Wegman's. There's no comparison. The employees are friendly and talk to my kids, not down to them (in general, every once on a while we get a dud). They have a really big health food section and lots of organic and even local produce. They are huge, though so shopping does take a while but their selection can't be beat. They are also cheaper than every other grocery store in the area, even the big national chain places. And it is clean. Our store isn't ery old, about 5 years old I think and they built a brand new building. Oh, and most important of all for moms of small kids, the bathrooms are extremely clean and not scary! LOL I totally sound like a commercial but we love this store.

Me too! Well, it's a bit more than 10 min to DE. We're in West Chester, dh works in DE. 7 yo ds, 5 yo dd, and 17 month old dd.

A great place for kids! We live near there, but don't go as often as we'd like due to cost. The kids love it. They have a really nice childrens' garden. We tend to go more in the winter to see the Christmas displays, but we are planning to go this summer sometime.

Heinz Organic Ketchup is free of hfcs. We buy it in the big 2 pack at BJ's. It lasts us forever in those huge bottles since only my ds eats ketchup regularly. It's probably in the regular grocery stores too but I haven't looked for it there. Our grocery store has a whole aisle in the health food section of organic sodas/ginger ale/root beer that are free of hfcs. They are really expensive, though, so we've never tried it. Also our farmer's market sells natural homemade rootbeer (made with real sugar) we are dying to try. I'm keeping a lookout for the pesi throwback stuff but haven't seen it here yet. Not a big fan of Mountain Dew but my sis lives on the stuff. I'll have to tell her about the throwback stuff. She doesn't care at all about being healthier but she might be interested in comparing.

We just finished this lesson. We read through it and I asked him what part of speech each word was and if he didn't know I just told him what it was and why. Toward the end he was just calling everything a noun. LOL I thought he did pretty good considering he does have language delays (though he reads at a much higher level). Frankly, this would be hard for most adults.

If you have little kids you could keep an extra potty chair in another room. Or a bucket, even, for bigger kids or adults in an emergency. We keep a potty chair in the bathroom and an extra one in the basement for just in case or for the kids to use in an emergency if we have guests. We have a utility sink in the basement that I've used to wash that potty chair out with. We joke that we have a family bed and family bathroom. It isn't uncommon for someone to be in the shower, with a kid on the toilet, and another kid on the potty chair. And possibly someone coming in to use the sink. LOL! And we have a teeny tiny bathroom! To get all the way inside you have to close the door. It's doable but I still wish we had at least a spare toilet somewhere. I can see more issues as the kids get older. Oh, and 2 of us do have toilet/stomach issues so it does sometimes become a problem.

I have a bunch from Wegmans grocery store. The handles are just long enough to put the bag on my shoulder but short enough to carry by the handle. The original ones I bought over a year ago have metal holes so they can hook them over the metal hooks on the plastic bag thingie at the check-out to fill them. But most cahiers didn't even seem to bother. I noticed the 2 newer ones I bought don't have that, though. They also have flat bottom so they stand up and fold just like paper bags. They hold ALOT and even after a year and a half + they don't really look worn. I think they hold more than 4 or 5 plastic bags. I can usually get the whole weeks groceries in 4-6 of them. Frequently the cashiers here over pack them though. One cashier put a gallon of milk, 4 1 liter bottles of seltzer, and the big jug of softsoap in one bag. I couldn't lift it from the cart to the car! I had to unpack it to get it in. LOL! I was also 9 months pg at the time and VERY annoyed. I now usually say, please DO NOT bag the milk. The older cashiers grumble at using them. I had one woman repeat over and over under her breath "I hate these bags". The cashier at the next register heard her and said "why? I love them!". My ds's job at the grocery store is to hold the bags and hand them to the cashier before anything gets rung up. Oh and they hold a heck of a lot of library books. I think I once had 40 childrens books plus several of mine in there. I couldn't lift it, but I didn't need to since I bring the stroller to the library for that purpose. LOL! They also make awesome park bags, beach bags, picnic bags, etc. Can you tell I love em? I have 7 from Wegmans and 2 more from the Acme grocery store. The Acme ones are smaller, more the size of a plastic bag so I don't use those much. I'm also thinking of knitting some string bags to keep around so I never forget a bag.

Yeah, my dh frequently goes to Saturday mass instead of Sunday. Our church does Saturday mass at 5 pm. (He's Catholic, I'm not Christian so don't attend with him)

Well, I live in PA, in other words the land of bad restrictive home ed laws. LOL! So my vote would be absolutely NO legislation. The ps have compulsory attentance laws, not compulsory education. Why do homeschoolers have to be held to a higher standard? I live near Philly and the drop out rate and illiteracy rate are embarrassing. Kids are graduating from ps in Philly that can't read at all, yet the state feels the need to over regulate hs'ers. (I'm not in Philly and our ps is actually excellent) I think we should be trusted to educate our children any way we see fit. Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I'm trying to type while nursing a wiggly baby that keeps kicking me in the face. LOL!

Last week ds (age 6) had something weirdly shoved up his shirt. He was walking around rubbing his belly, saying "oh, I think I'm going to have a baby." Out pops a dvd. "Oh, it's my baby," he says, hugging the movie. I believe it was Finding Nemo. Hmmm, too many movies lately? Could be. This is also the same child who looked at me the other day and said "Mom, is your belly so big because you're having another baby? Could it be a baby brother this time?" Um, no. Our baby is 6 months old. Oh, and I weigh more than 10 lbs less than I dd before she was born. They are always talking about having babies. Dd likes to nurse two dolls at a time. Well, we are a child led weaning, tandem nursing family. I am also a breastfeeding counselor. My kids know more about breastfeeding and childbirth than most 6 and 4 year olds. LOL!

We're using/planning on doing all 3. My ds didn't really use OPG. I bought it for him, but he taught himself to read at age 2 so we didn't really need it. I did a bit with him, thinking he might need a foundation in phonics. He was very bored so we stopped. We're nearly halfway through FLL. You don't need to wait till you're completely through OPG to start. I would get the kids reading fairly well. WWE is writing and I believe level 1 is copywork. It is my understanding that you can start WWE and FLL together, but you can skip the copywork in FLL. We'll be starting WWE level 1 with FLL2 (we'll probably be halfway through FLL2 when we start WWE). Ds is still working on the actual mechanics of writing and tires easily. So far we've done FLL orally and skipped all the writing and copywork. I haven't seen WWE, though. I preordered through Amazon and they aren't planning on sending it till next month sometime. My dd has just started OPG (she's 4) and has been enjoying it so far. We are on the short vowel sounds. I think I'll probably wait till she's 6 to start FLL unless she's begging for more lessons. I'm planning on starting FLL and WWE around the same time for her. She doesn't have the fine motor delays ds has.

I'm not even sure I even understand rep. I don't think I've ever been on a message board that had this system. Or maybe I was and just didn't know it. LOL! I'm not super active on this board anyway. I read a ton and get a lot of awesome advice and info but don't seem to have a lot oftime to post. I don't even think I've posted enough to give or get rep yet.

Can I join? I have 3 small kids and we don't take up much room. LOL! We've only been officially homeschooling for a year now. I live in an area that is supposed to have a lot of homeschoolers but I've somehow managed to not actually meet any. My 2 youngest are still young enough for MOMS Club activities and my oldest doesn't like to socialiize with kids his own age. And since dd1 is 4 all we've been hearing about is school talk from the mamas of her little friends. It's starting to get very wearing on me. Especially when they try to drag me into the conversations. Ugh!

I bought the TM because someone told me it was necessary. I've opened it once. LOL! We haven't gotten very far in book A yet because I let her do them whenever she feels like it 'cause, well, she's 4. The only pages I noticed you might possibly need it was the ones mentioned above. I actually forgot to look in the TM the day she was on the first one of those pages so I just made it up. I told her the names of the pictures and I think I had her color the picture as I said them (emphasizing the letter we were learning). I actually wish I hadn't bought the TM. I didn't for the other ETC books for ds. It's really easy to make up directions for these books.

Credit card. I use my credit card for most purchases, but we don't charge anything we can't pay off that month. We don't have any creadit card debt. I try to spread out any major purchases so my monthly bill doesn't get huge all in one month.

We're finishing up our first year, though we've been planning, preparing and researching since ds was a baby. I can't imagine doing anything else. Only 17 more go, unless we get any little surprises! LOL!

I just took that quiz and I was right under Ghandi, too. I told dh my results and his response was "whoa, big shocker!" (dripping with sarcasm) LOL! I am registered independent.

I think some people just feel it's necessary to make comments and judge you no matter what. They can find fault with everything. I'm not small weight wise, but I'm only about 5 feet tall, oh and I look about 16. (I'll be 33 this August) Which, I guess is an improvement since when I was 16 I looked like I was 12, LOL! You should see some of the looks and hear some of the comments I get when I out alone with my 3 kids. I actually had someone ask me once if I'd started having kids when I was 12 or something. It sounded more like this, "What, did you start having kids when you were 12?!" (wrinkled nose, incredulous snort). Very rude!

I do not find it teacher intensive at all. We have only done Primer, Alpha, and currently we're in Beta. My ds loves loves loves Steve Demme. There just must be something about him he really likes. He calls him Mr. Steve and watches and rewatches the dvd's on his own. (He's an aspie so that may explain the compulsive rewatching of math videos. LOL!) We watch the dvd lesson together, then I go over the lesson with him using the blocks, teachers manual and the first worksheet. Usually by then he's starting to grasp the concept, so the next day he does the next worksheet while I sit with him and help if he needs it. We do one page per day, and a lesson takes us about 1-1.5 weeks to master. We did spend a couple weeks on multiple digit addition with carrying, though, because I wanted to make sure he really got it and wasn't just doing what I told him to do. I love the way it teaches place value using the blocks. It made learning carrying really easy for him to see why. We usually only spend 15-20 minutes daily on math, even when starting a new lesson with the dvd. My ds really needs the short lessons. I imagine the lessons take longer in the higher levels, but I've not seen those yet. We plan on using MUS through all the levels, unless it ever stops working for him. Oh, I'm really not a math person and have a hard time explaining it so having ds watch the dvds with me is great. I like the way Steve Demme explains things and it helps me to explain it that way to ds.

What glitches with Vista? I've been using it on my laptop with Vista for at least 6 months now and haven't noticed anything. I was originally using it on my desktop with XP, but don't notice anything different with Vista. :confused:

I just bought the actual Crocs for my kids. I want a pair too but didn't want to spend that much money all at once. Had I known how much ds would love them I would have bought them sooner. He is very very picky about shoes and hates new styles. When he got his new Crocs he danced around in them for the entire day and refused to take them off! He tends to get really hot sweaty feet. I didn't try the knock-offs, but a friend of mine likes the ones at Michaels. I don't know how they hold up or feel though. I looked at the Sketchers version, but I don't think they were any cheaper.

My heart hurts for this poor little boy and his family. I have a ds with asbergers. Many of the behaviors described really are normal for kids NOT on the spectrum. But add asbergers and it does make it much more intense. One of the reasons I am so glad we made the decision to homeschool was that I was afraid of this type of scenario, though we made our decision when ds was a baby. I really wish the schools had more resources. All the K classes here have a teacher and an aide, plus parent volunteers so the teacher would not have been alone with the class, she would have had help, even if it wasn't a one on one aide for the child.

Wow, that's what it means? I admit I'm new to posting here (but I've been lurking for quite some time trying to get the feel of things), but I thought the stars were a good rating. Who thought up that system? And where is it explained? I feel like I just stepped into the Twilight Zone or Bizarro World!

That recipe sounds YUM!! Hmmm...now I want brownies. Memo to myself: must go to store for chocolate chips and butter. I really have never met a brownie I didn't like. The chocolatier (is that a word) and chewier the better. Cuddling a sleeping baby right now or I'd be making a batch of brownies. LOL!

The Plus version is sooo much better than Basic. Really, truly! I did not really care for Basic and mainly upgraded to Plus out of curiousity. I love it! I love that I have all my lesson plans all typed up and I can use them with all the kids later on. I also just discovered the reschedule feature. You can bump assignments back or forward. Awesome. I also like all the different reports you can generate. I'm in PA and I can just print off the resources report and attendence report for each kid at the end of the year for the port. Thankfully we still have a whole year before we have to report to the school district, but when the time comes I like that everything is all in one place.