:iagree: As several people have pointed out, in some social circles (including mine) it would be considered rude to assume it was okay to drop a child off at a pool party without checking first. That's why I asked what the typical situation was amongst your friends. With my friends (and we're generally friends with other families rather than with individual kids) it is assumed that birthday parties will be whole family affairs. I'm not saying that this is somehow a superior way to do things, just that that's how it is. If I were to decide to depart from this custom, I would need to make it really clear that I was going to do so, or there would certainly be misunderstandings. That's why I was wondering how your social circle usually handles parties. Do the other kids who are invited always have drop off parties or do the parents usually stay? I think something else that I'd need to evaluate before I decided someone had "forgotten how to be polite" is what his or her reason is for wanting to stay at the party. Because regardless of what Emily Post says, I do think intentions matter. Why do the parents want to stay? Is it because they're really hoping to score some free pizza? Since it would almost certainly be less work for them to drop their children off and leave, I'd be hesitant to assume ill intent. It would seem to me that they either think they'd be helping you out by providing more adult supervision or they have safety concerns because of the swimming.

Jean Donaldson has a book on resource guarding called "Mine!" that I found really helpful when my dog was guarding high value food and treats. I can't find my copy right now, but I'm nearly certain there's a whole section on guarding furniture, with a very detailed, step by step plan for how to fix it. It's a behaviorist approach--it involves taking baby steps and rewarding the dog for giving you the right response. ETA: Donaldson is also very anti-"it's all about pack order!" thinking. The intro to the book explains it all in a very clear way that made a lot of sense to me....resource guarding is a behavior that makes a TON of sense to a dog and would be a positive trait for a dog to have in the wild (you don't want to be the dog who just rolls over and lets the other dogs have whatever they want). Your dog isn't growling to make a principled stand against you as pack leader; he's growling because he wants the sofa, and that's how he tells you that.

The pool would make me nervous, but more than that it would just be outside the norm in my social group for parents not to be expected or at least welcome to stay at a kid's birthday party. Just because the parents would be MY friends, and, well, that's just how it is. So it wouldn't occur to me to NOT invite parents to my kids' parties. But, like I said, that's just the social convention in my group of friends. If it weren't, my expectations would be different. Have the kids you've invited had their own drop off parties in the past, or have they had parties where the parents are expected to stay?

That would be on the low side of average around here, I think.

Looks good to me! If it were me, I'd probably do more formal phonics in place of spelling...something like Explode the Code has a good bit of spelling built in.

We used to take ours to our county's recycling place/dump. They charged $1 per big bag (i.e. one that maybe 3 kitchen sized bags could fit in). Then DH changed jobs and it wasn't on his way to work anymore and they raised the prices some, so it was no longer worth it.

Right, of course...but this is the first big poll to show a majority in favor of gay marriage. Until very recently, social conservatives could argue correctly that most of the country was not in favor of gay marriage (civil unions have enjoyed majority support for quite awhile now). That argument no longer holds up. I wasn't really arguing with you about anything....I just happened across it and thought it was relevant to the whole civil union/marriage semantics discussion we had going on here.

Huh. CNN, in timely fashion, has just released a poll that shows, for the first time, majority support for gay marriage: Interesting!

It's a fairly recent thing, this association of political party with degree of religious observance. Remember that until a few decades ago (until Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Republicans took advantage of it via the Southern Strategy) Republicans were pretty much unheard of in the South. Certainly Roman Catholics historically vote Democratic and still do in much of the country. I lived in a working class Irish Catholic neighborhood of Dorchester, in Boston for a few years that was full of people who were very religious and relatively socially conservative but who would never dream of voting for a Republican. It's fascinating the way politics have evolved over the past half century, and the way the parties have battled over the claim to the populist mentality.

tomorrow night! There was an e-mail...sometime last week? I just checked, and you're in the cc list on it. Do you want me to forward it to you?

I spent some time a couple of years ago reading through the Amazon reviews and researching some of the "inaccuracies" on my own. In most or all cases that I looked into, what the reviewer pointed to as an inaccuracy was either a case of simplifying to fit the intended audience or something that's a point of dissension among historians. So I did find some places where SOTW presented one view as fact and didn't say, "but some historians believe..." This is fine with me, since I think it's part of my job to make sure my kids understand that historians disagree about things and to use a wide enough variety of sources that they're exposed to a lot of those disagreements. Aside from that, most of the criticisms of SOTW seem to center around religion. Too religious, not religious enough, Protestant bias, etc. Since we're Protestants who generally like secular materials but don't really mind too much if things get a bit religious from time to time, it works for us ;)

My 7 year old is doing it now, and he loves it. It's hard to say if it's been super helpful or not, because his reading had just started really taking off when we got it...so he's definitely improving rapidly, but I don't know if I can attribute much of that to Master Reader. Although maybe so...he's also doing ETC, and there's a lot of overlap in the rules they present; I've noticed that he understands and retains them better when he sees them in MR. If nothing else, it's a way to get him to do phonics practice willingly, even eagerly. It's also nice that he can do it independently. I got a good deal on the older edition; I don't think it would have been worth it for us to pay the full price, just because he's going to go through it pretty quickly (there are 40 lessons, and he finishes one pretty much every day, then takes a few days off in between levels to read the chapter book that goes with it). He did it sporadically over the summer and then has been doing it regularly for 2 1/2 weeks now, and he'll probably finish it in another few weeks.

My boys like legos pretty well, but they're not obsessed. Not a single one of them has had any interest whatsoever in trucks and cars, though. I was way more into legos when I was a kid, I think. I used to build orphanages and nuclear fallout shelters. Then I would plan out exactly which friends and relatives I was going to save and assign them rooms.

I'm every kind of liberal. I'm in Cherokee co.

Sojourners magazine sells a bumper sticker that says, "God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat." I want it, but I don't want to have the conversations about it (or at least not all the time). I can't quite commit to a bumper sticker.

Well, or you could get married by your friend Bob in a private ceremony in your backyard...I shouldn't have said "church"; I guess what I meant was that the word marriage would be yours to claim or not, and to claim however you wanted, in whatever sort of ceremony or lack thereof you chose. It would just no longer be a word with a legal definition. To be clear, I have no objections whatsoever to the government granting marriages to same sex couples; quite the opposite. But I also don't have any objection to making marriage a personal/spiritual/cultural term and having a separate term for a government-recognized arrangement in which two people form a partnership with certain tax implications and legal protections.

But I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) she's saying straight people would get married and gay people would do the same thing but have a different word. Just that the govt would get completely out of the marriage granting business altogether. Everyone, gay or straight, gets a "civil union" or whatever that grants all the legal rights of "marriage." If you then want a church blessing on your union, you also have a church ceremony. This would obviously require finding a church that DOES bless your union, but that shouldn't be an issue for anyone, again, gay or straight, who wants a church marriage. Gay people get married in churches now.

I have a big shelf and a chest freezer in my basement. No pantry and limited cabinet space upstairs, so it's a pretty full shelf.

We need to start a NM bleeding heart liberals club!

How long had they been in their houses? I mean, did they necessarily pay the mortgage off super early, or had they just been paying it for awhile? We had very good timing when we bought/sold our last house, so we made a nice profit on it and moved to a cheaper area. We made a giant downpayment and were able to get a 15 year mortgage. So we'll have ours paid off (assuming we stay here) when we're in our early 40's--just because that's when it will be paid off, not because we do anything special (although I guess opting for the 15 year mortgage is a way of forcing yourself to "pay extra" every month).

My 4th grader is using it, but he's only in the second chapter. He's not a big fan...and there's not much reason to be, from what I've seen so far. It's pretty dry. I'm not sure if we'll stick with it or not. He's also taking a class once a week, so it's a supplement for him.

Hmm...the analogy also looks very different when we assign intentionality to the Mac truck. i.e. a driver. Even if someone knows running out in front of a Mac truck is dangerous (and, not to belabor the point, but we live in a world where not everyone DOES know that God the Mac truck is dangerous), we expect the driver to stop in time if he can, yes? Like, say, if he's omnipotent? Actually, this is exactly why universalism makes sense to me. Otherwise, you're left with God as a Mac truck driver who's running people down right and left to teach them a lesson. ETA: not to mention, a God who deliberately created a Mac truck KNOWING people would be running out in front of it all the time. I think analogies just don't work well with a Calvinist God. He always comes off looking really bad.

What most everyone else said. Wait until he's 7. My 7 yo 2nd grader is doing SOTW1 right now (along with his 9 yo brother who's doing it for the second time and a tag a long 4 1/2 yo), and I think he's the perfect age for it. I know a lot of 5 yo love SOTW 1, but my oldest did it for the first time when he was 5, and he couldn't stand it. It took him until....right around now to develop an appreciation for history.

That makes a lot of sense. DH's school used to offer a "money management" class, but it was specifically for non-college prep kids. This always seemed dumb to me; kids who are going to college certainly need to learn money management skills, too!

I like Jean Donaldson: http://www.jeandonaldson.com/ ETA: although I think maybe she is most helpful to those with insane dogs like my Lucy. Odds are good your dog won't be insane ;)