I found My Note Games! which looked like exactly what I wanted, but the app store says it isn't available for purchase here. Can anyone suggest something else like this?

I don't use it that way intentionally because I thought it was right; I just realized I used both and looking for a pattern, I realized there was one.

I use day-ta for multiple and da-ta for singular. So, more often day-ta in context, but if I were discussing a particular piece of data I would say da-ta.

I don't have any kids that age, as my oldest is eight, but I handled all my own medical bills five years ago when I was that age. I was not on my parents' insurance, though--I have paid for my own insurance since I turned 20. We had several times when we had to set up payment plans and pay off medical debts over time. Sure, it's overwhelming and scary to look at those bills mounting up, but, well, adults deal with that stuff all the time.

My older son will turn five this summer. He is academically ahead but socially and emotionally young for his age. My plan is to continue on as we are for preschool, but I'm transitioning from doing it two or three times a week to five days a week. That is all optional, but I make the time and offer every day, and he takes me up on the offer most of the time. This includes cuddling up in my bed in the morning to do phonics and math, then violin practice. We're using OPG and Singapore Primary Mathematics (the textbook, intensive practice, and challenging word problems) and we do as little or as much as he wants to at a time. He goes through major spurts and stops with math. In the Fall he went through all of our preschool and pre-K math, skipped K and did the first half of Singapore 1a all within a few months, then stopped and did very little math for the next several months. He's near the end of 1a now; I have no idea what he'll be doing by September, but I'll add in Beast Academy whenever we reach that point. Violin is very challenging for him, as are all fine motor skills, but he is making slow but steady progress. We "play the gummy bear game" (aka bribery) every day he asks to practice. I set out six gummy bears to stand and watch him play, but I eat one each time he fails to follow instructions or pay attention. After he puts his violin away, he gets the remaining gummy bears. This has made a huge difference in his focus, and consequently in his progress. Before, his little five-minute practices were mostly spent in constant interruptions. Now he asks to practice usually 5-6 days a week, and we get about 8-10 minutes of focused attention. I can see his work with violin having big payouts in his fine motor development, his ability to focus, and especially in working on his perfectionism and perseverance. That's all for his individual subjects. I will add in a handwriting workbook for next year, though I'm not sure which one, yet. However, he almost always chooses to participate in the subjects his big sisters do together--read-alouds, SOTW (we'll be doing 3 next year), scripture memorization, poetry tea parties, Shakespeare (he is playing an officer in our production of Twelfth Night), BFSU (He may lose interest as we move into volume two next year, which is fine. I will wait another year and then go through BFSU I with him and little brother again when he's in first grade.), Excelerate Spanish, Child-sized Masterpieces, etc. All of that would be way too much to require of a five-year-old and worry about mastery and retention. But as fun, take what he wants and then go play Legos, it is great for him.

Well, I am not planning on buying a violin this week, so there's a start. ;) Actually, I sold one on eBay which I'll be sending off tomorrow. I've been hanging on to it for years, hoping to eventually be able to afford the repair it needs, but I'm trying to declutter. To that end, I think I may have found a home for my other extraneous violin. I found out the other day that a young lady in my Shakespeare group would LOVE to learn to play. An instrument/lessons are not on the table for her family, though. I asked if she would want to trade babysitting for lessons, and she was super excited about the idea. My old violin just needs an inexpensive repair (having the fingerboard glued beck on), so I thought maybe I'd offer to give it to her for the cost of the repair. Otherwise, I've been pretty frugal in general. Except that I spent some money on some thrift store clothes and some craft store items for costumes for our Shakespeare play. We have less than three weeks to go until our first performance. Yikes!

I used to work at a daycare and there was a family there who's kids were baby models. I thought it was nuts, but it did make me stop and think twice when the mom told me that her boys' college funds were maxed out, so they were putting their earnings into retirement accounts for them. (They were three and five at the time).

Family Friend/Dad To My Extra Preschoolers: When you come to pick up your girls after I've been wrangling 6 kids ages 2 to 8 for the past 4 hours, and I have two hours before I will be meeting you and a bunch of other folks to run the kids' Shakespeare group, please please please do not show up half an hour late and then hang around to chat, jump with the kids on the trampoline, etc. for the next hour. I like you, you're a nice person that I enjoy in social situations, but please take your kids and get out of here. I am an extremely introverted person, and if I can't have my quiet time for an hour in between getting places and managing large groups of kids all day, I will go crazy!

Yesterday: No, a birthday in the family does not automatically mean we are skipping schoolwork today. No, not even if you whine and complain at me over it. Yes, you do have to clean this up. Yes, I know you were making it for me. That is great, now clean it up. I understand you were doing a nice thing. Now pick up the scraps and craft supplies covering the living room and kitchen floor! No, I am not being unfair. How about next time it's your birthday, I refuse to do my normal daily tasks, make extra work that I want you to do for me, and spend the whole day whining at you? Happy Birthday, Mommy.

The brand is Frank Tretter, which I had never heard of before, but I am quite satisfied with the quality. It is not too tough to tune like some little ones, and it has a nice tone without any buzzing or scratching to it.

Well, I bought another violin. :) I've been searching for a month now for an instrument for my littlest guy and had pretty much given up on finding one in his size that was cheap enough and yet still usable. He's been faithfully practicing every day on the macaroni box/paint stir stick "violin" I made him for a couple of months now and he's ready for a real instrument, but I had finally decided he would just have to wait until he grew into a size that was easier to find used. But then I found this lovely, tiny little violin on shopgoodwill.com, and got it for $67 including shipping. Since older dd and ds's violin teacher refused payment after hearing about dh's work situation, it was only $7 more than budgeted for violin for the month. We also got to go to the community orchestra performance as a family for free, as a couple of friends in the orchestra had extra complimentary tickets that they offered us. It was awesome. Otherwise, we've been pretty frugal. My birthday is this week, so dh will spend some money on something there. (I tried to convince him that I really don't need any things, but he's got pretty definite ideas on gift-giving, so I don't think he'll go for that)

It took me a minute to realize that she was talking about Saxon.

My husband's lego ship is sitting on the desk beside me right now. :)

It hasn't been an issue with any of the other places that have held our loans at different times, but that one bank did everything they could to make it difficult to lessen the amount of interest they would eventually receive.

Make sure that when you make that extra payment, they are actually putting it towards principal and not counting it as advance payments on future interest. Some banks will actually do that if you do not specify--one that used to hold our loan required the additional amount to arrive as a paper check via snail mail with the words "principal only" written on the check, or they would apply it to future interest payments instead. Most banks will offer a small decrease in interest for setting up automatic payments. Shop around and see where you can get the best interest rate. I found that, for us, that was Sofi (by a fair margin). And if you go through this link http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/05/06/sofi-review/ from Mr. Money Mustache, you will get a $300 bonus, which you can then turn around and apply to your loan principal. But yeah, pretty much, you just have to pay more than you are required to each month so you are paying down your principal faster.

Well, we dropped most of our rainy-day fund on fees for dh to take the CA bar in July, plus to pay for an online prep course for it. It's a little scary to see our savings go like that with unemployment and a move looming on the horizon, but after careful consideration we believe this is the right plan. I have added watching my extra preschooler's little sister to the mix on the two days each week when she comes, so those days are pretty crazy trying to do school with six kids between the ages of eight and two, but it is good to earn a little extra money to work on rebuilding that fund.

We're applying to Inspire. I'm just delayed by needing copies of their vaccination records, which I think I lost a few moves ago. The tricky thing is that dd2 is accelerated in some areas and a little delayed in others, so it's hard to find a good fit for her. She wants faster and deeper but needs it with kinesthetic learning and no or very little reading. I found some really great German preschool songs on youtube with hand motions or dances that go along with them, so I was thinking I might build my own curriculum plan around those. ETA: Thank you both!

UPDATE My husband is being laid off at the end of June. He is currently searching for other work, but if he doesn't find something by then, we will be going to stay with my parents in the mean time. The silver lining to unemployment being that they live in San Diego--so if we do wind up living off of unemployment benefits in someone else's home, at least our kids will have a million easily accessible educational opportunities paid for by public funds through the charter system there. They will even pay for an instrument rental as well as lessons, so my boy can learn cello if he wants to. That part is fun to dream about. Aside from possibilities with that, though, here are my updated plans for dd2 and for ds2 (no changes for the other two: Dd2 (1st) Singapore Math 3 & BA 2 All About Reading We'll give the R&S spelling book we already have a try, but I'm thinking we may need to go to All About Spelling. Hold off on other Language Arts for now. She wants to learn German for her special subject. I am super excited to be teaching a language I can actually speak! I'm not feeling inspired by any of the curricula I've seen and I'm thinking about putting together my own thing. Violin lessons Ds2 (3 years old) I do preschool-on-demand for my kids, and I usually just offer something phonics, something math, and we do unit studies on whatever their particular area of interest is. And we start an instrument, gently, around pre-K age. This little guy's current love is the violin, though, so here's his: Singapore Essential Math OPG--or maybe AAR, since I'll have it for sister anyways. Violin and other music games--I'm compiling a list of fun games that teach music skills for when he's asking me to practice with him. I just need to find a violin for him.

My dd does both Singapore and Beast. On the weeks she is working on Beast Academy, she usually spends around 20-40 minutes on math each day, four days a week. (The shorter days are actually the ones with more pages/problems, while the longer days are the days with fewer questions, but she is working on days with more challenge questions. She is working 1 year ahead, and completing both Singapore 3 and Beast 3 in just over a year, working 4 days per school week. To schedule BA, I just noted at the bottoms of the pages where it said which practice pages went with which guide pages, wrote those out on an excel grid in order, and broke them up by roughly the amount I thought she'd manage well in one sitting by looking at the difficulty of the questions. So we have a plan, but I constantly adjust as we go along. I'll stop her sooner or keep her going further than planned based on how she is doing with the material, and then adjust my excel file accordingly.

Well, If I figured it for my oldest, because I have to buy everything for her, it would come out to $300, maybe $400. But then the youngers use all the same materials in turn. So do I answer $300-400, or do I answer $75-100? ETA: But that was just curriculum. If I included costs for instruments and music lessons, which I consider an essential part of their educations, that figure would rise about $500. But then, we would still be doing that if they were in public school. Also, these are my numbers from this past year, which is the most I have ever spent. But we managed on less when necessary. ETA: My oldest is only 8.

My son needs to move up from a size 1/10 to a 1/8 violin. I've been watching shopgoodwill.com and found a quality violin with some surface scratches and a few things missing: the bridge, strings, two pegs and a fine tuner. I got the violin for $60 (half of which was shipping)! I've been saving up bing points for amazon gift cards to put towards new strings, bridge, etc. All told, he is getting a $230 violin a small step up from what he has been playing for $71.72.

Thanks, I will.

So it looks like we may be moving back to San Diego, for an unknown length of time. I am from San Diego, but have never homeschooled there. If this happens, we will need to get in with a charter that provides funding for homeschooling. Some optional classes on a campus a day or two per week might be nice, too, but not necessary. What options have you guys used or heard of? How much funding do they provide? How much time does it take to fulfill their requirements?

I don't have any helpful advice, but I just wanted to say that you are doing awesome work! It is so hard to have to be the motor for everything, all the time, but it sounds like you've created some great opportunities for your kids and others. Here in my little desert, my efforts to put together a science fair died in infancy, but we did have Math Kangaroo and we are currently doing a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night). I am struggling with some similar apathy in about half of the kids involved--I don't know what else I can do to motivate them to work on learning their lines at home. I've had lots of people from the community starting to get interested, people wanting to support educational extracurricular opportunities for kids, asking if we are going to be continuing in future years. Unfortunately, dh is losing his job, so we'll be moving away in a couple of months, and I don't expect that anyone will continue with these things after I'm gone.

Thank you very much.