Wow, she's a real piece of work, isn't she? Already a good amount of advice in this thread, so just a :grouphug: .

We just got word yesterday that the company DH works for is making improvements to the healthcare plan in order to be more competitive and because the company's demographics are changing to older people with more kids. They will be covering more of the premium and depositing money into the HSA account as well. Our share will go from about $700 to $225/month and we will add dental because they are covering 100% of the premium. :hurray:

Awesome! :hurray:

I should clarify this is not a homeschool coop. It's an a la carte school which offers the same classes twice/day, once during school hours to capitalize on the homeschool market, and the same classes after school for enrichment for kids who go to B&M school. Because we go to the early class we are in with all homeschoolers, but we could also go to the afterschool class if we wanted. Thanks for all the feedback. It looks like it's not unusual that DS9 couldn't do this, and it also looks like the teacher doesn't quite understand what kids in this age group can typically do.

Yes, both my throat and jaw become tired. We do make caffeine-free honey-sweetened tea during read-aloud time. The kids think it's a fun ritual but really it's designed to relax them and soothe my throat.

Tough Mudder? I bow down to you.

Update... DS and I went over the concepts in the car on the way to class and he finally understood once he was away from the paperwork. I talked to the teacher and some other parents at the class today. Apparently I'm the only one who takes these homework email seriously and we were the only ones I found who made the table and did the work. :confused: The other parents thought they were just for fun and the teacher said she was happy if the kids were "just putting pen to paper". <_< I have a feeling though that she said that after I called her (gently) on understanding kids' abilities.

Some background: 9 yo is taking a weekly science class for homeschoolers grades 3 and 4. The current theme is Astronomy. He was given the information for (1). They may have given the information for (2) last week, but we missed due to illness. I helped him look up the information for (2) but I could only find it in days and hours so we had to convert it to decimal. He had some trouble with this but not much. Having both sets of numbers I let him try to figure out how to calculate a planet's # of days/year. I think he was thrown because the numbers we had were in Earth days, which shouldn't matter as they cancel out. But he couldn't make the leap to canceling those out and just getting a number like 1.5. I decided to do one example for him (the one in my original post) and he did the rest but I really think he just did the math and still didn't grok why, exactly. He just did what I had done and filled in the table. The person teaching the class is a grad student from a nearby excellent university but doesn't have experience teaching kids. I'm not sure she has a grasp of what kids are capable of. Some kids in the class are 8. But then sometimes I worry I'm not teaching the right things and stuff like this feeds into my paranoia.

I'm just curious, based on an assignment from a science teacher. Calculate the number of days/year for different planets: 1) Find the number of earth days/a planet's rotation around the sun (usually some number of inexact days/hours so they need to round) 2) Find the number of earth days for each planet's own day (sometimes less than one, like 16 hours, so they need to convert to .66) 3) Figure out you need to divide the number of earth days for each planet's year by the number of earth days for each rotation to figure out how many of that planet's days are in that planet's year. In other words, how many rotations a planet makes in one turn around the sun. Example: Mercury makes a rotation on it's own axis (a Mercury day) every 58 Earth days. It takes 88 earth days for it to go around the sun. Therefore it has 88/58 = 1.5 Mercury days, or rotations on its own axis/year. Would your 9 yo be able to do this on their own? Not the division, but the concept. If not, would it help if they were given 1) and 2) ahead of time?

Holy crap people are so damn prickly these days, on all sides, in so many threads. I'm taking a risk; there are at least 3 words in the above sentence for which people like to jump on others. :banghead:

Not sure how to reconcile these two things... I think what he is actually saying is that kids (and adults, really) want to be accepted and generally take on the ideas of those who accept them for who they are. So if the parents are too sheltering, worried about image, legalistic about religion, etc and the child doesn't feel accepted, they will gravitate towards people who make them feel so later, when they get a chance. If they feel accepted within their family, they will be more likely to follow the faith and values of their parents because home and family is where they feel they can be who they are. The problems are not specific to homeschoolers, but perhaps in his circles and for his intended audience, many people are drawn to homeschooling because they are the over-sheltering type. That's what I took from it anyway.

Wow, I am so sorry. This is almost my worst nightmare. (Worst is having the kids in the car with me.) One thing at a time. :grouphug:

We provide drinks and lunch, although if the timing of a move was 8-1 or something I might just do snacks. We also tip at the end and pay them in cash (and get a receipt) if they're small and local. The foreman appreciates this so he can just pay the crew out the same day and not have to worry about distributing funds after the check clears. If it's a more corporate and everyone is actually an employee of the company I don't worry about paying in cash, though.

I agree. Budget would not be the first thing that came to mind. So many people have specific ways of eating I would think it was dietary. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, nut free, dairy free, low carb, keto, paleo, no beef, etc.

:grouphug:

Score of 0 for actual licking. Don't care at all. Score of 3 for annoyance that she wouldn't listen to me.

I forgot to add the saying: "Fat is lost in the kitchen and muscles are made in the gym." It's soooo much easier to lose fat watching what you eat than exercising it off. If I don't eat something that's 200 calories, it took me a second (or a minute :) ) to decide, and no physical effort. If I eat it, it will take me an hour of moderate exercise to get back to where I was. Exercise is great and has many benefits, including increased mental health and better fitness. But if you're limited for time and energy (and who isn't) and your primary goal is weight loss it's easier and takes less time to not eat the calories than to worry about taking them off through exercise.

I am losing weight right now. We are really healthy eaters but I still have put on weight for the past few years. We eat grass-fed beef and pastured chicken and eggs, coconut and olive oil, organic veggies, drink raw milk, etc. We eat very few carbs. I signed up for myfitnesspal and started tracking my food. What I realized was that even with healthy eating, you have to follow the basic laws of the body's thermodynamics. I can fill myself with lots of good and healthy foods, and if I take in more calories than I burn, I'll store it as fat. Conversely, I can eat less healthy and if I expend more calories than I take in I will lose fat. I was gaining weight slowly eating about 1800 calories of really healthy food/day, when my intake needs to be closer to 1600 (I'm really petite). I'm now taking in less than that to create a deficit. I know it's silly but it took me a bit to wrap my mind around that. I started thinking of my fat as a "bank" of energy that I had saved and know I needed to spend it. You know when you clean out your pantry because it's gotten messy and there's extra food stuffed in there that's not getting eaten? It's like that. I'm not spending effort or money to get even more calories, I'm going to use my "bank" and empty it out as much as I can. So to that end I am actually eating more carbs than I normally do, but I am losing weight. You don't have to go low carb. Figure out how many calories you need to eat and subtract 300 calories from it. (myfitnesspal can help with this.) Then eat whatever you want within those calories. The first few days you'll mess up and realize it's dinnertime and you have no calories left, or that you ate within calorie limits but didn't get very much protein or calcium (they give you a chart). So you'll make adjustments and then it will become a game of how to get as much nutrition out of those calories and you'll lose weight in the meantime. The meals are not onerous to prepare. A sample day for me might be: cup of cottage cheese with fruit and coffee for breakfast chicken apple sausages and veggies for lunch 2 cookies for snack handful of nuts or piece of cheese or boiled eggs for snack some sort of meat and veggies for dinner I've been going for a 20-30 minute walk each day.

None of the things you listed as worries are things you should be concerned with. How to not be THAT client: --Try not to cancel if possible. Most cleaners really depend on the money. In the 9 years we've had our cleaners, only once have we been sick enough to not want them to come in. (We all had the flu.) I paid them anyway because it was short notice for them to fill the slot. --Decide if you want them to deal with your stuff or just clean. I don't like other people dealing with my clutter, books, etc so we pick up everything and put it away before they come. I like having the deadline every other week to get organized. They do the actual cleaning. --Decide up front what you want to do about cleaning ovens, the inside of the fridge, and whether you want them to handle laundry. --Find out if you will be expected to provide the cleaning supplies or they will. Make sure they know about any special requests like a particular cleaner, only vinegar and water, etc.

Here's a thread in which people helped me with a similar question: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/473562-my-son-doesnt-seem-to-get-beast-academy-problems-im-so-frustrated/ I think the crux of our problem was that I was used to going through Singapore materials with him and teaching him, but he would do the problems on his own. With BA we would go through the guide together, but I found I couldn't just give him a set of problems and walk away for 30 minutes. Actually that has changed for us because we moved on to other chapters. He really needed a lot of hand-holding in the areas discussed in the link.

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug: What a difficult and complex situation. I would talk to DH openly, not in any accusatory way. Put your insecurities aside and see if you can approach it from a place of giving DH a chance to heal. It sounds like he's been through so much. If this is too difficult or you need support, I agree with texasmama about getting outside help. A marriage like this is worth investing in.

We did Singapore on the weekdays and one hour of BA on Saturday and another Sunday. I highlighted the most important problems I wanted DS to do in BA so he wasn't wasting time not being challenged. Sometimes if there were a lot of similar problems I highlighted a couple of each type to give him variety. We always read the guide and we always did the starred problems.

Because of the provision that people cannot be rejected for pre-existing conditions. If you (general) want people to be covered regardless of pre-existing conditions, then everyone must buy in. Otherwise nobody would buy in until they were too ill to pay for themselves and the entire insured pool would only consist of ill people, which is not sustainable.

OP here... This is pretty much correct. I really wanted to know what people thought because it seemed a gray area and because "society" tells me I should experience much more discrimination than I seem to, as a brown Muslim woman. So sometimes I really do wonder if I'm just clueless and I don't see it directed at me, or it's less than other places because I live in a very progressive area, or both. My personal experience has been that people want to show how progressive and well-informed they are ("I'm well-informed and know all Muslims are not terrorists") they are by bending over backwards to be very kind and welcoming. In fact, I can remember the last time I felt racism directed personally at me. It was in 2009 in Alberta and I had not seen someone's homemade "No Parking" sign because it had folded. The HOA president had out it up to save a space for some workers. I didn't see it, and while I was unloading my kids from the car, the HOA president came over and started yelling at me and asking me why I couldn't read English yet. (I was born and educated in the US, btw.) Before that, I remember some racist incidents following 9/11 and before that, someone left some racist material in my mailbox during the Gulf War. So basically what I'm saying is that I only seem to notice things that are really overt, and for me those have been few and far between. Everyone will have a different experience, and this has been mine. I have appreciated people's empathy and understanding on this thread whether or not they think the library incident was racist. I really don't know if it was. I also appreciate people saying they are sorry this happened to me, but I don't see any reason for anyone to apologize for this woman's behavior, whatever her motivation. Well, maybe if a librarian popped in and apologized on her behalf... :D

These stories are reminding me of when I had to go to the hospital after my home birth. (Post-partum complications, the birth itself was fine.) I was 37 years old, had been married for 6 years and had only 2 children inc. the newborn. Doogie Howser kept asking me if I was sure I didn't need any help figuring out birth control. :huh: