Thank you so much! Many of these are already favorites of hers (Little House, All of a Kind Family -- we've worn out multiple sets of those ones, LOL, because they are *my* favorites too), but I was hoping this would serve as a list for others who might be searching too. I'd never heard of some of them (like The Chestry Oak), and I was reminded of a few that I had forgotten about (like Hitty). Especially since DD and I are surrounded by boys, we get a kick out of reading girly books, so hopefully I will get to read some of them along with her. I don't think I saw Alice in Wonderland on the list yet, so I'm adding that one. :)

This just happened to catch my eye, because I used Saxon 7/6 Homeschool with my DD this year. I managed to get the textbook and the full solutions manual (which includes the test answers) for $18 shipped, via amazon. (I was given the test packet for free.) I was pleasantly surprised at the very good shape both were in -- no writing in them, just a few slightly dinged corners, but plenty of life in them. I also just scored the next level of DD's Latin book via amazon for, no kidding, $4.25 (including shipping) -- very gently used (you can hardly tell it was ever opened), no writing at all, really great condition. So I am encouraging people to check out amazon's used books for good deals. :)

Oh, also, it looks like this at my house: -small washcloths (the "baby" kind) for cleaning little faces and hands after meals -microfiber shop towels for most cleaning -big washcloths (the kind that come in packs of like 18 for $5) for washing dishes, wiping counters/table; generally if it's washed dishes, I toss it in the basket and get a different one for the table, so I often go through several of those a day -cotton napkins (thinnish calico) for napkins I can tell which cloths go where by what they look like, so I fold them and put them away accordingly. I think in your position, I'd probably go with all white and leave them soaking in a bucket with some soap, maybe some bleach. I might also have a rack or line in the laundry area where I could hang them so they didn't get musty. And yeah, about a hundred sounds about right if you don't want to wash frequently.

If something is really wet, I hang it over the edge of a basket, but the basket gets taken to the laundry room every morning, and I do laundry pretty much every day (sometimes not both weekend days). I easily do a dozen loads of laundry a week, and I just toss kitchen cloths, napkins, washcloths, etc. in with regular laundry. I go through a lot of cloths in a day. The only things I do separately are delicate wash clothes, clothes that have stains and need extra treatment, diapers, and cloths that have nasty stuff (like bleach or the stuff I use to get rid of hard water stains; I don't use those often, but when I do, I wash those things separately). But normal everyday kitchen cloths or washcloths (and I have messy little munchkins too) just go in the regular laundry. I do think it saves money over paper towels; my microfiber cleaning cloths are several years old, and they're still in fantastic shape. Some of my kitchen cloths are a bit frayed but still serviceable. I'd say that if I totaled it all up, maybe it's one extra load of laundry a week, if I did all the cloths separately, but I'd use a ton of paper towels if I used them. (I only use them for very nasty stuff like cat messes or for draining bacon, so a roll lasts forever.) Paper towels would cost a lot more (but also, we have well water, so we don't pay directly for that).

That's perfect -- thank you so much! She's read some of those but not all, and that's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!

With DD being a sixth grader next year, I kind of want to have one last childhood year before she turns 12 and moves to the upper grades. So I want to take next year and have her read whatever classics she might not yet have read. What would you consider to be classics that every girl should have read by age 12? I'm thinking things like Little House books, Little Women, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, etc. Things not to be missed, if they haven't been read already.

That's what we did almost five years ago. We bought a commuting vehicle for DH, and the gas plus the car payment was still cheaper than gas for commuting with his truck. We paid the loan off in three years, though. We had to keep the truck for hauling firewood, but we don't use it very often. We also have my van, fully paid for. So, three vehicles, all fully paid for, but none of them have less than 150K miles on them (his commuting car is actually getting a new engine because that was cheaper than buying a replacement; fuel-efficient small cars are really expensive these days), and none of them are worth very much.

We had it done for DD as a toddler, the scratch testing; it wasn't terribly helpful, because we already knew that she reacted to milk (hives around her mouth). However, our DS1 was showing signs of allergies last year, and we got the scratch testing done for him, so that we could have a better idea of what the allergies were. They weren't food allergies; they were environmental ones, pollens and such, but we didn't know which ones. I think the testing can be helpful if you really don't have a clue about what's causing the reactions. In DS1's case, the testing did identify the culprits, but it was only somewhat helpful -- some of the allergens are just hard to avoid. We do give him Zyrtec in the spring, though, and we were able to do a few things, like put allergy covers on pillows and mattresses. It was helpful to find out, for sure, that he wasn't reacting to cat dander, because that would have been really difficult if we'd had to get rid of DD's cat. So yes, I vote for doing the testing if you don't know what the culprits are. DD did okay with the scratch testing, but it was only a few tests at her age. DS1 was miserable with the little pokes (and some slightly larger pokes), but he has a very, very low pain tolerance. But he was fine afterward.

Not Christina, but DD's cheapie e-reader is an E-Matic. I got it because I wanted to see if it would work for carrying my knitting PDFs, with e-books being a secondary function, so color was a necessity. It does work very nicely for PDFs and epub books. I have not tried mp3s or movies on it, but I think the sound is not spectacular. DD seems to enjoy it for reading. I liked that it does not have games or internet access; it needs a USB cable to connect it to the computer for loading. I considered the inexpensive Kindle (and may end up getting one of those for DD/the kids in general so we can use the lending library feature, which won't work on the Kindle iPad app, plus I like the e-ink) but ultimately wanted color.

Yeah, we've had that happen with WWE a few times too. I usually prompt her a bit with questions, but I love the idea of having her take notes too. I've just started having DD do that with other things; I had her read a book for history that wasn't terribly lengthy, and I asked her to take notes on it, in the form of "please write down X number of facts that you learned from the book." So while I'm sure she doesn't remember the whole book, a few facts that she learned did give her some hooks upon which to start her narration. I could see that working with some of the WWE passages too.

I am getting some of next year's curricula in PDF form, mainly to use via iPad, or DD's e-reader. I LOVE having PDFs. Our science program is entirely PDF (Mr. Q); we'll read the PDFs and use the iPad to fill out the follow-up sheets, and then I'll just print out a few samples for our portfolios. DD prefers reading (and writing) electronically, so when it's possible, I get her books that way. I am planning to get Art of Argument for DD for logic for next year, and I'll probably get the Kindle form. I'm planning to use some free math and grammar worksheets for her too, again in PDF form. The biggest issue I have is that if things need the Kindle format, they can only be read on the iPad (or desktop computer), not DD's e-reader (which is a cheapie one that does PDFs nicely but not Kindle books), and so we could end up with a backlog, where two people need the iPad at the same time, so we can't keep our work flow going. I need WWE3 for DS1, WWS1 for DD, and the WWS1 teacher book for me, so I opted to get WWE3 and the WWS1 teacher book in paper form, but I'll get WWS1 for DD in e-book form. But if we all had Kindles or iPads, I could see getting all of it in e-book form. (We don't use the student pages in the writing books anyway; we use our own paper.) We also travel for a full day at least once a week, to do errands, speech therapy for some of the kids, etc., and having the e-books is really helpful there. I often deliberately plan work for DD that is doable electronically for those days, so that it's not so much to haul around. E-reading/writing has been a HUGE benefit for me. :)

We don't have a lot of kids around our neighborhood, and those that are in it are at a sitter's house during the day, mostly, but yes, during the summer, I do make my kids come in for the middle part of the day. We do school year-round, so during the summer, I might let them go out for a bit in the morning, but not too long, or everyone's too tired to do schoolwork. Mostly, they head out in the late afternoon, come in for a bit when I call them for dinner, and go back out after dinner. If they had a reason to be out of calling range of the house, I'd probably suggest they take the walkie-talkies.

As others have said, I'm sure it's to discourage people from donating true trash. It sounds like this libary is planning to give away the books, permanently, but for a rotating collection, I could see wanting newer books so they would stand up to more and longer use. Also, they may want to counteract the idea of "the poor will take anything" and give them something really nice for a change. But yes, it would bother me as well. I almost never buy books brand-new.

My DD is 11, and her brothers are 8 and 4.5 (and 20 months). They play board games together a lot, and they build with Legos. They run around outside, and they play with Legos. They draw, and they build with Legos. They play house (DD is the mom, DS1 is her brother who has come to help with the kids for the day, and the little boys and DD's dolls are the kids), and they create things with Legos. DD teaches the little boys things like letters or numbers, and oh yeah, they build with Legos. They enact whatever pretend game of the week they've invented (usually something of DD's suggestion), have light saber duels, and guess what, play with Legos.

I voted "I cook with olive oil and haven't read negative effects about it," but that's not entirely true. I do cook with olive oil when I think it's the right oil for the job, but its smoke point is lower than some other oils, so it's not the right choice for everything. I mostly use olive oil for salad dressing or occasionally in a marinade or the like. When I do cook with it, it's almost always for green beans, because we like the way OO tastes with green beans when they're sauteed. Sometimes we use it for sauteeing spinach also. Usually, though, I use coconut oil or (real) butter for browning meat or cooking other vegetables; OO with snap peas, for instance, is more oily than we like, but we like the way they taste with butter.

Yeah, I have never understood why the smartphone is such a problem, but nobody's blinking at a couple of moms chatting while their kids are playing on the playground. Our co-op takes place in a facility that is a wonderful play space for the kids; they socialize and run around and play and have fun, and the moms have a nice place to chat. Nobody minds that; everyone is grateful for it. Why do we tout things like that as a good thing, but the flip side is that a mom doing something, anything, on her smartphone gets chastised? Why does it matter if she's paying bills with her phone instead of writing checks and envelopes with a paper and pen? (Seriously, if we were playing happily as kids, how many of our moms thought, "well, I really am just going to stay here and watch every moment" instead of "great, now I can write out the electric bill without distraction?") Why is it okay for a mom to chat face-to-face with her friend but not over the phone? Why is it okay for a mom to knit while her kids play (or in my mom's case, sew) but not okay to talk on the phone or play games on it? What about those precious moments a mom misses because she's, gasp, cooking dinner, or taking out the garbage, or switching the laundry, or even changing the baby's diaper? (Do other moms bring their older kids with them every time they have to do anything in another room, just because they'd hate to miss a precious moment? Seriously. Eyeroll.) Why is it okay for moms to work and leave their children with a sitter but not okay for a mom to talk on her phone for a few minutes at the playground? Why is it okay for a mom to have a sitter so she can go out on a date with her husband, but not okay for her to talk to that same husband on the phone while he's on his way home from work and the children are playing? How come nobody raises an eyebrow when a mom tucks her baby into his crib and misses the preciousness of him babbling to his toys, but she's not allowed to talk on the phone while he's digging in the sand? Really??? The reality is that while we should always remember that people, especially children, are more important than things and wants, we also are not going to see every single adorable thing they do, and no matter how much of it we capture, they're still going to grow up too fast.

I do have a Dyson and love it; I have the smaller, lighter weight one, DC18. I got that model specifically so that it would be easy to drag up and down stairs, and it is indeed easy for that. At the same time, I also love the wand, which makes it very easy to vacuum the stairs.

I'm sorry; I really can't give you an estimate right now. We sold our house six years ago, before the housing crash, so I don't know what the current prices are. There do seem to be a fair number of townhouse sorts of things, and that could be a very good option.

It's a nice enough area, especially with the water. Annapolis is a nice town. It's very busy, though, especially if you're west of Annapolis, toward DC, and it's very expensive. I think MD is not too bad for homeschooling (though we left before our DD was old enough to need to be registered). If you have the option of a bit of a drive, you might want to look south of Annapolis; we lived in Prince George's County, about 45 minutes from Annapolis, but it was quite a bit cheaper (it was 10 years ago that we bought there, though). Also, I'm not sure if across the Bay from Annapolis would be less expensive, but it might be a bit.

I have heard that they were rewritten, that the language was simplified, but I don't know about the racism. Our copies are the original copies, so I can't comment on the revisions directly, but I know I saw some reviews on amazon that mentioned them.

Gmail. DD has a gmail account, but I have it set so that my inbox receives a copy of everything she receives. So far, no spam at all. However, she's also not allowed to use her address to sign up for anything, ever; if she needs an address for something like that, I have her use one of my junk addresses.

I voted "tankini but no bikini," but in reality, she hasn't even worn a tankini. One-piece suits just stay put better, and don't have issues with midriffs showing.

Oh no, I am so sad to read this news! Kay, I didn't know you well, but I always enjoyed your posts. I hope you are resting gently and that you are not in pain. My thoughts and prayers are with you, your husband, and your son. (((HUGS)))

There's a used bookstore up here that carries those sorts of books; you might contact them and see if they're interested.

I'd have been really tempted to say something like, "No, I just love teA," but honestly, I do kind of really, really like babies and can't get enough of them. Of course, I like toddlers and preschoolers too, and so far, I like bigger kids (but I'm not terribly experienced with them yet, and I've had years of experience with babies). But yes, One of Those Kid Lovers!