Based on your list...what about Half Magic and the three books after it?

I have the MH Abrams book (albeit a much older, likely outdated version), but I'm hoping to find something that's aimed at a slightly younger crowd. Do they even make such a thing for the middle grades? If not, is there one for high school students that's especially clear and readable? I basically just want to have something on hand as I discuss books and poems with my oldest next year. I'm not going to hand it to him to read, but I want to start introducing some terms and concepts to him, so I'd like a reference where we can go together to get information (and just something that would be a good book to have around all through high school). Any favorites? TIA!

I haven't ordered any yet, but I have my eye on several of the Smithsonian Folkways collections for our American History. They have collections from pretty much any period or genre you can think of.

I have the MH Abrams book (albeit a much older, likely outdated version), but I'm hoping to find something that's aimed at a slightly younger crowd. Do they even make such a thing for the middle grades? If not, is there one for high school students that's especially clear and readable? I basically just want to have something on hand as I discuss books and poems with my oldest next year. I'm not going to hand it to him to read, but I want to start introducing some terms and concepts to him, so I'd like a reference where we can go together to get information (and just something that would be a good book to have around all through high school). Any favorites? TIA!

We pay a little over $2/pound for our grassfed beef. Ours is not certified organic, and it's a guy we found out about through word of mouth. The certified organic farm that sells to lots of trendy restaurants charges $5/pound. I wonder how much of the price of grassfed has to do with its typical target market and the fact that the people buying it have seen what Whole Foods charges ;) On the other hand, I don't see many organic farmers getting rich selling beef, so I certainly don't begrudge them the price. I just can't afford to pay it, so we buy from the $2 guy.

Grassfed beef is very lean. I would say the ground beef is as lean as anything you can buy at the store (if you're talking about getting grassfed). I think it's better tasting, but it has a different flavor--once I got used to it, other beef tasted very bland to me.

Watching this thread with interest and about to go check out some of the links... We're UCC, and up until now we've just done Bible stories (The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories is what we've used this year) and my oldest son reads to himself sometimes from the NRSV (which I like as as translation and also find very readable for younger kids who are strong readers). But I'd like to do something more formal and academic for my oldest next year. I may go with just giving him passages to read and discussing them together, though, pulling in some stuff from adult commentaries and references that I have.

worms?

Have you checked with your insurance company to make sure they won't cover private speech? My son's was covered until we had to change insurance companies, but I think it was only because he has a hearing loss that they agreed to cover it. Still worth checking on, if you have insurance. We switched over to the school system once our insurance company cut us off, and we had an okay experience, but there's definitely much less of a sense of urgency with the school system, much more of a tendency to put you off than with our private therapist.

Well, my dh is a math teacher with his math degree and my father-in-law is a math professor and number theorist with his collection of math degrees. So nothing beyond the obvious there. But DH studied operations research a lot in college and might well have concentrated on that had he gone to grad school. It's about...umm, well, the example I always remember is planning out ambulance routes so that they're as efficient as they can be. Stuff like that. He minored in computer science and spent the first few years out of college doing web programming.

Ahh--that might be it. It just seems weird to announce that YOU'RE not participating in the recession as a way of trying to get other people to come in and buy stuff from you. Because, you know, maybe the people driving by ARE participating.

Really? You mean I might be overthinking this? I don't know...THAT'S never happened to me before ;) I was thinking maybe it was some kind of riff on "render unto Caesar" gone horribly awry. ETA: x-posting...responding to the "trying to be funny" posts.

There's a store near my house that sells various lawn and garden decorations (wind chimes, stepping stones, birdhouses, etc). Maybe inside it's also a regular gift shop; I don't know--I've never gone in. Anyway, they have a billboard outside that has read, for months now, "Recession is not Biblical. We are not participating" and then something about how you need to come inside and buy stuff. Does anyone know what they mean by this? Recession is not Biblical so if you don't come in and give us your money for stuff you don't really need, God will be mad at you? Why is recession not Biblical? Why do they think God wants me to spend money at their store? I am just...perplexed. I'm generally fairly up to date on various threads of religious thinking, even the ones I disagree with, but I haven't heard this anywhere else.

Depends on the hospital...I've had babies at 3 different ones; I don't think any of them required IV (heplock, yes). One of them was fine with eating and drinking. My first was 24 hours--almost all of that with contractions no more than 3 minutes apart. I always say I recommend skipping your first labor and starting out with your second. 6 hours and 100x easier than my first.

I know this is a typo, but it's very true for a lot of men I've met :lol: I think the gap year is a great idea for a lot of kids. I taught freshman comp when I was in grad school, and so many of the kids clearly didn't really want to be there, were doing it because it was expected of them, and didn't appreciate being there at all (and their grades reflected that). An extra year might have done wonders for some of them. In GA, we have a lottery funded scholarship program that pays full tuition at public colleges, but I've heard that a huge percentage of freshman lose it after the first year because they don't maintain a B average. So my kids had better be ready to buckle down and study when they go to college unless they want to be working full time to put themselves through college.

My 7 year old doesn't, but he's pretty weak on narrations and really resists doing them. I'm still deciding whether we'll add in narrations for history next year or not. He also really resists history (I promise he does like some things--just not the same stuff I think is fun. He's into math and science), so my main goal there is to get him more interested in it.

Sometimes. I've read Ramona the Pest twice now, but DS#2 wasn't as into it as my first, so we didn't re-read all of Ramona. We're re-reading Charlotte's Web, and I will be thrilled to read it again to my youngest, too. So, yes, but only the best ones.

A big chunk of it is teacher salaries...although it sounds like this particular district might be a little too fixated on lighting :). That's the reason you'll see per student costs so much lower in other countries--and why the arguments claiming they do more with less money require an asterisk--teacher salaries and benefits are usually lower in other countries because the government provides more of the services that employers cover here. So, anyway, first you'd need to pay yourself a salary and cover your health insurance and retirement fund out of that $8700.

FWIU, it's generally assumed that they used donor eggs, but they haven't talked about it publicly (I don't know for sure; maybe they have talked about it). I think they decided to have more children after their older son died in a car crash.

I bought it on impulse from Amazon today...because I was ordering something else anyway, so why not? ;)

DH is a teacher. He's at school 7:30 to 4 every day (and then he tutors for extra $ 4 days a week, but that's not part of his regular job). And then of course he works at home pretty much every night grading papers and/or preparing for his classes. But then of course he has a lot of time off. So it's hard to say. In reference to the post upthread, while it's true that many salaried professionals work, like teachers, more than 40 hours a week, it's also true that most of them with his education level are making 2 to 3 times as much as my husband. Money is absolutely a sacrifice we're willing to make for more time together as a family...but it IS a sacrifice. DH worked at a non-profit IT job before he started teaching 6 years ago. It will be another 7 or 8 years before he works his way back up to the same salary teaching that he was making at that (non-profit, mind you) job. If we weren't compensated for that loss of income with more time together, he wouldn't be doing it. I would wager that a great many of the best teachers feel the same way. ETA: ...and now I'll get off MY soapbox ;)

Popovers use a lot of eggs, relatively speaking. My recipe uses 4 (for a dozen popovers). Not going to use up ALL your eggs, of course, but I've been baking them instead of other breads when I have too many eggs--uses up some eggs and I have a quick, high protein bread around for the kids to snack on or eat for breakfast.

I got it today, too! J in Santa Ana sure has been busy lately! I was guessing maybe they bought lists of addresses from somewhere I've actually bought seeds from.

We use/have used a lot of their books, and they've all been a big hit around here. We've used Building Thinking Skills, Mind Benders, Mathematical Reasoning, Science and Math Detective. I love their stuff!

Incidentally, the salary for a 40 hour week, 52 weeks a year (i.e. no vacation) at $40/hr would be $83,200. That's a great salary, but it's not an outrageous one. Plenty of people with no overhead, people who just take home a paycheck from someone else, make that much (and get benefits worth much more on top of that). I would suggest that the thinking that because someone is doing something useful and worthy like "helping children learn" s/he should be paid LESS than other people is...a little backwards. Can you tell this is kind of a personal subject for me? :) Listen, I TOTALLY get how hard it is to afford stuff like this. But I don't think the solution is to tell your friendly neighborhood tutor that s/he has an obligation to take less than the market supports for his or her services. Would you tell your friend who was selling her house that she really ought to price it under market value because a lot of people need a house and can't afford one? This isn't fun money for us; it's an important part of our income. Like I said, if someone couldn't afford it and wanted to propose a barter arrangement, he'd be all over that (he's worked out bartering arrangements of massage therapy for computer programming before, in fact).