Whoa. No way! I thought my dismissive, non-listening doc was bad, but guess I have to give her credit that she didn't try that one. Grrrr - hope you'll find someone better. OP: Isn't it just a hopeful moment when you get the labs you want? You feel like, "Even if everything is normal, at least I finally am moving one step closer to diagnosis"

I just finished a nice fat novel from the library "lucky day" shelf. Do all libraries have those? The shelf is for copies of books that you'd otherwise be #38574 on the hold list for. Anyway, good read, references to teA are general (rather than graphic), set in the early 1900s, not in any danger of becoming a classic but a fun late summer engaging novel. The Shoemaker's Wife

Gracious. This is such good advice. With little ones who have advanced language skills showing up, I personally would want to be feeding their brain like the excellent post above. I just have one who taught herself to read at 3, and in retrospect she would've thrived in an environment like the above. I moved her into a more typical scholastic routine, along with her older siblings, but if I'd known better I would've played it differently and given her a super-enriched learning environment, rather than just essentially starting regular schooling (at home, I mean, but standard curriculum progressions) earlier.

:grouphug: What happened with both my dad and my MIL who each have Alzheimer's is that they did stuff that got them a clear diagnosis without being a danger. I mean, dementia doesn't necessarily move super quickly, so October might very well be fine as far as Wolf making a trip, and her progression of dementia might move her into clear Alzheimer's without danger. Uhm. That was super garbled. Like - my dad would do stuff like not being able to remember how a belt went into belt loops, and forgot where the bathroom in his house was, but was still entirely safe with his power tools. My MIL thinks there is "The Johnston Family" living in her house. We'll phone, and she'll be doing something for "The Johnstons". But thankfully she hasn't done anything dangerous yet, because we're having a horrible time getting her placed somewhere safe - and we're over 1000 miles away so I really feel your helpless frustration.

Yeah, that would've caused a reaction in a couple of our peanut allergic children. Still, that doesn't rule out it being something else :grouphug:. Sorry, food allergies are so hard!

Two of our "non-allergic" children have OAS to a boatload of stuff, and when you get used to their "avoids", it's really not that big a deal. Nutritionally speaking, since they can still do the cooked form of foods, these guys aren't as much at risk of deficiencies. We *do* keep big boxes of non-latex gloves around for when those children cook, because the OAS'ers react dermally, by wrist rashes (dd 16 will get a rash up to her elbows if she peels potatoes). And our experience is that nuts are different than fruits - at least at our house, the OAS ones can't tolerate the nut flours where they're allergic to the nuts. Do keep an eagle eye out on labels for soy. It's in a lot of stuff you wouldn't first think about. One I remember being surprised by was whole turkeys, back when the little guys first lost soy.

Argh. We just ditched our land line and switched our home phone # to my cell, and now I'm thinking :banghead::cursing::rant: because those stupid ceaseless calls eat up my low-minute-plan minutes that I thought I was sooooo smart getting. I've started, when I get one, hanging up and hitting that number and sending a text message (texts are free on my plan) saying not to call this number as it is on the national do not call registry, but I'm sure that's probably making someone on the other end go, "flag this one - call every 20 minutes!!"

I'm bumping for you, because I'm a 2-month smartphone owner and have pretty much stopped phoning 'cause texting is so easy now that I'm not on a clamshell. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "texting app" because I had understood that the ability to text is pretty much on every cell phone. But it would be SO easy for me to be wrong about that :D. What I did want to say is that I am head-over-heels in love with Swype. Watch a video clip somewhere to see what it does. It makes texting a dream! Hoping someone can answer the rest of your question! Our plan comes with unlimited texting - there's no choice, though, or I'd have to be thinking it through like you are. We're more limited in our minutes, so we've been making the switch in our family in how we communicate.

Yet more proof that Expedit should be awarded superhero status :001_smile:. I love the polka-dotted paperback holders - did you make those yourself or buy them somewhere? I neeeeeeeeeeeed something for little paperbacks!

Wow, thanks so much. Although it made me startled, then sad, to realize that's only one of my dd's (the little guy has dreadlocks). :001_huh: Still, she'll be excited to have someone other than mama do it!

Wow, so amazing - what an uplift. Thanks for sharing it! And congratulations!!!

Half of my children are vac'd, half not. The one who brought pertussis into the family a couple of months ago is fully vac'd. Asthma did complicate it for my children who have asthma, but other than that, there was no difference in severity or duration between my vac'd and non-vac'd dc.

The blood tests (immuno-cap RASTS) are supposed to be more accurate, but level 1 and 2 are really low. My children with multiple food allergies eat their 3s or they wouldn't eat anything :tongue_smilie:. Symptoms trump tests. If you're still seeing some symptoms in dd, since so many people are lactose intolerant and you have a mild milk in there, you could always do a 2 week dairy free trial and see what happens. You've got some time since it's not like she's anaphylactic here. And removing peanuts is actually a really easy one - not like peanuts are a staple and in everything. If you've done wheat, peanuts would be SO easy. For the child that is a peanut-butter lover, there are so many readily available alternative nut butters now, this is an easy one.

All seven of mine still living at home had it recently. Cough syrup did NOT help. The only thing that seemed to help mine was sodium ascorbate (not any-ol' Vitamin C - needs to be sodium ascorbate for this). Comes as powder. Dosage was beginning with small dose (~1/4 tsp in juice, 2X/day) and increasing to loose stools but not diarrhea. <------this treatment found on another "mothering" board, really did help my children's symptoms back off. Thank goodness. Pertussis takes for-ev-er to go away, feels like :grouphug:

Since reaction trumps testing anyway, if I didn't have insurance I'd do a classic elimination diet. What a pain, but then you'd really know know, which allergy testing can't even do for you.

Random beat me to the quinoa, but I wanted to highlight that one - it's been a friend around here.

:grouphug: I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how well colleges are adapting . . . that was our experience when ds1 with ana peanut/treenut was college shopping. He also had a celiac friend who was able to eat at food services, they were so aware. To OP: we phone manufacturers here, too, but that only helps when the allergen is known, right? I agree with keeping a list of every ingredient in that ice cream for comparison over time. The problem is that they only test so many foods . . . the list of foods that aren't tested in standard allergy testing is ginormous.

Haven't read other replies, but we're a family of 10 (eldest is gone now tho) and have 2.5 bathrooms, but one of them has "issues" and has only been functional off and on. And when it is, it's actually the laundry room, so while there's a toilet in there, there is no mirror, no storage for toiletries or anything. So that one is just a potty :). Is it a bit irritating on Sunday mornings? Meh . . . only a tiny bit.

As far as the weightloss - it's not that you'll drop weight when your thyroid is adjusted, it's just that dropping weight is next to impossible when you're hypothyroid. So you'd still need to do weightloss stuff with diet, etc, but now these things actually have the possibility of working!

Bumping for you. I do make yogurt, but for my little girls with such extreme food allergies that my recipes probably wouldn't taste good to anyone but them! This website has recipes for "sneaky" popsicle fruit/veg combos that might translate to yogurt flavoring combinations, you think? Congratulations on your new toy - I was super excited when my sisters gave me mine as a gift last year. Have fun! If you come up with sneaky delish recipes, make sure to post them for the rest of us :001_smile:.

I'm making a switch into Math Mammoth for the little guy. I'm reading about apps like RepliGo Reader or ezpdf that could be used on an android device for marking up pdfs - we have a Kindle DX and that big screen would work great, but I don't know (and Uncle Google is failing me here) if this would work on a non-Fire Kindle. Anybody know?

We plan two weeks at a time, since that's how dh gets paid - so we do grocery shopping the day after payday, but I try to have the menu finalized the day before payday. We have to plan all meals and snacks because we have 3 separate sets of dietary . . . what do I call it? . . . needs/frameworks/etc. So our menus are crazy complicated, BUT the way we physically do it is pretty simple. I just got out a ruler and printer paper one day and made a grid with 15 horizontal rows, the top for "Day - Breakfast - Lunch - Dinner" and then one small vertical column to the far left for day/date and three columns for the meals. Dinner is a little larger. When I had that to my liking, I scanned it and now can print it out each week. Like pp, we have some areas of the menu that are on a rotation. For example, my highly allergenic dd's have a 5-lunch rotation for M-Sat. So that is written onto the original chart, as is a breakfast rotation for the non-allergenic non-working folks. So every 2 weeks when the menu is printed out ready for me to fill it in, these things are already on there. Also, I have a file on the computer that has the groceries needed for the pre-printed meals. So when I'm making the shopping list, I look at that file and fill in anything needed for those meals. I've tried a bunch of complicated systems. We do have a "meal binder" that we were using for quite awhile with 6 two-week rotations for dinners, with all the recipes in the binder. That was when my dd was cooking, because she HATED generating menus and didn't like to cook what I chose, either. Now I mostly cook, and a different dd, and we both like to learn new stuff, so we've ditched the binder for now.

Hi, I'm Kim. I used to post on the old board, and was active for awhile on the WTM high school Yahoo list back when eldest was in high school. I was read-only here for a really long time. We're heading into our strangest year ever, a sabbatical year. I have a weird form of lymphoma and struggle with a lot of nausea and exhaustion. So we made the decision to unschool for one year (exceptions: ds 13 will do pre-algebra and ds 6 will do reading, math, and science in a more structured way). I need to get my house together. Some of the younger ones haven't had the same kind of life-skills training that the older ones got. I need to catch up my physical home and my discipline home and do it through the health challenges.

All eight of ours were born at home, the last four waterbirths. When #7 was born, the midwife commented, "well, that's the third c-section you didn't have" because 3 of the births fell outside of what the hospital would've allowed. She said, "I just wish I could drag my colleagues at the hospital to births like this so they could see the great outcomes from not intervening when they intervene". BTW I'm not hospital-bashing with that . . . I was both a NICU and L&D nurse, so I believe in some perfect many-choices-to-fir-the-situation world :D. I like a sports bra and full/gauzy/loose-ish skirt for laboring, then I just pull off the skirt when I get in the tub. There was all the difference in the world for me between the "land" and water deliveries. My 4th baby, the last "land" delivery, was a bigger one, but #5 was bigger yet and a MUCH easier delivery due to the influence of the water.

Oh that's what that is. Crud. I totally agree - that's what I HAVE Prime for :glare: