My first thought was biking. Mountain biking or bike-touring (or racing, for that matter.) No one said scouting, if that's an option.

As a cross-curriculum idea, I love all the David MacAulay books: http://www.amazon.com/David-Macaulay/e/B000AP72G0/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1301182301&sr=8-2 And I was going to suggest model-building...I'm a Naval Architect so I was going to suggest ship models :tongue_smilie:Many of the Anatomy of the Ship books are amazing. In particular I recommend the Endeavor and the Dreadnought. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=anatomy+of+the+ship&x=0&y=0 I built mid-ship section models of each, which shows the structure. Also check this technical drawing and design series: http://www.drawyourworld.com/Catalog/HTML/sketch1.html

I own it. We are finishing Vol. 1 first and have until probably the summer until we are ready. But I have read through #2 and it is great! I'm a lover of BFSU, though, and it has a high attrition rate, so keep that in mind. But did I say I love it? :)

They are pretty preventable, in terms of bringing them home. I suggest leaving your luggage, when you get back, in the car or the garage and bringing it in straight to the washer/dryer. Even if you happened to have a problem at the hotel, you can do a lot to seriously minimize the chances of infesting the house IMHO.

This is a cool website: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/kidscorner_games.htm I did two projects with mine. I made cards based on this game: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/games/animalclassgame.htm Just on index cards and we used them to play a kind of 'rummy' (collect three characteristics from the same animal family. Then I made a huge poster and divided in in tiers. Top tier = all things Second Tier = <<Living Things>> <<Non Living Things>> Third Tier (subdivisions under Living)= <<Plants>> <<Animals>> <<Fungi& Bacteria>> Fourth Tier (subdivisions under Animals) = <<Vertebrates>> <<Inverts>> Fifth Tier = subs under Vert. = Mammal, Reptile, Amph., Bird, Fish and under inverts = Anthropod (insects, spiders, crabs, lobsters), Mollusk (snail, clam, squid, lobster), Cnidaria (anemone, jellyfish, hydra), echinoderm (sea stars, sea urchins), worms I got the smallest Avery labels which are 1/2"x3/4" and used 200 little photographs of animals from all these categories and natural and manmade non-living items. I would love to share these files because I worked hard on them, but I don't really own the rights to share the photographs many of them came from Montessori Printshop here: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Animals_c152.htm?page=all But it wasn't hard at all. Then we started at the top and peeled off one of each of the stickers and stuck them in the first tier. With a second set of stickers we peeled them off and sorted them non-living and living (and discussed criteria for each.) With a third, discussed criteria for plants/animals...etc. and stuck them down. It turned out to be very fun, and a visually beautiful reference, really, when we were done.

Check out Montessori Printshop's files, by continent: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/African-Landmarks-GeoF-19.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Asian-Landmarks-GeoF-14.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Australia-Oceania-Landmarks-GeoF-39.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/European-Landmarks-GeoF-35.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/North-American-Landmarks-GeoF-28.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/South-American-Landmarks-GeoF-34.htm The photos print really well. I cut them up and we play memory or Go Fish type games with them.

This is a make-your-own, but m daughter will play Go Fish (and Old Maid) with *anything.* For phonics, I could put a letter on one card and a picture on another, print it on cardstock and she beg to play. "Do you have an 'uh'?" No, go fish. It would force both pronouncing the sound a letter makes and the leading sound of a word from a picture. We use the same cards for memory matching and bingo-style games. To play bing, we divvy up one half of the cards between players and put the matches in a bag, then take turns pulling a card from the bag and calling out "who has ____?" ETA: Sometimes I've used materials downloaded from MontessoriPrintship, like these: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Phonics-Sound-and-Picture-Sorting-PSF-1.htm but from clipart searches are sometimes just as easy.

Yes. It could eventually tax your Internet connection, though. We use a public WiFi here and if we get too carried away with streaming (usually 2 is okay, 3 depends on different things) everything sloooows way down.

I think trying to scare young people into doing anything by telling them they will hurt themselves is howling at the wind. Teenagers often think a) they are immortal and b) it won't happen to them. The Oooh ScaryScary approach had been shown not to work well. In part because it's not really so true. All those things may very well happen to teenagers who get addicted to heroin...way down the road. But those who try it and find that the sky does not in fact open up and they aren't cracked like an egg in a pan pretty quickly realize it was hyperbole meant to manipulate them. There is also a James Dean kind of glamorous attraction to masochism and self-destruction that actually lures in some teen personality types. So I'm a 'no'.

I'll post photos of my apt., although it doesn't 100% fit your bill. I just moved into a 1 bedroom and gave DD the bedroom. The living room is the size you describe, about 14' x 12 or 13'. This is what it looks like from the entry: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661133&l=98d3391825&id=1447299302 And this is the view from the bed so you can get a sense of the size and layout of the whole room: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661130&l=813568ef52&id=1447299302 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661129&l=0e5cb713f9&id=1447299302 It works...to seal it off a bit more I could see using a curtain, on say a 4-poster-type frame like an old Victorian bed...I would like a loft in my perfect world (and you can see I have the ceilings for one!) but at this point I don't have the $. Murphy bed would rock, too, but those are $$$. It works, though. I like it actually. (I am getting one chair to go where that mess of wires for my computer is :))

Where I live, they only do the tax assessments once in a fairly big while. It's common for the tax assessments to be very, very out-of-date, especially if work's been done on the house. If you do enough work you might trigger an assessment, but you just as easily might not.

I have wanted to use the forum here to sell some of my unused stuff for a while, and what's held me back is inexperience. When it involves someone else's money, I don't want to be left not sure of something. Right now, I really can't afford to sit on things I don't need. So to be clear: I can list each item ppd; take the first responder's address and request that she make payment; with paypal, I can generate an email that let's a buyer use that for payment (or give an address so she could send a MO), correct? then just take it down to the post office to mail it out. To be sure, ppd is 'postage paid' and that is the way most books here are listed, not 'actual shipping costs'. And Paypal is typical, and that's the way it works? Also people who ship books...do you like tyvek or bubble mailer envelopes? Thanks for taking the time to read mundane questions. I just don't want to get to the middle of a transaction and be unsure.

Check your reading comfort. I like the Kindle because it lets me avoid doing so much reading on an LCD screen. As much as a use a computer, this is a concern of mine. I have an iPhone and appreciate all the various functions available, but for focused immersive reading at long stretches I much prefer the unlit, real ink display.

This is the only thing, it's been bugging me all night long. I have not caught up on the morning's replies so if I'm repeating something then I'll just lend my voice... His *choices* are about the way he treats...HIS HAIR. Your *choices* are about the way you treat another person. You can't compare the way I treat MY HAIR with the way I treat YOUR KIDS. You see no difference in effect and consequence? This whole "you're being intolerant of my intolerance" argument I have never been able to wrap my mind around, to pretend that all "choices" are just equal "choices."

It's true, I'm not a sports-watcher. I get my news from print/internet, but if I still watched live sports that would bother me. Consider making friends at your local sports bar/restaurant. I'm not really kidding, either. It's fun, to watch the game with the same people all season. When we were first married we would go down the street to watch even though we had the games on TV.

Me! We are now 100% cable company free. I have a cell phone only and the new building I moved into has WiFi...goodbye TWC, I can't say I'm going to miss you. I looked at streaming NetFlix and the choice was easy. Don't miss it a bit.

I found the same thing. Speaking for myself, getting too much into couponing led me to buy stuff I was bettr off without. There was danger for me in buying things that were great deals without asking 'should I be buying this to begin with?' I don't mean buying things I wasn't going to use, as much as buying things like cereal and snacks that I could do better with alternatives. I do best with shopping the loss leader meats/poultry and freezing stuff ahead of time. If I get out ahead of myself like this, I can do really well paying very little for proteins (I got $30 of free pork loin yesterday for example in a BOGO sale.) ETA: I have only an apartment-sized freezer, but I can get a month's worth of dinners in there pretty easily if I pack everything in bags or plastic wrap.

Of all things, the book Super Baby Food is a nice little tutorial on grains for porridge. She's really into her 'super porriage' idea, which I take some leave some, but she got me trying various grains and grain combinations to eat for breakfast and they were great. Off the top of my head, I think my favorite was quinoa or oatmeal with millet about 4:1 (millet being the 1.) I ground them up, cooked them on the stove, and then put a dollop of whatever you like (nut butter, yogurt, I liked a heaping tablespoon of applesauce or pear sauce.) She had a whole system, though, in terms of storage/prep/saving leftovers. I'm sure it's something you could get from the library.

We just moved at the beginning of the week to a small town. I can give you one story of what I thought was a huge Pro, that I wasn't even really thinking about. I had it on my (enormous) todo list to return a modem to Time Warner. No big deal, I just had it in my head I was going to get the modem, look up[ the address and direction, drive there park, drop it off, drive home. I hadn't actually literally gone though those steps in my head or anything, it was just a vague picture and I had mentally blocked off at least 40 minutes (or more?) for it and wasn't, you know, looking forward to it. I was walking the 2 blocks from my apt. to the Post Office and walked by a store front with a big Time Warner sign in the window. I love living here! One word 'walkability.' Which translates to time and productivity. The last time I started my car was Tuesday. Love it. (Knowing your neighbors is gravy!)

I learned to draw this year. Shocked the heck out of me, because I can't draw. Like, stick figures and a dog=two ovals and four stick legs. I read a couple books, mostly to draw with my 6yo niece who into drawing, and I was really engaged and surprised at what I could do. Now at night after DD goes to bed, it's what I do to relax. It's the cheapest hobby I've ever had, I bought a nice sketchpad and a set of pencils.

IMHO, this is the simplest, most elegant way to put it. In many ways, a child who has not gotten what infants need when he was an infant, needs those holes to be filled up. When an infant acts 'ugly', when they scream in your ear, when they make a mess, we hold them tighter and make them warm and comfortable and loved. If a child didn't have that, in a nutshell, they need it whether they are 12 months or 12 years. Once we've parented bio-kids or kids placed as newborns, we have a complex set of 'age-appropriate expectations' and they may just not apply. We hate to 'reward bad behavior' and in general kind of like to withhold affection/nurture in many forms as a way to "engage cooperation" to use a euphemism. These things may really fall very, very flat with a neglected child (not to mention corporal punishment which is illegal here and other places I know about.) At their best, many common methods *depend* on an attachment and trust between parent and kid that foster kids don't have. You may have to un-learn not only what method you feel is best to 'make your point' but also your fundamental understanding of what/how a 1-2yo should act, and be willing to go against your experience to help him. That's just my humble opinion, for what it's worth.

You have to be very careful about the safety of any kids you have in the house. Only adding children younger than the oldest is common and sound advice, IMHO. There are exceptions to everything, case-by-case basis for sure, but you have to be very careful. I don't know if you have little ones in the house?

It's one of those things that's hard to encapsulate (at least for me.) The one thing I pick to tell people who ask in your shoes is: really think ahead to the challenge of freeing your mind to un-learn what you learned parenting your bio kids and re-learning what parenting foster/older adopted kids will need. That's hard, IMHO. I really believe it's largely because parenting is so incredibly personal, and we have so much heavily invested, you come to a place where you sort of 'have' to believe that you did things the Right Way. I think that's why we see these crazy mommy-wars go on between people who make different choices. There are plenty of ways that parenting foster kids is like parenting you bio or placed-at-birth kids, a la what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And there are *plenty* that they might be very different. So to truly, carefully serve them, IMHO, you really have to be prepared and willing and ready to start over learning what you believe is best. Maybe even things that meant the most to you in the past. I don't tell people that to give them any kind of negative warning, but I think iut's something really worth thinking long and had about in advance. The rumination will pay off IMHO. For everyone involved including the kids already in your house. Logistical advice would be to find an agency that offers a lot of support and training, and *be firm* with them about what placements you can and cannot handle. And take this opportunity to read everything you can find. http://www.tapestrybooks.com/categories.asp?cID=96 has a nice selection. My story...is actually kind of boring. We trained and were liscensed in NYS in 2002 as foster parents in a foster-to-adopt program. We finally got matched to a waiting child, a 12yo boy and he lived with us awaiting finalities a little over a year, at which point the whole story changed and he was placed with an uncle. I learned several years later that arrangement 'fell through' somehow and he was back in the system, and I sought him out but he was lost to me, more or less. I had an infant, was separated facing divorce, my license had lapsed and it wasn't going to happen. Both experiences were pretty big blows, to put it mildly, something that I don't really have the words to talk about much. I found *a lot* of bait-and-switch working with the system, it isn't easy (or it wasn't for us, living where we were/working with whom we were/what have you.) It was one of the best experiences in my life, it changed my life, it changed my heart. Extremely painful and I'd do it again without hesitation.

:lol::lol::lol: Yes!

I really encourage you to look at the air quality specific features of the Miele. They specialize in sealed-construction and dust-free operation. Dyson has a bigger following, Miele is a little obscure in the US, and Dysons are nice machines that boast great suction. For an allergy sufferer, I would not go bagless myself. (The Miele dusting brush attachment also rocks my world. If you have blinds, you'll wonder where it's been all your life ;-) ETA: Of the two, my Miele has held up much better, but when we separated my husband got custody of the Dyson (that's when I discovered and bought the Miele) and he takes lousy care of stuff.