How to Get Your Child to Love Reading has a list in it called something like "Books you have to read before you're 13," and I've really liked it. I pulled most of my oldest DS's 3rd grade reading from that list, and I plan to do the same for the DS7 next year. It's mostly fairly recent fiction (the past 50 years or so) and a blend of the award winners and standards you'd expect and some more obscure, off-beat choices. In the past, I've been able to find the list online...I'll look around and see if I can find it again.

I like to remind myself that for every time I think about not mentioning something like that, a bunch of other people probably actually don't mention it ;) :iagree: (my son's the same age as yours--a few weeks away from 8, so I figure he's a very young 2nd grader anyway). I'm hoping for a big "click" (like he had with reading last year) that will speed things up a good bit. But I'm not worrying about it much at the moment.

I'm glad to see my DS isn't the only one who'll still be working on 2B at the beginning of third grade. He's doing well right now, but he, uhh...takes his time with math. Anyway, here's our third grade list so far: Math: Singapore 2B/3A Science: science in a nutshell kits plus related books/possibly a lego physics class, depending on finances LA: MCT Island level, WWE 2/3, lots of reading, poetry memorization History: SOTW 2 and other reading Languages: Song School Greek, outside Spanish class

Just want to point out that we had no way of knowing my son was having hearing problems without the screening. He spoke early and well. He never complained about his hearing, and we never noticed him having any trouble hearing. That's because he hears perfectly out of one ear, so when he's with immediate family and in relatively quiet situations, he hears just fine. The reason I link his hearing loss with his social anxieties is that unilateral loss becomes a big deal in groups and in situations with lots of background noise. With just one good ear, you can't tell where sound is coming from and it can be hard to pick out what someone's saying to you from all the background noise. But just based on the fact that he freaked out in group settings, we never could have guessed it was because of hearing loss. Most kids with social anxiety don't having hearing loss, after all. He was saying 500 words at 21 months. He almost never had ear infections. We have no family history of hearing loss. There was just no way to know without the screen. Not trying to single you out or to suggest that you're wrong about your kids' hearing. Obviously most kids hear just fine. But after our experience, I'm a big advocate for screenings even if you don't suspect there's a problem. I still feel really sad and guilty when I think about what DS went through and how we might have been able to prevent it or at least alleviate it somewhat.

My ped. does routine hearing screenings at certain appointments. My son has unilateral hearing loss, and the first clue we had was when he failed the hearing screen at his 5 year check up. So I'm a big advocate of hearing testing, too. My son has a lot of social anxiety, much of which I suspect we could have avoided had we caught his hearing loss earlier (she actually tried to do a screen when he was 4, but he wasn't being cooperative, so we put it off a year).

DS is halfway through 6a right now, and our current plan is to do Art of Problem Solving's Pre-algebra next (not out yet, but it's coming out this summer).

oh, goodness. my list (as always, with a bias toward modernism and southerners): Willa Cather Edith Wharton Zora Neale Hurston Eudora Welty Katherine Anne Porter Flannery O' Connor Toni Morrison Marianne Moore Edna St. Vincent Millay H.D. Gertrude Stein Alice McDermott Adrienne Rich Gwendolyn Brooks Elizabeth Bishop Emily Dickinson Mary Oliver Sylvia Plath

I'm a little panicky at the thought of next year, because I'll have two doing MCT for the first time (one Island, one Voyage). We're sticking with it because it's my thing (pre-kid I was working on a phD in English) and it's something I enjoy spending time on...finding a way to fit it in is another matter. Part of what I'll probably do is farm out math with my oldest to DH (who's a math teacher. We complete each other, academically speaking :)). But I get it. I gave up on Right Start math after less than a full year because I was going insane spending so much time on it. There are only so many hours in the day.

...reading more of the article...I'm just so...not thinking like the people who plan school lunches. It's so weird to me that the idea is that we have to give kids flavored milk otherwise they--gasp!--won't drink milk at all! I don't think milk is evil; I think it's a pretty efficient way to get a lot of nutrients into kids, and it doesn't seem to have any negative effects for me or my kids. But I certainly don't think it's essential. Two of my kids don't drink milk unless it's chocolate, so they...don't drink milk very often.

School lunches are fascinating. Sometimes I feel guilty because my kids occasionally drink Sprite when we go out to dinner, and then I read about kids drinking chocolate milk every single day at school, and I feel much better about myself. chocolate milk is delicious, and, really, I'd rather my kids drink that than sprite, since it has fat and protein in it in addition to sugar, but I can't imagine letting them have it every day.

I hear exactly the opposite here :D. It works out well; he teaches high school math, and I definitely would rather have my job than his, too!

:iagree: DS7 was very similar...a big, sudden leap just before he turned 7, and now (just before 8) he's a voracious reader who's been reading stuff like Narnia and Harry Potter for months. We started reading lessons when he was 4 1/2 or 5, and I kept at them, but I kept them light and very brief, because I didn't want him to associate reading with misery. Slow and steady wins the race sometimes.

Hmm....well, I wouldn't really classify my second DS as a late reader, but he certainly struggled more in learning to read than his brothers did. My oldest was reading Magic Tree House books at 4; his younger brother was struggling through Frog and Toad at 6 1/2. Now he's almost 8, reading well above grade level, and I can't begin to tell the difference between his reading ability at this age and his older brother, the early reader. I'm not sure what that means for the poll....I guess 2nd grade was the great equalizer here...but my older son still reads well above grade level; it's just that now his brother, who started much later, does too. I tend to think there's a very big difference between the skill set involved in learning to read--actually learning to sound out and recognize words--and what's involved in being a reader. I'm not sure if that makes sense...my oldest and middle kids learned to read very differently, I think...my oldest has a great visual memory and could see a word once and remember it forever, whereas my younger had perfectly age-appropriate decoding skills, but for a long time needed to sound out words every time he came to them, even if he'd seen them a million times before. So THAT part of the process took him a lot longer, but once he had that down he was golden; his comprehension was always great. I've found watching my kids learn to read in different ways completely fascinating (although I have to say that I'm relieved that my youngest is of the self-taught great visual memory variety; it was a lot more tiring teaching DS#2 to read...but also very gratifying).

We've had Jasper, my grandfather's name, on our short list a few times (although when this information was relayed to my grandparents, my grandmother remarked, "he doesn't like his name; he goes by Jack!") My grandmother (Jasper/Jack's wife) is Evelyn, which is kind of on the upswing. And DH's grandfather was Leo...Ari is sort of named after him, in a roundabout way--but I've also heard of a few baby Leos. DH's grandmother was Hilda, and I sometimes wonder if that will ever make a comeback. It seems like the sort of name that could. Our parents all have very 40's/50's names that are nowhere near ready to come back (Allen, Barbara, Carl, Ann) We each have a Catholic mother, so there are about a million Marys out there, too. ETA: my dad's side of the family is very southern, so we have some winners out there like Mozelle, Crawford, Voncile, and Otis (pronounced, for no apparent reason, Ottis)

yes, there will be poop all over the place. We have "chicken shoes" that everyone changes into when they go out in the yard with the chickens, and it works out fine. But the chicken yard doesn't take up all of our property and isn't the main place the kids play outside.

On one hand, I'd say that if WW is working for you and you're happy with it (and feel like you can keep doing it long term), then if it ain't broke don't fix it. On the other hand, I'd say that there's more to eating than whether you're fat or thin. My mom lost a bunch of weight a few years ago and has maintained it with really strict calorie-counting. But she has type 2 diabetes and her blood sugar is poorly controlled even with medication, and she's also on meds for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She pays very little attention to what she eats beyond just the calorie counting, and IMO, she'd be doing much better if she'd cut her carbs way down. That family history of diabetes is much of the reason I finally decided to start eating low carb. I'm actually not losing much weight...I've lost about 10 pounds, but that's over the course of 4 months. That's discouraging (and I just had bloodwork done last week to check my thyroid, et. al, and I'm not so patiently waiting for those results), but it is working better than WW ever did for me (I'd generally lose 5 pounds then stall for...umm, ever). And, more importantly, my blood pressure is great and my blood sugar has been really good and stable. I don't get blood sugar crashes when I don't eat for a few hours like I used to and I don't get crazy sugar cravings anymore. SO...all of that to say that I think for ME keeping carbs low is definitely the way to go, because I know that I'm prone to blood sugar issues and that this fixes them. Even if I were losing weight with WW I would still think this was better because of that. But that doesn't mean it's true for everyone.

Jill Krementz' A Very Young Circus Flyer Out of print, but they're cheap on Amazon. I love this series of books (I had A Very Young Rider when I was a kid. It's non-fiction, told from the child's point of view, about his experiences living and performing with the circus. Lots of photographs. Also, Jill Krementz is Kurt Vonnegut's widow. Irrelevant trivia! ETA: x-posted!

I'm trying to think of books where the dog doesn't die...There's always Ribsy, but that might be a bit young. ETA: apparently No More Dead Dogs addresses that very issue. Looks great--I'll have to check it out!

Sounder Where the Red Fern Grows Roger Caras has a book that I LOVED when I was a kid called Yankee: Inside Story of a Champion Bloodhound. It's about what the title suggests--raising and showing a Bloodhound. I think it's out of print now, though. and it's non-fiction, of course.

I think of "essentials" as, generally speaking, the Nicene Creed. Certainly I've never had a problem as a universalist in either my DOC church or the UCC church where we were members before. I grew up evangelical (well, I'm a religious mutt: half RC, half Baptist), so I get what you're saying...but I think you might find that a kind of theological openness compatible with your beliefs is more common than you might expect in mainline protestant denominations.

I think there are a number of denominations that are of the "in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty" school of thought. I like my Disciples of Christ church because questioning and disagreement is actively encouraged. The UCC is the same way.

A ha! I'm really tired of vampires taking all the good names.

(I'm not sure there's ever been a baby name thread that I haven't posted in) Okay, now I can't stop looking at the SSA lists....Rosalie was one of my top 3 girl names in my graveyard of unused girl names. It wasn't in the top 1000 until 2009, when it entered at 837. Last year....590! what happened with Rosalie? Is there some pop culture Rosalie that I don't know about? Fascinating! ETA: I'm fascinated in general by how much easier it is to come up with a girl name not in the top 1000 that's still actually a name than with boy names. I consider some of our unused girl names to be less weird than our actual boy names, yet they don't make the top 1000 (Susanna and Delia come to mind). Why are there so many more girl names!? It's not really fair.

They've all gone up again. Sigh. I wish they would stop that. Ari is poised to crack the top 500 next year. The others are in the 400s (Gus is really August). I suppose I shouldn't really freak out since it's very likely none of them will ever make it to the top 100. Also, it might be a bad sign if no one else liked the names we picked.

The only way I'd want to go with the quick service plan is if it were a very short (say less than 4 or 5 days) trip, and I didn't want to spend the time sitting in restaurants. Tips are definitely something to think about though...last year was the first time we were there on the dining plan since it stopped covering tips, and they add up really fast since the meals are so expensive.