Alternative possibility to investigate: functional neurological disorder, which can present as twitches/tremors (and many other ways as well.) We thought my second daughter had restless legs syndrome for years. Nothing seemed to help and docs were not terribly interested in it, as it was not obvious when we would be in the clinic. About a year and a half ago, the symptoms progressed to include other body parts, occurred at other times of the day, and became quite disabling (requiring a notetaker and other accommodations for classes.) After a ton of research, she got great help in controlling the symptoms through a clinic in Michigan called The Recovery Project. We traveled a significant distance to get there, as help for this issue is not easy to come by. Anyway, throwing that out there for you or any future readers that it might help.

Agreed. Very few see themselves as the problem.

You really do have a complicated situation there. I hope you are being kind to yourself. I do understand the feeling of having medical issues for a child turn into a part time job (or more than that, really, once you add travel into the mix. And advocacy time.) Public school might be a solution during normal times, but if it's online school in your area, it seems like a worse solution. My experience with kids and public school is that the time commitment is not less so much, just different. Though you don't have to physically be there during a portion of the day. It sounds like the foster children are truly family. I would not change anything there. We always tended to have very busy lives and did a lot of car schooling. You have a few more kids though, and pandemic times don't really allow for ridealongs. I would definitely be looking at curric that is open and go with short lessons. Now is not the time to worry about excellence in writing for a grade schooler. Just keep plugging along learning something. A simple math workbook, simple language arts workbook, and videos or books for science and social studies. Nothing heavy. Certainly nothing project based, unless that is really your thing. Maybe consider hiring someone to work with the kids on their simple school plan on the days you have to be gone.

My husband (who works in the field) told me last week that 1000 missed cases just showed up for our state (which has relatively low numbers). I haven't seen them show up in the daily case counts yet and am curious about how it will be handled. Maybe just one dramatically high day.

Based on the example you gave, I think it’s too soon to assume the neighborhood is cliquish. I agree that it is very possible your kids shared your viewpoint on Santa. People may just need time to warm up too. That said, if the neighborhood proves that it’s not a source of friendships, I’d certainly look elsewhere once life is more normal again. Our neighborhood is not social at all, and all my kids’ friendships were from activities.

Can you give an example of the behavior? I do think it's a hard time to meet new people right now. People are nervous about contact with others in general, and especially others whose habits they don't know.

My college student moved to New Mexico to live with her sister as things were gearing up in March. It's a pretty locked down state at this point. I hope everything goes well for them.

Case lists several merit scholarships on their website. It does not appear to be just need-based.

When I say "tippy top", I mean high GPA and scores, but also leadership, strong writing skills, quality consistent community involvement and extracurriculars. My youngest has the 4.0, and can probably get the test scores up, but is missing a lot of the other pieces (which is fine :-) ) There are not enough spaces at the Ivies (and similar) for all the valedictorians to attend. It does come down to other factors, and that's the part that is hard to predict. And sometimes the other factors can overcome less-than-top-tier academics

Interesting because that is one of the states that has stayed pretty consistently locked down.

@MamaSproutI do sympathize. It is quite difficult finding excellent merit for the very good, but not tippy top, student. There are many great engineering schools, but the ones like UAH that offer fantastic automatic merit are not very common. Our last college search for our tippy top student looks very different from the one for our upcoming very good student. It's a little stressful, honestly. I hope you find just the thing. I doubt admissions will be much of an issue for her, but I know paying might be a different story. I don't know your income situation, but maybe consider one application to a school that is known for excellent need-based aid, even if you think she might not qualify. My engineer went to Princeton. We don't normally qualify for anything other than loans, but our aid there was excellent. I have shared the story of my daughter's brother-in-law, who I was helping with college apps because of his difficult family situation. I would call him a very good student and interesting person, but not tippy top. I did NOT recommend that he apply to Ivies because he did not need to waste money on apps, and it seemed unlikely that he would be admitted. The kid secretly applied to Yale, got in, and now attends for $1600/year because the school was so responsive to considering his individual circumstances in his financial aid appeal. Take all that with a grain of salt, but wanted to throw it out there. I know nothing about your individual circumstances, but maybe it can help somebody. That said, my youngest is not applying to Ivies. Unless she does it secretly, lol.

Does he want things? Serious question. I think I am kind of hard to buy for, but I really don't want gifts either. Maybe a promise of a chore or help with a big task? All I ever really want is for people to clean (and they never do)

I'm all about updating the sports gear as long as it keeps them active and we can make it happen. The years really do pass quickly though it seems like the updating is endless and financially painful at the time. I have short girls, so the growing was slower, but replacing competitive figure skates is $$$$$ Plus cross country ski equipment, running, dance gear, rock climbing. Oh my goodness, lol.

UT Dallas? Does not have aerospace, but does have mechanical. I don't know if UNM Albuquerque is a nerd school exactly, but maybe? Again, no aerospace, but some great financial aid opportunities.

Oh, I would pursue it. I forgot that this is a college grade that won't go away after graduation, and she will almost certainly be going on to grad school.

Was she upset? That would be so very annoying to have a grade drop so significantly over a busywork type assignment like that! I do suspect schools will be quite forgiving about that sort of thing, especially under the current circumstances.

I don't think I'd up the ante :-) Why not make the nuts again?

Alice, I missed that you had a Messiah acceptance too. I loved that school. Older daughter also got into Calvin, and liked it. She preferred Messiah though. Both wonderful.

That's awesome! My older daughter came very close to attending Messiah. We visited twice. I'm hoping my younger daughter will apply.

We did it a few years ago for our two rescue dogs. If the dog has many, many breeds in the mix, you are probably going to be disappointed because they will have a hard time nailing it down. It did appear that our littermate pups probably had different fathers :-)

I will try to be specific. It's going to sound whiny and helicopter-ish. All I can say is that I am not that parent, lol. The content itself is fine. The issue is with the way the instructor organizes the class and the difficulty in communicating with her. We choose asynchronous classes to maximize flexibility. Our time zone is quite a bit behind the East Coast and we are busy people, so specific class meeting times don't work well and it is best to have a situation where work can be done at the time we deem more convenient. An example of one practice in this class that has proven stressful: the instructor does not open up assignments until the week that they are due. On Monday, in the early AM there is an assignment given that is due later that day. Keep in mind, 8 AM on the East Coast is 4 AM in our location. So even rising at 6 or 7, my daughter has less time to finish the assignment than others. She has to leave the house at 11-ish for another local class that happens to meet on that day for two hours, then she has to go to her job for five hours. So there is not a whole lot of time to finish the assignment that is due that evening. Is it doable? Yes, sure. Would it be nice to get the assignment on say, Friday, so there's not a mad rush on Monday morning? Absolutely. My older daughter took several PAH classes. We never experienced this particular rigidity before. Communication allowed for working assignments around various commitments fairly easily. My daughter has a difficult time communicating with the instructor about the various problems that crop up, and that is not normally a problem for her. I have corresponded with the instructor a few times myself (not about contentious issues, more logistical type things) and had a similar odd feeling about our interaction. I will say that the instructor's response to my daughter's attempts to explain her scheduling difficulty with that Monday assignment has been a blanket "College courses are difficult." Fair enough 🙂 To be clear, this is not about the instructor's assignments being difficult, per se. Unfortunately, the problems with this instructor has made my daughter unenthusiastic about the content, and I hate that. When she doesn't understand something, she is reluctant to ask clarifying questions of either Ms. Dean or the TA because the answer is rarely satisfactory. My older daughter was really inspired by her AP English Lang class with Ms. Inspektor, and AP English Lit with a no-longer-there instructor named Ms. Green.

Kelly is the owner and a mother of young adults. She would be very caring, I am sure. https://treatyourselfbakedgoods.com/

Was your son's girlfriend actually admitted into a program that guarantees a nursing spot? I ask because those direct entry BSN programs are fairly uncommon. It's much more typical that one is accepted as a nursing major, but then has to apply after 2 years for official entry into the program. That is where the holdup lies for many students. admission into the final part of the program is highly compeititive. A friend's daughter (3.6 GPA at the end of two years) was not accepted into the program at her large public university and had to make a new plan. I just last week had a discussion with a young man (high school senior) going into nursing about the challenge of finding a direct entry program. He is leaving his preferred geographical area for school for that reason. I have a BSN from a Minnesota university myself, though I don't currently work in the field. Know many, many people who do though.

I do think you have to choose the credit card carefully. We found that having our daughter on our Bank of America card did not impact her credit rating positively. Something about them not reporting authorized users to the credit bureau (I may have the specifics wrong, but I was given an explanation like that by someone with the credit card company.) We now have her on our USAA card that is supposed to impact her score positively. At this point though, we have also cosigned a car loan for her. It's interesting that my younger daughter has had so much more credit rating trouble than her sister. She actually has money in the bank, graduated without loans, and has a job with a significant starting salary that she has held for a few months now (and had been an authorized user on our credit card). Her sister had student loans, works a smattering of part time jobs, and was never an authorized user on our card. I do think we will make sure our youngest has a small student loan when the time comes.

I've really appreciated your insights, so much so that I shared them with my daughters who struggle (without identifying information or even saying they were from a forum.) You have a real depth of thinking that is useful and practical.