I'd likely ignore it completely. I do not respond to randoms imposing themselves on my time and expecting to elicit my free labour. I also have nothing at all to do with the education department and do not believe for a second they are interested in my thoughts. Eta - actually that's not strictly true, I follow the law in my state regarding HS registration which involves the education department and I'm not happy about it. At most, I would encourage them to advertise for volunteer participants through our well known home education networks - after speaking to and being vetted by the leaders of said networks.

It is effed up. The head of UK trans charity mermaids talks about how her husband got rid of all the 'girly' toys. The same charity that uses this slide for educating teachers/police officers/politicians... There is a doctor (clinical and developmental psychologist and head of a US gender clinic) saying that a sign of being trans was when a baby girl rips out their barettes or a baby boy unsnaps his onesie to make it a dress. "And at age one would unsnap them to make a dress, so the dress would flow. This is a child who was assigned male. That’s a communication, a pre-verbal communication about gender." https://4thwavenow.com/2016/09/29/gender-affirmative-therapist-baby-who-hates-barrettes-trans-boy-questioning-sterilization-of-11-year-olds-same-as-denying-cancer-treatment/ You're unable to understand the new concept of gender because it is purposely undefined. It is an innate feeling of knowing something. That's literally all we have to go on and that's what laws are being changed based on and kids are being sterilized because of.

I don't think the parents would articulate it that way, but there are a whole lotta trans kid stories that start with 'I wasn't allowed to grow my hair/wear dresses and my parents punished me for playing with dolls, so we went to the gender clinic when I was 5.' Which is one of the reasons why some of us are concerned that parts of trans ideology reinforces sexist stereotypes, imo.

Social workers are just people too, some with biases and prejudices. That is why there are legal standards of practice. That is why there are boxes to tick, to allow them to do their (very difficult) job professionally and within the law. Most jobs have professional standards for a reason. I find the emotive guilt trips, about helping abused children (as if we don't all want to help actually abused children,) as an excuse for allowing an overstep of power to become the professional standard really quite dangerous. They can figure out what is going on by starting with the presumption of innocence, by starting with respect for the privacy of the home and by working within their legal remit to source actual evidence. Now, those legalities will be different everywhere and so it should be up to the cps worker- the one with the training and the power - to work professionally within those legalities.

It doesn't matter, cps is the one with the power and the standards to follow. They know that there is a culture of fear for a lot of the parents they surprise with a visit, they should be very careful about abusing that. They should - at minimum - say, every time someone kindly invites them in, "thank you, legally you have no requirement to allow me entry into your home and not doing so would have no effect on your case." What I'm saying is that the correlation they are seeing is a direct result of an abuse of power, and it is the remit of the party with both the power and strict responsibilities under the law (not the citizen who is entitled to presumption of innocence) to know the law and behave professionally.

Yes, but it's only a red flag now because cps have normalised the expectation of overstepping the legal boundary of the private home. People upholding the letter of their rights should never be a red flag. Government workers who routinely overstep theirs is a red flag. I'm annoyed because I believe that in the case of interfering between parents and children the standards should be very high and they should be enforced.

I do get what you're saying Bluegoat, but to this above part of your quote - yes. If following the legal process doesn't provide enough evidence to encroach upon the boundary of the private home, then what else can they legally do?

I hope everything resolves quickly for you Ananda

Also, make sure all the ash drawers are cleaned out. Clogging can impede the airflow and cause a backdraft.

Ugh, another life? Getting through one is painful enough!

Origami? Card making? I had great success with a similar age group making and playing with geoboards - I used thick cork tile and lots of push pins, the kids had to push all the pins into the grid design and then I had picture cards with rubber band designs to copy. For origami/cards, I would have a couple of example designs made up, some explicit instruction sheets printed off (so they can take home if they wish) and I would also be there making with them at the same time- to demonstrate any tricky steps. Does most of the bad behavior happen when there's a lull in the activity? Is there one or two ring leaders? I might try having a couple of activity stations set up, so that there is something to go to if the planned activity lulls. It doesn't have to be related. If there's some definite trouble makers, I might intentionally split the group up, 1 small group to explore the activity station or do a treasure hunt for books in the library (find 1 interesting book on x, find a book with a picture of y on the cover etc) while you go through the more intense directions with group 2. Do you have any helpers available? I might start giving good-natured trouble makers helper jobs, to get them on your side and taking ownership of the success of an activity.

I liked this, especially the race to calculus/focus on other, real math, thanks for posting.

Yes! There have been times when dh has looked at me, puzzled, and said 'uh, no, that's not what happened! Remember x, y, z...' It is an automatic instinct to just accept her truth as the truth. Though, I don't think my npd person intentionally lies. I think, to them, truth is whatever their current emotions tell you it is. An example, she loves to tell the story of me moving out of home. In her version, I was 16, it came out of nowhere, and dh's family brainwashed me into moving in with them. The reality is that I was 17.5 and graduated, dh's family were not at all happy about it (they were 'get married first' people) but I had nowhere else to go because she was moving across town into her latest boyfriend's house!

Yep, and their vit c, turmeric and homeopathy will cure it anyway...

Well thanks to the podcast mentioned up thread, I just realized that my vaccine scar is from the smallpox vaccine! Which I think is pretty cool.

Yeah, there is definitely a mindset that these diseases are not that bad and we can cure them with vitamin c so why should we quarantine ourselves? They really think coming to a homeschool group meeting with whooping cough is appropriate. 😡 In certain circles, I got a lot of shocked side eyes for admitting to giving my dd the gardasil vaccine.

I honestly don't know. The 'it wasn't so bad' is a very strong beast. Coincidentally, I mentioned something about my childhood to dh yesterday (a child lashing out symptom of the crazy) and his reaction to it - what I thought was a funny story - was fairly extreme. I'm reminded again how far outside of normal it all was...

I voted extended circle. I can think of a few cases that I knew of. A family in our homeschool group. One friend of a friend adopted an infant after many many years of waiting. One of my highschool teachers adopted two little girls internationally. And an old friend was adopted by another friend's family as teens, due to a bad home situation. Adoption is much rarer here in Aus than the U.S. We have long term foster care placements, I know a couple of those.

Yep this! That said, I loved having winter babies. Our winters are more mild than yours. My favourite was having one right at the end of winter, I remember feeding him at a few weeks old - early spring - outside under the dappled light through the leaves and blossoms of our sugar plum tree.

We just started 3rd. My son is doing Beast academy for maths (finishing level 2, starting 3), wwe (again, finishing 2 starting 3), grammar island, spelling power, duolingo Russian. He's working his way through a literature book list and continuing violin lessons. We do bible, history, science, art etc all together. Keeping it simple.

Oh yes, the preschoolers know you've betrayed them! At least you can prepare, discuss and bribe them.

Not bad at all!

Yes, because in feminist theory, women and girls are oppressed due to their biology (not their feminine essence) - females are recognised as those humans of the class that produces ova and are treated as such from birth. Or from before birth these days, which is why there's 120 million missing girls in the world due to femicide. 'Gender' is a word that feminist theorists used to describe the hierarchy, the tool that reinforces female subjugation. Masculine and feminine stereotypes are how this hierarchy is enforced, that's why males who don't perform masculinity well enough are targeted too. So, unsurprisingly, a lot of feminists have a real problem with an ideology that codifies gender and elevates it to a higher importance than physical sex. That's one reason why being called 'cisgender' is so offensive, we don't identify with our stereotypes or subjugation. That's just a simple version, I'm not a feminist academic. One of my issues with transgender ideology (NOT with trans people) is that they have yet to present an explanation of what gender or gender identity is beyond 'feeling' or stereotypes we thought we left behind in the 80s. The other main issue is not with transwomen per se, but with the ideology that relies solely on a person's self identification to determine their gender, which then overrides their sex in accessing female only spaces - like prisons. Some of those spaces feminists fought extremely hard to create (like rape/DV crisis centres). This is really getting off topic so I won't say much else here. It's a slide used in training adults, like teachers, social workers, police officers...

Dd tried some discworld but hasn't taken to them yet. I'm thinking about starting again with an audible version, there's some radio drama type ones.