year’s progress in math (working three years behind her grade level) in 6 months. Littlest sister with learning disabilities was not doing academics, but went from 2 years delayed to half a year delayed in the 1.5 years she was with me. Good environment and teaching can make a huge difference, but the same environment and teaching will not produce the same results. That experience also really emphasized benefits of our home environment that I never even noticed before. I knew that a stable home filled with books and parents who read extensively and value education makes a huge difference to a kid’s starting place academically. I never particularly noticed (before we had a 10-year-old constantly telling us how weird we were for it) that we speak with wide vocabularies about a range of topics, often bringing up new things we have learned because we think they will interest those around us as well, that we make up games with complicated, extended storylines, that we ask questions of one another about deeper insights and connections behind many topics, that we frequently reference historical events, that we are playful with words in our conversations together.

To you too! Have a wonderful holiday!

I have found that upscale children's thrift stores, because they have clothes from a variety of past years, are generally much better than most stores for shopping for my tween picky dressers. Stores with new clothes usually mostly just have whatever the current season's style is, and if my kid doesn't like that style, we are out of luck. But because thrift stores have a variety of styles from different years, we can much more often find something for everyone. Our favorites are Kid 2 Kid and DI.

She didn't say it was for radiation, but I didn't ask about what the specific concern was. It might well have been the contrast she was thinking of, though we were not discussing contrast specifically at that time. My son has to do his MRI scans with and without contrast every time, and the gadolinium buildup in kids' systems from many uses of the contrast over time can be bad, but not nearly as bad as not getting those scans. He is supposed to have lots of fluids before and especially after his scans, because it will flush out more of the heavy metals and leave less of them permanently in his system. It is a little scary to tally it up and realize my kid has already had ten MRIs in less than a year, but now that things are more stable it should be only four times a year going forward.

My son's doctor told us that they don't worry about numbers of imaging scans until they are into the dozens for MRIs and the hundreds for X-rays.