My own public school experience (social misfit, poor education) led me to the decision that my son's experience would be very different, even if I had to walk on hot coals.

:iagree: Add me to the list of those who are very glad to know that they are not the only ones... I dreaded phone calls for me to babysit when I was a teen. :tongue_smilie:

:) Yep, me too. I actually have loaf of Challah bread that DS and I made as my profile picture right now. I am not a food photographer, but I don't let that stop me.

First of all, my heartfelt sympathies in the loss of your mom.:grouphug: My mother died 2 1/2 years ago, and it is a difficult grief. Second, taking pictures of the deceased by family is a fairly common practice in this neck of the woods. Generally it is done privately while no other mourners are present. This may sound macabre to some, but I have a picture of my brothers and maternal uncles carrying mom's casket to the burial site. It is a tender scene of my mom being carried by those she loved to her final earthly resting place. It is bittersweet and I'm thankful to have the picture. Again, my sympathies.:grouphug:

Hi there :seeya: We're roughly 10 miles from the Minnesota/Manitoba border up here in the northwest.

Hi Dawn :) I know the frustration of having a bright kid who simply cannot spell. Period. We had tried everything, including an evaluation with Dianne Craft, Sequential Spelling, etc. DS has phonological dysgraphia, which in a nutshell means that phonemes just do not "stick" in his brain. We do use AAS, and have seen some improvement. He will, however, have difficulties with spelling all his days. I wanted to tell you that what has enabled him to produce written work on par with his peers is when we finally made the lateral move to assistive technology. Co:Writer, which is word prediction software, has been an answer to prayer. I like to describe it as spellcheck on steroids. It really is amazing. For example, if you type in a word phonetically~~~say "opshnl", you will get a list of choices. "Optional" will be there, and the user can then click on the choice. You can also download dictionaries and vocabulary words for special projects. Say if you were writing a paper on knitting/telephones/Egypt/Civil War or whatever, you can go on a site and download from there. It's late, I'm tired, and I don't know if I'm making any sense :tongue_smilie:, but I thought I'd just mention what has worked well for us. :001_smile: