Are you talking about public magnet schools? If so, that is what my sister and my friends and I all attended. We auditioned and submitted portfolios and went to school an extra hour a day. We were bussed from all parts of the city and had to conform to academic and behavior standards or we were kicked out. I was surprised to hear some opinions against magnet schools because we had such good experiences with them. There were waiting list, so I can see how some people might see them as unfair. I just don’t think the answer is making every kid who can’t afford private school or homeschooling to go to the failing neighborhood school. Of course, I don’t know what the answer is. That is why I asked.

We still do stockings and presents and a big Christmas dinner and then a walk and some board games with extended family. My adult kids still come home, but I try not make any other demands of them all year other than to be home on Christmas morning. I also make sure that I still pay at least their car insurance and cell phones so I can have a little to back up my request. We still have little kids at home who would be pretty disappointed to spend Christmas without their siblings, not to mention poor mom!

I totally did not know that!

I have heard that the school district used to have absolutely no services for gifted students. When parents tried to work with the district to start a program they were told “tough luck.†Then a gifted charter school was started and the district was suddenly able to get a gifted education program started. So I do feel like they can provide a push to the district to improve.

My MIL was a nurse. She used to tell my BIL to quit reading and go play outside. He made friends with the boy across the street and started going over there to play every day. MIL was quite pleased until the neighbor stopped her one day and said, “We love having J come over. He is such a nice boy. He just sits on the couch and reads.†Never going to make an extrovert out of that one!

The last birthday party my kids were invited to was pretty much a nightmare. The birthday girl was alternating between pouting and slamming doors and bossing everyone, including her parents around. The guests were bored. The father of the birthday girl kept sneaking off to watch football instead of interacting with his kid. And for some unknown reason, they had planned a 5 hour party. My youngest just turned 8. Her sister spent a month sewing new Barbie clothes for her gift. On her birthday, all she wanted to do was play barbies with her sister. Dh came home early to take us out for a birthday dinner. Dd asked if he could just grill something instead because they didn’t want to quit playing. They played until bedtime. Dh had fallen asleep on the couch, so I let them play an extra hour after bedtime because you only turn 8 once in a lifetime. I don’t think we will ever have birthday parties with more than our family and maybe one close friend. In any case, you may be right about the child in question, but my kids would totally understand not being invited the next year. Honestly, this child might just not be compatible with your daughter and that is okay too.

If you go this route, please give the parents advance notice so that they can decline the invitation if they aren’t okay with this policy.

Absolutely not. I wouldn’t say anything. Whether you are impressed or not, she is your guest. Why would you confiscate something that belongs to someone else’s child. If you don’t like her behavior, don’t invite her again. That is a natural consequence.

I’m on a ranting roll, because my other celiac kid is on her way to her swim team holiday party. Last year, they wanted to decorate gingerbread for an activity. I told them that it would be really awesome to have an activity that all of the swimmers could participate in so they make different holiday crafts. Guess what the activity is today. It isn’t enough that I have to feed her before and after because there won’t be anything for her to eat other than what we have brought, but then she will get to stand around and watch her friends decorate gingerbread. Older Dd gets sick from inhaling air with flour in it. Hopefully younger Dd won’t get sick from the party. If she does, then I guess she won’t even be able to attend next year. Way to build team unity.

I have reminders set in my phone for a couple of days before they are due and again for the day before they are due. When the alarm goes off, I tell whatever kid I am with, “Make me pay my bill when we get home. Don’t let me do anything else until I have paid it.†I have usually forgotten by the time we get home, but a kid reminds me, and I sit down right that second and do it.

My celiac kid had a 5 hour Greek final on Thursday. Her room mate made her a celebratory meal for the end of the semester. Now Dd is so sick from cross contamination. I wish we could have more gifts and celebrations that don’t involve food at all.

I had a very good experience at our local Verizon store. The person waiting on me took care of what I needed and did it the way I wanted it done without trying to convince me to buy anything. I did call corporate and tell them I had excellent service. The entire time I was waiting and then being helped, one associate was working with a specific customer who had been there before I got there and was still being helped when I left. I couldn’t help overhearing some. I was amazed that the associate kept making calls and trying to find solutions for this customer. He never once said,â€There is nothing we can do about it.†And he never once tried to pretend that the customer had somehow caused his own problem. It was quite amazing to witness true customer service. I also had really good service from our local Comcast people. My salesperson was good about calling me and even coming to the house to make sure everything was installed to my specifications. He is the kind of salesman clients follow when they leave a company. It is so refreshing to experience good service.

I have a very big frying pan, but it only heats up where the gas flame actually is, so I’m constantly having to move it around so each section is over the heat. I bought an electric skillet when our kitchen was gutted. It should have been an ideal solution but mine heated very unevenly. I was constantly moving the food around to get it on or off the hot spot. Mine was probably just a lemon.

It has been noted on these boards before that a disproportionate number of us have mothers with suspected or diagnosed personality disorders. I’m wondering if some of how we parent/homeschool is a direct reaction to having been raised by a less than healthy mother. I know that I lean very far over to be respectful to my kids because I never want to be “that momâ€.

I’m lucky to have buy in from my kids because they don’t ever want to feel that bad ever again. I’m getting pretty good at making meals that taste like junk food, but are made out of real ingredients. Today for lunch, I made fried chicken and fried rice with sweet and sour sauce. It was labor intensive but pretty delicious even without flour or rice or sugar or food coloring. My kid would starve if I just limited her food without giving her replacements that she enjoys. I figure I can spend the time shopping and prepping and cooking or I can spend the time trying to deal with her meltdowns. All of that is to say, I totally agree that some kids would rather starve. I’ve seen it first hand.

Other people might be able to help with diet elimination ideas more than me, because my kids react to so many different things that we have to be pretty restrictive. I don’t think that is common. We started with the entire family doing a Whole 30. That helped us pinpoint which food groups caused a reaction when we started adding more in. One of my children has high blood sugar and one has very low. Neither one can eat cereal or regular pancakes (I make pancakes with almond flour and they eat them with butter instead of syrup) Our family is completely grain and sugar free. Even so, things slip by. Yesterday, Dd had a horrible stomach ache. Sure enough, I had brewed her a cup of tea that afternoon and didn’t notice the “natural flavors†listed on the bag. Again, I don’t think most people have to be this careful. I have friends who have had great success with the Feingold Diet. That might be a good place to start. Hugs, and good luck to you. I’m hoping you get great results and a happy kid and family without needing to resort to medication.

I have used pans that you could use without spray or oil to fry an egg sunny side up. I just don’t want one for myself because I don’t want whatever the nonstick surface is made out of leaching into my family’s food. For sunny side up eggs without a broken yoke, we heat a cast iron pan first, then add butter and then the egg. I never have trouble flipping it. For me, I feel safer about butter and iron than I do about Teflon.

My daughter saw a gallon bottle of red dye in the store yesterday. She said, “For me, that would be death in a bottle.†I was lucky that mine was still a toddler when we figured it out, but unlucky to have a toddler who raged and talked about wanting to get hit by a car and begging us to hurt her.†It was terrifying. My oldest noticed that it always happened when she ate pepperoni pizza. Turns out they put red food coloring in it. Mine also has celiac so that complicates things. We just cook everything from scratch and she is a delightful agreeable, responsible, helpful kid.

I’m going to echo what previous posters have said. You need competent medical help, but what you are describing sounds much more like my kid with food sensitivities that my kid with Autism. I’ll always be thankful to the hive for the day that I posted saying I was really afraid that she would have to be institutionalized at some point. Veteran poster after poster replied, “Nah, those rages sound just like a food reaction.â€

Another vote for cast iron. I use mine several times a day. Nothing ever sticks.

http://www.timesheraldonline.com/social-affairs/20171208/deep-cuts-needed-for-vallejo-city-unified-school-district Here is a little more info.

The school district here is absolutely failing. A 5th grade teacher is retiring in December and a new teacher won’t be hired. Parents can volunteer or the kids will be added to existing overflowing classrooms. A kid who graduated from the district told me that he had several classes in high school that never had a teacher all year. The kids just had to have study hall or get distributed to other classes, but nothing was permanent. From day to day, it changed regarding if you had study hall or which classroom you went to. They can’t hire teachers because the schools are so bad that no one wants to teach there. I don’t personally know any parents who send their kids to the neighborhood schools. Many working class families only have one kid so they can afford to put her in private school. Other families have gotten transfers to the better neighboring districts. Still others are using the public school service to homeschool. But most of the families I know have their kids in charter schools. We have a very nice science focused middle school and a Spanish immersion elementary school. These charter schools seem to provide about the same level of education as the public schools where we moved from. You might get a better or worse teacher, but the schools are safe and you might not love the textbook adopted but your kid learns to read and do math. You might have to jump through some hoops but there are accommodations for LD kids. It has “suddenly†been discovered that the district has a 12 million dollar shortfall. Everything I have read and heard from everyone I know wants to address this by closing the charter schools and forcing those kids and that money back into the public schools. Here is the part that I actually don’t understand. I can see how that would help very long term, but are parents expected to just sacrifice their individual children’s education? I don’t think their could be noticeable improvement before the kids currently in charter schools graduate. The thing that makes me uncomfortable about this solution is that parents who can afford it will still send their kids to private school and they will be educated. Families who can afford to keep one parent at home can use the public school at home options and they will be educated. But the kids who have been getting a decent, education through the independent charter schools will just be out of luck and these are families who already tend to have fewer resources than the first two groups. I’m not seeing how this is the obvious solution to the district’s financial problems. This is not a JAWM. I’m asking because I feel like I’m missing something important because the answer seems so obvious to everyone I hear from.

I do not insist on a college degree for my kids. My 11 year old is talking about culinary school. I would be fine with that. I’d also be fine with it if she got a culinary certificate and never worked in that industry. I think education can be valuable just for the education and not just for money or job prospects. I support broad class requirements for undergraduate degrees. For my kids, this is where they try something that they wouldn’t choose to take on by choice but find a new appreciation for the subject. I don’t find what my kids are doing at university “irrelevant†last night, I was helping my oldest with the first 26 pages of a rough draft on the similarities between the sublime and kitch. Not only do I think this assignment will improve her research and writing skills, I think it is actually good for her brain to be stretching and working harder in new areas. It probably won’t lead directly to a job or to money, but that is okay because money isn’t my end goal for education and it isn’t hers either. She was complaining about the some of the other students in her top tier honors program. She said that they just want to jump through hoops and get As. They aren’t interested in excellence at all. This is part of the problem to me. You can pay for students to go to college, but you can’t force them to do the work. You can’t make them care. Even with a degree they probably won’t be ideal employees, but I believe they will have better options than if they didn’t get a degree at all. We will support our kids’ education to the extent that they are still motivated. Dh said that he doesn’t care if they get PhDs and then do jobs requiring no education at all. He said he would be happy if Dd became one of the country’s most well educated dairy farmer. We want our kids to be educated because that is our value system. We aren’t expecting some monetary payoff for our investment. It is interesting. I get quite a few comments from people about how worthless they believe a college degree is. Obviously I’ll never agree with that because I don’t think any learning is worthless, but many times, the people I’m hearing this from have personal issues that don’t make them a good fit for university. I choose to take their opinion with a pound of salt.

I think that the early years with kids can be pretty overwhelming for most of us. Who enjoys being up all night with a cranky baby and all of the other just draining parts of having very young children? If one or more of those children happens to have special needs, the exhausting phase is quite extended. Ask me how I know. But there comes a point where you just have to choose what you want to spend your time on and what you really don’t care about. This is why these discussions can be so important. Sometimes we don’t realize we are making a choice until we hear someone else say, “Well, I don’t do that.†I’m interested in when less is more. Some of the adult kids from frankly neglectful families are just amazing. They are competent and able to find their own solutions. They do the hard tasks cheerfully and can be amazingly well read just due to what they chose to study in their down time. On the other hand, I don’t find the adult children of my type A friend’s all of that interesting. I think back on their spotless homes and color coordinated homeschool shelves and I see that the mothers were working hard, but it didn’t really translate into the results that they had hoped for. What is always tricky is finding the balance. I spend plenty of time with my kids. The most fun I ever have is being together as a family. That doesn’t keep mean I need to be a slave to them. That doesn’t mean that they can’t chip in and contribute to the good of the family. It just means that the less time that we spend on drudgery, the more time we can spend having fun together.

I feel like I do very little work compared to busier seasons. I have time to get up when I want, drink my coffee in bed and let the little girls sleep until they are rested. I ask them what they feel like for breakfast and I start cooking while they feed the pets. We eat together, but I’ll usually leave the dishes until later. Then I do a few pages of school with each kid. With my older kids, I did crafts for each day’s topic, but my younger ones hate doing them. They prefer to control their own crafting, so I let them. I also don’t spend a ton of time finding correlating library books. I require 1hour of independent reading each day. They pick their own books and get close to 25 nonfiction books from the library each week. 11 year old wears ear buds all day. She listens to history lectures and classical literature. She can listen while she cleans the chicken coop or sews or sweeps the floor. I feed them again at 3:00 they get free time each day to draw or play together or do self-directed crafts and projects. I’m free during that time. At 6:00, I take them to swim practice for 60 or 90 minutes depending on the day. Then we come home, eat supper, watch an episode of a cooking show with dad and he reads to them and puts them to bed at 8:00. Surpringly, I still spend quite a bit of time helping my adult kids with school. Middle daughter will send me a power point and ask me to tell me to help her make sure that she didn’t leave anything out. My oldest will tell me her conference proposal is due at midnight. Does she need a better transition between paragraphs two and three. Also she is 16 words over her word count. Can I help her decide where to trim. I expect to spend at least an hour on that today. But it feels like less work than playing a board gamewith kids. Cooking takes up quite a bit of time because of food allergies but I listen to a good audio book and can usually turn it into an enjoyable activity. Dh offen grills something for supper if he gets home before I do. In the summer, by adult kids cook supper every night and do a good amount of taking the younger kids to activities. I feel like we have a really good life. Everyone gets real food, plenty of time to sleep every night, plenty of time to read and to exercise. These are the things that I believe make for happy healthy humans. I’m fortunate that my kids do not crave screen time. So we do not have any power struggles about that. Left to their own devices, they will choose playing American Girls or gardening or sewing or making something out of the pine cones they find in the yard. I find all of those activities more important for long term success both in and out of school than more and more seatwork. Taking care of toddlers and babies is a full time job and then some. Homeschooling 2 elementary age kids isn’t for me, unless I insist on turning it into one.