My husband is unemployed, so we dropped down to catastrophic medical insurance, without maternity coverage.

That's what I was wondering, but I took a test and it said no.

Is it normal to have contractions when breastfeeding an older baby?

Hey, don't worry. My daughter wasn't speaking much yet at 23 months, either. I was starting to get worried about her, when suddenly, the week before her birthday, she started speaking in full sentences. I can see huge differences in her development in all areas in the past four months. ETA: The reason I do all of that is because she was also a screaming little whirlwind. I was searching for anything that would help when I read a post where a mom said she had to give her kid a ton of mental stimulation to keep her behavior manageable.

My toddler loves her box. Besides messy art projects and sensory play (like these peas) in her box, we also enjoy Before Five in a Row, cutting and pasting, lacing cards, button sorting, Starfall.com, simple sorting and matching games, lots of ideas from 1plus1plus1equals1.com, wooden stacker toys (like Melissa and Doug makes), playing with nuts, bolts and washers, banging on the piano, and anything else I come up with. I have found that if I give her some time every day with a stimulating activity and my undivided attention, she is far easier to manage for the rest of the day.

Wow, that's so neat! My little one calls Dada and Nana by their names, but I am the baby sign for 'milk'. :glare: Her older sister did the same thing--first word was Dada at eight months old, but I was the 'milk' sign for quite a while longer.

Neat! Mine can't do that at all, yet, and she only recently started scooting around. That was the other nice thing about getting the developmental assessment--I was starting to worry a bit about her gross motor skills, but they said she was doing fine with that. My older daughter was an early mover.

My husband had actually heard her saying, "Dada dada dada!" when he would walk in the door, and he still insisted that she must just be making sounds for the fun of it without understanding what they meant.

12 for my parents: 5 kids and 7 grandkids but they're only 52 years old, and only one of my siblings and I are married yet. My youngest brother is only 16, and I'm planning on having a very large family, so that total should shoot up in the next decade or so.

Thank you, it's good to know I shouldn't necessarily expect that.

Just a few words that I'm sure of. Hi, Yeah, Dada, Nana (what her big sister calls my mom), and I think maybe she's calling her sister La la (her name is Lizzie). She does a few signs, too.

I knew she was actually saying words! I didn't dare to even tell anyone except my husband and my mom, and neither of them believed me. Until the other day, when she had a developmental assessment. (Not that we decided to for her, but because we're participating in a research study at a local university.) I'm just feeling vindicated and wanted to share with someone. I don't even dare to bring it up with my sister or my sister-in-law, who I normally share everything with--I wouldn't want them to think I was bragging that my kid's smarter than theirs are, you know?

More than a pound! My doctor told me that my first daughter would be at least nine pounds, probably ten, and that was why we had to induce labor--she was probably already too big for a normal delivery. Twenty hours of pitocin and an unnecessary surgery later, my little girl weighed in at 7 lbs. 2 oz.

My girls have only had the newborn screenings, but they are still little. I know that my older daughter has good hearing, because she will frequently help me with my own loss.--I am hard of hearing, and she will tell me when she hears the baby wake up in the back bedroom, or the garage door open as someone comes home, or the dogs are barking at someone behind our backyard fence.

Okay, I haven't read any of the posts after this one yet, so maybe this has already been said, but the quote above is an outrageous statement. The constitution states that the president must be a natural born citizen. This is a requirement for every president we have ever had, and every time we elect a new president, they produce this document.

Is anyone from there? Are there any homeschoolers there? I understand it's a really small town--like the entire population is about three times my high school. How do I find out if there are any homeschool co-ops there?

the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings the Chronicles of Narnia the Shanarra series (Terry Brookes) Chronicles of Pridane

I saw the Bob Books for sale at Costco today for $9.99 a set.

So then, do you have any suggestions about how to handle it when my husband has very different expectations for our kids than I might? On the reading issue, he's ahead of me, but in other areas he is mildly against acceleration. When I brought up an idea I had for how to plan their schooling so that they could move ahead in each subject at whatever pace they want (so long as they keep up with a certain minimum in each subject), he said, "Why on earth would you have them do that? Just let them do their work in whatever time it takes them and then let them go play!" I explained that I didn't mean to make them go faster, that this was just if they wanted to learn more and go quicker through material, and he expressed concerns that this would make them weird. He was a lazy, gifted child who loved the fact that he never had to exert any effort at school, and he still doesn't see a problem with that. (Despite having barely scraped through law school because he never had to learn to work at learning until then!)

Thank you both.

If you weren't "normal" as a child yourself, then how do you know what is reasonable to expect of your kids? I've been wondering about this for a while now as I have been researching and planning in advance for my kids. The other day, I said to my husband that I figured I would start teaching Lizzie to read whenever she asked me, or when she turned five if she didn't ask on her own by then. His incredulous response was, "You're going to wait until she's five?!" Now, understand, he learned to read at the age of three with a little play-school instruction from his older brother. On the other hand, I didn't learn until Kindergarten, but I was reading the Lord of the Rings by the end of first grade. When I first started reading this forum, there was one of those threads asking for book recommendations for a _____ grader. I posted some of my childhood favorites, and then realized my answers were horribly out of place when I read through all of the other answers. I plan on letting my kids move forward in subjects at whatever speed they're ready for, because I hated being held back to the speed of the class myself. But how do you know what is reasonable to expect of a child, I guess as a minimum?

Is it all right if I post, too? Mine are still little, so we haven't started yet. But here's my 'perfect picture': You know the picture on the cover of the most recent WTM, of the excited little girl reading the book on her smiling mother's lap? That's my dream homeschool--that excitement in each of my kids for every subject. Oh, and they all are best friends with their siblings, clean up after themselves, and are ridiculously well rounded in life skills, music and art, physical abilities, etc. as well as academic subjects. Oh, yeah, and my husband magically decided to put forth the effort to speak Spanish to them, so they're bilingual, too.

I don't know anything about PUPPPs, and I'm very sorry you're so miserable. But, just based on my personal experience, I would strongly advise you not to go with an elective c-section. On my doctor's advice, I was induced unnecessarily with my first daughter, and then when the induction failed because she wasn't ready to come yet, I had a c-section. I will never do that again unless my baby and/or myself are at risk. (I did, actually, go through another induction with my second.) My daughter was small and just not ready yet, and my body knew it, even though they said that she was overdue. I know that they do c-sections all the time, but it is still a major surgery and can have significant complications lasting for years. I don't want to go into the awful details, especially not to a woman who's going to have a baby soon, but I wish I could go back and tell myself to just stick it out.

Thank you! They were supposed to be my girls' easter dresses, but I don't know it that will work anymore, since my four-month-old just jumped from 3 month size to 9 month size in less than a month.

What lovely quilting and knitting! I want to join in: