Lately I am liking my bike with a bike trainer. I mean, I like my bike outside on a bike trail, but then I got the bike trainer so I can use it watching TV, too. I might prefer the treadmill if I had room to keep it in my living room where the TV is. But I don't.

Last I heard is that she will be appearing at some point, though she won't be a regular cast member.

I am tentatively in. This week I'm reading....uhh, Spinning Disney's World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent. It is not quite great literature, but it came up on my PaperbackSwap wish list, so I have it around, and I wanted to start with something easy. And I just finished Love in the Time of Cholera, so I do read real books, I promise! I have no idea what to read next. I need to make some lists.

As always, Doc Jenson at EW.com has a lot to say about it: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20334411_2,00.html

Locke is Jesus...and which one is Judas? I need to go figure that out!

I like Aldi for certain things. We usually do a big trip there once every couple of months and stock up on stuff. I buy cereal there, some baking stuff (cocoa, white flour, sugar, cooking oil), and a lot of snack food (they have great organic blue corn chips).

Would there be a way to give equal, smaller gifts to all the kids at the event, but then give an additional gift to the other kids at another time? Maybe subtly mention to the parents that something else is coming in the mail for their kids?

Yeah, I left off Native Son for the nightmare factor ;); it's kind of always a problem with finding really good contemporary literature for that age, I think... Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying might be really good for a 9th grader. It's not on the same level as some of these others (it's good rather than great, I'd say), but it's worth reading. I'd put Margaret Walker's Jubilee in that category, too.

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon or Beloved, maybe Jean Toomer's Cane is taught a lot in classes on Modernism, but it might be a little inaccessible for a 9th grader

:iagree: I think most of us who have more than one child have observed that different children have different "learning styles" on our own, by watching our children, not by reading studies about it. If people don't have different learning styles, then what's the alternative? Everyone learns best in the exact same way as everyone else? Where's the study for that? ;)

Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Accidental Tourist, or Celestial Navigation

DS1: self-weaned at 18 months when I got pregnant again DS2: weaned with some gentle encouragement ;) just past 2 when I was pregnant again DS3: self-weaned a little after he turned 3

65 right now, 58-60 at night.

...and lowers the risk of a heart attack. You just can't win ;)

I bought the 1st/2nd and 3rd/4th grade books this year to use with a kids' book club I'm running, and, honestly, I'm kind of disappointed in them. Other than a few pages of introductory material, all they are is lists of questions for different books. I don't love the book choices (there are a bunch of Judy Blume books in the 3rd/4th grade level, ranging from Freckle Juice to Blubber....my son has read and enjoyed the Fudge books, and they're fine, but I don't think of them as especially deep. For another thing, Freckle Juice and Blubber are targeted at completely different reading and maturity levels; it just seems strange to me that they're even in the same book). I also wasn't particularly impressed with the questions. A great many of them are simple comprehension questions; the suppose the wolf was an octopus type questions are very rare (maybe one to two per book). The level of analysis it calls for doesn't seem very challenging at all to me. It's all based on Bloom's Taxonomy, so maybe my real issue is with Bloom ;). It's also filled with typos and, more annoyingly, in a lot of cases the author doesn't seem to have actually read the books very carefully before writing the questions. For Stuart Little, he asks, "Suppose the little cat was mean and nasty? How would that have affected Stuart's life?" It's hard to imagine anyone reading Stuart Little and coming away with the opinion that Snowbell isn't "mean and nasty." I mean, his meanness and nastiness is a pretty major plot point. For James and the Giant Peach, he suggests, "Predict what the aunts will do when they find out where James is." Well, since they die at the beginning of the book, my guess is they won't do a whole lot. So, yeah. I was disappointed, especially for the price I paid. You can do as well looking around online to find discussion questions for most of these books.

Are your current dogs youngish? What about some kind of class or activity she could do with one of your current dogs? obedience, if they haven't done that yet, or maybe agility? ETA: Santa can't bring the actual class, of course, but a gift certificate

Okay! First trip was a year and a half ago, so kids were 7, 5, and 2 1/2. We didn't have a sleeper for this trip. The train leaves Atlanta in the evening, so we pretty much got on and it was time to get the kids ready to sleep. It took awhile to get them to sleep, but once they did, they slept fine. DH and I, on the other hand, didn't sleep at all. Not at all. It was weird, because DH can usually sleep anywhere. But aside from that, it was fine. You have LOTS more room in coach seats on a train than you do on an airplane. There are also outlets, so you can bring along a computer and the kids can watch movies (don't forget headphones). There's the dining car which eats up a good bit of time, too, if you go there (the food is not great, and it's overpriced, but it's fun to eat on a train). There's also a snack car where you can buy chips and drinks and hot dogs and stuff or just sit at one of the tables and look out the windows or play games or whatever. If you have a sleeper, it's heavenly (especially if you get a sleeper after riding coach the year before ;)). We had a "family suite" on our trip this past summer, which just means they open up a wall in between two sleepers for you (there's only one per train, I believe, so book early if you want it), so we had a good bit of space. DH and I still didn't sleep that well, but it was fine. Meals are included with the sleeper, and it seemed like they were constantly feeding us. Even though we didn't get on until around 8 or 8:30, we were offered dinner, then breakfast the next morning, then lunch right before we got off in the early afternoon. The kids LOVED the sleeper. We have to change trains in Washington or NY, and the second stretch of the trip is much harder because it's a commuter train--smaller seats and not many other kids making noise to drown out the ruckus ours make. I'm happy to try to answer any other questions....I love the train; I just wish it were cheaper.

On my way out the door, so mostly I'm posting to remind myself to come back later....we've done two long train trips with kids (Atlanta to Boston)...one with sleeper, one in coach. We had a blast! If we could afford to get a sleeper every time, we'd never fly. More later....

Non-crafty me made these: http://familyfun.go.com/christmas/christmas-decorations/christmas-ornaments/buildable-bird-674956/ for the ornament swap I was in. Easy! and cute!

Or if you actually have.... Where would you start? Would you buy a pre-written program or put it together yourself? Would you talk yourself into spending the money on IEW's Teaching the Classics ;)? Would you add in a heavy writing component or mostly focus on discussion (maybe with informal journaling)? This is just a seed of an idea, but I'm thinking of something like this for our homeschool co-op for next year. I taught freshman comp when I was in grad school, with a heavy focus on literature, but this would be maybe 4th to 6th graders or so, I'm thinking. I have trouble getting around to sitting down and doing focused discussion with my oldest on what he's reading at home AND I think a group setting can be really helpful in talking about literature (not to mention that it seems to be something a fair number of homeschooling parents don't feel comfortable with themselves), so....that's why I'm thinking about the class. Still very much in the brainstorming phase, so any and all ideas/suggestions are very welcome!

The whole family. We bought the homeschool tickets for our in-laws, even. Well, my in-laws that is. They're just "parents" for my husband.

I've always assumed this was to make sure it gets done, rather than taking a chance that whoever adopts the dog will neglect to spay/neuter for whatever reason...sort of like how they like to do as many vaccines as possible as early as possible with babies. Is there a medical reason why it's BETTER to do it earlier? I'd never really heard much about the controversy until a couple of months ago, when I saw a post about Chris Zink's work on a list I'm on. I still haven't looked into it much....I'm not sure I'll ever get a chance to make the decision for a dog anyway, since we've always gotten rescue dogs who are already spayed/neutered. That's interesting about potentially wanting to wait with athletic dogs, though...we do flyball with our dogs, and they're certainly not from "premium lines" (or if they are we have no way of knowing)--lots and lots of mutts compete in flyball (and agility).

Update: thanks again, everyone....things are going better this week. I was wrong before, we were actually on week 3, so we just started week 4 yesterday (Homer Price, not Paul Revere :)). He read the passage, then we talked about it without following the WWE script, and then I had him write his own narration instead of dictating it to me. It was fine! Good, even! So I don't know which of the tweaks I made caused the change, or if it was the change of subject matter, or what...we'll see how things go over the next few weeks.

What?! I've never heard of this! It sounds so....wrong. Shudder.

I seem to remember that at my husband's high school they don't give Ds and under 70 is failing. I'll check with him later. Anywhere I've gone to school with number grades, under 70 has been failing.