We say fart. My kids, both girls, will fart loudly around us. They think it's wildly hilarious. I find it very annoying, but my husband doesn't sympathize so I'm fighting a losing battle around here.

Why? To the OP, I like the idea of printing out the original and attaching it with a big F on her page and a note to see you. I would also contact the parents and let them know what happened. I wouldn't remove her from the class. This could be a good learning experience for her.

It might not be realistic to expect people to perfectly never ever judge on appearances. The hostility in the thread was directed toward those who defended making judgments on appearances, who saw nothing wrong with this. I'm sure every single one of us has made snap judgments about people. I know I do. But I'm not proud of it. I don't think that's ok for me to do.

I can't be sure, but I think what she meant was that her kids are not sheep, meaning they won't do something (like get a tongue ring) just because a friend does. And yes, our friends may influence us, but I think people are overestimating that influence. I was homeschooled growing up and my best friend got her tongue pierced when we were teens and I never had the least desire to do that. (I also didn't let it interfere with my friendship with her. Yay for a middle ground!) Your children are homeschooled. They probably value peer approval less than the average teen. Isn't that one of the many advantages of homeschooling?

Just to add to all the doom and gloom in the thread... I strongly disagree with adopting any child if you have biological children in the house. Maybe if you have older teens and plan to adopt a baby. But your biological children don't deserve to sacrifice their childhoods to the saving of hurt children. My parents adopted a bunch of really messed up kids. I was the oldest, I got out soon, and got off easy. But I have brothers and sisters who have had their family implode around them because of the kids my parents thought they could help.

There's also a nook. Which, in my opinion, is much cuter than the kindle. I don't have any of these products though, so I can't really make a recommendation. If I were going to buy one, it would be the iPad.

I would have snuck off to a book party with some romance novels and comic books.

Send a letter, canceling it in writing even if you canceled it over the phone and have no reason to suspect that they wouldn't cancel it and even if the card isn't working. I had a credit card stolen out of my mailbox one time. They were running some kind of internet scam where there were hundreds of charges of less than $1. Anyway, we called the credit card company, canceled the card. They issued us a new card with a new number and then basically rolled the old card onto the new one so that we could use the old one and the charges would show up on the new one. It was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. We kept calling and canceling the card and told them not to issue us new ones but they kept doing it anyway, or simply not canceling. We had to work with the fraud department and even though we never had to pay for any of the charges we did not make, we still spent a couple years dealing with it.

You have made it clear that the tongue ring is enough to disqualify a person from friendship with you, so clearly the tongue ring is more important than any other thing about a person. Their personality, morals, character, thoughts and ideas are less than the tongue ring because apparently none of these can override the tongue ring.

Impressive... ;)

Am I really understanding you correctly? You think a parent would be justified in fearing that by hanging around a potentially gay teenager that their own teenager might become gay? (I'm not even going to comment on the whole concept that pierced tongue= homosexuality.) I'm very sorry if I'm misunderstanding you here...

That's tragic, I'm so sorry. :( I grew up in Southern Baptist churches, and haven't attended church in a while. I still consider myself a Christian, but I struggle with my faith. Moreso when I read about things like what Christians are putting the OP's son through. Over a pierced tongue and the "wrong" haircut. It's just heartbreaking to me.

What about multiple piercings in the ear? And what about non-visible tattoos (always covered by clothing)? I need to know if I'm on the shun list. Also, I must confess, I wear flip flops and once.. *gulp* I had bangs. But I'm a woman, are bangs only non-Christian on boys? And how long does the hair have to be to qualify as bangs? And who decides these things? ;)

Because a tongue ring is a fairly superficial reason to shun someone, especially when that type of judgment and shunning is causing someone to turn away from their faith. And from someone who claims to belong to a faith that is supposed to love people unconditionally and look at the heart of a person rather than their outward appearance, it's rather disgusting behavior to refuse to be friends with someone. Over a pierced tongue. I'm really not sure how anyone could feel good about that...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Christians have this weird idea about looking PAST the outside? Sure, we can only make assumptions about a person based on what they look like, but shouldn't we put those aside and, I dunno, actually get to know them as people?

Can you ask her to narrate other things that aren't school related? Just casually, as part of your usual conversations. For instance, Imogen has always liked telling me the plots of tv shows or movies or even books she's reading. She only watches tv at her grandparents' house so I am fairly unaware of what she's watching (I trust my inlaws to monitor this). But it always drove me nuts. I hate people telling me the plots of things. But when it occurred to me that this is basically narration, I let her do it. Perhaps you can ask her what happened in a tv show she watches or a book she's reading for fun, just to get into the practice. Perhaps if you know the plot you can even ask more leading questions. What was your favorite part? Why do you think character X behaved in such and such a way? Etc. I will say that this hasn't necessarily translated beautifully into being able to do narration for school. But we're getting there. There was one selection from WWE that I hated and we skipped. I had no idea what was going on and couldn't even summarize it myself. Then we got to a chapter talking about Charlemagne and it was perfect. It was a descriptive passage and she was complaining that she didn't know what to say. I read the first paragraph to her and said, "What is the main thought of this paragraph?" She said, "It's about what he looks like." I read the next one and asked the same thing. "It's about what he likes to do." Etc. It was easy because the passage was clearly divided up into paragraphs with distinct thoughts. But the concept that we're trying to pull out main ideas really helped her and she's been able to take that and apply it to other things. I make her write four or five sentences over her history selection, but on Monday she wrote eight so she could say everything she wanted to say. This might not sound like a big deal to some of you, but this is a child who likes to do the very minimum that you ask and no more. I will say that writing is my kids' least favorite subject. I still don't know how to make it fun. I make Imogen write stories out of Latin derivatives and I think this is the only writing she really enjoys because they don't have to be logical. They're completely random. One week she wrote, "I am a female in an ambulance. I adore animals. If I see one in a trap or something, I will liberate it."

Thank you everyone! This gives me a lot to work off of. I'm excited for this, I think they'll love it.

I need ideas. For the past several months, my kids have been obsessed with codes. They have created at least 100 codes between them, everything from A=1, B=2, to creating whole new set characters for the alphabet. Or a code were the first word of every sentence is to be written. Or where the word is scrambled is specific ways. Imogen painstakingly translates the Morse code messages my husband has printed out for her. So, I'd like to turn this interest into a unit study. The problem is that I've never done a unit study and I'm not sure what all is involved. I'd like to study codes and languages that have never been figured out, like Linear A (or was it B...) and that one book with all the fake plant drawings in it whose name is completely slipping my mind. I'd like to include stuff about spying in general and the types of codes spies often use. Maybe talk about the Navajo Code Talkers? So does anyone have any ideas for books or other resources for this unit study? Or additional topics we should cover? When you guys do a unit study, how to do approach it? What do you include? I'm not looking for something that's all encompassing, but something I can easily add into the rest of their work though I'm certainly willing to put some of our subjects on hold while we explore this in depth.

Since when is sheltering a bad word? To shelter. Protect. Provide safety. Harbor. Guard. (From a thesaurus.) Doesn't this sound like a parent's job? I consider my kids sheltered. This means I have protected them as best I can from the bad things of the world. In practical terms this means they don't deal with bullies at school. They watch only a little television, so they don't have a lot of that influencing their lives. It means I pay attention to what they're reading, what music they listen to and what video games we have in the house. We criticize parents who buy a 12 year old a video game with a mature rating on it or a CD with a parental warning on it, without at least previewing the content. Why? Because this parent isn't sheltering. They aren't paying attention and they aren't making decisions about what influences their child's life. When people talk about sheltering they accuse parents of over-sheltering, and that can happen, but I think it's worse to under-shelter. Our society wants kids to grow up too fast at a young age, yet stay children into their 20s. It's kind of weird.

I met my husband when I was 17 and got engaged on my 18th birthday and was married at 19. We celebrated 10 years in June and are very happy together. Maybe this will be ok. However, I think she's being nasty to you, saying all those hurtful things. Good job not freaking out. I agree that she probably told you like that to get a reaction. Can you talk to her about birth control? The last thing you want is her winding up pregnant and them moving up the wedding by five years.

One of my brothers dropped out of high school. He works hard at his job, which is doing the same thing at the same company as my brother with a college degree in economics (bad timing on that degree). Sure, he struggles to make ends meet sometimes (who doesn't these days) but he is certainly not on welfare and not in poverty. So there's some anecdotal evidence that high school drop outs can support themselves. :)

Maybe you guys have seen this, but the Urban Dictionary can't seem to decide what it thinks about us. (Yes, I know the entries are written by different people.) :) Well Trained Mind Forum Well Trained Mind I find the first one very strange, but it looks like the writer visited during the election season so maybe things were really charged around here. In any case, it's not so much a definition as a rant. :p

That's my question. I'm guessing that wouldn't be ok. :p

Nosy people want to know... What other forum? :) You can PM me if we're not allowed to say... though that would be kind of funny in a thread talking about how nice it is to be censorship free on this board. ;)

This has been around for a while. I heard about pro-ana years ago. Really, I think people overreact to it. These people are supporting each other in their anorexia, they're not recruiting. The pro-ana sites I've read actively discourage attempting to "catch" anorexia if you are not already anorexic. I got weirdly fascinated as well and read rather extensively on them... I failed to catch anorexia. ;) These girls are quite sick and it's sad that they would rather support each other in this destructive illness than seek recovery, though sometimes the girls who run even very popular pro-ana sites eventually do recover. Edit: When I say that people overreact, I mean that they worry about people becoming anorexic simply by being able to access the site. I do think pro-ana sites are harmful for girls who already struggle with anorexia and other eating disorders. These girls don't need tips on how to diet better, they need tips on how to improve their relationship with food and their self image.