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Garga

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Everything posted by Garga

  1. I hate sleeveless or cap sleeves. The bottoms of the cap just sit there and roll up a bit in the underarm. Ew. I want my underarms well covered. Well covered. I like sleeves to hit halfway between my shoulder and elbows. I would go with a dress with a shrug. I would try to find a shrug smaller than Vonfirmaths, if you can find one. They make shrugs that fall just under the shoulder blades. Or mabye they don't anymore. I got my shrug at a thrift store, so maybe it was old.
  2. You used the middle school years to teach independence. I didn't. I'm using the time now that he's entering high school. I could be totally wrong, but I felt that he wasn't ready to teach independence yet. For my son, I felt that teaching independence was like teaching him to read. If you try to teach a kid to read when they're not ready, you're just banging your head against a wall. Which is what I did with my son. It was awful. I wish I'd waited until he was older instead of frustrating the two of us to tears every day. I felt that way about independence. My son just wasn't ready until now. In the past when I tried to teach him things related to independence, it was like when I tried to teach him to read when he was 5 and 6. Horrible. But now that he's 13, it's been pretty easy. Sort of like how at 7 reading started to click and it wasn't as painful as at 5 and 6. Then again, I could be wrong for waiting. We could have a horrible year next year being that I'm just now deliberately teaching independence. But I can't go back in time, so I hope it works. :) Not disagreeing with what you did with teaching independence in middle school. Just musing about it. And while my 13 year old is being taught things, my 11 year old is also being taught somewhat alongside him, though not as deliberately. We'll see how it goes with the 11 year old and see if he picks up on this stuff easier than my ds 13.
  3. CLE math is good. It's a series of workbooks with 16 (I think) lessons per book. There are 10 a year, but the first book is a review of the previous year. The lessons are written to the student. It's a spiral type of math, which means that each day they learn a tiny bit of new information and then the rest of the lesson is review. Some of the review was learned that week, some of the review is from weeks ago. It constantly cycles through the concepts so that they're not forgotten. If you google for "welltrainedmind cle math" you'll probably find a bunch of threads about it. It's known for being a very solid program, but as with everything, it won't work for everyone. It does work well for many, many students.
  4. Garga

    WWYD?

    I don't think there's enough information to sort of what she was thinking. She might have been chatting with you and then chatting with him entirely separately. Each conversation could have had nothing to do with the other. Or She could have talked with you, fishing about the potion bottles, because she knew she'd talk to your ds about it and she wanted to confirm with you that he had the bottles before discussing it with him. Perhaps she's talked to kids about taking things home when it turned out they hadn't and the kid got upset. She might have wanted to avoid any drama if she asked your son about it and he hadn't taken the bottles. Or she could have thought your son would lie about it because he'd be embarrassed if she confronted him. If nothing else strange happens, I'd figure that the conversations were mostly separate and that she was just trying to avoid any drama from anyone. She probably felt like there was no reason to involve you in the bottles as it was up to your son to return them since he was the one who took them home. Not in a sneaky way, but in a "be responsible for yourself without mom's help" kind of way. And she probably didn't want him to feel embarrassed for accidentally taking something he shouldn't have, since he didn't know he shouldn't have taken them.
  5. This is what we did--had the attorney right at the beginning. The offer that was made seemed ok to us, but he started pointing out things and saying, "Do you really want to X? Because you don't have to agree to that just because they've asked for it." We didn't know we had the option to make changes to the offer they made us. He saved us money and hassle.
  6. Speaking of awkward. I hate (hate, hate) when the dental hygenist flosses my teeth. All of them snap that floss into my gums and it hurts a lot. My teeth must be too close together or something. They have to use a lot of pressure to get the floss past the teeth and then it snaps right into the gum. So the last time I finally said, "That really hurts. Just let me do it," and she did, but she was really confused by the whole thing. Does no one else find that snapping floss into gums that have just been prodded hurts? Am I the only one sitting there wincing in pain from each snap? Ugh.
  7. It's the small talk. I don't like the small talk. My sons love going to a woman I know who has a salon out of her house. She's the only employee. And when we go, I have to make small talk then, too. I just want to sit and read a magazine, but that would be rude, being that she's the only other adult in the room. I think it's because my small talk tends to confuse hair dressers. I don't know why. At least once every time we go, no matter who we go to, they give me a weird look like I've just said something really bizarre. It happens every time. At this point I'm so skittish that I'll say something weird, that it makes me say something weird. I wish I could just read a magazine.
  8. I just finished reading Smart but Scattered. What I took away from it was to make schedules and charts and to-do lists and link them to points towards rewards. I'm starting small with the bedtime routine. My ds11 and I wrote down all the things that need to be done before bed. I put each to-do on a piece of cardstock and put that blue sticky stuff on the back of it. As he completes each to-do, he moves the piece of cardstock from the "to-do" side of a sheet of cardstock to the "done" side of a piece of cardstock. There is a lot of reminding at first (according to the book) but slowly they start doing these things naturally. You're not a bad mom at all. And I understand if you don't have the energy. I'm only now finally getting the energy to do this and I've been a parent for 13 years. It just didn't seem possible before now.
  9. We sold the last house and then bought this house with an attorney. He charged a few hundred. It was only a few hours of his time all told. When we went to closing, there were a few mistakes in the contract and he asked them to fix them. And they did the fix wrong, so he told them to do it again. My dh and I would have been intimidated by the whole thing, but he handled it for us. I wouldn't buy/sell without any help. The attorney was a good choice for us. Not crazy-expensive, but he made sure the paperwork was 100% correct.
  10. I have an old top loader and it has always taken only 30 minutes per load. I wonder if the Speed Queen is just really an old type of washer? I hear all these stories of new washing machines taking so long. I've always said that whenever my old workhorse washer dies, I'm getting a Speed Queen. I think it won't be much difference. Simple and fast.
  11. Well, do appeal twice in writing. Eons ago I worked at a health insurance company and the loved to deny appeals...the first time. The second time they'd take you a little more seriously.
  12. Fridge died. Backup fridge in the basement started to die from the overload of the stuff upstairs. Car window won't go down. Toilet won't flush unless you hold the handle down extra long. Water softener seems to be dead. Car brakes needed to be fixed. I think that's all right now. It's all blurring together. We did get a new fridge today, so I can scratch that broken appliance off the list. There was a moment of disappointment when the delivery guys sheared off the water hose by accident coming in the door. But the guy stopped back at the house on his way home from work with a doo-dad to fix it. I feel your pain.
  13. Please appeal. And why didn't the hospital confirm all that? Every time someone goes in the hospital, they call the insurance company for the benefits. Why didn't they alert you? Jerks. Appeal, appeal, appeal. I don't even know what you can base it on, but it's crummy that they won't work with you. From their point of view, you are supposed to know your benefits. You are supposed to call and find out. You did make an honest, in good-faith mistake, but they might not care. See if you can talk to someone in the finance office at the hospital for wording to appeal. You simply must try to appeal. And be sure to appeal in writing at least twice. (If you haven't appealed yet in writing, then it doesn't count. A phone call doesn't count.)
  14. I thought of one more. Now be careful with this one and don't let yourself get beat up over it. After a year where I slacked on teaching, I realized that if my kids were sent to a school and I found out that the teacher was slacking the way that *I* had been slacking, I'd have been furious. Don't take this too far, but if you find that you're slacking (and be honest with yourself), consider whether you'd let anyone else get away with slacking on your kids. This is not talking about taking a shorter day than public school. This is not talking about having the kids do traditional school bent over desks. This is talking about taking a good hard look at yourself and being honest with whether or not you're ignoring your own goals for no good reason other than you stayed up too late playing Candy Crush. Or you ended up taking a 2 hour lunch break because you were here on the boards and now the kids don't want to study so you let them go, even though you know in your heart you should have stopped being online an hour and a half ago. If you're working steadily and working toward your goals honestly and are putting in effort then the above isn't for you. But if you're letting yourself slide and have an uneasy feeling in the back of your mind that maybe you're letting things get out of hand, then take stock and make the appropriate changes.
  15. Pick one curric for each subject (if you are picking curric and not creating your own from scratch.) I used to be the queen of "we'll do X math, plus I'll supplement with Y math, and we'll play math games, too!" If you have kids with really high IQs who want to do all that, fine. But if you have kids that are on the average to above-average scale, then just pick one thing for each subject and call it a day. Let them talk, too. I can get into wah-wah-wah lecture mode and not let anyone else say anything. Don't necessarily let them interrupt to be silly all day long, but do let them talk and do let them be a little silly from time to time. I remember this from the book Hold Onto Your Kids: make sure each greet and goodbye is done well. For example, the kids were watching a video for an hour and a half while you did some things around the house and now you're all together about to do some work. Don't just jump right in. Take about a minute to reconnect. Greet each other again. "Hey, guys, how was the movie?" Give them a hug and a kiss and smile at them. You guys have been apart (albeit in the same house and only for an hour and a half) and need to reconnect. Do this first thing in the morning, first thing when you or they walk in the front door after being apart, and after any bit of time apart doing separate activities. Also, make good-byes special, too. A big hug before bed or when leaving the house, etc. Even if you've reconnected with the kids, don't jump straight into homeschooling without another extra hug or kind word or smile. Smile. It's easy to get into teacher mode and have a straight face when you're teaching. Especially if it's something complex like in math or something. Smile a lot. I signed up my son for Spanish classes with a local teacher in a classroom. We sat in on a class to check it out before we signed up. The teacher smiled at the kids the entire time. Just beamed at them. It was such a nurturing environment. All the kids were relaxed and raised their hands throughout the class. She smiled the entire time and said, "Good" or "Yes" whenever they got the right answer and very, very gently said, "Almost" when they didn't. Have set times when you'll end each subject. Don't let them drag on forever...unless the kids want to. But most of the time, once you start a subject say, "We'll work on this for 30 minutes," and set a timer so the kids know when the class ends. Then take a 5-10 minute break before the next subject. This made my homeschool much better for the kids. I had the tendency to keep going and going and going, trying to drum things into their heads. But now, when that timer beeps, we stop, no matter what. We just stop. I thought it would be frustrating to do that, but it's not. It works really well. Usually have a nice routine of how the day will run. (Breakfast, then math, then music, then snack, then history, etc.). If that's a new idea to you it might take a while for the kids to get on board with it, but once they do (after a few weeks), it makes the day run smoother. This isn't always true for everyone. Some people really enjoy a bit of chaos. But most kids like a routine. Above all, number one: relationship. (Like that greet/goodbye thing above.). Gentle answers as much as humanly possible...gentle answers. If something is going wrong, pause before speaking. Don't blurt out things that are too harsh. Pause and think of the gentlest way you can answer. Sometimes you'll have to be firm and not necessarily gentle, but whenever possible, be gentle in your speech. You can be loud if that's you, but say the nice thing whenever you can. Assume the best of them whenever you can. That's what I mean by 'gentle'.
  16. Ha! That's the story of my life, Quill. I try so hard to keep quiet nowadays. It's just better that way. I guess you should just ignore anything else as much as possible.
  17. Now I'm sad, too. I loved all of those posters! And Peela.
  18. I'm a picky eater. A large number of food just simply taste horrible to me, or the texture makes me gag. Always been this way. My parents didn't coddle me at all. I had to sit there until the plate was cleared, every night. I sat there for hours a lot of times. I just couldn't bear to put that horrible stuff in my mouth and eat it. It was pure misery. I'd have loved to have been told to prepare something else for myself. One of my kids is very picky. The other is somewhat picky. I'm trying to strike a balance between what I had as a kid and totally catering to them. We've finally settled on 6 dinners that everyone can stand (me, ds13 and ds11--dh loves everything). We rotate through those 6 dinners week after week. One of these days one of us (and it's just as likely to be me as anyone else) is going to start to hate one or more of those 6 dinners. I'll have to worry about that later. Ds13 is already starting to pick at the tilapia more than eat it. In the past year, the boys have learned how to make their own breakfasts entirely on their own and recently they've learned the last of the lunches. (We cycle through 3 different lunches.). LIBERATING!!!! And for a home ec credit for high school, my ds13 is learning how to cook all 6 of those dinners that we all eat. By the time summer is over, I should be able to say to him, "DS13, make the chinese beef for us, please, while I sit on the couch watching tv," and he'll be able to do it! (I won't really be able to sit on the couch, but a girl can dream, yes?)
  19. I hate cooking, too. I was just talking to a friend about it just an hour ago. When I mutter about how I hate cooking DH likes to sigh longingly and say, 'I love cooking. I wish I had time to cook.' Yeah right. It's not necessarily the cooking of a meal, it's all the other things you mentioned: the whining, the leftovers that only I will eat, the never-ending need for food that interupts the day, every day. Oh, and the grocery shopping! I won't even talk about the grocery shopping. It drives me nuts when DH says that he wishes he could do the cooking because if there was any way to swing it so that we aren't eating dinner after the boys' bedtime, I'd totally hand the job off to him. He and I both wish he had the time to cook.
  20. Remudamom! I've missed your posts so much. You could say in 2 sentences what takes me 4 paragraphs to write. And your two sentences would get the point across so much better, too. I always loved your quick wit and wry comments that cut to the heart of the matter.
  21. Anyone else? Ugh. Buying appliances is hard!
  22. Our fridge is dying. Anyone have any recs for a new fridge? We don't need a lot of bells and whistles, though my dh and ds would like an ice dispenser that crushes ice and a water dispenser. Other than that, I think all we need is for the food to stay cold. And we don't want to spend a lot of money, of course.
  23. I have a friend who has many, many medical issues. Often bizarre ones. She lives near me, so she's in our general area. She seems to have found a doctor who will listen. When she went through cancer in her 20's this doctor (from what I'm remembering) was willing to work with her on some alternate methods for helping her as well as traditional things and seemed to really listen. Do you want me to ask her for recommendations? Did I already do this for you (I remember doing this for someone, but can't remember who)? Or are you just DONE with it all? My MIL goes to doctors near Baltimore, or even just Westminster. She has more medical issues than I do and says that she thinks the medical people in this area are too sheltered. They have too few patients/issues so they're not up on things as much as the doctors in a busy metropolis are. So your idea of going to a different area might be sound. You may have better luck with someone in the Baltimore/Towson area. In a busy area, there's a greater chance of the doctors having run into someone else with your condition before. Around here there just isn't that big of a pool to choose from. Your condition might be the big fish in a small pond that the doctors don't know about. In another area, you might just be one of many fishes with your condition and they might be more open to your ideas. Does your DH go with you to the appointments and help talk to them about it? Since I know you have trouble talking to the doctors in a patient/doctor setting, vs on a plane or somewhere. But no pressure from me for you to take action. I'm just throwing that stuff out there. I completely respect your wishes to be done with all this if that's what you prefer.
  24. Yay! Another new person to meet! I'm looking forward to meeting the new people and seeing everyone I've already met again. And that's saying something because I greatly dislike leaving the house.
  25. When I started this whole thing 9 years ago, I believed what I read about homeschooling: The kids would learn to read at about age 4 or 5. They would love reading and would read soooo much that I'd have to beg them to stop and do other things. The kids would find all sorts of cool things to be interested in and would research them themselves and be out in the garage inventing useful things out of junk. The kids would love to play instruments and would play and sing together. They'd probably put on concerts for the family. They would naturally want to know things about science and math and would take the lead to figure stuff out, reading websites and asking to go to the library to get books. None of that is true. None of it. My kids are pretty average. They don't want to do any school, no matter how fun it is, ever. They didn't learn to read early and the oldest is just now this year starting to find a little bit of enjoyment in reading books. He's 13. My youngest still maintains that he HATES reading. (As a voracious reader, this breaks my heart.). They do not take the lead on anything academic, they hated (hated) lessons with instruments. When left alone, they do not do anything other than say, "I'm bored," and then play with Lego (no science probjects in the garage.) I'm not really upset at those things. I was just surprised. I honestly believed it would be like the fairy tale books I read. I must have missed out on the practical, real homeschooling books. Now, with my feet firmly on the ground, I have no idea what to expect for college. I have been giving my oldest a lot of mini-speeches about his future now that he's entering 9th grade. I think it's dawned on him that the next four years are important because this is his education, not mine. I think he's just now starting to realize that all this "school stuff" is to help him prepare to be a grown, independent man. I can see him look alternately nervous and excited about it. My husband works at a community college. If nothing changes in the next 4 years, my sons will probably start college there. DH and his immediate family do not have to pay for classes. Just the fees and books. Basically, the first two years of the boys' education would be free. I am preparing them for a 4 year as well as the community college where my husband works, just in case they figure out what they want. But right now, with the way they are (having no clue what they want to do with life and not being the sort of homeschooled kids that are go-getters), I'm happy that they'll start at the 2 year and then they can move on after that to 4 year when they figure out what they want.
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