Update in original post!

ISTJ here. I am very similar. It takes me a very long time to even refer to someone as a friend. I have a very small inner circle. Five years ago, I closed the door on one of my closest friendships. It had been somewhat of a roller coaster through the years but would be good for long stretches so it seemed worth it. The friendship went off the rails again, and I was just done. We still communicate. I don’t have any hard feelings. I would stop everything and help her and her family if needed. But I don’t think I could ever be close again. It was too much drama too many times. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Merlin Bird ID (put out by Cornell Lab of Ornithology) is a super awesome free app that helps with IDing birds. It will ask you some basic questions about the bird: size, color, what it was doing, a couple others and uses your location to give you possibilities. There is also a sound ID as well. You just turn it on and it listens to the birds sounds around you and tells you what birds it is hearing. So. Very. Cool. I have a 13-year old bird lover who began at a similar age as yours and with the Burgess Book, Field guides, bird feeders, and a sketch book. Enjoy it!

The tung oil is a bit too thick/viscous for the wood to absorb by itself. The citrus solvent is basically a thinner. It smells amazing too!!

We just put butcher block counters in about a year ago. We have gray cabinets and I absolutely love the look of them. I didn’t want to seal them with a poly so we used a mix of dark tung oil and citrus solvent from The MilkPaint Company. We had time and my dh was installing them so we treated them with tung oil mix 7 or 8 times and then I let them sit about 6 weeks to cure. They were still a bit “fragile” at first-seemed to scratch easily. But after a while they got harder. I was a freak about them at first. My family was terrified of the them, 🤣. But we are good now. I do put another coat of tung oil mixed with citrus solvent about once every 3 months right now. We do have it around our sink. I baby them a bit still. I try to make sure I don’t leave puddles, but my family is not so terrified anymore and they aren’t so careful. The water just beads up and I get it when I see it. So we’ve had a good experience so far and really love them!!

No first hand experience, but I’ve heard many times from others that the advanced is very doable for a middle school kiddo.

I’ve found that it helps a bit to cover the drains whenever you aren’t using them. I just use an old sour cream lid, anything that you can slide off easily when you need to use the drain. It’s always a kitchen sink problem for us so this works well.

Ugh. That is terrible and so unfair. I hope we have a better outcome.

What a great partnership! I wish all states were that way!

Oh absolutely! I do totally respect everything that they do. I have been an obnoxious and condescending homeschooler (mostly just in my own head). I feel like I've come a long way. My teens definitely made me realize there are no guarantees and homeschooling is not the perfect recipe for perfect kids. It works for us right now. I hope it keeps working for us. But I would not put that on anyone. And I am thankful that public school is a very valid choice for most. Great thoughts! Thank you!

As always, Lori, this is great stuff! You have such a knack for breaking a big task into smaller chunks. I was going into it with the mindset of "Mr. Superintendent, tell me how we can make this work, I'm willing to help!" and I see it now it might be more beneficial to lean towards, "This is how this can work, I'm willing to help!" I need to make it easy peasy for them for sure. I am going to contact a coach at a school that I know has done this in the past to see if he will give me any advice or forms they have used to keep things easy. Thank you again for breaking this down for me!

Makes total sense with what teachers have been through the last couple of years. Thanks for the heads-up.

I'm not sure what kind of reputation homeschoolers have here. From my one contact at the school, it seemed as if it wasn't necessarily good. But we are very diligent homeschoolers. Definitely need to take the team approach, I think!

That's a lot of thinking ahead. I just saw that by laws say, I would need to let them know by May 1st of the previous year if I wanted them to take a class or two. Now, whether they would stick to that, I'm not sure. I'm guessing it's about availability.

Illinois has no oversight whatsoever for homeschooled students. I definitely see how some might have a problem with that. The high school by-laws state (we are not there yet but elementary is similar), that the student should be "enrolled at the school and is taking at, or under arrangements approved by the member school, a minimum of 25 credit hours of work"...(this means 5 classes apparently). So I think the leeway is the "under arrangements approved by" part. Some schools will work with you on that and others won't. So I need to convince them to work with me. 🙂