I voted other because I might go vote today or tomorrow, if I can find time. Otherwise I'll vote on Tuesday.

I think 10th grade was my last year trick or treating, so I was 15? As long as they're dressing up, being friendly, and saying "thank you" I don't have a problem with anyone trick-or-treating.

:iagree: When I was in school, 8th grade was the earliest you could take algebra, but DH is a math teacher and reports that a fair number of kids take it in 7th grade now.

DS7 just started WWE2 a couple of weeks ago, and it actually says in the instructions for the first dictation, "if the student asks you how to spell a word, tell him; this is not a spelling exercise." I watch him as he writes and ask him if he knows how to spell the trickier words as he comes to them.

DH had a friend/co-worker whose wife was unschooled through high school (along with her siblings). We haven't kept up with them that much since we moved away, but I know she is still very pro-unschooling and plans to/is unschooling her own kids. So she certainly considers it a success. That said, she's never been interested in or pursued any kind of conventional career or college. I think she's mostly home with kids now; when we knew her she did some work as a private chef.

But that would be a very different thread. And one in which I imagine a lot more common ground could be found. The OP very deliberately DID make this thread about gender. General cultural shift emphasizing family and community over the marketplace? I'm all over that. That's not what the OP posted, though.

I was just looking at that...you actually just get one of them for the $40, though!

thanks for the suggestions! she has plenty of food and water and bedding (and three nesting boxes to choose from, if she doesn't like one of them). I have nine hens all together, and the others are laying fine (well, some of the older ones are moulting, but they WERE laying fine). I would blame it on less daylight, except that she was never really laying well to start with. Maybe that is it, though...maybe she's going to take the winter off and then start back up with her lay an egg every once in a while pattern in the spring. sigh. Really? I wish I'd heard that before I got her (although it might not have deterred me; I was intent on dark brown eggs. We got her and a Welsummer...she doesn't lay, and the Welsummer was so mean to the kids we had to sell her, so maybe I'm just not meant to have dark brown eggs). If only she had a fun personality or something to make up for it. But she's pretty unexceptional all around.

I have a Cuckoo Maran who hatched in early March. She took FOREVER to start laying at all, then finally layed 2 or 3 eggs. Then she took a break for at least a month. Then she layed maybe half a dozen or so more eggs, at the rate of 2 or 3 a week. Then she stopped again. I'm pretty sure it's been a month since she layed an egg. What's her problem? Is there anything to be done about it, or is she just soup fodder? I'm not really going to eat her; my 4 year old named her, so we're pretty much stuck with her, and it'd be awfully nice if she'd lay an egg every once in awhile! Any ideas?

No personal experience, but here's the review of it (not the vegetarian one, though, it looks like) on dogfoodadvisor.com: http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-reviews/natures-recipe-dry/ My first thought is that dogs are not "naturally" vegetarians, so it certainly wouldn't be a more natural diet for your dog. We recently switched to a high protein food for our dogs (Taste of the Wild), and it seems to have made a big difference, particularly for my 15 year old dog.

Put mine up yesterday, but forgot to post here. link in sig!

My mom does Cocker rescue, and the vast majority of her organization's dogs come from shelters. Most of the shelters in the area have their number and will call when a Cocker comes in. I think lots of shelters keep lists of rescues and will do their best to find somewhere for every adoptable dog (even if they're not technically a no-kill shelter), but some, especially (IME with the shelters around here) the ones in small, rural counties, don't have the staff or the resources to do this.

Ha! me, too.

DH teaches in GA and pays Social Security and a mandatory 5% of his income to the TRS. He also has the option of putting additional money in a 403b.

I can understand someone being taken aback by the question, particularly if she didn't immediately understand what you were getting at, but as a professional she should really be able to handle an awkward question without getting flustered and defensive. I wouldn't want to deal on a weekly basis with someone so sensitive.

We just have one library card, and it stays in my wallet. We have a library book basket, but the books tend to wind up all over the house anyway. When we're going to the library, we just grab all the ones we can find, and I ask the librarian to renew any that are still out. They almost always turn up by the time we hit the limit on renewals. Also, we have fines pretty frequently.

Affordable pet sitters you can trust are hard to find. With cats, you can have someone come by every day or two to feed them. With dogs, you really need someone to stay at the house the whole time. We pay around $250/week for a housesitter, and I think we're getting off relatively cheap (of course, we have a cat, 3 dogs, and 9 chickens).

2 weeks is a really long time to board dogs; it would be very expensive and stressful for the dogs. We go on a two week trip to visit my in-laws every summer, and I start worrying about finding a housesitter months in advance. Figuring out what to do about our pets is the single most stressful thing about traveling for us. I would never assume it was okay to bring my dogs with me to someone's house, but I might ask, because it could easily be the difference between being able to take a trip at all and not being able to afford it.

We use the chewable tablets from Trader Joe's and cut them in half, so it's a really low dose. Works like magic. I hate giving it to him so often, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's harmful, and I really don't know what else to do. This is a kid who slept with a pacifier until he was SIX because he would take hours and hours to fall asleep without it. And no matter how late he stays up, he's the first kid awake the next morning. (also, just to defend my honor as a mother, I do consider being scared to be a "good reason" for getting out of bed and would not charge anyone a dollar for that. It's for general dragging bedtime out as long as possible with endless requests for water, warmer or cooler temperatures, fewer/more covers, sneaking into the other room to talk with brothers, etc.)

At our house, getting out of bed (without a good reason) costs a dollar. ETA: is she having lots of trouble falling asleep? DS7 needs melatonin to help him fall asleep, or he's up for hours and hours after bedtime. Wow--I sound like an awesome mom in this post. I drug my kids and then steal their money!

We pay for the most basic, just the networks cable. The way it works out, they give us a discount on our cable modem for being cable subscribers, so the cable TV is essentially free. We have netflix and use that much more than network TV. We used to watch Lost, and now we watch The Amazing Race. We don't seem to be able to keep up with more than one show at a time. It kind of makes me sad sometimes, because I wish I found the Entertainment Weekly website more relevant (yes, I'm serious. I kind of love Entertainment Weekly).

The church we've been going to is more touchy than I'm comfortable with...they really get into shaking hands and greeting each other; it lasts FOREVER. No one wants to be the first to sit down! It's so much fun to talk to everyone! And then they station the pastor at one door and then someone else who participated in the service at the other door, so there's no way to bypass the line. And then, instead of shaking hands, most of these people want to HUG me! Sigh. I am trying to get used to it, because it does all seem genuine and not fake friendly (and, being Southern, I feel I can recognize fake friendly pretty easily). My 9 year old hates touching strangers way more than I do, and he's gotten very skilled at ducking out unnoticed at the end (he will shake hands, but he draws the line at hugs). Anyway, I hate holding hands. But I guess I would do it, because I hate drawing attention to myself in such situations even more. Maybe I'd secretly pray for someone halfway across the room instead just to be contrary, though.

I consult him endlessly, but, uhh...he's not a lot of help, honestly. Bless his heart. This would be where I tell the story about how he gave me old beer bottles that he found in his aunt's basement the first Christmas we were together, but I won't, because he hates it when I do that. Suffice to say, present selection isn't his strong suit.

My 4th grader is doing MCT Town level, so he has a writing assignment every week there. He does 1 or 2 history summaries a week and usually has some writing to do for an outside biology class he's taking. He does WWE style dictation and narration from the books he's reading for literature. And he spends lots of time writing on his own for fun, too.

I don't think so. DS9 is doing Town this year after doing Island last year, and he regularly sighs and says, "I already KNOW this" because so much of it has been covered before. So far he's actually finding the writing assignments LESS challenging in Town--which is more a matter of personality than technical difficulty; the Island assignments tended to be very open-ended, and he likes concrete.