Is there someone coordinating meals for the family? Are you close enough that you can just call up the mom and ask her if there is anything she is craving? Or that the family can't eat? My sister went through chemo this summer for leukemia. It made her anemic and between rounds she just craved red meat. She loved it when someone brought them fajitas. Her dh does not like beans--that would not have been a great meal. She had no problem just telling people what they would like or couldn't eat. Flowers would have been a big no-no. She could not be around them when her blood counts were down. Chemo is different for different cancers. People react differently too. If you can call either the recipient or someone close to them who has the scoop, you can provide just what they need and your meal will be a huge blessing to them. Thanks for reaching out and caring.

:iagree: We started out with SWO and switched to R&S. I much prefer R&S. The activities teach students about the English language. SWO activities often seemed like busy work and could be frustrating for my child who is not a puzzle person. I remember activities where she was supposed to unscramble letters to form a word on her list. If you don't like puzzles, this is time-consuming, frustrating, and doesn't do much to reinforce the spelling.

Definitely one story here, but we have a dd in a wheelchair. We moved from a 3 level home (garage on bottom, living areas up half a level, all bedrooms and bathrooms up another half level over garage) which would be very difficult for anyone with mobility issues, though we loved the house. Single levels are so much easier for everything. Laundry is on the same level where you are, no matter where you are. Easy to run trash or recycling out to the garage. No carrying vacuum cleaners up stairs. Being on the same level promotes family togetherness. And dh and I know that we'll never have to move due to our own health issues later in life. Single levels do cost more per square foot. Around here they are in short supply probably because of that. A very high percentage of homes built in the last 20 years are two story, I think because builders can make more money off of them. When we needed to move to a single level, we couldn't find an existing one and had this one built for us from the builder's plan in a neighborhood of mostly 2 stories. So single levels hold their value well here and are pretty easy to sell--there are always people out there who want a single level (like older folks who can't do stairs as well as they used to).

Books we've been using: Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Farris. You could probably do a full year with just this book. If you don't have poetry books already and don't want to make a large investment, just get this book. I picked up an old edition at our library's used book sale. Shel Silverstein books. I've had these since my childhood--Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up (actually given to me as an adult). The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. Given to my brothers and sister and I when we were kids--I kept it. My American Heritage collected by Ralph Henry and Lucile Pannell. Just another one hanging around from my childhood. Poetry Speaks to Children. This one is more recent. Has a CD with the authors reading the poems too. And more books I haven't gotten to yet: Caroline Kennedy's A Family of Poems. Christmas gift from a few years ago. The Harp and the Laurel Wreath--Laura Berquist Have a few of my mom's books from her college days and I think I could find some in the Ogden Nash book and the Emily Dickinson book that we would like. We've read some of their poems in the other books--Nash in Favorite Poems and Dickinson in My American Heritage. I also have The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and could do some of his sonnets--will probably wait until next year when we are in that time period. Anyway, we have all of these great books around. I just pick one up on a Sunday evening and start reading through to find some I like. It's really pretty easy. Having a theme like Ogden Nash week helps me out too.

Not really a change, but I am so enjoying MCT Town level with my 5th grader that I may start Island level with my 2nd grader. She'll probably be done with FLL 2 sometime midwinter and will be ready for something new. My 5th grader is doing Paragraph Town for writing which I think is just excellent--it's making me wonder what was in Sentence Island. I may go through that quickly with her after Paragraph Town.

WWE 2 with a 2nd grader here. 4x/week, about 10 minutes per day. Day 4 is a bit longer than the others since there is narration and dictation. When we were finishing WWE 1 last year, we were a bit behind schedule and did several weeks of 2 lessons per day. It worked fine for WWE 1 because we just did a narration and a copywork each day. WWE 2 isn't as symmetrical and I think it would be a little more awkward to group lessons together. Maybe days 2 & 3 would combine okay (copywork, then a dictation of that copywork), so I could see a 3 days/week schedule. But 4 per week is the most natural rhythm for WWE 2 I think. I don't know anything about WWE 3.

Here's how we're doing it: I seem to have collected a lot of poetry books that I haven't really used much up until now. I grab a book each week, usually on Sunday when I'm planning out my week, and find a few poems that I really like. I did 2 weeks on Where the Sidewalk Ends, for instance, which I used when I was in 6th grade. I shared some of my favorites from back then, reading one or two poems a day for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. My girls take turns finding poems they like for Thursday and Friday. They are free to choose any book, not necessarily the one I picked for that week. They can pick a poem we've done before or one they find on their own. They are really enjoying this. I find them reading through our poetry books on their own time. We are very slowly going through Building Poems and I will sometimes point out or have them find some of the things we've read about. We've only finished the chapter on sound, so it's been stuff like alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme. Whatever jumps out at me in a given poem.

Art and science are always the most popular here. And literature--pick a book each week, do related crafts, etc.

If we're talking one food I could eat every meal for the rest of my life, it would be bread. I do try to watch the quantity I eat for weight control, but I love bread--most any kind.

I hope your daughter stabilizes soon. We live with seizures here and I guess the frequency of them makes them a little less scary. We have several each month. Dd almost always comes out of them on her own, but they can go on for 5 minutes. She does not get blue lips or have other signs of breathing problems. Our protocol is that we don't pull out the diastat until we hit the 5 minute mark (actually more commonly we use the diastat when she has cluster seizures--one after another). I would not hesitate to give diastat to a teenager who is seizing--it's the fastest way to get the potentially life-saving medicine in them. Using it is scary the first time, but when you know how your child reacts to the medicine it isn't bad. We don't always know why dd is having seizures, but two very obvious triggers are coming down with an illness or lack of sleep. If dd is getting sick, a seizure is the first sign we have of it--before fever or coughing or anything else. If we keep dd up too late or if she has trouble sleeping, seizures the next day are likely. Not sure how old your dd is, but seizure patterns can change during puberty. Good luck getting everything back under control.

I've heard you don't want to buy them too big, but can't remember why. Maybe they stretch out? My foot measures 8 but I often wear 8.5 or 9 depending on the style of shoe. I got the Costco version of Uggs last year and am very happy with my size 8.

For us, knowing the facts cold didn't really get finalized until dds were doing harder problems. My 2nd grader is just now really demonstrating that she knows her facts well as she does 3 and 4 digit addition with renaming. She just told me the other day that now it seems easy--I think just through the seemingly endless repetition of having to do it over and over, day after day. So I wouldn't necessarily hold back and stay at the one-digit facts stage until mastery is demonstrated; our experience has shown that mastery will happen over time as the skills are used. Just need a little extra mama patience!

We have used Colonial Life, American Revolution, and I taught Civil War in a co-op. I love them and hope to use them again our next time through (we only did the lap books). My kids were on the young side for these our first time through (K/3rd for the first 2, with my 4th grader for Civil War). I had to do a lot of the assembly of the crafts. After doing the first two, I set the age range for my co-op class for 3rd-6th. They could easily be used in middle school too. I think the older the kids, the better the quality of their work will be and they will get more out of it. What's ideal? Maybe 5th-7th. Younger kids definitely get something out of it--I'm not sorry I used them. But older kids will get more out of them.

Thinking of you today and praying that all goes well for you.

Love my 2000 Honda Odyssey--very reliable. I would go with either Honda or Toyota over any American model.

I'm 5'3 and 3/4 too. I maintain at 1800 calories/day and will lose slowly if I'm down around 1500-1600 calories/day. My exercise is 1/2 hour fast walking on the treadmill, 5 days/week.

Regarding the OT Assistant degree--I would really be cautious about the worth of this. I have a disabled child and have familiarity with OTs in different settings (school district employees, educational service district employees, Shriners hospital employees, private therapy employess from two different places). I have never come across an OT assistant. Now they might be in settings I have not encountered (such as working with adults), but it bears looking into further if you are tempted to do that degree. The school should be able to tell you where their graduates find employment I think.

Assume you will have a roommate to save money. As a young single with a teaching degree and a job, a friend from my teaching program and I shared an apartment. Another friend didn't think she would like living with someone else. Her lifestyle was far more expensive than ours, not through extravagant living, but just from thinking that she had to live in her own place (in CA bay area--very expensive).

Lots of sleep every night. 8-9 hours.

Praying for complete healing, whatever it turns out to be. And peace and strength to you and your family.

Yes! There are times when I would just like a spoonful or two of ice cream, but I don't think my kids should eat ice cream in the middle of the afternoon. But the rules are different for mommies, aren't they? Besides, Mommy always eats all of her dinner. She can handle a little snack in the afternoon.

I'm really enjoying Latin and learning a lot. My adult brain catches things that my dd's 10 yo brain doesn't and I can say "Oh I get it--here's how this works". And her 10 yo brain memorizes vocab way better than my adult brain! It's fun to work together on translations--she learns from my approach (here's the subject, here's the verb) and she helps figure out what case a word is in and can recall a definition for a particular word a little better than Mom. We're a great team. But I think we both like languages a lot. Not sure I would do this if it wasn't fun for me.

I don't usually make pumpkin pie, but we have a pie social at church on Thanksgiving Eve and I'll eat some there. We like chocolate cream, a crumb-topped sour cream apple pie, and French cherry pie. I tend to save the French cherry pie for Christmas because it looks christmasy with the red cherries over the whipping cream & cream cheese layer. I'll take a pie to the church social and on Thanksgiving itself our little family of 5 will eat whichever pie we don't want to share. Usually chocolate cream. Thinking of a chocolate ice cream pie this year.

My understanding is that Goodwill will send unsellable clothing to a recycler. I would much rather have our old clothes recycled rather than just go to a landfill. So I don't usually throw things in our trash. Kids' clothes in decent shape go to a friend who loves hand-me-downs. If I give to other organizations (like the church that does a free clothing give-away for back to school), I will make sure that my donations are in good condition. But most everything else will go to Goodwill and I let them decide what they can sell and what goes to recycling.

I was thinking spices. My sil brings me curry powder from her native Malaysia and it is wonderful. I'll bet India has some great stuff you can't get here (but picking it out and figuring out how to use it may be a challenge).