Both books are from the beloved Vision Books series http://love2learnblog.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/vision-book-series.html ... many of which have been reprinted by Ignatius Press. I've easily found the original hardcovers in used book stores or via bookfinder.com . If you want the Vision bios from the Counterreformation era, don't forget St. Ignatius and the Company of Jesus, by August Derleth, writer of the Cthulhu stories after Lovecraft's death.

Did you know that we're getting an AQUARIUM?!? http://www.austinaquarium.com/

Thanks, SWB!

Right, I've now ordered the Road ID in purple, in the hope that Wee Girl will like that enough to wear a wristband. They're very inexpensive! When I get back to the US, I'll get the MedicAlert pendant as well. Thank you all!

Yes that's the kind of scenario that scares me. People today are so primed to see child abductors lurking in every van that anything they're unfamiliar becomes suspicious.

I agree, a bracelet would be much more practical; but she won't wear anything on her wrist, while she doesn't mind something around her neck. Wee Girl's mutism is pretty severe; she simply can't talk to anyone outside her immediate family. It took grandparents and her beloved cello teacher (the mother of her friend) over a year of visiting with her frequently before she was able to speak to them at all. She'll speak to children her age or younger, though, which gratifyingly keeps expanding her list of acceptable people as she gets older.

Middle Girl is in that difficult stage where she's bored by most books for children but too little for most adult reading (and too sheltered, thank heaven, for most YA books). Besides the aforementioned Stevenson, Kipling, and Dickens, she's enjoyed collections of A.A. Milne's essays (written for Punch long ago) and Gerald Durrell, as well as plowing through stacks of horrible inspiring biographies for adolescents from the turn of the previous century with titles like "Leaders of Men," "Men Who Have Risen," and "Tales of Patriotism." She's determined at the moment to be the next Andrew Carnegie. (I haven't the heart to tell her we're too middle class for her to rise from poverty to greatness.)

Have you considered the Salvation Army? It's not just a thrift store. I've heard others with similar concerns say they found it to be a good fit.

I've heard from one young priest that he hates the "offering for sacrament" system, but Catholic priests in the US are paid $25-30K and even living in the rectory and not needing to support a nuclear family (though they often enough have other family that could use help), they really can use those offerings. He said the priests who have money independently will pass the offerings on to charitable use. Religious priests (i.e. priests who are members of religious orders and so have taken a vow of poverty) can't keep the offerings, and will always pass it on. No priest, however, would pressure a family for money; it's a violation of Church canons to make the sacraments a matter of payment, and a Catholic who can't or won't offer a stipend/stole fee must and will be offered the sacraments anyhow.

Here's a corrective to the idea that memorization is bad, googling is good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22971225 So schools in the US and UK have been assigning a recent Nancy Willard poem as William Blake. The internet says it's by Blake. But a school librarian knew it wasn't, because nobody who had immersed themselves in Blake and memorized any of his work could possibly mistake it for Blake.

[i copied my list of hidden resources from this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/275175-what-do-you-use-that-no-one-else-does/ ] Word Wealth, Junior (late elementary) Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children (elementary age) Perrine's Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (middle/high school) Scribner School Paperbacks (various; high school classics with thorough and excellent study guides) Living Shakespeare (abridged but not adapted; late elementary or middle) Open University Discovering Science (middle school/ early high school general science course)

Ember Days, aka Quattuor Tempora, twelve days (three days in each season) of semi-fasting after which tempura was named. Days for the ascetic discipline of eating yummy fried Japanese food for lunch.

Back before 9/11, in some airports they had the x-ray screen turned so you could see what the screener was seeing. I put Great Girl's diaper bag through the x-ray and was stunned to see the clear silhouette of a pistol in the bag! The security people freaked - in a professional sort of way - whisked it off the belt and hand-searched the bag to find a contraband Tyrannosaurus Rex that Great Girl had added on her own initiative. Somehow it had angled in just the right way to look exactly like a gun. The security guy laughed, held it by the tail and pointed it at the other security guy. Oh, the old days, when airport security could be funny.

I'm always suspicious of teachers with explanations of why they don't need to teach.

As part of my youngest's therapy for enabling her to speak (she could process language sounds receptively, but not expressively), we used large textured letters as multi-sensory aids, associating the shape and texture with sounds. When her brain finally figured out how to produce the sounds it wanted, as an unexpected corollary she began to sound out simple words quite fluently; like she had had one of those intensive phonics courses for teaching babies to read. But though she could read and genuinely understand beginning readers, she stayed on that same beginning level for a couple of years, and only recently began moving forward in reading ability. So from our unintended experiment with one child, at least, I would agree that children pushed to read early are going to end up at their own right level.

Before Great Girl got to use a calculator, she first had to learn quick pencil-and-paper methods for crunching of large numbers (using a 1920's arithmetic curriculum), including finding roots. Then she got to learn logarithms through making her own slide rules out of paper and a ziploc bag (one of the most awesome TOPS Science units). THEN she got to use a calculator. (And I did show her the log tables I had to use in the not-everybody-can-afford-a-calculator days; she saw immediately how to use them. It was a good thing.) Turns out that when she went to college, it took her no time at all to understand how to use the technology, including how to do research using a search engine. Which turned out to be much easier when she already had a great deal of both general and specialized knowledge in her head, and a mental framework for organizing information acquired through laboring over dead-tree reference works and indexes. We're big fans of the Luddite approach to education.

Here's food for thought. This was a recent case (sorry I can't be troubled to look up the citation). Restraining and other no-contact orders prohibit the person against whom the order is issues from contacting the protected person secondhand, by asking someone to forward a message to them. However they can talk to any other person and not be in violation if that person forwards the message, no matter how foreseeable it was that the third person would forward the message. So one enterprising stalker forwarded a very unpleasant, abusive message to a person who had a no-contact order by forwarding it to every last Facebook friend she had, and friends of those friends, making it statistically certain that someone would forward it to her, which is of course what happened. The judge ruled that this wasn't a violation of the no-contact order. Thus stalkers may continue harassing their victims with impunity thanks to social media, more easily than dropping a letter in a mailbox.

Occasionally My Content will begin working; then it resets to weeks ago plus (sometimes) whatever thread I last posted in. OtherJohn, is there any progress to be expected? I'll understand and find a workaround if it's just a permanent bug.

What we really need is draconian privacy laws, with a big hole cut in the first amendment to make room for them, enabled by a massive federal database that will monitor all social media and other internet, mail, and telephone communications, with automated flagging and prosecution of unauthorized privacy violations. Maybe the NSA can help out with that. Meanwhile, we need everyone to wear those Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks.

Just mentioning that the TSA is no longer permitted to separate children from their parents, except for walking through the metal detector. http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/traveling-children

Dang, you people are organized. I just buy one of these: http://www.apluswhs.com/products/ward-lesson-plan-book/ Each Monday, I pencil into the Friday row what I hope to get accomplished in each subject that week. As the week goes, I ink in what we actually get done.

Yes, these were my thoughts, too. Actually I've been trying to figure out why I feel so reluctant about it; and I think it's in great part not wanting to 'medicalize' her anxieties. Which is silly, but there it is.

Does anybody have, or would you consider, one of those medic-alert pendants for your dc? We're abroad right now. On the way through the airport, Wee Girl, who is selectively mute, triggered the TSA's random check. The agent pulled her and me aside, wiped my hands for explosive residue, asked me her name, and then turned to her and asked her "Is your name [Wee Girl]?" Of course she couldn't answer, just crumpled into herself in her usual way. The agent looked hard at me, asked her another question (I don't recall what it was) and got the same silence. The agent was obviously very unhappy about this and I quickly said "She's very shy, she doesn't talk much" - it didn't seem like the time for explanations about disabling anxiety disorders. The agent had another look at our passports and then passed us through, but I was pretty shaken; I realized that the TSA might easily have insisted on taking Wee Girl off by herself and questioning her, which would have been disastrous. So. I thought it might help with future situations with law enforcement (especially the pseudo-cop kind) if Wee Girl had a medic-alert tag: maybe just her name, my phone number, and "mutism." It had already occurred to me that if she got lost she would have a tough time saying who she was; the TSA incident, though, made me realize that some authority figure might actually find her inability to confirm her identity suspicious. Any thoughts?

Yesterday I informed, sotto voce, a nice young college student that the hem of her long skirt was caught in her undies. She immediately thanked me and adjusted. But if I'd had any sense that she had intentionally arranged her skirt that way, I would have minded my own business.

Would this be one of those TSA agents who forced my body-conscious 14-year-old girl to stand in a glass scanner, with her arms and legs spread, so they could take a photo of her with her clothes off? I'm so glad to learn they have the modesty interests of the nation's young women at heart.