I feel like it must be happening at our homeschool community center, but supposedly we were the only family that had it.

I think the main reason they're so much worse now than they used to be is that lice have become resistant to the over-the-counter treatments. As you might imagine, I've been reading up on the subject. When I was a kid, the pesticide lice shampoos were 99% effective. Now their effectiveness is 25-30%.

Encouraging follow-up: I combed them super thoroughly with the electronic comb today. I didn't get a single thing out of Alex's waist-length hair. From Colin's hair I got one tiny nymph about a millimeter long. It was never this good after using the over-the-counter shampoo - I continued to get a few nymphs from both kids every day as well as occasional adults. Ulesfia might actually do the trick.

Incidentally, my parents were both shocked that homeschooled children can get lice. :lol:

Last year or so, someone in this forum posted about how lice are so easily gotten rid of that a chronic case is obviously due to parental neglect or laziness. Does that sound familiar to anyone? I would like to buy that poster a plane ticket to Baltimore. She can show me how it's done. My kids got lice last month. I bought an electric lice-killing comb and a steel comb and some Nix pesticide shampoo. I combed them out with the electric lice-killing comb the first day. I marinated them in pesticide shampoo. I fine-combed them for hours and hours with a steel nit comb. Meanwhile, my marvelous babysitter washed all the sheets and blankets and all the clothes the kids had worn recently or might have worn recently. She bagged up all their stuffed animals and all of the throw pillows in the living room and she vacuumed the furniture thoroughly. We ran the pillows through the dryer on high heat. After that I combed them out every day for two weeks. I spent hours and hours on my daughter's long hair, every single day. I alternated using the electric comb and wet-combing with conditioner and a nit comb. Every. Day. At the one-week mark I shampooed them again, even though we were pretty sure that the lice were treatment-resistant - I saw live lice right after the treatment. Eventually, after more than two weeks of daily combing, we stopped getting anything. Their heads stopped itching. We breathed a sigh of relief... ...And now the lice are back. This time I got a prescription for a massively expensive medicated shampoo called Ulefsia. I have been doing nothing but shampoo and comb hair all day long today. My husband stripped all the beds and washed all the bedding and vacuumed all the furniture. The kids bagged up their stuffies and the throw pillows and everything, and we're on the merry-go-round again. That's minimum another two weeks of daily combing. Please please please let the treatment work this time. Apparently Ulefsia isn't something lice can develop a resistance to. I just don't even know what more I can do.

I have always worked. I used to find it quite stressful when I had an academic job, but now that I am in private practice I find it incredibly rewarding. I think I'll always want to do it. Working for myself is very flexible - I can just make an executive decision that I'm not available certain hours or days - so I don't think I would feel tied down. And I love the way it feels to help a family figure out what's going on with their kid.

So, this is a totally ignorant question - farm people, help me out. What are the costs associated with keeping animal and human areas separate? Is this something they probably legitimately can't afford to do, or is it something they just don't care enough to do? I understand that proper fencing probably is expensive, but couldn't they do these janky reclaimed-wood fences like the one they have around their kitchen? The choice to free-range their kids, farm animals, and dogs all on the same plot of land... I find that so baffling. Also the idea that they are, in part, drawing from their pond for water use, but the animals aren't contained and rainwater is washing the animal waste into the pond. How much of a substantial upgrade in resources would it take for them to be able to keep their animals contained and away from water sources and human living areas?

Um. This person is apparently soooo close to the Nauglers (FB close, I mean) that she's not aware that they returned the pre-fab cabin and built themselves a... I don't even know what to call that three-walled thing. It's like an Adirondack shelter, except not actually sturdy. But what do I know? I'm just a "naysayer" who doesn't support the fundamental parental right to let your kids run around barefoot in goat shit.

Oh good gracious goodness. That article turned my stomach.

So, I know NOBODY who sells or touts essential oils.My homeschooling community and my facebook are EO free. (I do get invited to MLM parties, but it's always Jamberry nail wraps.) Is Young Living, etc. primarily a thing that's happening within evangelical Christian culture? I was asked to speak at a Classical Conversations-focused homeschool resource fair. My talk was "Learning Disabilities: An Introduction for Homeschooling Families." Nobody came, but the side room that had a YL essential oils presentation had eight or nine people in it. http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/fda-targets-essentials-oils-see-eos-as-threat-to-new-ebola-drugs/ According to this site, the only reason the FDA is speaking out against EO cures for Ebola is that they're protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. Those cads! "The article reports that the FDA issued warning letters not only to the two large essential oils distributors, but also to the Natural Solutions Foundation, which is marketing a product called Nano Silver which could potentially kill the Ebola virus. As has been documented in many other places, the Ebola crisis presents a huge market opportunity to the pharmaceutical industry to rush new drugs and vaccines into the market, and I have no doubt that one or more of these pharmaceutical giants have made complaints to the FDA against essential oils and other natural products that might cure Ebola. The U.S. government already owns a patent on the Ebola virus."

I finally got our notification! I figured that if we hadn't heard by now it meant Alex didn't do as well as we thought. But they were just slow sending out the email. She scored 7th in Maryland and 13th nationwide at the fourth grade level. There are two kids in her program who got perfect scores at the 6th grade level! I am very impressed.

Normally Mother's Day leaves me feeling down. Most years I get very little recognition, which isn't so bad in itself but makes me really aware of the contrast between how society says the day is "supposed" to be for me, and how it really is. Last year there was nothing except a decorated bag of M&Ms my 5yo made in co-op. I literally had to tell my husband to tell me "Happy Mother's Day." This year I got breakfast in bed (Dunkin Donuts and tea) and handmade presents that the kids put a lot of effort into. Now my husband has taken them to church and I am home enjoying another cup of tea in silence. This afternoon we will go see Avengers 2: Age of Ultron together. (My choice. Really.) And I will call my mom, of course.

I do LD diagnosis as a private psychologist, and I always ask homeschoolers for details about what curriculum or materials they use and how much time is spent on various subjects. My academic achievement tests show what a child knows, but I can't interpret that information without knowing what the child has been taught. Just as an example, suppose I see two eight-year-olds and neither one of them is able to read. The first one has had 30 minutes of daily reading instruction since kindergarten and is just not getting it. The second one is an unschooler who spends most of his time outside on the family farm exploring the woods and caring for the animals. Both kids get identical scores on my reading test, but that only worries me for the first one. You say they're concerned that your child doesn't know sight words. If your curriculum doesn't present sight words for memorization, that would explain why he doesn't know them. Not being able to blend is much more worrying, especially if you're teaching with phonics-based methods. I totally agree that they should have prepared you better for the meeting, though. Sounds like they're not used to dealing with homeschoolers.

Not THAT kind of hijinks! :tongue_smilie:

Also? I knew Linus in college. We may or may not have engaged in hijinks and shenanigans of the type one does not normally associate with one's curriculum provider.

I will say that we do most of the narrative questions orally. I do have Alex write the "Notes to Self," and I think those are helpful, but yeah - she's not expected to write multiple sentences about "how do you know that X is blah blah blah." It's enough of a struggle to get her to articulate it orally. ("It just IS! It's OBVIOUS!" "Well, Linus wants you to put it into words.")

In our house we have a rule that the word "sucks" can only be applied to the Yankees. I attempt to enforce the rule that "Jesus Christ" can only be used when speaking about religion, but DH is not always the best role model on that one. ...Okay, or possibly me. My kids say "OMG" constantly, just the letters: oh-em-gee. If they said "Oh my God" I would probably make the same request that I do about Jesus Christ, with approximately the same level of effectiveness. Alex, who is 10, came to me the other night concerned that "I picked up some bad words from you and Daddy, and I have a hard time keeping myself from saying them." On her list, along with a few truly distressing words, were "cruddy" and "freak." She didn't seem to differentiate at all. So we had a conversation about why one should be judicious about when one uses certain words. Alex does have friends who would probably be forbidden to play with her if she came out with some of the words on her list.

$600 for a straight-up IQ test? Dude. I need to raise my prices.

We did MEP through 4b, and then compacted MEP 5-6 together only doing selected portions. The only part of Jousting Armadillos I felt comfortable skipping was the negative numbers chapter. MEP covers operations with negative numbers really well. The introduction to variables was pretty easy for Alex because we'd had some of that in MEP as well, but I really enjoyed the way JA developed the concepts and she enjoyed the whimsical questions. Now we are about halfway through Crocodiles and Coconuts and I am breathless with admiration for what a fantastic book it is. I love the way that Linus builds deep understanding of how two-variable equations and how they are used to represent data in the real world. My daughter really gets how equations are depictions of relationships, in a way that I don't think I fully grasped until college statistics. It's a very practical approach to algebra - a great match for the future scientists out there. Oh, and C&C is definitely algebra, not prealgebra. Major sections are graphing functions on the coordinate plane, simultaneous equations, and conic sections.

We got a couple of pairs of these, from Kohls: http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1924989/so-knit-bermuda-shorts-girls-7-16.jsp

Oh my gosh, how am I ever supposed to narrow this down? What are you guys getting? In my list I have The Skeptic's Guide to American History 12 Essential Scientific Concepts Particle Physics for Non-Physicists The Origin and Evolution of Earth The Story of Human Language Peoples and Cultures of the World The Long 19th Century: Europe from 1789-1917

Boy. It takes me a good 8 hours to gather enough information about someone to diagnose them with a language processing disorder, and I have to administer tests and gather historical information. I definitely can't do it third-hand based on someone else's description of a brief social encounter. What do you know that I don't?

Baltimore has a black mayor, black chief of police, majority black city council, black state's attorney. The situation is more complicated than "evil-hearted white people in charge purposely oppress black people," but that doesn't mean that the situation is not steeped in racism. Baltimore is one of the most segregated cities in the country due to institutional practices like redlining. We were hit hard by the subprime lending crisis, and African-Americans were hit hardest - it has been proved in court that there were systematic efforts to steer black people to subprime mortgage products even when their credit rating qualified them for better loans. Baltimore has been absolutely ravaged by the drug war, which is overwhelmingly racist in the way it's carried out. (Just one example: the mandatory sentencing discrepancy between powder cocaine, which is mostly used by white people, and crack cocaine, which is mostly used by black people.) Baltimore neighborhoods and schools are scarred by decades and decades of racism and racism-influenced economic disparity. It's systemic racism. It's structural racism. It's institutional racism. Putting black officers on the street doesn't magically dismantle the structures and institutions built by racism over centuries. Social and institutional change is slow.

If you're on the dining plan, make ADRs (advance dining reservations) for your table service meals, ABSOLUTELY. We loved: Boma, at Animal Kingdom Lodge - grilled meats and excellent, really interesting salads, plenty for kids to eat, buffet style Teppan Edo, the teppanyaki place in the Japan section of Epcot. (It's one of those places where the chef does fancy tricks for you.) Biergarten in Epcot (music and dancing during dinner is always a hit with kids, and the food is buffet style and good) Sci Fi Drive-In at Hollywood Studios - really fun atmosphere Crystal Palace - character dining with Winnie the Pooh at the Magic Kingdom, surprisingly good food for a character meal For quick service: Flame Tree Barbecue Columbia Harbor House Be Our Guest is quick service for lunch, and I thought the food was excellent - plus the atmosphere can't be beat My absolute favorite quick service: Sunshine Seasons in Epcot. Really good, really varied food. Something for everyone.

Gifted testing is one of the things I do professionally, so here's my two cents.[1] Much of the literature for gifted parents focuses on the importance of testing and identification, because when your child is in the school system testing is pretty much your only hope for gaining access to an appropriate education. (And even then, unfortunately, most school systems don't have all that much to offer.) But when you're a homeschooler, you don't need "permission" from an IQ test to modify your child's education. If you feel like you recognize giftedness, go ahead and act accordingly. I recommend testing: a) when the family is interested in trying for admission to programs like DYS or PG Retreat. b) when there is disagreement between parents about whether giftedness is present or how to respond to it. c) when there is significant asynchrony or suspicion of 2E. d) when the parent is uncomfortable accelerating without "proof." e) when the homeschooling parent is struggling to meet educational needs appropriately or to deal with overexcitabilities. f) when the family is just curious and can afford testing. For what it's worth? My own children have never been tested. I am comfortable treating both of them as gifted without an IQ score. (...Well, I gave my son the WPPSI when I first bought the test kit, because I needed practice. But that would hardly be considered a valid administration.) [1] I actually charge a lot more than two cents. :tongue_smilie: