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.

This. It's not like there are teams of pediatric podiatrists involved in the creation of every new shoe last by every brand, and even if there were, SKL's point holds - it's not your child's foot. I think that's one of those myths passed down by grandmothers who heard it from shoe salesmen back in the day. This would be the same day when we all got Xrays to fit our shoes, in the shoe store, for the same "reason". Fun Wikipedia article on that here.

Bwaahhh haa haa . . . we're fewer people since eldest moved out. Good thing, now we'll just need to find a house with 3700 to 5500 square feet :rofl: :smilielol5: . oh my. gasp. OK, back to being fine in our 1799 square feet and good thing, too, since the budget is never goin' there!

Hey, Grimm isn't on again until March!! What are they thinking?!? I might possibly have broken my addiction by then :nopity:

I had an ulcer last year at this time. Ulcer symptoms can really vary for people! But I had a very bad stomach ache that didn't differ upright/lying down/ morning/ evening. Mine was wierd in that one day everything was fine, the next day was the onset of pain, just boom like that. I asked the GI doc later about that (didn't make sense to me) but he said that ulcers can show up like that. My labwork and CT scan did not show an ulcer (they were perfectly normal), even though it turned out to be quite large. It was only seen via endoscopy. editing to add: while stress can certainly exacerbate the situation, by far and away the vast percentage of ulcers are caused by H. Pylori, and are therefore quite treatable! That's the good news :-). Not like a lot of health problems that drag onnnnnn and onnnnnnn.

Both Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen rate these highly in their reviews BUT Be careful. Tramontina makes two lines of pans. One is fully clad, which means the layers continue up the sides. The other just has the disk on the bottom. The set linked to is one of the good sort though, and would really be a lovely start. Whatever you end up buying, you'll want to make sure the cladding goes up the sides of the pans. Most brands you look at will have lines that have the disc on the bottom and other lines (usually more expensive) where the encased layers go up the sides. I have two pieces of All Clad that I found at thrift stores; they're gorgeous and I give them little kisses because I adore them, but honestly that Tramontina set is just amazing for the price (I have the larger set as my main cookware, got it when we banned nonstick from our home).

First 4 "land" births, next 4 waterbirths. Night and day. The water made all the difference to me. I love the comment above - poster "pink sparkly hearts" water birth :D. Yup, that about says it for me, too. I did get in a fishy pool with #2 and bathtub with #3 and found the former's sides not rigid/grab-able enough and the latter just way uncomfortable. We ended up with a 150 gallon Rubbermaid stock tank and have since loaned it out to friends, so it's seen lots of babies born. Another nice option is the actual birth tubs many midwives have to rent, or available online for rental. I plan someday to turn that stock tank into a pond/fountain landscaping feature.

I've been on 8 mg Zofran once daily for a year now for my cancer nausea (not chemo nausea) and honestly, it just dials it down where I can function, it never really gets rid of it. I have side effects to Phenergan, though, so I stick with the Zofran. It was also true for me that just taking one pill (or even another 8 hours later) didn't help at all. It was only when taking them for a period of a couple of weeks daily that it started helping. Which wouldn't work in your situation at all! :grouphug: hope that second one helped.

Could it possibly be ulcers? When I had a large ulcer, it felt like that and they sent me home from the ER after CT scan showed nothing, ultrasound, labs fine, etc. But they did put in a consult for GI, and they did an endoscopy and found an ulcer that way. I will say that once the ulcer started hurting it didn't go away, though. I'm not sure if that's everyone's experience with ulcers. :grouphug: I so hope you feel better soon.

My dh had an immovable "none of my cousins" rule, too, and some of my favorite boy names were on his cousin list :glare:. I wanted to name a dd "_________(feminissima first name) Georg" because we always use family names as middle names and I have Georg ancestors and I thought it was very appealing, like George Sand and George Eliot, but nooooooo.

And oh-so-trendy, too! Win! :D