$1350 seems a lot to me too. I saw a chiropractor weekly (on the advice of my primary care doctor) for several years because of back pain and loss of feeling on my right side caused by long hours of driving in the car for work. In my case, it was covered by insurance (I only paid $7 a visit out of pocket) and I did get some relief for the few days following the visit, but never complete relief. I didn't feel much better until I changed jobs and didn't spend 2-6 hours driving in the car everyday anymore. I haven't seen a chiropractor in years now and feel fine. I would listen to the other posters and get a second opinion first for sure and I would get that opinion from a MD. You may have damage that the chiropractor can't see or you may need physical therapy instead. You may not see relief until you find a job that doesn't require repetitive motion. I hope you find a solution to relieve your pain soon. :grouphug:

We wanted a Tempurpedic, but didn't want to spend the money. So we tried them out at our local furniture store, figured out which model we liked, and then bought a knock off from an online place that had a awesome guarantee and shipped directly to your house. This is the one we bought. I was really nervous about doing it (what if I don't like it? What if it doesn't feel like the Tempurpedic? And on and on and on...), but my dh convinced me and it ended up being a great decision. We love the mattress and we saved a ton of money.

Oh! I forgot they were even on! Thanks for the reminder. I need to go grocery shopping so the remainder of the Girl Scout cookies it is! :D

:iagree: I flipped through it at Barnes and Noble and decided not to read it for the same reason.

First of all, Ali in OR, you are a rockstar! I couldn't believe it when I saw you had hit 13 on your list! I am still just puttering along here. ;) I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest in 5 days by pretty much reading it every single available free moment (I guess I could have paid some late fees to keep it longer, but I'm a psycho). My review of it is here. I'm still working on A Reliable Wife (I must pick up the pace on that one. Book club meeting is 3/9), I started The Forgotten Garden (that one I'll definitely be paying some late fees on. I'm less than 100 pages in and I only have it until Thursday), and still plodding in Jane Eyre. I don't even know if you can call it plodding anymore. I guess it's collecting dust until I can get motivated to read more of it...and stop checking out books from the library that are one week only titles. :tongue_smilie:

:lol: I just saw this thread after I started this thread in which I said "of course we'll have to mummify a chicken." :tongue_smilie: I'm just adding to the count!

:iagree: about Hillsdale Academy. I went to Hillsdale College and the K-12 academy is very well respected. You can download their curricula for every grade for free as a PDF on their website.

That was hilarious. Thanks for sharing. :001_smile:

Our elementary is a 8. Our middle school is a 4. The high school is a 7. :001_huh:

:iagree: One of my dear friends who is a mom of 7 and has homeschooled from the beginning is in the process of putting her oldest ds (age 10) into PS. He has dyslexia and ADHD and she has struggled with teaching him from the beginning. They have hired tutors over the years to no avail. She had him independently tested in December. He was at grade level in math, but up to two grade levels behind in every other area. On the other hand, her 2nd oldest child (age 9) who has no learning disabilities is above grade level in every area. She's beating herself up about "failing" her son, but I think they will have just as much of a challenge teaching him at PS. It SO SO SO depends on the child, on the quality of your school district, and what your expectations are as a parent.

I'm jealous! We don't have this week off. Our next school vacation isn't until the week before Easter.

I just checked my card online and I have 58 checked out right now. I think I hit my personal record a week or two ago of 89. At our library, you can only have 100 at a time so I was really trying to reach it. ;)

The book Garbageland really had an impact on me. After reading that is when I started to be more conscious of what was going in our trash can. The waste in our society is crazy and will definitely have an impact on our children's future if we don't change.

I agree with everyone who said donate with one caveat---if you have some really nice condition name brand items (e.g. Gymboree, Gap, etc.), especially complete outfits with accessories, you may try selling them on eBay. I once sold a Gymboree outfit of my daughter's that I bought secondhand for $25 on eBay! Granted, it was a jumper, shirt, hat and tights, but I couldn't believe that someone would pay that much for a secondhand outfit. Good luck on your path to minimalism!

I bet you would find lots on etsy.com.

With all of you guys reading The Book Thief and saying how good it is, I want to too! Time to put it on my hold list at the library. I finished Summer at Tiffany which was a nice refreshing read. I love memoirs! See my review here. This week I'm frantically reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (due back to the library by Thursday! Who knew it was over 500 pages long?!?!?), and still plodding through Jane Eyre. I also started A Reliable Wife because it's the pick for my book club this month. So far, so good.

It is truly disappointing. Unfortunately, professional orchestras are hurting nationwide. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are both professional musicians in Charleston, SC. I can't tell you how many times they have had to take pay cuts, go on furlough, or have been on strike in the past ten years. The bottom line is most people aren't willing to shell out a lot of money for tickets to their events in difficult financial times.

Thank you for making my night---as a former VP of my neighborhood association, I salute you :D

Me too! My son has two bins in his room and a train table. My daughter has plastic bins filled with Barbies and Ponies and a lunch box full of Polly Pockets in her room with a chair full of stuffed animals. There are more toys (mostly Legos, Tinkertoys, puzzles and board games) in cabinets in our family room. Everything else is all over the place in the basement. We haven't ever been strict about making them clean that up because they tend to build things like tents and forts that they use over and over. They do have pegs on the wall down there for dress up clothes so I do make them keep all of that picked up. You are brilliant! I love this idea. At one point, we actually had to remove everything that wasn't a piece of furniture (including clothes) out of my daughter's room so we could only bring back in things she could handle picking up herself and that had a home. If it didn't have a place to live, she didn't want to pick it up, or she didn't want it anymore, it didn't go back in. After that, clean up and life in general was much easier. Prior to that, it was melt down time everyday of the week when time to clean up rolled around.

Pop music is mostly just trash lyric wise these days. The problem is I still like it, and now I can't listen to it unless I want my 5 year old singing "I'll let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans. I'll be your teenage dream tonight." If you don't know, these are some lyrics from Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream". I wasn't even really paying attention to the words until she started singing along. It's just wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels! Classical in the car from now on!!!!

I'm 99% sure this is what's aggravating your back. I used to travel for work (i.e. sitting in the car driving for 2-6 hours a day, 5 days a week) and I actually started losing sensation in my right side. I freaked out and saw the doctor. She determined that it was a pinched nerve and sent me to a chiropractor friend of hers. Seeing him helped, but the pain and loss of feeling did not leave me until I got a desk job and stopped traveling. To this day, any time I do a repetitive motion involving my back for an extended period of time I am messed up for days. Some light stretching might help. If you have any friends who are physical therapists, see if they could give you a copy of some back exercises to do. These help me immensely when mine starts acting up.

I think most doctors get hardly any training on nutrition in medical school so they really just don't know. Our family is not completely dairy free, but my husband is and I am mostly dairy free. He has severe problems with his digestion that are made worse by eating beef, dairy, and whole kernel corn. He discovered this by doing a strict elimination diet for 3 months after suffering for years and undergoing tons of tests. I have digestion problems too that are aggravated by cheese and tree nuts. The kids still eat cheese and yogurt and drink about a glass a day of milk because they like it and do not seem to be adversely effected. My gastro doc says that the foods that most commonly effect people with digestive issues are soda, coffee, citrus, nuts, and dairy.

Nope, not my last name. Don't tell me that happened to someone else too!??!!? I have to admit I felt that same way until this winter when I discovered the joy that is Vitamin D. And I suppose if I had the chance to live in perpetual summer land I would go happily :001_smile:

I don't know what kind of insurance they have or where they are located, but my family has had great success in figuring out unidentifiable medical issues at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. We went there every summer beginning when my youngest sister was a year old because she has a rare type of asthma that is virally induced. This was discovered by the Mayo doctors on her first visit. The local doctors knew she had asthma, but couldn't figure out the trigger. On two separate occasions my parents also went there for issues of their own that our local doctors couldn't figure out. My mother's example stands out to me. When I was in high school, she got what appeared to be a bite on the neck. The bite turned into a red line on her neck and then went away. Shortly thereafter, she started getting full body tremors. The local doctors thought she had Lyme's disease or MS, but couldn't decide which. When my sister's visit to Mayo arrived, my mom made an appointment too. After all the tests they ran, they told her that they had seen about 20 other people in the last year with the same symptoms. They too didn't know what it was exactly, but knew that in all the other cases the symptoms ended within 6 months of beginning. Sure enough when it hit the 6 month mark, my mom was fine. The great thing about there is that the entire city is dedicated to medicine so almost all the hotels have shuttle service to all the clinic and all the hospitals, and there's an underground tunnel system connecting the medical centers too. I hope you find a way to help your nephew. I can't even imagine what you're going through.:grouphug:

:lol: Oh my gosh! I can't even imagine what would have happened had I been knitting at the same time. Last time I tried to skate like I did when I was a kid, I ended up in an ambulance with a dislocated knee. What's the matter with Michigan? Aside from the crappy economy, I love it! This absolutely killed me! :tongue_smilie: I once tried to make sloppy joes with tofu. That was just plain unnatural. Never again! I learned my lesson on this one the hard way. When my 5 year old was a newborn, I cut her thumb nail too close and it started bleeding profusely. I couldn't get it to stop so I called for dh to get the Liquid Bandage. Keep in mind---my daughter is screaming the entire time. I held up her thumb while he dabbed on the Liquid Bandage, and I blew on it so it would dry. When I went to let go, I couldn't. My fingers were glued to her thumb! And she's still screaming. He then went to fetch some baby oil to put on us to try to separate us. He put it on top of her dresser while he inspected how he was going to do it. Right then, the cat jumped up, knocked the bottle of baby oil into an open drawer, and the drawer got filled with it! I still am paranoid about cutting the kids' nails to this day.