I like Pepin as well :-). Another one that is just lists of flavor combinations to spark ideas once you've cooked through a good instructional book is The Flavor Bible. It's kind of fun - like, "Whoa, the sage in my garden is getting out of hand. I suppose I could do chicken, but yawn . . . let me grab The Flavor Bible and see what else I can do with some of it".

The Hashimoto's Institute is having an online summit in a couple of weeks - free, you just have to register. I'm looking forward to it. My body just won't absorb iron correctly so every few months I get IV iron transfusions - would your doctor be open to that? They're usually administered a week apart for two or three weeks; that'll last me 2 or 3 months. My ferritin was 4 last month, for example, but 3 rounds of IV iron fixed that up. It's not like I'm energetic after that, but the worst edge of the exhaustion is taken away.

Julia Child's "The Way To Cook" is awesome for everything . . . that's the book I used to teach myself to cook when we first got married. James Peterson's "Cooking" is another one that teaches well and is highly recommended (check out the Amazon reviews) (this is what we now give for wedding presents). I have also heard highly recommended Madeleine Kamman's "The New Making of a Cook: The Art, Techniques, and Science of Good Cooking". I prefer learning from cookbooks, too :-).

Here's a not-too-flattering review: http://www.techhive.com/article (of the MovBand)

We started the youngest at 3. He still deals with the allergies and asthma (didn't end up helping any), but he has a really complex medical picture in general so his experience doesn't necessarily apply. Shots will reduce symptoms for many, but by no means all. Five of our children have gone through the whole several-year course of shots and two have been helped quite a bit, the other three only slightly. I've heard figures all over the map, but most often hear that 60% will respond, so it's not a guaranteed help. The thing that made the biggest difference for us was using the Bionix Shotblocker. You used to be able to buy 'em all over, but now just on eBay, but one is under $10 and it has really really really really worked to make the little ones not feel the shot. Our two other tricks were the ice packs as mentioned above, and a brightly-colored bag of a type of toys that he didn't have at home (little cars/men) that only came out after his shot.

I'm just echoing 1Togo. My four-so-far who have been to college have done really well out of the gate with the required college writing having used these materials. Ready to have my 9th and 10th graders work the Elegant Essay this year - love that book :-).

I thought I remembered Bambi, had to look it up and sure enough, there was a 1966 re-release. I remember Sound of Music in the theater too, but I was too young when it came out in 1965 to remember seeing it, must've been later. Fun thread, thanks OP!

I just received my "you're in remission" news two weeks ago - two years with the cancer. My experience paralleled scrappyhomeschooler's. I was fascinated by my children's standardized test scores after a year of cancer-schooling (our state mandates yearly testing). They slid a bit in math, but all of them had huge jumps in their reading scores with more time to read than when so much more of their day was taken by directed learning. Not that I'd do that again, just that there was a silver lining. More to the point, there are two dear women in our church who kept homeschooling through their husband's fights with cancer and both of them have expressed two things: that they feel guilty about especially their younger children falling a couple of years behind, and that they are so glad they kept the children home. That it was very difficult at the time, but both of the fathers very much needed that. And those younger children are catching up, of course. I'm sorry you're having to go through this {{{hug}}}. It's so hard emotionally on the spouse.

I painted ours with Annie Sloan chalk paint and spray painted my brass fireplace metal with Rustoleum's Oil Rubbed Bronze. I'm loving it still - post here if you want pic: http://shadyfifth.blogspot.com/2013/05/painting-fireplace.html

Potatoes, sunflower and rice bran oil, Dr.Bronner's (cheaper there for us), animal feeds, rolled oats, alternate flours and starches, coconut aminos,and produce in season.

Bumping because I'd love to know, too . . .

I have an Optimus Elite through Virgin Mobile's no-contract, $35 a month for 300 talk minutes and unlimited text and data. They use the Sprint network for that. I find it super easy to text because it comes loaded with Swype, which I like. I'm not having the problem trinchick speaks of - if I need the keypad when a call is in progress I just jiggle the phone a little and it lights up and is usable again. I really, really, really like my phone. Dh has the HTC One V also with above plan and while it's fancier than mine, I like my interface a lot better. I'm not smart enough for his phone ;-)

I birthed our youngest and two weeks later sent Eldest across the country to college. I always marvel that Youngest has such a strong sense of Eldest as his brother; they've never lived together.

Our goats in labor had some pretty human screams, but that was pretty brief so nobody called the police . . . whew.

We've had ours for awhile. Very, very easy to clean if you do it right away. We use ours and would buy it again, BUT that might just be because we got it for our super-allergic daughters, who are now able to have "ice cream" that they can make themselves any old time. I don't know if we would feel the same otherwise. But if you like frozen fruit desserts in general, the Yonana is super easy and easy to clean. And the texture somewhere between smoothie and sorbet, probably closer to the latter.