I'm very proud of myself for finishing my third week in a row!

Interesting...that might work well. We don't really have the money to spend on it, though...we wouldn't have tested in the first place if it hadn't been inexpensive. But it turns out DS has a few too many issues for bargain IQ testing :)

I don't get into that much detail. I hate the "why are you homeschooling?" question, actually, because I could probably name 50 reasons why it works better for us than public school would, and I have a hard time condensing it to something appropriate for casual conversation. But mostly I just say something about how we like the freedom it gives us to individualize the kids' educations.

I find making tortillas to be less of a pain than making loaves of bread (which I do without a bread machine). My recipe is similar to the one linked to above...I can make a double batch, including mixing the dough and rolling them all out and cooking them, in under 30 minutes. You could always get a tortilla press if it's the rolling them out that's holding you back.

We're anywhere from $9-15/mo, no sewer, for 5 people. When we were in major water conservation mode in the thick of the drought last year, we found that taking showers every other day instead of every day made by far the biggest difference in water bills. And kids get baths less frequently...usually once or twice a week, with generous spot cleanings in between.

Mine's up!

No, you're not just cheap. $20/pound sounds very high. I would expect to MAYBE see prices that high for the very best cuts of beef. I just checked the price list of a place near us, and their prices range from $5/pound for ground beef up to $20/pound for filets. Most cuts are in the $7-10/pound range. We pay much less per pound for ours, but we buy in bulk.

I was looking at the Explore yesterday...unknown places are not so much an issue; I think he'd do fine with that. He has to take a standardized test sometime this year because of Georgia's homeschooling regulations, anyway--so testing is something he is going to have to be able to handle, one way or another. ha--good question. Mostly just our own information, and since I've heard it's best to test by 7 or 8, I thought we should go ahead and do it now, and then if we DO need the score, we'll have it. There are a few gifted programs we've considered looking into for him...a college near us offers a Saturday school for gifted kids (which I think we do have enough information for at this point. The examiner told me they'd be happy to write a letter explaining things if we need a score for admission to a program). And I thought we'd look into Davidson's Young Scholars if he qualified (he doesn't, based on what we have right now. He was 99.5th percentile in the perceptual reasoning, and they want 99.9th. But if we had an accurate verbal, who knows?) Really, we just went back and forth for awhile about whether testing would be helpful, and we ultimately figured...why not? But now that we've come this far, it's just kind of irking me that we didn't get an accurate score out of it. But it might well not be worth dealing with another test to get a score. He saw a therapist for most of last year about the anxiety. She thought he was doing well and didn't need to come anymore. There's a lot of history...he has a hearing loss in one ear that we believe led to lot of the social anxiety stuff. He's made huge improvements over the past couple of years (since we learned about the hearing loss and he got a hearing aid). He's doing much, much better than he was before--has a good number of close friends, will talk in small group settings, doesn't show much anxiety in day to day life...but, yeah, he's not there yet with the talking to strangers thing. And then throw him into a test setting where his perfectionist issues come out (he pretty much won't offer an answer to a question unless he's positive he's right, even at home with me)...and, well, you don't get a valid test result. Typing it all out and thinking it through, it doesn't really seem like another test makes sense right now. I'll just have to live with my overwhelming curiosity as to what that pesky verbal score would have been ;) And the nice thing about this thread has been that I've finally learned how to multi-quote!

Thanks, EKS...yeah, I don't really know that there's anything anyone could DO to prevent him from clamming up (aside from taking several months to get to know Ari before attempting to test him, but this seems impractical ;)). But in a couple of years, who knows?

I got my son's WISC IV results back today. We had him tested at a local university after going back and forth for a long time about whether it would be useful to have the score or not. Finally we decided it wasn't that much money, we might want to enroll him in a gifted program of some kind at some point, and, at any rate, it couldn't hurt, right? Well, maybe. They don't usually do feedback sessions, but Ari's results were so fascinating, apparently, that they wanted me to come in and talk about him. This left me spending two weeks speculating as to what his test results were and why they were so darn interesting. Basically, it turns out, his verbal comprehension score is way lower than his other scores--it is, in fact, "Not Interpretable"....because he refused to answer a lot of the questions. He's a VERY shy kid; we've suspected we could get a selective mutism diagnosis for him, in fact, because he pretty much doesn't speak to people he doesn't know well. Had I researched the WISC a bit more beforehand, I would have realized how heavily it relied on verbal answers and predicted exactly what would happen. Oh well. So now I'm kind of...not sure what to do next. If anything. I don't have a full scale IQ score at all (it was also "Not Interpretable" because of the verbal score). The perceptual reasoning score is quite high, but even with that I wonder to what extent I should trust it since he clearly was dealing with a lot of anxiety about having to interact with a scary stranger. I'm wondering if I should look for a non-verbal test he could take. I don't know. Having come this far, I'd just sort of like to have a valid score. What are the options for non-verbal tests? I just read a bit about the Ravens...my concern with that is that it seems like it focuses almost entirely on the same kind of thinking as the Perceptual Reasoning part of the WISC. I think his verbal skills are quite good--maybe even better than his visual spatial skills--so I'd like something that could give us an accurate picture of that. I guess mostly I'm wondering if there's a test that would take the examiner out of the equation--where he could sit and take a test without interacting with someone he doesn't know, so that social anxiety didn't throw things off. ETA: also interesting is that his "similarities" verbal subtest score was actually pretty good--95th percentile. That's the one that requires the shortest answers. Oh--and she said that he often looked like he was about to respond and then wouldn't say anything. I.e. it's pretty clear he often knew the answers but didn't want to talk. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I have no idea. But one time I was putting together a TV cabinet from Ikea, and the directions said, "it is recommended that you be two people to assemble this." I tried and tried, but I could not be two people, so my husband helped. So...what do your directions say? Do they recommend that you be two people?

That's me. I was in in grad school (English phD program) pre-kids.

But JJ Abrams isn't really involved with Lost anymore. And that was the point of negotiating a definite end date for Lost--so that they'd know when the last episode would be and could plot out the storyline accordingly.

Yes. Clear your schedule for the next couple of months first.

Adoption is not the only (nor likely the most common) way for lesbians to have kids. I know far more lesbian couples with children than without. In areas with a large gay population, it's very, very common for there to be multiple children in an average elementary classroom with 2 moms (or 2 dads, although I imagine that's a good bit less frequent). ETA: I don't have numbers, but I suspect perception of how many gays and lesbians have kids is largely dependent on where one lives. I would guess that same sex households with children are far more likely to live somewhere with a large gay population, precisely so that their kids will know other kids with similar families.

My first update since March :blushing: ...hoping to do better this year!

In Georgia, you never really have to keep records of everything. The only thing you send to anybody is your letter of intent and attendance forms. So there's no one but you telling you what counts and what doesn't :)

Again, this line of thought totally mystifies me. Marriage HASN'T always been between one man and one woman. Polygamy is a very traditional form of marriage in many, many cultures. So saying in one sentence that gay marriage shouldn't be legalized because it's so non-traditional that it could lead to the (re)legalization of a form of marriage so "traditional" that its roots go back thousands of years in hundreds of different cultures....it doesn't make much sense to me.

Immigration rights is another big legal issue that a lawyer can't help you with. I was just reading in Time a little while ago about a lesbian couple with 2 sons and one of the moms is now facing deportation because they can't legally marry and she has no other way to stay in the country.

Polygamy has "worked" or did "work" for thousands of years in many cultures, yet one of your arguments against gay marriage is that it could lead to legalizing polygamy. Even if I found "but we've ALWAYS done things this way" to be a compelling argument, which I don't, I have a hard time following your thinking here.

Well, it depends on how small we're talking, but, in general, I'd go with vacations. We have about 1900 square feet for 5 of us, and I don't have any particular desire for anything bigger. I could go a bit smaller for more vacations, in fact!

No...although I see what you're saying. Christian universalism doesn't conflict with Calvinist views of God's sovereignty vs. free will. God still decides who to save; he just decides to save everyone in the end. In an overly simplified nutshell.

One of the things I find most interesting about Calvinism is that it does seem to me that it has far fewer theological differences with Christian universalism than it does with Arminianism. Or at least the theological differences it has with universalism are easier to resolve. In fact, last night I googled Calvinism vs. universalism and the first thing that came up was a somewhat convoluted essay that seemed to be warning against Calvinism with some sort of slippery slope to universalism argument.

My understanding is that parsing a sentence means to break it down and analyze how its parts fit together. So, I think, diagramming is one tool you might use to parse a sentence.

I have. I just haven't necessarily come to the same conclusions as you have ;-).