Oh I feel your pain (and mine is only 6!!! :tongue_smilie:). I just have to laugh about stopping in the middle of a word to talk about something completely random. Oh yes, I feel your pain. I've calmed myself down enough to not care so much about handwriting. For now, so long as it's more legible than his daddy's, I'm not going to care :lol:.

All the baby pics from a few weeks ago made me happy. Last night DH was going through our 2011 pics to burn some onto DVDs for our parents. He found this gem and I thought I'd share. I know I'm a little biased, but I just think she's beautiful. This was taken when she was 5 or 6 months old. She has more hair now. :D

Ok, then yes, I would be going with option A.

Who would be watching them if you're at work?

I have heard so many possible causes for eczema, it's quite overwhelming. When Digby was diagnosed, the doctor said warm bath every day for about 5 minutes. No soap unless necessary and when it was necessary, I only used goat milk soap. I got mine from here. After baths, I didn't dry him off, just let the water stay on while I rubbed lotion on him. For really bad flare ups, I'd use hydrocortizone cream and then put lotion over the top. It got to the point where I don't even need hydrocortizone on him anymore. I also have to keep them in cotton. I learned my lesson the hard way on this one. Baby girl also has eczema and I thought she was doing well enough that I put her in some fleece jammies. The polyester doesn't breathe as well and now she's got a rash all over her tummy. It can be kept under control and they can grow out of it, but it's not a guarantee. I have a friend in her 20's who still fights it. She says she can't take hot showers. Good luck. ETA: Oh yeah, I did All Free and Clear and that seemed to help before I switched to making my own detergent. I only use soap and lotion products that are unscented.

How long did it take? I was better the very first day. The key for me was to go to bed earlier. It's the hardest thing about being a night owl, going to bed early, feeling like you're wasting time sleeping. But for me it was an absolute necessity. My depression flares up and I go crazy with sleep deprivation. Going to bed early and waking up when the kids do keeps me sane. Did you do anything other than drink coffee to boost your energy? I've never drunk coffee. The thing that helped the most is going to bed earlier. It is essential that I get to bed before midnight, anything before 10 is best. For the first several weeks, DH had to force me to bed. He's a night owl too, so I want to stay up with him, but for my mental health and sanity, he knew that I couldn't keep staying up so late. Advice? For me I had to stop looking at things the way I regularly do. I usually focus on how going to bed early results in loss of "me" time. I don't get to read the books I want or watch the movies I want or do the crocheting I want because I need to go to bed earlier. I need to focus on the results. Going to bed earlier=getting enough sleep to keep the depression away. So even though I hate it, I focus on the benefits and the results I want. I love being able to wake up and get up without having to bribe the children to go back to sleep. I love being able to get us all going on our routine. I love having more patience and not yelling so much. So will this work for you? Who knows. My ideal time is 10pm-8am. But that's just because baby girl and Digby are waking up about 4 times each every night. Hopefully once they start sleeping through the night again, I'll get enough sleep in a row to go 10pm-6am.

:iagree: It's normal to feel overwhelmed with the abundance of curricula out there. I'm not sure I have any good advice about curricula, since I've never looked at any of the ones you've listed besides Sonlight. Hopefully someone with more experience can help. I would recommend reading The Well Trained Mind, too. If nothing else, it'll give you a few really good options for each subject and help you narrow down your search. I remember spending years trying to figure out what curricula to use and the Well Trained Mind helped take away some of my panic. :grouphug:

I understand the difficulty, feeling like you need to get it right so he;'ll understand and worried it won't change anything or that he won't even care. That's how I felt anyway. I'm so sorry. It's a horrible thing to have happen. I just felt like shaking my father and yelling at him, "YOU'RE SO STUPID, YOU CAN BE HAPPY. JUST BE NICE!!" but I knew it was no use. Good luck again

oh crap, I'm too late. Ok, hopefully they were of more help than me (since I am just guessing and have no idea what I'm doing! :lol:)

ok, what I did was chain two, sc at the top of the 3rd DC (the middle one in each arch), ch 3, sc in the 3rd DC all the way around. I would skip the dtr at the end and just add the 5 DC in the ch spaces and do a SC to attach it to the base in between each arch. I would just keep working that all the way around. Sorry it took so long, I had to do it myself to understand the instructions. I would just adjust the pattern and take out some of the steps since they confuse me when working in the round.

I don't know that I have anything of use to offer other than a :grouphug:. My parents divorced after 30 years. It wasn't really a surprise as they had never seemed to have gotten along, but it still hurt. In the months that followed, my dad did some really awful things and I haven't talked to him in about three years. You are free to be angry, hurt, disappointed, etc. But it's unlikely that you'll be able to say anything to change his mind. Good luck to you, I know how much you're hurting.

Are you chaining 30 in the beginning instead of 33? What specifically are you having problems with? Transitioning to the next round?

Had my first at 21. Had my second at 25. Had my third at 26. I'm done. DONE. I know I'm young to make that kind of decision, so we haven't done anything permanent. There was a big grieving period after my second, because things got so bad after he was born that I couldn't in good conscious put the two I already had or any future ones through such h*ll. Then we got a sweet little surprise. Things were not as bad, but still bad enough that I didn't want to put anyone through it again. Less grieving, but still feeling very heartsick and guilty over the fact that I feel like a failure. DH is very supportive of me and has mostly left the decision up to me since the majority of the work falls to me. He thinks it would probably be best to stop now too.

Pigby just started his today. You can give yourself a pat on the back for being more with it than I am :thumbup1:

At six, I wouldn't expect him to actually get it done unless I was following up on it. Usually I have to supervise too, but mine is a young six year old, maybe yours is closer to 7. Yesterday, I told him about 5 times to go change his clothes. He ended up staying in them all day because I never supervised him changing them. I think it's normal for them to see something else, get distracted and forget what they are supposed to do. I think he saw some books and started reading instead. So today, I was in there while he changed. I also make use of the timer, "I'm setting the clock for five minutes. If the timer goes off and your room isn't clean, you aren't getting a story tonight." Then he asked if he could have 8 minutes. Since he asked politely and three minutes didn't really matter to me, I said sure. Kid got it done in about four.

So Boscopup introduced me to the Homeschool Buyers' Co-op yesterday (thank you! :thumbup:). I see that Mark Kistler's art program subscription is $40. Does anyone know if this is this the regular price or a sale price? I have no money left in the homeschool budget for this month, but I am hoping it will be available next month. :D Thank you

We're doing kindergarten right now. Plans for first grade: Continue with MUS Alpha, probably switch to Beta next January. Continue FLL 1, probably switch to level 2 in January. We're starting AAS level 1 in a few days, I'm not sure where we'll be come August, since he's really good at spelling. We'll just keep going. I just discovered Startwrite this afternoon, I'm so excited. We'll be using that to practice writing instead of WWE. We'll be using BFSU and Elemental Science. Sometime we'll be starting SOTW, whenever I can get my act together.

What is HSBC? And thank you :001_smile:

sorry to hijack, but does any body know if the HWOT font is available in the demo version? Thanks.

So what I ended up doing is laminating the blue, red and yellow cards. It cost about $20. I had hoped that they would have been the roller laminating machines instead of the pouches, but nope, Office Depot has pouches. Apparently Digby is in the process of giving up his afternoon nap :cursing::banghead: so schooling Pigby is going to HAVE to take place while Digby is awake. I am hoping I can strap him into his booster seat and keep him occupied there but I have no idea how distracting it's all going to be. And I have a feeling he'll manage to sneak some cards while I'm not looking. He's pretty handy like that.

:thumbup1: I like the way you work. I've got the machines running now. We're recovering from a week of sickness and lack of sleep so it's time to clean up this mess.

I bet I'm the only one missing church today because we are all out of clean laundry. :svengo:

I bet I am the only one who gets annoyed when things are crooked. For example, if I'm laying in bed I can't have one side of the sheet going over my shoulder and the other side going over my waist; they must both go across at the same level. Or in school, my desk HAD to be parallel with the wall. If it was angled, I had to fix it. DH seems to think it's funny to twist his socks or the kids' pants around because it absolutely must be fixed. :glare: Punk :tongue_smilie:

I wear a swimming mask because no other trick worked. My eyes are just super sensitive.

thank you, that is very helpful