I have a 9 yo and I would let him read it. I wouldn't stop my 7 year old, but I would tell her that it would probably upset her (and then she would likely choose not to read it. She's an advanced reader for her age, but very sensitive and has gotten good at making choices she's comfortable with.).

Yeah, this. I love that dh and I have our own rooms, for the same reasons. His snoring is out of control and it really affects my ability to get a good night sleep. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that if I had to sleep in the same room with him we'd have probably ended up divorced. I am cranky, cranky, cranky and not very nice when I'm sleep deprived. He's being evaluated for apnea (finally!), so it could end up changing - but there's nothing wrong with sleeping apart from your spouse if it works better for you.

We are not with CAVA anymore, but my teacher had to do this when my kids moved up quickly, and it wasn't a big deal. For example, when my son moved up in science, he spoke to the teacher on elluminate and she asked him to talk about the most interesting things he'd learned in science and she asked him a few questions about the topics. When dd moved up in LA, she had her read a bit out loud. With math, she asked her to do a few problems. I'm not sure if it will be the same with your VA, but she didn't ask anything that a child ready to move on wouldn't have a very easy time answering, and saying "I don't know" or getting something wrong here and there didn't prevent them from moving on. My teacher told me it was mostly a formality due to state requirements for keeping their charter.

Let us know :)

My husband is a retail manager. I worked in retail for many years so, while I've never worked for the company he's with now, I feel fairly confident that I could describe his day to day activities.

If you have supply issues, steering clear of Sudafed is a good idea, but for someone with an established supply or an older baby, it's not likely to be a problem.

For live presidents, I'd probably pick Bill - just because he seems like he'd be the most entertaining. For dead ones - I don't know - one of the early ones. Adams or Jefferson or Madison probably.

I got one on my last day of work, the day I got laid off. That was a cruddy day, let me tell you. I think I was going 11 miles or so above the limit. I thought the limit was 45 there, but it was 35. Or maybe it was 25 and I thought it was 35. In any case, I was going a mile or two above what I thought was the limit, so I was speeding either way. The only other time I've gotten tickets, it was for parking - we used to live on a street that did street sweeping a couple of times a month, and sometimes I'd forget.

Yes, I forgot to mention these. They were awesome! I still don't think they had toilet paper, though!

I live in a big city in Mexico, and all the public toilets I've used have been equivalent to what you would expect to find in the US - seats, doors, paper, most of them relatively clean, etc. I've heard some of the bar toilets are pretty nasty, but I don't bar hop. When I lived in Paris, they really ran the gamut. Most restaurant bathrooms did not have paper - we always carried our own. If the place was nice enough to have an attendant (that you were expected to tip) or charge to use (like at Versailles), they were usually very nice - clean, fancy soap, nice paper, doors, seats, etc. A lot of bathrooms did not have seats on their toilets. I noticed this at a lot of restaurants and museums. They had clearly all been removed, and I never did figure out why - they didn't seem to have broken and not been replaced, just bowls with the seats removed! There were also some really bad toilets at bars - a lot had the hole in the ground with handles to squat, and you "flushed" by running the sink water, which drained into the squat hole.

We got ours a few days ago, too. We watched them all when they aired, so I haven't opened up the dvds yet. DS is on his second year of US history, and we might watch bits and pieces as we come to the era in his studies.

Hmmm. . .well, here's my perspective as an atheist, and I assume that some might consider it insensitive, so consider yourself forwarned - I feel like "not taking the lord's name in vain" is a rule for Christians. I would resent being expected to follow the rules of a religion to which I choose not to belong. If someone brought this to me, I'd try to be sensitive and might try to watch it, but I doubt I would be very successful at it. If I came into someone's house of worship by choice, I would be very mindful of their rules, but in a classroom I was teaching in? It would probably bother me to be asked.

Yep - this is why I mentioned it. I assume she'll be sexually active some day, and it's a good tip to pass on. I had to find this one out all on my own!

Yeah, they hurt pretty bad. When i was about your dd's age, I very nearly passed out at work when I had one. I only lived a few blocks away, but I had to have someone drive me home. I've never tried the AZO stuff, but I've heard wonders about it - cranberry pills, water, water, more water, cranberry juice, antibiotics, yogurt with active cultures (because the last thing she wants is to end up with a yeast infection from the antibiotics on top of a UTI). If she's not getting significantly better in a couple of days, take her back to the doctor. It could be that the antibiotics aren't the right ones. Watch for lower back pain, because that could indicate an infection spread to her kidneys. And, I have no idea if this applies in this situation, so forgive me if it doesn't (and even if it doesn't apply now, you might want to mention it for future reference), but if your dd is sexually active, urinating after intercourse can help prevent infections in the future.

My kids can all do somersaults - even my very physically tentative dd. They've all done them from a very young age - my oldest was probably under a year old. My almost 10 yo ds can do an excellent back flip, too. None can do cartwheels, though - I was never able to do them as a child so I can't really give any advice to them on it.

This author also does The Runaway Mummy and Furious George (which my kids and I love, since George is, in part, furious because people keep calling him a monkey, when his lack of a tail proves that he is clearly an ape :lol. This is something that has infuriated my scientific and detail oriented oldest about Curious George since he was a wee one!)

My husband is a retail manager, which means his schedule changes week to week, day to day. Sometimes he's gone before we wake up, other times he leaves in the late morning and isn't home until long after the kids are in bed, he rarely has two days off in a row and they are almost never weekend days. Honestly, his crazy schedule is one of the reasons we home school. When ds1 was in k and 1st, there were weeks that dh and ds saw each other for only a few minutes on only a couple of days. So - we make our "off" days coincide with dh's. On the days he leaves before we're up, we start school first thing, so everything's done by the time he gets home. On the days he's home for most of the morning, we start a little later so the kids can have daddy time in the morning. Sometimes we do a little while he's home - if I have a read aloud planned, dh will sometimes take that over. If I have a video for the kids to watch and it's something interesting to dh, too, sometimes we'll all watch it together on the evenings he's home or in the mornings before he leaves, or even on his days off. So, I would suggest to you something like this - take days off when dad has days off, except for things that dad might want to help with (in some families, dad is the science guy and does all the experiments or something like that). Have a schedule of what you want to get done each day, but be flexible about when you start for the day. If you aren't doing all the same subjects every day, write a schedule as Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. So you'll know that on Day 1 and 3 you do math, phonics, language arts, and science and on Days 2 and 5 you do Math, Phonics, LA, and History/Social Studies, and on Day 4 you do Math, Phonics, LA, and Art. Or something like that. So it doesn't matter if Day one falls on a Wed this week and a Monday the next week - you know what # day it is, so you know what subjects you're covering. Then you need only adjust the starting and ending times of your days based on what time he leaves for work. This can be a little more complicated if you have to work in extracurriculars, but you can work around those.

I said later in the morning, but we're really very flexible about it. Actually, ds2 usually does his pretty much first thing, but the other two are usually later in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, rarely in the evening. It just depends on what we have going on that day.

My new kindergartener is getting ready to read, but has some fine motor delays. We've been working through ETC's "Get Ready for the Code" and also have "Get Set For the Code." He enjoys it, but there is a lot of letter forming and he really struggles with it. He does fine with circling correct letters and drawing lines to the letters to match a picture with it's begining sound, etc - so that sort of writing would be okay. I know they also have an online version of ETC, but I'm not sure I want to go that route. He already uses Starfall and Readingeggs, so I don't know if I want yet another online program. I looked at 100 Easy Lessons ages ago and it didn't really appeal to me. We're with a charter school, and they have tons of different books and curricula that are outside their regular core curriculum, so I'm looking for lots of different suggestions. They can search all their libraries and I can check them all out if they have them. DS tends to be a visual learner and has a huge library of sight words in his head, but I think it's important to give him a good phonics foundation before he heads too far down that road.

I think I would go with this order. In fact, I'd probably put Rowling a level above Lewis in a lot of ways - they have a similar ability to create a world that you can easily immerse yourself in and characters that you care deeply about and are able to relate to, but Lewis loses points with me for beating you over the head with the Aslan = Jesus/God metaphor (while I'm not a Christian, I can appreciate a good religious allusion/metaphor, but there's something to be said for the art subtlety!). I think Pullman blows both of them out of the water (at least in the Compass series. I tried to read an older series of his and found it insufferable.) I do think Rowling it far superior (writing wise) to many other current authors targeting a similar demographic - Rick Riordan, for instance, spins a fun yarn, but the writing (plot, characterization, use of literary technique, etc) is not on the same level as Rowling.

For my son (9yo/5th grade), I'm not doing any formal language art/literature programs. We are reading/discussing/writing about novels this year. He really doesn't need spelling/grammar/vocabulary as he's excellent and intuitive in those departments. For math, we're actually doing three different programs. He's doing Aleks pre-algebra online (I'm not a huge fan, but we are with a charter school and they provide it free of charge and he enjoys it), Life of Fred (we'll probably do fractions, decimals, and at least the first pre-algebra book this year), and RightStart Math's geometric approach. He likes that they are all programs he can do pretty much independently. For science, we're using Hakim's "Story of Science" and for history we're using her "History of US." He's also reading independently on topics of interest in these areas. We're also doing a bit of computer programming and Spanish. I've never used any of the programs you're using, but I've heard that MUS is not usually a good fit for accelerated kids. I'm considering getting AAS for my younger two (k-er just starting to read and 2nd grader who is an excellent, way above grade level reader, but struggles with spelling) and looking at the sample words for the first couple of levels, I'd imagine that if you're starting at level 1 or 2, they are way below your ds' abilities unless spelling is a challenge for him.

Neither of my boys are.

The way I see it, the goal of a class like this is not to have the students leave with an encyclopedic knowlege of the history of zombie movies. If it was, I would agree that it would be a mostly worthless class. The goal is (I would assume) for students to leave the class able to use the analytical skills they probably first learned while studying classic literature (or film) and apply them to other things - in this case, to recently or currently produced media. I think that is a valuable skill - looking at your own world with the same eye you use to look at past cultures. For other students, it could go the other way - analyzing something current and possibly meaningful to them as a gateway to understanding more classic media. This is the same reason I don't mind my son reading comic books, as long as that's not all he reads. There are some themes that are universal, and I love seeing him draw the connections between his/our world and things we study for "school."

Story of Science Life of Fred RightStart Math We're enjoying all of them now:)

I have the SOTW 2 AG, and there are literature lists in it for each chapter - yours doesn't?