I think it's as important as those big bottles of vitamin D we're all buying these days!!!

I tell my husband that it is PMS Potion.

:iagree:

:iagree:

They should have already had those policies in place. It's just not that complicated. They should have known better. There is enough of a record of violence on school grounds that, while they might not expect a two hour long gang rape to occur on their grounds, they should have been watchful for anything out of place.

Well, perceptions and statistics aside, I cannot absolutely guarantee the safety of my children, but I am certainly going to err on the side of caution when it comes to what some may call overprotectiveness. I'll at least make it harder for the bad guys to get them, whether there are lots of bad guys or only a few. They'll have to come through me. And my kids will continue to start college with their handy dandy mace at their sides!

If it helps any, she is making straight A's now, with the college's much less willy-nilly grading system. We don't expect a 4.0 every year, she took a fairly easy course load for her first semester, with our blessing since she entered college with several credits already. But we believe a 4.0 her first semester, as of midterms, is a pretty good indicator of what sort of student she is shaping up to be.

My daughter barely had the GPA needed to compete for the upper honors program at her school. I mean barely. She also was just over the lower limit for the ACT score, mostly because of her math score. She got in to the program, beating out kids with much higher GPA's and ACT's. A few weeks ago the director of the program, who happens to be a homeschool dad, asked Sarah to stay after Honors seminar for a moment and talk to him. He asked her why her GPA was so low even though her dual credit classes at the community college were all A's except for B in math. He wanted to know why the grades I gave her were so low. She explained my willy-nilly grading procedures in such a way to make it sound more organized than it actually is. He told her that the majority of the faculty believe that mom-grades are meaningless and that what I had done by not grading her more generously proved this to not always be true. Then he said that he felt that my tough grading was the right way to do. Then he told her that she is an asset to the program but that has nothing to do with how I graded her or this thread but I am simply boasting because I am gosh-darned proud of that girl. Just ignore me.:D I don't think being a straight A student would have been to her advantage in this situation.

Right!:iagree: The other thing is if you do dual enrollment, you hope the college grades will match what you've been giving. Fortunately for my daughter they did.

But there can be situations where all that extra info is appreciated. I turned in a letter outlining my educational philosophy with an attached scope and sequence. The college already had a transcript, but my scope and sequence went into a great deal of detail. We believe that because the heads of the various depts understood what our homeschooling goals had been and because her test scores backed up what we were saying, she was accepted into a program that has not accepted very many homeschoolers in the past. It did not hurt that the director of the program is a homeschool dad who uses Peace Hill Press curriculum! He knew what I meant when I said I was inspired by WTM.

Seventh grade is when our umbrella school requires it.

I think they are absolutely responsible. The area should have been patrolled. The fact that the assault continued for such a long period of time makes it clear that nobody was patrolling the school grounds.

You are not the only one on these boards with this point of view, but you are the only one who has responded this way in this thread. (I point that out so you won't think I have a bone to pick with you personally!) I really do think the world has gotten darker and uglier than when I was a child and certainly when my mom was a child. I don't know why it is the way it is, but I think we (parents, schools, anyone who is charged with the care of responsibility for the safety of children) have to be more watchful than our parents had to be, and much more watchful than our grandparents had to be. I really believe it is a big bad violent world and that children are easy prey. I keep a careful watch over mine. I wish for a world where my children could ride bikes in the neighborhood or be safely dropped off at the library while I run a quick errand, but that is not the world in which I live. My children do not have a tenth of the freedoms I had when I was their age.

It depends on what you are eating in the place of meat. If I make a vegetarian meal of beans that are then smothered in cheese and sour cream (like when I make bean burritos for instance) it's probably a draw at best. But if I make a pot of bean and veggie soup then I believe the volume of veggies and the high-fiber low-fat source of protein trump even the leanest of meats. We eat both meat and vegetarian meals. Edited to Add: I do purchase my meats from small local farmers who raise their animals healthfully and do not send to a feedlot at any time. The pork I buy is fed, as the farmer says, nothing that he would be afraid to eat himself. The beef and chicken I buy is 100% free range until the day it meets it's ultimate destiny. So, other than restaurant meals and the occasional frozen casserole thingy from Kroger, our meat is of good quality. Before I had access to quality meat at an affordable price, we eat much less meat than we do now.

See, I think I ordered the wrong course. I ordered micro and after I'd already paid for it I heard from my umbrella school that the course had to include micro AND macro. So she just did both. But we'd have rather had one course that covered both!! Oh well, she survived it. It was probably good for her!

I am a member of the Mothers Of Puking Children Club, too! My daughter threw up a lot. Sometimes it was her migraines. Sometimes it was.....nothing. She just threw up a lot. We went to several doctors before we learned to accept that there was nothing really wrong, except the migraines. We use to refer to our van as the Pukemobile because often the passenger side of it was coated in, well, you know. I refused to clean the Pukemobile, by the way. Every time there was an incident I made my husband take it to the detailing shop. We always paid them more than they asked, considering what it was we were asking them to do! Happily, she outgrew it mostly. She still throws up when she has a serious migraine, but it is far less frequent than it used to be.

I am so sorry. I did not mean to sound defensive. I really meant it in more of "Oh, really? That's interesting...." conversational sort of way. I am very sorry.

Oh, gosh, I'm sorry. I really did not mean to come across as judgemental. I guess if we were conversing together in a room my tone of voice would have been more of a "oh, really, hmmmm, I look at the differently". More of a "that's interesting, I look at that differently". I meant no offense.

Really? We openly drink in front of our children and we talk to them about moderation, alcohol, drunkenness. I guess we kind of figure the more open dialogue and modeling of appropriate alcohol use will be more effective than treating it as something evil.

Actually, I have a big problem with crowds as well. So I get that. I have major personal space issues. I don't know if it is a fear, but I do get anxious when people are in my personal space.

Oh, you'd be surprised how much drama ends up in my life whether I want it or not. There was a big family falling out that centered around someone's divorce and people were divided and it became dramatic. It did not help that I did my fair share of emoting in my facebook status box. I'm not particularly proud of that, by the way. My husband and several friends encouraged me to emote elsewhere, in a more private venue. But yes, drama does find me and sometimes I even create it.

They might eventually. I was blocked by someone I know locally who has a lot of the same friends as I do. I had defriended her and so it never occurred to me that she might have blocked me until I was reading on someone else's FB wall and they answered a question that she had apparently asked in the thread. But I could not see her question. It was like they imagined she was there! But several people were responding to her back and forth so I knew there was a conversation with her going on. It was pretty wild. That's when I knew she'd blocked me.

1) Snakes. I literally cannot garden or tend my flowerbeds because I am terrified of snakes. 2) Tornadoes. This is a fairly recent one, but I live in a community that has been slammed a couple of times with F4 and F5 tornadoes and we have no tornado shelter. So when a tornado comes we hunker down in our hallway and we do not assume that it will skip us yet again. 3) I40 I am paralyzed with fear by the way the large trucks travel on this highway. I will go hours out of my way to avoid I40. 4) Flying. I just don't do that. At all.

Well, I could have saved all the typing and just held up this: :iagree:

Yikes. Nope, that's NOT what I like influencing my girlie. I liked the younger Hannah Montana just fine, but I knew from years of Disney channel stuff that she would want to move her career beyond teeny bopper eventually. It's not a nasty video by comparison to many that parents would instinctively avoid, but since her audience tends to be young girls it would be easier for parents to miss this and think it's okay since it's Miley.