I just need to share! We've tried for 7 years to get pregnant on our own. In the meantime, we adopted our beautiful twin girls. I kept insisting I had endomitriosis, but my OB wouldn't do the surgery until I'd done all sorts of expensive fertility stuff. She didn't get that I wanted to know what was wrong with me- not just get pregnant. So, I was angry and bitter and left it alone for a while. We just moved to a new state and now I'm 31, so I figured I'd stop dinking around and just go straight to the endocrinologist. She did the surgery and, sure enough, removed two spots of endomitriosis Yay. (I was right. :glare:) So now, after 7 years of not getting pregnant and basically accepting that and moving on, she is telling me that she sees no other reason we shouldn't be able to get pregnant, but that I have about a year before the endo starts growing back. I'm on Clomid and this was our first month trying. I feel like I am just going to start my period and I should know within the next 24 hours. I hate going through all of this again! The doctor gave me so many reasons to be hopeful---and now I'm kind of mad at her for it! I know that doesn't make sense, it's just that I've worked so hard at being ok with not being able to conceive and now I have this doctor telling me- ok fixed, go for it. (In the end, we still could have unexplained infertility though.) I feel like a fish out of water. I don't want to go through this pain all over again, but it would be worth it if we can get pregnant... Some of you know how I'm feeling. Sigh. I just want to hurry the next 12 months up and have the answer! So, of course, now I can't stop thinking about whether I might be pregnant, whether I might get pregnant, etc. I'm a planner and I've not been able to plan anything when it comes to parenthood! It's just frustrating. I'm just needing to share today...

Are you talking about Medicaid? If so, my girls are on it (straight Medicaid, not connected to an HMO) because they are adopted through foster care. They were on it in Utah, and now in Virginia, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of coverage. They have covered almost everything except my daughter's speech at one point. Apparently she wasn't "bad enough" even though you can't understand her! I could have fought it, but we managed another way. They covered vision therapy, too. They cover everything from the pediatrician, medications (eve things our primary insurance won't pay for), etc. You just have to make sure you go to providers who accept Medicaid. That's where it can get tricky. My girls are on our insurance, with Medicaid as a secondary. I've found that we have way more options this way. You may have to take what you can get. It's usually ok for medical things, but for dental, you'll *probably* not have the best choices. It may be worth trying to pay out of pocket for dental so you can have better dentists---this is MY experience, and I am very picky about dentists. Medicaid also covers vision. It covers appointments and glasses every two years. However, it only covers really cheap frames and it won't cover the polycarbonate lenses, which are important to me. So, we pay out of pocket for glasses. Let's see, it also paid for their regular therapy (out patient mental health), it covered my daughter's sleep study, and we didn't pay a thing to have her tonsils removed. Mind you, we also have a primary insurance and we've been told that if you have primary insurance and use Medicaid as a secondary, they usually pick up whatever the primary doesn't cover. This has been our experience. It's been easy for us, but it's something my girls will always have until they are 18, so I never really think about it. We are super grateful for Medicaid because sometimes, it's been the only way we could pay for certain things that might have otherwise not happened, like vision therapy. On the same token, we've also had to weigh the quality of services we can access through Medicaid against the benefit of just paying out of pocket. I hope that helps! I've found the key to Medicaid is that is a doctor insists that it is medically necessary, they are pretty sure to pay for it.

You have GOT to be kidding. People on here send you messages like that?!?!

Parenting From the Inside Out

I've taught kids like this before. They are very good at segmenting, but still weak with blending. It's not super uncommon, especially at this age with very phonetically spelled words. You may try using a word family approach to blending, and see if that helps. For example, take his "plot" and ask him to point to the letters that spell "ot." Then make a list of other simple words that end in "ot" (pot, spot, hot, clot, etc.). You can do this for other words he is working on in his reading/readers. It will help him with linking those symbols to a sound when it is visual input instead of auditory input. I hope that helps. Barring any reading disability, I'm sure he's just on the uphill side of becoming a fluent reader. He'll get there.

:iagree: I'm MUCH more concerned about making sure not to post pictures of my kids or their names on my homeschool blog. While I LOVE reading blogs that do have these things, it makes me feel very uneasy that anyone in the world can look at it. (I have a private blog for pictures and whatnot.) I was even reading a homeschool blog where the mom listed her address. Talk about scary. :blink: I guess everyone has their own boundaries.

Did you join the CLE Yahoo group? There are always people on there trying to sell stuff.

If it makes you feel any better, I was never on the charts and didn't even weigh 50 pounds until I was in 4th grade! I weighed 80 pounds in 8th grade and hovered around 90-95 until I was out of high school. At 30 years old, I weigh just under 110 and am about 5 ft 3 inches tall. I was always short, but not THAT short. I was just super skinny. My mom was the same way as a kid and my grandma is still that way. (It has nothing to do with what I eat and I don't have any contributing health issues.) Just wanted to share. Sometimes I think we get so worried if our kids aren't meeting the "standard"- in whatever area. If she's healthy in every other way and being small runs in your family, I wouldn't worry too much. If you want to pack some extra calories, though, what about Pediasure? My mom also used to stir an egg into my Cream of Wheat. I have a child who needs a lot of protein, so we try to do eggs instead of cereal, peanut butter with apples and celery, almonds as a snack instead of crackers, etc. Ooops- just read it again and saw she is only 7 months old--- I saw DD2 and thought she was 2 years old! Haha, so take my answer for what it's worth...

Yes! A really good example of this is my daughter doing long multiplication. She'll multiply, then go to add, and somewhere along the way she forgets what the answer to the multiplication problem just was. It takes her longer to do everything. It took her a loooong time to learn to add and subtract for this exact reason.

Everyone. We were feeling like our new neighbors hated us the first year they moved in. They brought us Christmas goodies and it opened the door for a friendship. Just do something simple for those 4 and something grand for the 5 you really know. It's not like they are going to compare.

I'd recommend All About Spelling! You could probably go through it pretty quickly, but it would fill in her gaps. My horrible spelling 9 year old is just finishing Level 2.

For what it's worth, our pediatrician prescribed Concerta to our daughter, and said he wouldn't prescribe Vyvanse unless Concerta didn't work. He mentioned something about how Vyvanse is absorbed in the body and that it was harder on the...liver? I think. Maybe something to ask your doctor about. Concerta worked wonderfully for us. Beautifully. Changed her life. We didn't have any of the negative side effects because my dd already had a tendency to overeat. This helped her control her appetite. The first two weeks felt like she was the Energizer bunny, but by week 3, that had tapered off. She always took Melatonin at night to sleep. She hasn't been on for about two months now, just because I'd rather not medicate her, if possible. She's doing well. If I had to put her back in school though, I'd immediately put her back on the meds. That's awful to say, but she wouldn't survive any other way!

HA! Love this.

Thanks Christina! I forgot we have Dreambox, too. Perfect. My parents have a home in Bucaramanga and I can't wait to get down there sometime! Your kids are so lucky!

Your daughter sounds exactly like mine!!! Have you looked into oral motor dyspraxia? That's what my daughter was diagnosed with. We've been in speech for 4 years, very faithfully, and I was disappointed with our progress. We moved, saw a new developmental ped, got this diagnosis, and are now seeing an SLP who is PROMPT certified, which is a program for kids with apraxia that emphasizes muscle movement and the therapists touch the child's face. It has made an immediate difference. All the oral motor exercises in the world didn't do my daughter a lick of good because it wasn't that she didn't know *how* to make the sound, it was that she couldn't coordinate her muscles well enough to even understand what the right way was. I hope that makes sense. It might be worth checking into.

I thought about that... but I don't really know where to go with it. Should I focus on animals? Tides? Just check out books and follow their interests? I am hoping the tide pools will still be exposed because that would be perfect!

We will be going to visit my family for the whole month of January, staying on the beach- YAY! I'm planning on bringing our math, spelling, and history (because they love it). They'll read a ton and they'll bring their composition notebooks so we can work on writing (we do WWE, but we are also working on paragraphs/writing on our own). I'm not sure if I want to bring FLL 3 because the books are so big. We'll be flying. Any advice?? I'm not going to be OCD about school while we are there, but I do know we will have time to get a good chunk done. What would you take? FYI- Not doing school really isn't an option because we've taken so many breaks for traveling already this year. We will have quite a bit of down time to work.

My 9 year olds (4th graders) are doing FLL 3 and WWE 3. It is FAR more than they'd be getting in PS and suits them well. Also, FLL3 is only 80something lessons, so you could get through it pretty fast. Personally, I think the passages in WWE 3 are fairly difficult, so I don't feel like it's "behind" for them at all. I really wouldn't stress. They'll be fine no matter what you decide to do.

If it makes you feel any better, my 9 year old is just now finishing up AAS 2. It really does build upon itself and it's not unusual for kids to need a review of skills from time to time. Sometimes we do one lesson per week, sometimes two, and sometimes we spend three weeks on a concept, until it's really mastered.

My 9 year olds know all of the states and most capitols, just from a poster in their room. They know a lot of countries from the map work in the SOTW AGs. They also went to an IB school from K-2 where geography was emphasized, so they have a solid foundation for continents, oceans, and generally where most countries are located. The met a man from Serbia the other day and he explained to them that Serbia is between Italy and Greece. They couldn't wait to get home and find it on the map. I'll sheepishly admit, I didn't know exactly where Serbia was, even though I learned all of the countries and their capitols in 6th grade. For my girls, their retention is much higher when it is linked to something meaningful. While I might eventually use a program to just "memorize," I think it's equally important to use the map when discussing history, current events, stories, holidays, etc.

If it makes yours daughter uncomfortable, I'd probably just get a new teacher. I would think telling him not to touch her might just make the situation tense for everyone. He might feel verrry uncomfortable after that. Personally, because of my girls' history, I would just get a new teacher. But full disclosure: I would never choose a male teacher for something that intimate. So take it with a grain of salt. At this point it's not about accusing him of anything. It's about your daughter. It sounds like it's not a good fit, personality wise, anyway. It might be a good opportunity to show her how important it is for her to tell you these things. Maybe she could tell you if she wants a new teacher?

Another secular SOTW lover here! I think if you make it through the whole first book, you'll feel differently about the religiousness of it. At least, I did. She approaches other religions/traditions similarly- so much so that my 9 year olds think that they could choose to believe in Jesus just as much as they could choose to believe in Zeus. You add so much other literature to SOTW, that it is really just the skeleton. We love the Activity Guides and use SOTW for narrations and map work. This is our favorite part of our homeschool.

See, and for my ADHD dd, TV makes her symptoms sooooo much worse. Funny how different things work for different kids.

NEVER.

We moved across the country this year. As hard as it was, I got rid of boxes of books. I got rid of all the paperback early readers (my kids had outgrown them), any junky books with TV characters, doubles (a shocking amount!), and books I knew the girls hadn't touched in a long time. I also made a small box of books that I wanted to keep for my girls, but didn't want to have out anymore, like favorite read alouds they had outgrown. Now I know the special books are safe and I can give them to them when they get married. Silly, but books are sentimental around here. :) Then when we moved in here, I gave even more books away! We still have boxes and boxes that aren't unpacked. It's a sickness. Good luck! I hate moving!!!