They're in pajamas until lunch time, more often than not (on days when we're home). Usually after lunch they get dressed to go out and play.

I'm reading Ender's Game (was pre-reading it to see if DS9 could read it yet; I've already decided no, but I'm planning to finish it anyway, since I've started). I can only handle Ender's Game in relatively small doses, so I just started Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts. I'm pretty sure I can finish at least one of them this week. I'm also listening to Anne Tyler's Noah's Compass as an audiobook, but I doubt I'll finish it this week.

That's only if you're staying at a value, though (the part about sit down meals not being included)....you get the quick service dining plan for free dining at the values (used to be regular one until a couple of years ago :()...moderates and deluxe you get the regular plan. Whether free dining is the best discount or not depends on your situation...I've done the math and, for us, it's definitely the best (we're a family of 5, get 2 value rooms, and upgrade to regular dining). If you want to stay at one of the more expensive deluxes and have younger kids, you can usually save more with a room only discount. For our upcoming September trip, we're thinking of doing 5 nights at Pop with free dining, then switching to the Contemporary with a 35% off code (and no dining plan) for 3 nights...just to get a chance to stay at a deluxe for awhile.

It was really well done. It's based primarily on interviews with six different defectors (along with a lot of historical and political information), and she does a great job of weaving the stories together into a coherent narrative. I think they all defected in the mid to late 90's, maybe into the early 2000's, so it largely deals with conditions in NK in the 90's. There's also some stuff at the end about defectors trying to integrate into South Korean society, which is another fascinating thing to read about.

I'm going to join in, even though I told myself I didn't want to officially do the challenge this year (after my miserable failure last year), because I've been reading so much so far this year. Maybe I will get to 52! My new Nook is helping :) so far I've finished: Sleepwalk With Me by Mike Birbiglia Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley After This by Alice McDermott The Giver by Lois Lowry Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick ...and now I'm reading Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura and Lisa Ling. I'm on a bit of a North Korea kick. I also have Anne Tyler's Noah's Compass checked out as an audiobook, and I'll probably start that tomorrow.

Well, either you eat them or you have some retired chickens roaming around. Or you could give them away to someone who doesn't mind doing the eating (older chickens, FWIU, aren't good fryer chickens; they're tough and are only good for stews and that type of thing). We're not really there yet with any of ours--our older hens just turned 3, and they're still laying very well--but we plan to just keep them around indefinitely. We figure we'll get 2-3 new chicks every few years so that we always have a good number that are laying well. My understanding is that they usually don't stop laying entirely until they're pretty old; they just slow down. So if you used to get 5-6 eggs a week from a 2 year old hen, maybe you'd get 2-3 from a 6 year old hen. It's pretty hard to get accurate information about how much older chickens lay and about chicken life expectancy (I've heard everything from 7-8 years up to 15 or 16) for obvious reasons--it's a fairly rare chicken who gets to die from old age.

Definitely. We have 7 different types--not a problem at all.

Mine are in a 6 foot fence (well, at night they're locked up in the coop; but during the day they're free in the yard). They can definitely get over it when they're young; we only have one who tried to get over more than once or twice, though. She's one we added to the flock later, so she wasn't very comfortable with the other chickens. She flew over the fence over and over, so we finally had to clip her wing feathers (which is pretty easy; we just watched a video online and then did it). I'm hoping she'll be over her wanderlust by the time they grow back in and we won't have to keep doing it. In general, though, IME even if chickens CAN get out of their usual area, they don't want to. They're very much creatures of habit. I have a couple of hens from breeds with reputations for flightiness and wandering, and even those two are perfectly content to stay in the yard.

I would leave mine for a weekend, but probably no longer than that. Just because they tend to make a mess with their food and water (and sometimes manage to knock it over).

You can order them through the mail, buy them at a feed store in the spring, or look on Craigslist or somewhere and buy them locally. I've ordered from Ideal and from My Pet Chicken (I believe they get their chicks from Meyer???), and had pretty good experiences with both. I think the main advantage of ordering from a hatchery is that you can get exactly what you want as far as breeds. And they'll sex them for you; locally bought chickens are more likely to be straight run (a mix of males and females). There are TONS of breeds that lay brown eggs. We have a Buff Orpington, two New Hampshire Reds, a Plymouth Rock, and a Cuckoo Maran for brown egg layers. Of these, the Buff Orpington is probably my favorite. She's very calm and sensible, reliable layer, good for kids. The Cuckoo Maran lays darker brown eggs. I'm not crazy about ours; she's not very friendly, and she's not a reliable layer (I have a thread on here where she wasn't laying at all; she suddenly started again a few weeks ago and now lays an egg almost every day. who knows how long it will last, though). We have two Easter Eggers that lay green eggs. Easter Eggers (a lot of hatcheries will call them Ameracaunas or some variation) are sort of a mutt version of an Araucana, which is a rarer breed. around 5-6 months they have to stay somewhere really warm until they get all their feathers. We kept ours in the basement, with a heat lamp on 24/7. You can always find someone to give/sell eggs to! We started with 5; we have 9 now. I would definitely get at least 3; that way if you lose one (not rare with baby chicks), you'll still have at least two. Chickens aren't happy without chicken friends. Have fun! Chickens are great :D

I have that CD :D ...love it! I also think that, aside from being catchy, they're great little summations of the sun signs. For me life is fun....'cause I am number one.

I reuse the bags from store bought bread to store mine.

But according to the article, the tropical one is the one we've always used in the west anyway.

Apparently, it was all a big misunderstanding: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/13/no-your-zodiac-sign-hasnt-changed/?iref=allsearch thank goodness, because I really couldn't have handled being a pisces.

I have a Nook and a library card from the Free Library of Philadelphia on its way to me (for $15/year). I've already made a list from their site of around 40 ebooks that I want to check out when it gets here, and I'm not even close to halfway through the list of books they have (they have around 4000 ebooks). So that alone makes me very glad I went with a Nook.

Thanks everyone! Some of these he's already read (or had read to him) but a lot are ones I hadn't heard/thought of before. I did know about the sequels to The Giver (I hadn't read them before, but I'm reading Gathering Blue now and I'll either give it to him for school or just see if he wants to read it on his own at some point. I keep eying Ender's Game...my brother just read all of them and suggested it, but wasn't sure if Ari's old enough...I just bought it for my Nook, so I think I'll read it myself and see what I think.

Another non-wine-lover who doesn't mind the Two Buck Chuck Merlot.

I actually have Have Spacesuit, Will Travel on my list of potential reads for him; will check out the other one, too--thanks!

other suggestions? Primarily for school reading, so I'm looking for things that are well-written and meaty--good for discussion, thought-provoking; not fluffy. He's a strong reader and not an especially sensitive (to scary/disturbing stuff) kid.

DH and I use one, and my oldest son won't get rid of his, but I don't use them on my younger sons' bunk beds. It was incredibly liberating when I realized I could get rid of the top sheet for them.

This is what becomes clear to me whenever these threads happen: for those of us for whom letting our babies keep all their body parts is the default position, the "medical benefits" of circumcision sound ludicrous. Obviously we would require a much, much higher risk/benefit ratio to start removing any other body parts as a precautionary measure. Had we never heard of circumcision before and someone presented these reasons to it for us, it would sound just as patently absurd as suggesting routine appendectomies or mastectomies, if not more so. When I start (as I do) from the position that of course I'm not going to cut off part of my baby's penis, the arguments in favor of circumcision sound ridiculous. For them to make any sense at all, one has to come at it from the position that keeping a foreskin or cutting it off is pretty much a toss up to start with. And in countries where circumcision is unheard of for infants, later circumcision for "medical reasons" is also incredibly rare.

My kids got dressed themselves and were out playing (one of them in crocs and one of them with no gloves) before DH and I got up. When they came back in, we did some light school for about an hour, then we all went out to play for awhile. Now they're drinking hot chocolate, after which we'll probably do some history before lunch. So we're having a sort of semi snow day.

Where's my snow?! People on Facebook keep posting pictures of tons of snow in Atlanta already, but not a thing here (an hour or so north of the city). They've already canceled school in our county for tomorrow, though.

I voted laundry, but really it's only the putting away part that I mind. I need to get my oldest at least to start putting his own away (my very oldest, DH, already does his own :)), but I have a sort of overly complicated system. I probably need to let the system go...

Or routine appendectomies for, say, all 4 or 5 year olds. That would save nearly 400 lives a year in the US, no one (at least in industrialized countries) needs an appendix anyway, and the complication rate is about the same as for circumcisions (or much lower, depending on where you get your stats).