Not just seeds, but there has been a run on chicks here lately, too. My dd has been planning on raising chickens this year, and the places we have tried have said they were selling out within half an hour of getting their weekly chick shipments in.

Do hospitals have a way to sanitize homemade masks before use? I would love to help sew, and my girls probably would, too—but we have a cough at our house (probably just a cold, but you never know).

Estate planning (wills) and property law.

I’m lending out homeschooling curriculum to people who are suddenly needing to homeschool. My years of curriculum hoarding are now justified.

Yep. And I have seen two of her prior choices in family court. They do not inspire confidence.

Always, and followed up in number 2 slot by stepdad. ETA: And dd has been sleeping in bed with her bio mom and the boyfriend on her overnight visits.

Our foster dd did not go home. We got a call the day before the reunification that it was not happening. Bio mom was hiding a live-in boyfriend and telling her older girls to lie about him. So reunification is still the plan long term, and dd is supposed to restart supervised visits with her mom and mom’s boyfriend next week. It makes me want to throw up. These are the precise living circumstances of the vast majority of dh’s victims over the years.

My kids were getting very concerned about food the other day, after we had gone to our normal store for bread and been unable to get any, and then we had tried another store and been able to grab some bread there, but couldn’t get any milk, and seeing all the empty shelves at both. We were explaining that there is nothing to be scared about and telling them about all our food storage (not hoarded, #10 cans of wheat and things we’ve had for years for emergencies), and the seven-year old was still worried until dh took him out to look at the pig and told him, “That is two hundred pounds of meat. I promise you will not go hungry.” My sister has five boys between the ages of 11 and 16, four of whom are distance runners. She said she feels like she needs to wear a sign when she goes to the grocery store, with all the glares she’s been getting picking up their normal groceries.

Well, foster dd has a runny nose, so everyone’s music lessons today are cancelled except one dd’s lesson is going online. My dear friend’s wedding reception is canceled, and I canceled my trip back home for it. I really, really didn’t want to do that—keep thinking how much of a problem would it be to drive down there and hang out with my family at home?—but I’m doing the logical thing. I told dh I might buy a puppy and/or baby goats this weekend to console myself. He may believe I was joking. The plan for today is normal schoolwork, ELE exam for dd, and one Skype music lesson. Also, finishing gathering and packing up all the rest of foster dd’s stuff for her return home tomorrow. ETA: Almost forgot, the kids have dental checkups this morning.

She’s become like our own little girl, and we love her. She has grown and developed in leaps and bounds, and is now only about 9months delayed, vs. about 18 months when she came to us 6 1/2 months ago. She is going home to her mother one week from today, and there is going to be a gaping hole when she is gone. But her mother has offered for us to be her godparents, and so (so long as bio mom doesn’t change her mind) we will hopefully be able to maintain contact with her and know how she is doing in the future.

Thank you all!

This was an old thread I posted an update on. He’s doing property law & estate planning.

Update: My dh started his new job this week. He’s joined a private law firm and is learning the ropes to do property law and estate planning. I swear he looks five years younger.

We’re all up in the air. This year has been such a struggle. I am so discouraged. My oldest is going to public school in the Fall. I feel like a failure. I am making an academic decision for her based not on what I believe is best academically, but because of what really boils down to a parenting issue. But I can’t keep doing this. I am so sick of the struggle and the rudeness and the bad attitude. It is so difficult to get four children’s schoolwork done when the oldest requires the greatest supervision to keep on task. She really took advantage of the months of my distraction to get out of as much of her work as possible, and now is incredibly angry with me for forcing her to do more to make up lost time in the subjects she is half a year behind our plans for the year in. (Distraction=when our foster daughter first came to us and most of my attention went to keeping her from injuring herself or someone else). Dd11, 6th: public school, piano. I don’t know yet if I will require any more from her or not. Maybe spelling. (My sil tells me that her kids’ district does not teach spelling at all). Dd9, 4th: will go to public school, too, if she decides she wants to. If she goes, I will after school her in spelling and math facts memorization. If not, we will generally continue with what we’ve done before with BA 5, MCT Town level, AAS, SOTW 2, MEL chemistry+ ? for science, typing.com and Spencerian handwriting, German with a tutor. Voice lessons and Horseback riding for extracurriculars. Ds7, 3rd: is saying he wants to go to public school, but we don’t think he is ready to do well in a classroom. He latches on to something and does it obsessively for a period of time, and is likely to melt down if you force him to transition out of it before he’s ready. It’s not a problem at home. I don’t mind if he does five days worth of math in one sitting and spends more time on Language Arts another day. But it would be a problem in a classroom. At home, he is always my easiest or my hardest student, depending on whether he is having a perfectionist meltdown that day or not. His perfectionism seems to be getting worse, and nothing I have tried seems to be working. And you never know whether today is going to be a wake up bright and early and get everything plus some extra done well by 11 sort of day (~66%) or a rolling on the floor screaming that the computer is lying because he got a question wrong sort of day(~33%). He will be doing BA5 (and possibly beginning prealgebra—is that possible?!), MCT island level poetics book + the rest of Town level, R&S spelling, HWOT & typing.com, SOTW 2, MEL chemistry + ? for science, Spanish in some form. Cello and judo+soccer+baseball (in different seasons) for extracurriculars. Ds5, 1st: is my lopsided boy. He will be at home with me. AAR 2, AAS 1, HWOT 1/2, BA and Singapore 3, SOTW 2, MEL chemistry+?, start a language. He’s talking about French or Japanese. (Eeek!). Violin and horseback riding aka. cowboy lessons. Dd3: will not be with us. She is going home to her bio mom soon. Things will be much easier here, but emotionally harder. It feels like she belongs on this list.

I had a hard time finding any good pictures of myself that were recent. I really need to have someone other than my kids take some photos of me. This one is from ten years ago. I'm rather older and fatter now.

I remember my mom prepping me as a kid before we went to visit my great-grandmother, talking about how she had some wrong ideas about people who were different, and to come talk to her about it if grandma said anything. She never did, though. Actually, the only racist comments I've ever heard from members of my family are from my Japanese aunt and cousins. They are quite vocal that Japanese people are better in every way, but it's okay, they know you can't help it and they still like you. Anything that my half-Japanese cousins did wrong was met with, "It's the [American father's last name] in them. Japanese kids would never do that" by their mother, but taken with the attitude of, well, what can you expect, they can't help it. Meanwhile the non-Japanese cousins listening to this conversation would never dream of getting up to the trouble our cousins engaged in. The quickest way to make any of my cousins mad as kids was to say that they were American, too, which they would vehemently deny, and go into a long tirade about how superior their race was and how everything good in this world was invented by a Japanese person. Seriously, my twelve-year-old cousin was ready to fight us for laughing at him when he insisted that J.K. Rowling obviously stole Harry Potter from a Japanese person.

Good luck with this. So much of this tendency to compare seems to be so much a part of individual kids' innate personalities. My youngest, ds5, is in many ways very like dd9. He has not been quick to read and may also be mildly dyslexic, though he's ahead in math and is my most lopsided kid. But either way he never seems to notice or compare to when his older siblings learned things (at least not yet). He generally always assumes that whatever he does is quite good for his age. May it long stay that way.

I just don't know what to do. I feel guilty if I hold him back, and guilty if I don't. Both options feel wrong. I need a door number three.

Dd9 is considering taking up either clarinet or voice lessons. I have been searching high and low for a voice teacher willing to take a nine-year-old, because that is where her deepest musical interest lies, and she also has a beautiful voice. I haven't found any local teachers who are willing, but my sister who is a great singer may teach her by computer.

I know the regular answers: use different curricula so it’s harder to compare, focus on each one’s strengths, talk about each working on own personal bests and not on what others are doing. But my ds7 is just so darn good at so many things, and dd9 thinks she is not very smart and not good at things. She is sandwiched between ds7 and dd11 who are both fast thinking, very talented, competitive, loud-talking extroverts who love to run the show. Dd9 is is a quiet 2e kid who compares herself to others. She is dyslexic. We have worked long and hard and she now reads well at or a little above her grade level and reads for pleasure, which is a huge victory. But she does compare herself to ds7, who read well before she did and reads more advanced books than she does. Also, her spelling is much worse than his, and she notices. She is also super distractible, quite possibly diagnosable as ADHD, and much slower to get her schoolwork done. She has played suzuki violin for over four years, and he has played the cello for two, and is a book ahead of her. She’s decided to quit violin after the music festival next month. I have had them doing MCT and Treasured Conversations together the last couple of years because I just didn’t have enough minutes in the day, and it has seemed to go well, but it’s another area where little brother is at her level. They were at the same level in swimming lessons this last session. He passed and she didn’t. They both love Beast Academy. He flies through it, and often chooses to do extra for fun. I make him do the end-of-chapter tests and stop and do some Singapore IP or CWP between each chapter, and he’s now about three chapters behind her. I feel guilty for intentionally slowing him down. One of the things I disliked about public school and saw as a big plus in homeschooling is that each kid can learn at their own pace without having to wait around for the class, but now I have been trying to keep him from progressing at his own pace. I might have started them in different curricula in math from the beginning, but I didn’t foresee this. He has just covered two years of BA in under a year and a half. She has her own foreign language and extracurricular—horseback riding has been great in that it is basically self-confidence training with animals. The thing is, she is a really smart kid, but she just doesn’t see it. She is a sweet, sensitive, intelligent child with beautiful handwriting, an amazing green thumb (seriously, this kid can grow anything), and a wonderful creative flair, but she doesn’t place as high a value on her strengths as on the more easily quantifiable things she sees from her siblings.

He’s not meant to be a pet. The idea is to eat him eventually, after he’s tilled and fertilized the whole yard. I built a small mobile pen to be moved frequently to fresh ground, to mimic Joel Salatin’s intensive rotational system on a smaller scale.

He is small. He is a four-month-old Guinea Hog, and might grow up to 150 to 200 lbs. They are supposed to be great foragers and rooters, and quite resilient to both cold and heat—and also I found the idea of a 200lb. pig far less intimidating than the other option in my area. Plus the twelve-year-old entrepreneur selling him was absolutely adorable, and super competent and knowledgeable about his pigs. (I was tempted to buy two from him, but restrained myself.)

Meet Rototiller.

Thank you very much!

Looking for a birthday gift for my oldest, and we thought an MP3 player would be fun. I had an iPod in college and it was great. It could hold all the songs I could possibly want, and I hoped the intervening years would have brought the price down to a good range. Well, prices are down, but everything I have found has video, pictures, recording, games, ebooks, etc. I just want a music player. (Actually I don’t care if it has ebooks, but none of the others). Do they make those anymore? We are not going to allow our kids to own smart phones or tablets, and I don’t want a handheld device with many of the functions of smartphones, either.