We have a lot of trees down... Stay safe, Jean! :)

I shower after I go to the gym or run. If that is in the morning, I sometimes put clean pj's on afterward. If I do both in a given day, I shower twice. There isn't enough hot water for us all to shower at the same time, so I send kids to shower throughout the day based on when each kid needs to be out of the house. The boys usually get dressed after a shower. My daughter often puts on a leotard and jammie bottoms after because that is what she often wears to gymnastics.

:iagree: My young gymnast (ds14) used to have 2 week disposables, but you could see the chalk stuck on the lenses before two weeks were up. We went to dailies and he finds them much more comfortable. Ds16 also has dailies, but he does not wear contacts every day, only for days when he has tae kwon do. Dailies work out close in expense to to weeklies since he doesn't use as many dailies but would still need the same number of two weekers per year.

:iagree: Furthermore, do I even homeschool my oldest anymore? I provided a pacing schedule for him for Chemistry to prep for the AP exam, and provide assistance when asked with that and math. He does Latin online, and is full-time dual-enrolled in community college. I don't teach him anything anymore. For that matter, ds14 has online classes for humanities and self-study (with assistance whenever he asks) for math and science. Ds11 is taking English (Middle School Tools) online and will be moving to more online classes in the fall, leaving only my daughter truly homeschooled versus home-directed educationally. However, from the point of view of people with children in brick and mortar schools, we homeschool. Next question, what about people with children in cyber schools? The children are home for school, but full-time enrolled students in an outside school. It seems easier to let people define themselves. T many people, it seems easier to just say "we homeschool" than define what ever it is you do that is outside the mainstream in more detail, even if that thing is just not sending littles to preschool with the intent of future homeschooling for compulsory grades.

We are required to do a standardized test annually. I go to ACT as soon as practical, which was 15/9th for aspie ds16, 13/7th for middle son, and youngest son is taking it through NUMATS talent search this spring at 12. We do this because they prefer it to two days of SAT-10 testing and it has qualified the older two for JHU-CTY online or summer sessions if they wanted to do them. My daughter is still stuck with two full days of bubble-filling with hundreds of other homeschoolers this spring. They all took their first standardized tests in first grade either at public school or with other homeschoolers group testing.

Here's Stanford: http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/ But I don't know how long admissions would take and then whether you could do just a semester.

My teens are allowed, but ds16 doesn't text anyway. Ds14 has friends in school who can only text during lunch or between classes which keeps it from becoming an issue when public school is in session. On the rare occasions we have school and his friends don't it has become a problem, but those occasions are, at least, rare.

:grouphug::grouphug: Last week was supposed to be our first week back after break, but everyone was sick, so I let them sleep in and do what they could. Dd9 is looking supremely tortured to have been forced to rise before noon today. :glare:

:grouphug::grouphug: I just spent a frightening amount of money setting my older kids up with outside teachers for at least some courses for the rest of this year. I am hoping that keeping guidance counseling, math, and science as my responsibilities and outsourcing pretty much everything else will reduce stress and tension while also holding their feet to the fire for high quality work in all subjects, even the ones I most dread grading and assessing. Also, I found that being teacher and guidance counselor presented some conflict of interest on my part that reduced in their ability to hear what was saying about what they need to do to meet their own goals. With someone else setting specific course goals, they can hear what I am trying to tell them about rigor and expectations.

I haven't tried it, but I don't think it would have helped my thumb sucker. He'd have pitched an unending fit if he hadn't been able to figure out how to get it off. (And as his older brother was a difficult young Aspie, it just would never have been important enough to drain scarce emotional energy at that time.) He stopped when he got a tongue crib at 7 or 8 because thumb sucking causes tongue positioning patterns that exacerbate the tooth movement problem even after thumb sucking stops. I pushed pacifiers on my younger children instead of their thumbs and at least avoided tooth problems though my daughter was almost six before she gave hers up entirely. If that guard works, it would be a lot cheaper than the orthodontia. On the other hand, even without the thumb sucking pushing front teeth out, my younger children will benefit from braces.

:grouphug: ds14 is down with pneumonia as well. I took him into urgent care with a fever of 102 and a barking cough this morning. He'd had a cough for a week or so and all his siblings and his dad are coughing as well but not with that barking sound. Poor kid will be missing the Washington Open gymnastics meet this weekend again. Pretty soon they are just going to mail us the T-shirt when they see his registration, lol. He got a breathing treatment at urgent care and came home with scripts for antibiotics, cough medicine, steroids, and an inhaler. I took my daughter as well because she had a cough, low fever and had been complaining about her left ear. We found a bead (like the kind little girls string together to make play jewelry...) in her right ear that had obviously been there a while. Strangest incidental finding ever.

Did she take a PSAT at all? That would have given her some sense of where she is. Otherwise, I'd definitely do a practice test asap and consider having her do a pricey classroom prep course if you have the money. They do a lot of practice sections in the prep courses. You can do this at home, but if she is refusing, I;d outsource if possible. I have a prep schedule set for my oldest beginning in January for his Junior year PSAT next fall, but if I find it isn't getting done, I'll outsource it to The Princeton Review this summer. I have mine start taking the ACT in the spring beginning at 13 (when they can sign up online) as their annual testing per our state homeschool law. I had my tenth grader do the PSAT in October. Our local high school seems to seriously frown on having 9th graders take the PSAT or I'd have ds14 take it next fall along with his older brother. I'm not sure when I'll have ds16 take the SAT itself first though, as I'd like to see his PSAT score from next fall before deciding.

The grandparents and I joined forces to get ds16 the Make electronics book, tool kit and both components kits. It was a big hit. :) We got ds11 the Lego Mindstorms robot. ds14 insisted that all he wanted was a car, and not just any car, an Italian sports car. We got him a cherry red 1:24 die cast Porsche. Surprisingly, he loves it and put it right on his desktop with his Dalek. He will also get, somewhat delayed since I had to negotiate which boards were acceptable to him first, a Netguino (which apparently is programmed in a language similar to C# - Arduino was not acceptable to him on programming language grounds) microprocessor and associated parts to play and learn with from Maker shed. I also got kids teachers - in the form of outsourced classes - for Christmas inspired by endless searching and reading of reviews here on the boards, but they seem oddly less enthusiastic about that as a Christmas gift. :tongue_smilie:

Shopping Goodwill for books is my favorite guilty pleasure. I go there when I need ideas for teaching a subject, ancillary textbooks for older children, guilty pleasure reading for any and all of us, and even for retail therapy. The number of books I can leave with without spending a fortune is a major contributor to my chronic need for more bookshelves. :glare:

If his tetanus shot is more than 5 years old, I'd definitely consider a fresh one tonight. Otherwise, I favor the cautious approach of seeing the doctor when in doubt. Good benefits and healthy but klutzy children may make this an easier position for me to take, however. I have two I absolutely must get in for boosters very shortly after the new year (and would have to take to emergency for boosters if they got a serious cut or puncture wound before that is done...). I am ashamed to admit that it took a recent episode of House to get me to dig out their shot records and discover this fact.