I think the issue is that we have different goals. She wants to understand the church stuff and I want to talk to people. I told her we would wait until her reading is stronger. We're partway through 100 EZ lessons but took a break for a month due to illnesses and me fracturing my rib.

My daughter (kindergarten) has been consistently asking to learn Greek. She wants to learn "church Greek" (Koine, we're Orthodox and visit a Greek-speaking parish sometimes) but we know people who speak modern Greek and it would be nice for her to be able to speak with them. Can someone who studies Koine Greek understand modern Greek and vice versa? What are the benefits of learning Koine over modern when we are in a community with lots of Greek speakers? It seems harder to find modern Greek curriculums and the Greek school at the parish I mentioned is really expensive, but I'd like us to be able to speak Greek with people.

We're in the city and all the fields are completely flat, unfortunately! We've been going up and down the driveway for the public pool that's a few blocks away. We found a cheaper 18" bike at Walmart so we're going to give that a try.

I found a cheaper one on walmart so we're going to try that.

Even if you do something that leaves you vulnerable, the person who takes advantage of that and hurts you is 100% at fault.

Yeah, I should have done a balance bike but by the time we thought she was old enough to handle the hills around here, she was too tall for all but the really expensive bigger balance bikes so we decided to wait and just get her a bike when she turned 5.

Even with it all the way down, she can barely reach.

She's too short to do that with this bike so we'd need to spend money on a smaller one. It's why I tried to emphasize to her Godmother that it needed to not be too big.

My daughter's godmother offered to get her a bike for her 5th birthday. I told her my daughter probably needed an 18 inch bike but she just gave us her niece's old 20 inch bike. I figured with training wheels, it would be fine. But it turns out my daughter, who is as tall as a 7yo, is too heavy for training wheels so they keep bending and she just rides tilted to one side. I tried taking them off but she can't reach the ground beyond her tiptoes and I can't run with the bike holding her up because I have bad knees and she just puts all her weight on me. We both ended up losing our tempers. We spent the full birthday budget on other stuff because we thought the bike would be fine and there are no used bikes available within reasonable driving distance. At target, the 18 inch bikes are $90+. I know the right answer is to buy a smaller bike but I've been trying so hard to be frugal. 😭

Oh don't get me started on what Ma and Pa say about the Indians. My daughter gets really sad because we've read a lot of nice books about Native Americans. She loves these books but I'm not sure I'll buy the rest. We're definitely having a lot of discussions about how people treated the Natives and about how some of the parenting decisions are unfair.

Ohhhh I never knew about that agenda. That makes a lot of sense! And yeah I can't believe that every time they start to settle into a place, he forces them to move again. At least in the big woods, they were near family.

My daughter really likes the books, so we're just discussing things as they come up. I know people really were expected to act like this back then, but it's infuriating haha. My daughter was genuinely horrified by the description of what people used to do on Sundays. No coloring books in the pews back then!

We're reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and I forgot how much they made me want to scream sometimes as a child. I thought maybe I was just remembering them that way because I was a child when I read them, but no. Blonde hair is better than brown hair! Even thinking about disobeying due to unforeseen extreme circumstances means you get yelled at! You have to give all of your new special beads to your baby sister who can't even wear them or else you're selfish! Everything is so over-the-top authoritarian and if Laura doesn't act like a perfect saint with no material attachments, she gets called naughty and bad. It's honestly kind of dreadful. I want my daughter to share things and be kind and I set that example. But the message that if you don't willingly and cheerfully give up everything you want/have, then you're a bad person is really bothering me.

Thank you so much for explaining that they do introduce the pairs later on! I tried to Google info about it and didn't find anything useful, just generic reviews, and didn't see that when I searched through the book. We're halfway through lesson 8. At best we can get through half a lesson a day. The rhyming exercises are I think the only part she really struggles with, even though she's figured out how to do them. She sounded out a CVC word the other day without stopping between the sounds and I almost cried.

So I got the 100 EZ Lessons book and it's going better but still like pulling teeth. She hates the rhyming exercises so much that she almost cries, but she gets everything quickly once she actually puts in a solid effort. (I'm genuinely wondering if she has my ADHD at this point because we did 3 of the little exercises in 10 minutes today before needing to stop and getting her to focus for that long was a Herculean effort). She did ask to start learning math so I got the Singapore Essentials book and she LOVES it. Still hard for her to focus, but she asks to do it every day (I make sure we do reading first) and she doesn't want to stop even when it's clear she's reached her limit for focusing. I do have a question about the 100 EZ Lessons book, though. I noticed that in later lessons, it doesn't teach letter pairs and the sounds they make, but rather will show ĒaT and say, "This word has a little sound in it. We don't say that sound. Just say the big sounds." Same with words like ROCk and NŌSe. And it says "you" is a " silly word" that we don't say the way we sound it out instead of explaining that "ou" makes the ū sound sometimes. Will this make it harder for her to sound out words when she sees them for the first time in a book? This book is working out better than the Ordinary Parent's Guide for teaching blending but I'm concerned about how it's teaching the actual phonics. Does this end up being an issue?