Thanks. Congrats to your ds, too. I think we should have a Lukeion student gathering sometime. Ds would like to take a trip with the Barrs before he heads off to college. I told him to start saving. :-)

Thanks. I think dh has an extra stick of plain chapstick somewhere that I can borrow. The goopy factor is an issue especially when I have to leave the house. Thankfully it is not as bad as some pictures on online med sites. I hope it calms down before I head to the Cincy convention. I guess I could wear sunglasses the whole time.....which would help my eyes from the glare of the convention hall, too. Ha!

I did not know about the risk of glaucoma. I already have a degenerative eye disease and I am slowly losing my vision. Don't need anymore eye issues. :-( I will try the Eucerin cream. Thanks for posting.

Yes, very annoying!

Does anyone have experience with this? I have always had extremely dry skin. A couple of years ago I noticed a small patch of eczema near my ears. The doc prescribed a topical steroid and it went away. About a month ago I noticed that the skin below my lower lids seemed dry and flaky. Putting lotion, coconut oil etc hasn't done much. Some days it is much worse than others. At times, there will be more puffiness and the skin will crack and bleed. I cut out gluten from my diet last June. I did a Whole30 and was able to add back minimal dairy without any problems. I'm wondering what caused this flare. I may need to cut out dairy altogether. Sigh.......cooking and eating used to be such pleasurable activities....now....not so much. Any suggestions for what I could do or possible causes? Because it is so close to my lower lid and near the inner eye I have to be careful what I put on. The coconut oil would get on my lashes and mess my eye glasses...wearing my contacts was out. I really don't want to see my doc AGAIN! I'm getting a little tired of seeing various health professionals at this point in my life. Thanks in advance for your help.

Brag alert! Ds earned a Purple Ribbon (Highest Honors) for Greek 1 through Lukeion. He is thrilled, especially after his Gold Medal for Latin 3 (also through Lukeion). I have to admit that I was nervous about signing him on for Greek after seeing the time commitment for Latin and his other coursework this year. But he really wanted to study Greek. :-) He will continue with AP Latin and Greek 2 next year as a Junior but I don't know if he will have time to add Greek 3 to his schedule during his Sr. Year. He's interested in Engr so we're trying to figure out how to still keep up with all the other Math/Science credits and still be heavily involved in Music. Aaaack. Anybody else? ETA: Ds informs me that Highest Honors is a Blue Ribbon according to what Mr. Barr posted in class yesterday. I guess Purple Ribbon is a perfect paper?? Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

Glad to hear you are settling in to your new location. We've moved too many times but never in the middle of a school year (well, once but ds was only 2 at the time). Sounds like you did a great job in the midst of the move. Enjoy your new abode!

We visited Washington DC about 10 years ago before we moved from VA and the ladies on the boards recommended Harrington Hotel. We stayed there and it worked well for us. It is a no frills hotel but it met our needs for a place to sleep at night. It was very reasonably priced for being close to the places we wanted to visit. We could walk wherever we needed to. The drivers in DC are a little crazy!!

Congratulations to all. How exciting to see the results! Ds earned an NLE gold medal in Latin 3 with Amy Barr - this is his third gold medal. He's hoping he gets his NGE results tomorrow. Ds expressed an interest in Latin early so we did Prima Latina, LC, Latin Prep 1, part of Latin Prep 2 before we switched to Wheelock. I knew I wanted ds to eventually enroll at Lukeion so we switched to Wheelock in 8th grade and covered the first half at home. He completed the second half with Lukeion and continued on with Latin 3. He decided to start Greek 1 with Lukeion this year in 10th grade. The courses have been time consuming but he thoroughly enjoys them. We have been very pleased with Lukeion. ETA: Yay!! Ds earned a Blue Ribbon (Highest honors) for the National Greek Exam (Level 1).

Thanks, gardening momma. I will head over to the social groups page. I am not on Facebook. I'm not sure about dinner plans yet. Dh and ds are coming with me this year. Ds wants to meet the Barrs at The Lukeion Project and we all want to hear Dr. Ben Carson.

Yes, I was wondering about the regular (college level) vs the AP compatible. Have you used either one? Would love to get more input. My impression was that in order to cover the AP questions, a few topics were left out of the AP compatible course. Is that correct? Thanks.

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug: I am so sorry that you have to experience this especially with a sibling. I have seen this dynamic played out and among "friends" and it can be so disheartening. You sound like a fabulous sister!!

ITA with the bolded. As I'm gearing up for school, this has been a challenge. When my brain is focused on school planning I don't want to think about all the food prep but I know it has to be done. I hope to make a bunch of muffins with eggs, meat, greens etc or an egg casserole with sweet potatoes grated and other veggies so that I can freeze them in portions to eat for breakfast. Fried or hardboiled eggs every morning can get old. Don't ask me what I will do if I have to remove eggs from my diet which is sometimes suggested for those with autoimmune issues.

Have you seen the book by Danielle Walker - Against all Grain. She also has a website with the same name. It does have a lot of baking recipes with nut flours that may not be the best for those with autoimmune issues but she does have some other recipes that are good. I'm still in the process of finding good meat sources and transitioning to a modified Paleo way of eating.

Ds is 10th grader this year, did Derek Owens' Physics last year along with Alg 2. He will be taking PreCalc with DO this year and Thinkwell Chemistry. I purchased Thinkwell (AP compatible) several months ago but was wondering if I should ask Thinkwell if we can use the regular version instead. It appears that some topics are not covered in the AP version. I had originally planned for ds to take AP Chem through PA Hsers but they require a high school Chem class. Ds had only done an Integrated Phy/Chem course in 8th grade. At this point, I'm wondering if I should switch to the regular Thinkwell Chem since he will not be taking the AP Chem exam this year. I've heard it's a tough exam and it will also be the first year with the new syllabus. I'm not sure how much of the Thinkwell (AP compatible) syllabus will be changed to accommodate the new AP guidelines. BTW, we will also be reviewing a Chem text along with the Thinkwell course, depending on how much/ how well Thinkwell covers the material. I thought I'd ask for some advice here before I contact Thinkwell asking if I could switch to the regular version. Thanks in advance.

Susan, Any chance that PHP is working on a guide for the Medieval volume? You could fast track it so that I can use it this fall. :-) Emoticons not working for me :-( Thanks for all you do. VH

I am so very sorry to hear this. I understand what you are going through because I just went through this myself in March. I will try to link to my thread but if it doesn't work, you can search for LADA on the chat forum. It turned out that my antibody test came back negative. So I scheduled an appt with an endocrinologist based on the rec of my primary care doc. Prior to seeing her, I purchased a blood glucose monitor and tested myself on a schedule for a week. All of the levels were normal except for a couple of times when I ate a baked sweet potato for a post workout snack and after eating dessert of sweet rice/mango at a Thai restaurant. I saw the endocrinologist in May who ran the A1c test again and a bunch of blood work AGAIN $$$! The A1c showed a level of 6.1 which is still pre-diabetic. All I got from the endo is that the test indicates pre-diabetes and I need to watch my diet and exercise. I already eat pretty clean and exercise 5/6 days a week. It really irks me to think of wasted money especially since I just wrote a check for about $700 to the insurance company this week. I also understand feeling like a medical freak. I have a rare autoimmune disorder; a rare degenerative eye disease (which means I am slowly losing my vision) which is unrelated to the diabetes; had shoulder surgery over 2 years ago and the docs can’t figure why I still have pain. My other shoulder is getting pretty bad but I am reluctant to pursue any medical intervention. Aargh. So at this point, I have decided to tweak my diet further. The diet recommendations by the endo and what the ADA recommends will not work for me since I was already eating better than those reccs. I started the Whole30 during the month of June. My reintro to stuff in July did not go as planned because we were travelling and staying with friends over July 4th weekend. I am continuing to eat clean and will do a more systematic reintro later. If you haven’t heard of Whole30, google the website and the book “It Starts With Food.†I will most likely be following a modified Paleo diet. I am still not sure what I will be able to add back in to my diet. Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to let you know that I understand. I have spent the past few months reading up on diabetes and learning more about the Paleo/Primal diet. You will get through this. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions. Hugs and prayers. Here’s the link to my old post: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/465187-anyone-have-experience-with-latent-autoimmune-diabetes-in-adults-lada/?hl=%2Blada&do=findComment&comment=4875788

Have you checked out PreCalc using the Math without Borders DVD? We used Foerster for Algebra 1 and 2 and I considered getting the MWB DVD for PreCalc but with several health issues going on, I decided that I needed to farm out Math at this point. So, ds will be enrolling in the online course with Derek Owens. I need someone else to check homework, grade and answer questions. We used DO for Physics this year in 9th and I highly recommend him.

Sheryl, When we moved from an area where I had attended BSF the leader suggested studies from www.joyofliving.org. They are very similar to BSF studies. HTH

:lurk5:

I just used Paint on the computer. The funny thing is that I have uploaded pix before even without reducing it further. I checked and the last time I uploaded with no problem was in Feb. I'm still using the same camera. Strange...

I am no longer able to upload pictures. I've even tried to reduce the size of the pictures to see if that would work but no such luck. I wasted 2 hours this morning getting nowhere with AT&T our internet service provider. Of course, due to "technical difficulties" they were not able to save a copy of my chat. I got on again and the next person disconnected me from my server so that was the end of that chat. Uggh. We probably need to find another provider but that's a topic for another post. All they wanted to do was upgrade me to Uverse!! I recently tried to upload pix to my email to an Amazon seller but gave up after several days. I thought the issue was with my computer but I wasn't able to do so using ds' computer either. I kept getting this msg:"The attachment upload is taking a long time. If you do not have a slow connection and you are not uploading a large file, please try again later." I was wondering if my upload/download speeds had recently changed. Hence my call to AT&T our ISP. Any advice, suggestions to try?? Thanks in advance.

Aaah, yes. As you saw in my post above - I have not used the book - there just wasn't any time esp when we were covering several great books for literature. My original thought was to read a few sections that may be relevant to things we were covering in science. I may have ds read a few pages over the summer.

In the preface the authors state that the book was conceived as a companion to their textbook: The Science: An Integrated Approach. There are about 50 excerpts. The authors state, "A central challenge of this volume has been to present portions of the original scientific texts in a way that is accessible to non-scientist students...........Accordingly, we have edited most of the following papers to eliminate the most technical portions, and thus focus on the essence of the discoveries." I'm typing this in a hurry. If you have more questions, I can try to answer later today. HTH