Rosie said ouch because half an hour from the Sydney CBD is going to cost you a fortune. Also traffic anywhere in Sydney by car is a nightmare so half an hour will actually take you a lot longer... although travelling on a train is probably quicker. In general it will be difficult to find a place to rent fully furnished...it's not usual to rent that way here... most rentals don't supply anything except maybe a dishwasher...you need to bring your own everything...fridge and washing machine are not included like they are in the USA. I don't know how much your DH earns but yes that is quite a high salary. My DH earns around that and there is no way we could afford a place that close to Sydney. Keep in mind everything is super expensive here...food...electricity. Utilities are also never usually included in the rent ..you pay for all those yourself seperately including water and the rates are high. I'm assuming you are a US expat ... what are your plans for health care? What kind of visa will you be coming on? I can't remember exactly how our health system works but if you have a residential visa you can get social medicare...I don't know about other visa types. If your DH's employer is set up here they will sort that I guess. Sadie will be able to help you out more...she lives closer I think. But yes...half an hour from Sydney means your DH better have a very good income..it is not cheap. If you want to get an idea of grocery costs try www.woolworths.com.au and www.coles.com.au Lastly, I don't know if you homeschool or not but NSW has some of the strictest laws in Australia..you might want to look into that before you go there.

Of course it isn't doctrinally sound but that doesn't stop people treating others horribly. Most 15 year olds are still trying to find their worth and being treated like a leper is not going to help their self esteem. I've seen first hand how COMMON this is in the church...it isn't a few isolated people doing it. I knew a girl who was raped ...someone broke into her house while she slept. Plenty of people said aloud " Oh it's not her fault, she is still pure". and then had secret words with their sons discouraging them from dating her because ..you know...." She did leave the window open in the first place".

Yeah...and the teacher was probably LDS....I was told that story a few times in my Young Womens classes...it's disgusting to teach young girls that. I had a best friend who got pregnant at 15. She tried many times to come back to church but in the end left for good. She felt so bad about herself " being used" and felt like no LDS guy would want her and she was probably right. A few times I asked some of my guy friends why they didn't ask her on a date and the answers I got. " I don't want someone who is used goods". So I am guessing they teach the guys similar things in Priesthood. That kind of mindset is very much alive in the LDS church. I had a few friends get pregnant before marriage and the times they dated LDS guys...well they all told me that the guys mothers hated them and tried like crazy to discourage their sons from dating them. It's little wonder they leave the church for good...I would too if the people made me feel like dirt.

My kids love Minecraft...and are addicted to Skylanders. I have no idea why...I have zero interest in video games myself so my interest extends to making sure it's age appropriate and thats it...I don't know what they actually do in the game. My DD is crafty so if your DD was knitting she would put it down and ask to be taught...however when friends are visiting I tell my kids to put their games away unless the other kid is addicted too and they want to play together. My kids love building things...they spend a lot of hours with Lego or all sorts of other building materials...we have many types...so,its no suprise to me they also like minecraft. Unless it's taking up all their waking hours I don't see the issue.

Used it and loved it for all three of my kids. I printed out most of the books as it didnt use e- reader versions back when I used it so I don't know about that. I think more people don't use it because it's expensive...but it's actually cheap for what you get. They have lesson plans and activities for every book...and phonics readers for those just starting out. It's fabulous... if you choose to use it you will not feel you didn't get your money's worth. All of my kids were reading above grade level very quickly using this site. Can't recommend it highly enough. To get around the big sign up fee...you can sign up as a class which costs the same as an individual and get other people to go in with you to form the class.. I did it this way and ended up paying $4 for the whole year access. The method they use is a mix of phonics and sight words. The sight words help them learn to read a lot quicker. We found the books to be engaging and interesting. They have a good mix of fiction and non-fiction...especially as you get to the older ages. I store mine in a shallow tub in order and just grab the next one as we read through them. They are very sequential and each level has a book that is the benchmark...so if your kid can read that book you can move to the next level. So You don't have to read every book in each level...just enough of them till your kid can read the benchmark book. This way they don't get bored if they learn fast...the difficulty increases slightly each level. There also lots of fun type books they can read besides the levelled readers....comic books, series, poetry. I think my kids read up to Level M and then didn't need them anymore as they began reading independently after that. My daughter is dyslexic and they helped her tremendously in learning to read...she now reads way above grade level despite her dyslexia. It is really worth it if you can afford the cost.

NM

My DD turned out to be dyslexic and rule based doesnt work for her....plus it is really expensive.

Beaches and Stepmom - the one with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon I try not to watch these movies...ever.

Love this book...I've read it twice now...by choice :tongue_smilie:

Divisadero...by the author of The English Patient (which explains a lot) Only read it through because it was assigned for Uni ...but I hated that thing..sooo boring and weird and loooonnnggg The Richard Castle novels were terrible....but I was expecting them to be :D My kids say Coraline...but we never made it through that one and I just noticed it is on my reading list for Uni in Childrens Lit...so I will now have to read it all the way through :(

Except that this wasn't what was bad about the books. It wasn't so much the content but the grammer, the sentence structure and there were even misspellings. It reminded me of Disney...when they make a movie and then hurridly put out a thousand branded items for fans to buy up. It was like someone sat down in a back room for 5 minutes pumping out this rubbish so they could have something to make money with. They are very poorly written which drove me crazy. I wasn't expecting them to be Lord of the Rings quality ...but come on... my 3rd grader could write better constructed sentences then the writer of these books.

Yes and it was terrible...oh so bad. I think they let the junior scriptwriter write them lol. I had the hardest time reading " it" ( could only stomach one) because it just didn't marry up to the show. There is no way those books would make Castle a rich, best selling writer. I know it's silly but I felt disappointed that 'Castle' would write anything like that.. he's supposed to be intelligent. And "Nikki Heat" is so lame...there is no way she is based on Beckett lol. Fan fic at its worst lol.

It depends on your kids if you want to supplement. I use CLE LA and EIW along with MBTP. My kids needed very thorough teaching in LA. I found MBTP would say things like..write a paragraph on.... but my kids didn't know how to write a paragraph. We were using AAS but dropped that recently as it wasn't working for my kids. Not sure what I will use but CLE spelling seems to be ok. I don't think you need to supplement unless your kid is struggling with a specific skill. This year we are only using MBTP LA as we have done the science/social studies subjects to death. After that I will probably only do select units as being in Australia I don't need all the US focused ones. We like MBTP a lot. It is a lot of writing but I found other programs I used didn't have enough and my kids skills were not improving. They are improving a lot with MBTP ...and my kids seem to like all the books so far. Oh one thing I found you probably will need to supp is handwriting. MBTP does include it but its very basic and my kids needed way more practice. Plus I found their work pages dodgy...the lines where gigantic and sometimes uneven and my kids had the worst time trying to write their letters on them...we ended up going with HWOT. Handwriting practice is only included in 4-5 and 5-6. After that you need your own if you want more penmanship practice.

I put other because if I was hungry enough I would eat it (although probably not enjoy it) :drool5: My kids on the other hand ...even if they were starving ...would not touch it. Actually they might eat the bread roll... but not if it had touched the fish first because then it would have fish germs :001_rolleyes:

Which level are you looking at? I've used 4-5, 5-7, 6-8 and now 7-9. We like it a lot here. 4-5 is awesome for preschool.

I think your books look wonderful. I don't have a colour printer though so would probably have to buy the in book form. I'd love to try this with my kids...unfortunately they seem allergic to every curriculum these days.. Maybe I will try your broken up schedule and just do a little at a time throughout the year instead. See if I can sneak it in that way.

Yes die cuts is what I meant...I just made my own.

I used this and paid $50 for the online curriculum and that was all. I got all of the books from the library and as for the manipulatives... I used what we already had at home. If you can't get the exact thing it's easy enough to supplement. For the glow in the dark paper which is used for the firefly unit...I just printed off fireflies on regular paper. It didnt have the glow in the dark wow factor but all you are doing is hiding them around the house and having the kid find them...so it isn't essential they glow kwim. I didn't run into a single thing I couldn't easily get or substitute myself. It does contain templates but I just got those off the internet...for example one week you needed 10 cat templates... it doesnt take that long to set up each week if you are wanting to save money...maybe 20 minutes a week to get everything together. As to the curriculum...totally worth it. We loved it and its well put together. Perfect for that age group.

Do it. I enrolled my super gentle son who just sits there and lets people hit him because he says its bad to hit and doesnt want to hurt someone. He wasnt that interested at first but now he loves it and in his usual perfectionist way he is excellent at it. I knew nothing about it so I just enrolled him in the only class in town...still don't know what kind it is but but it has big sticks and knives lol.

Get yourself a 5yo ;) Poke, poke, tap, tap, tap Mum,, what can I do....Can I play something that uses electricity? Poke, tap, prise open eyelid Muuuum...I'm hungry ...Can I have a cookie? So I get up....to prevent him starting the morning playing the Wii while eating a bag of cookies.

A mum from our homeschool groupb recently passed away from leukemia. She was only diagnosed just after Christmas. She refused conventional treatment wanting to try natural therapy's first. She passed away so quickly after diagnoses... I wish she would have tried conventional medicine first...might have given her longer time at least. It just seems not very common to pass away so quickly... I know someone else with terminal stage 4 cancer...who has so far lived an extra year and a half past her expected time using conventional medicine... it's extreme cancer she has but she has gotten so much more time with her family. Anyway, after the first lady passed away her DH was telling people at our group the treatments they tried and even though she died and died quickly they were all agreeing that alternative was the best thing to do ...I said nothing...just felt bad for her two young boys. I hate that they even had to make that decision in the first place...but I really wish people would stop trying to influence people into forgoing scientific treatments rather then trying something they found on the net.

When I was in Canada I couldn't understand what they said LOL. I kept saying to my DH..." I know they are speaking English but I don't understand a word they are saying" It wasn't really the accent...it was they way they used language and such...I didn't get any of their culture references and when people talked to me I felt like I was listening to them in slow motion. LOL The words were the same but the meanings were all different. Now I'm all messed up... everyone in Australia asks if I am American ... I've picked up DH's accent and since he's Canadian he gets a little ticked off when people ask me that LOL. When I was younger people always used to ask me if I was a Kiwi... "No that's just my allergies" LOL

My DD broke her ankle with no swelling or real bruising. Typically what you described is a break in the outside bone of the ankle..like a piece gets chipped off or cracks. It's a very common injury caused by rolling the ankle. DD got it when she slipped on a plastic bag on the floor and her ankle hit the table leg. Generally they don't plaster it. They wrap it tight for support and tell you to use crutches till it doesn't hurt anymore. Make sure you keep off it.

The MMR virus is non transmissable...you can't 'shed' it and no one can catch it. The chicken pox virus is ' sheddable' but it is extremely rare and can only be contracted if the vaccinated person themselves got a rash from it first( also rare). Having lived in Alice Springs where their hospital has an entire ward just for kids with rotavirus I've seen how sick these kids get..it's worth the tiny risk of shedding for kids to be vaccinated. If you are really worried about it...stay away from newborns as they are those who typically get the rotorvirus vaccine...adults and older kids are generally immune naturally and don't catch it. Two of my kids had rotorvirus and after being vomited and pooped on every 20 minutes for a week..neither DH or I caught it. Babies are generally the ones who die from it not adults... so it's not really a concern for the adult public. People criticise me all the time because I vaccinated my kids and therefore ' poisoned' them. So yeah..I do get bugged about it by others. Funnily enough I never tell people off for not vaccinating their kids...but I do roll my eyes when they go on and on about their evils. I just hope none of their babies ever pick up something serious enough to kill them. I had measles as a kid...it sucked enough I wouldn't wish it on my kids and got them vaccinated. I don't believe the myths about it and had no reason not to. And for what it's worth...I wouldn't trust an article that uses outdated information for your platforms. Nobody gets vaccinated for smallpox anymore...so it's inclusion is just for the purposes of scaremongering.

I use it all the time on my Ipad...I've never had trouble with it loading