It looks like you can get McDonald's W-2s online.

We're using VL. I do like it. It's takes a different approach than Henle - more whole-to-parts, reading-centric than the parts-to-whole, grammar-translation of MP and Henle. And the translations focus on the Vulgate, instead of Caesar. And the length of the readings is greater than Forms or Henle - averaging a page or more. Here's a review I did of VL on another thread: We started Latin this year with Visual Latin. I had been planning to go with MP's First Form series as our spine, and incorporating Lingua Latina as reading practice on the side - with the idea of targeting dd's weak points with our actual curriculum, with me adding in stuff that hit her strong points on the side. (Some of her language strengths are pattern-matching and intuiting meaning from context (and her memory is excellent), while weak points are anything requiring auditory processing skills, as well as breaking down the big picture meaning into parts or explaining explicitly how the parts work together to build the big picture meaning. (Half of elementary math for her was learning to show her work via writing equations.) She loves stories and reading, and story-centric LA approaches generally made the hard nitty-gritty details of LA both doable and palatable; most of our LA work has been remediating weaknesses.) But I waffled a ton, and eventually decided to go with Visual Latin, which is a much more reading-heavy, Latin-is-details-but-still-don't-sweat-them-more-than-you-need-to approach. I figured that, instead of me supplementing with material targeting her strengths while the curriculum hits her weaknesses, maybe let's try the other way - the curriculum hits her strengths, and I'll supplement to shore up her weaknesses. (I still plan to include LL, and VL has plans for how to integrate LL with VL.) We're on week 13, and it's going pretty well so far. I've incorporated an MP-style Latin recitation time at the beginning of each lesson - chant the endings we've learned, and the model words that go with (plus we do some Latin prayers and songs - dd loves the songs). VL has three videos, with an accompanying worksheet for each video. The first video introduces a Latin grammar point, the second video illustrates and practices it in sentences, and the third video is the instructor reading the translation passage, with time for the student to repeat the sentences after him. The translations are based on the Latin Vulgate, which works well for us because they are familiar and pertinent to our goals. DD loves translating - she's great with meaning - but I do force her to slow down and consciously work through the implications of the endings she knows. After we've read the passage through and she assures me she understands it, but before I turn her loose on translating it, I read through the passage a sentence at a time, and ask her to parse every word she's got the knowledge to parse. With endings that can be multiple things, I have her tell me all the options, and then tell me which one it is, given how the word is used in the sentence. If she doesn't know, I help her think through what the word's doing grammatically in the sentence (she already knows intuitively, since she's solid on the meaning before we tackle parsing), and compare that to the purposes of the various options. She's not a fan of this - doesn't see why it's necessary because she already knows what it means - but my number one concern with her is that she doesn't pay attention to the details till she has to, and by the time she has to, she'll be in over her head. So I'm making her, because I'm a mean mommy ;). One thing about VL, versus MP, is that its focus is on meaning (which is good and why I picked it), but that also means it's not terribly hand-holdy when it comes to the nitty-gritty of memorizing vocab and endings. It tells you when to memorize endings, and does provide online vocab cards for quizlet (and has a place to do quizlet in the schedule), but idk, with a kid who is meaning-centric and detail-weak, I feel like I need to be a lot more intentional about it. So I've incorporated a lot of MP's drill ideas (like recitation) and practice ideas (like fully parsing before translating - but *after* reading for understanding (I don't like how meaning can get lost within the trees in g-t methods)). On the other hand, if you aren't aiming for rigorous Latin, VL is a lot more amenable to fussing less about memorizing and relying more on the vocab lists and Latin charts (both of which are provided). Should it ever become overwhelming, VL is well suited to backing up and re-doing lessons. (The worksheets are a pdf download.) Or even just backing up and re-reading the translation passages over and over again. (I actually include re-reading old passages as part of dd's independent Latin practice.) VL is on the reading method side of things, and doesn't ask for more memorization or explicit grammar work than is strictly needed - he's fine with use of charts and vocab lists for reference while translating, and he doesn't require parsing of the translation passages. The worksheet grammar practice is meant to be just enough so that you get the idea and see it in context - it's pretty gentle, but so far has been sufficient for dd. Gets you used to the idea of paying attention to endings, that endings convey meaning, and the basics of how they are used in sentences. The real meat is in the reading/translation passage. DD likes that, because context helps her - the more context the better. She knows what the sentences mean, and that provides a base for learning explicitly how the endings and such purposely convey that meaning. (Plus there's lots of repetition of vocab in the passages, which helps with memory.) In short, I think that VL hits my dd's meaning-based strengths well - she enjoys and is capable of the work the program demands. I am choosing to supplement with more drill and parsing work (weak points of hers) because I think it's important, and I'm concerned she'd hit a wall otherwise. VL provides a lot of implicit drill and parsing - long translation passages that require those skills - but I'm fairly sure that dd would subvert the point, working off pattern-matching and intuition instead of learning to explicitly think about the grammar, and at some point that would catch up with her. Although VL's solution for that - back up and redo lessons - is a good one, and might work just as well as my pre-emptive teaching and drill. (I have read that many people find that VL gets more difficult around Lesson 10, and that's when the translations go from "take your best guess from context at forms you haven't learned" to "you've learned all the forms used, so translate them accurately", and it may be that students were taking their best guess at *all* the forms, and weren't applying the grammar that they *had* learned as they translated. That's one of the reasons I've been making dd parse everything she knows (where I determine whether she ought to know it before even asking, because she flips at the idea of explicitly reasoning through an educated guess, even though she does it intuitively all the time) - to make *sure* she is applying the grammar she's learned, as well as developing the habit of paying attention to the endings. We're on lesson 13 without having hit a wall, so so far so good.)

It actually looks like the opposite to me - that the advertisers uploaded a contact list with your email or phone number, and Facebook helpfully looked up the emails/phone#s and connected them to the FB account associated with said email/phone. Here's FB's explanation: "These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they or their partner uploaded that includes info about you. This info was collected by the advertiser or their partner. Typically this information is your email address or phone number. " There are a zillion of them, and all I apparently can do is hide them, so I don't see ads from them. I can't do what I want to do, which is get my info erased from their contact list and/or completely de-connect them from my FB account. And the settings are fairly buttoned down - but it does allow anyone to search by email or phone#, and that's what's getting me here, I think. ETA: It's unclear to me what info those advertisers can get from my account, since they aren't friends (and my content is limited to friends), all my location data is turned off, and all my "allow advertisers to do things and access things" settings are turned off. ETA2: And one wonders how much FB facilitated those advertisers getting a hold of my email/phone#, in order to add it to their contact list. ETA3: Ugh, finally hit the end: 623.

Mine *is* bad - dark and thick and long. It was embarrassing in high school - I wore long sleeves in TX - and it was such a relief when I shaved it off senior year, in prep for laser treatments. Anyway, I've done a ton of stuff, but my rec for easy, unobtrusive, and unlikely to make things worse is to use a hair trimmer. I use mine on the quarter inch setting. It's quick, but it makes a huge difference, trimming down to 1/4 in - makes my arm hair very unobtrusive. But unlike with shaving (going from nothing to stubble in days), it's a gradual regrowth with slow, subtle changes from week to week. I retrim whenever it bugs me (every couple of months, usually). I actually just trim my leg hair now, instead of shave it - gets it unobtrusive enough and eliminates the daily maintenance. And when dd12 wanted to do something about her light-but-getting-noticeable leg hair, I had her trim it the first few times; made a big difference.

My concern would be that, in a literate society, the "default" path to becoming an educated person revolves around reading. So that the alternate paths to knowledge and wisdom that exist in an illiterate society either don't exist in literate societies at all, or are much less common. So they'd require deliberate effort to search out and take advantage of. So that for a non-reader in a literate society, the most likely alternative to knowledge-via-reading isn't knowledge-via-non-reading but rather is lack-of-knowledge-via-non-reading. It's not that non-reading paths to knowledge and wisdom don't exist, but that in a literate culture those paths aren't commonly found or commonly known. With the heavy dominance of reading-is-the-path-to-knowledge in literate societies, it's too easy for non-readers to throw the baby out with the bathwater: to reject the search for knowledge right along with rejecting reading. I guess then my aim with non-reader kids, in addition to making sure they *can* read well, would be to deliberately guide and point and teach them about non-reading-paths-to-knowledge-and-wisdom. To try to facilitate those non-reading paths as assiduously as I tried to facilitate reading and the reading path. ~*~ One factor with my middle was anxiety about reading unfamiliar new things. She really resisted reading anything outside her comfort zone - which was really narrow - and it persisted even after she was reading comfortably. Something about tackling an unfamiliar new author, an unfamiliar new genre - it scared her. We went round and round about it. She actually did better when I assigned particular books than when I gave her free choice. And she also did better when I read a book aloud to her. She's an avid listener of audiobooks, but she didn't like unfamiliar audiobooks any more than she liked unfamiliar books. It was the new content that got to her, not reading itself. (I've noticed myself that I am a lot more resistant to trying new books when my anxiety is high, even though I've been reading all the things since I was little.)

I've always thought it was kind of ridiculous, and all the irl painted brick I've seen I've hated - looked so flat and monochromatic in a bad way. I never understood why people did it - imo the result was always worse. Plus there was no going back. But I admit the pictures in your link were pretty. But repainting every 3-5 years? No way - no look is so cute that I'd commit to that insanity for the rest of the house's life. One of the reasons I like brick facades is because of their low maintenance. But even siding and such doesn't need repainting every 3-5 years. I really can't fathom why *new builds* are going with painted brick instead of either picking a brick color they like or going with siding or something meant to be painted. (Especially those pricey-looking custom builds. All the new build neighborhoods I've seen in the past 10 years were too cheap to do all brick - it was all siding, or brick fronts and siding for the sides and backs.)

Just some. I'm Lutheran, and the only reason I've heard of it is because an Anglican blogger I read does it. It's Here's her posts tagged Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Here's the website for it: https://www.cgsusa.org/about/default.aspx . It does look like anyone can buy anything, although it wasn't intuitively obvious to me at first glance what, exactly, one would buy to diy it at home - there's a *lot* of options. The "introductory books" category was manageable, though, and has stuff about the overall philosophy and approach. ~*~ FWIW, all the churches I've been at are just too small to have a dedicated SN anything. But we did have four children with autism at my previous congregation, and the pastors worked with the parents to figure out custom options for each child, including modifying confirmation. (I know that one child couldn't stand the noise of the blended service and did much better in the traditional service, which used an organ.) And no one ever said boo to me staying in the class with my kids (which I did for several years, because of separation anxiety). At this church, my kids *are* the SS class, and the teacher is really great about things like dd's being gf and such, and helping prepare ds for upcoming changes, and such. In fact, in general at both churches people went out of their way to accommodate dd being gf, and my kids' lasting-longer-than-average separation anxiety, even though where we are now is stereotypically the sort of place that you'd not expect it. I guess the potential plus of a small place is that they have to ability to work with parents to design custom solutions for individual kids in a way that's not as possible for larger places, except maybe mega-large places with a dedicated SN team. They don't need to have already planned for all the possible SN things - all they need is the willingness to be flexible - and they can learn from parents and tailor the particular things needed. I know some small places aren't flexible, but some big places aren't either. I don't think size necessarily correlates with flexibility - small places can be as willing to help with SN as large places. And I think small churches have some unique flexibility advantages *because* of being small.

3rd-4th: WWE2 - Did wonders in getting my prolific reader but reluctant writer to go from not writing to writing good, complete, connected sentences.

Our previous house (rental) had pink fixtures - toilet, tub, sink - and I actually really liked it. The surrounding tile was creamy white with pink and gold accents and I thought it looked nice. I've seen some bathrooms that kind of went nuts with pink everything that I didn't like, but this one was well done. Of all the original mid-60s things in that house, the bathroom was one of my favorites. (And, actually, I found the heavy curtains really practical in winter. And the harvest gold carpet grew on me ;). It wasn't blah while also not being garish and it went with more than you'd think.)

This is what my parents did, when I was a junior in hs. It was my credit card, but my parents were joint owners. My limit was lower, though, $500. It was convenient, especially because my parents could pay it off from their own account - in high school I only used it for things they would pay for. It became a bit of a problem when I was out on my own and my being late with a payment dinged my parents' credit. My parents took themselves off my younger sister's accounts (started when she was a child, like mine) when she was on her own, but by the time we realized the problem I was out of state and thus not able to go in in person to take care of it (with my permission, my parents tried to take themselves off my account without me, but they weren't allowed to - it took all the joint owners being present to do it). It wasn't a huge deal, since I did have a local account and another cc by that point, but it's something to think about.

Interestingly, a blogger I read had this post today: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/2019/03/classical-yes-trivium-maybe-eventually/

I'm kind of both/and. I don't think the ages/stages thing is really a feature of classical education as such - I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are first and foremost *subjects*, albeit subjects that also need to be taught in a classical manner - but I have come to see the ages/stages concept as a helpful rule of thumb. First get a good intuitive understanding of the basic facts of the subject along with their formal definitions (bearing in mind that the "grammar of a subject" isn't rote memorization of facts divorced from their context, but is the facts joined to their animating idea); fundamentally, first learn what a thing is - learn to know it intuitively and to be able to call it by name. Then, learn to explain what things are and why they are like that. Learn to put that intuitive understanding into words, learn to *use* those names and definitions to explain what things are to others. Learn to use what you know to *prove* your intuitions, instead of just assert them. And then, learn to explain things *well*, to explain them *convincingly*, to apply your knowledge of "how to explain what you know" to your knowledge of "how people are", "how life is". I do think that it's important to not divorce your understanding of the ages/stages from the nature and purpose of the subjects themselves. I actually came to appreciate how the ages/stages model accurately described what I saw in my kids and their progression once I had a better understanding of the role of grammar and logic. In classical education, grammar and logic are meant to help you better study and understand *reality*. Grammar study is about learning to use words and phrases and sentences to accurately describe *reality*; all those fine grammar distinctions exist because people noticed fine distinctions in reality and wanted to be able accurately describe them. Learning grammar helps you *see* the world with greater precision. And logic is about taking one's ability to describe reality with fine accuracy and delving deeper into the nature of reality, learning how to explain *why* things are, learning how to deduce new true things from the true things you already know. So there's philosophy inherently baked into grammar and logic study. How you describe reality, and how you think words connect to reality, and how you think logic connects to reality - that all affects how you teach grammar and logic. And how you connect your grammar and logic study to everything else you are doing. I think a lot of people teach grammar and logic to kids the way you'd teach grammar and logic to computers: rules divorced from context. Rules that don't depend on what a statement means, rules that you can use and apply in a rote manner to generate correct output from correct input, without having to consider what either the input or output means. It's like a grammar game or a logic game: internally consistent, but with no connection to anything outside itself. Computers need that because they don't understand what things are, what they mean. They rely on their programmers to give them meaningful input, and they apply their rules by rote to transform the input into (hopefully) meaningful output, without ever understanding *what* any of it means or *why* any of it matters. But classical education is supposed to teach *human* grammar, *human* logic. It relies on the quintessential human ability of knowing *what* a thing is. A four year old child can look at a chair and say "chair", but that is an intensely hard task for a computer. Grammar study - both as a subject and as a stage - is rooted in that ability to *know* what a thing is. Grammar study teaches us how to accurately describe our intuitive sense of what a thing *is*; logic study teaches us how to accurately prove the truth of what we know; rhetoric study teaches us how to effectively communicate what we know. Classical education is rooted in the belief that humans can know true things about the world. ETA: I think that age/stages isn't classical itself, although it can be helpful in classically educating.

When I lived in the south, I lived in my sandals. I only wore closed-toe shoes for hiking. (I've had the same pair of hiking boots since college.) When I lived up north, I got the most use out of my sandals and my nice snow boots. Except for church, I always wore one or the other. (I actually accidentally wore my nice snow boots to church once and it was fine - they were black and sleek and unobtrusive.) Now that I'm back in the south, I still use just my sandals and my nice snow boots. (I had no idea that my snow boots would be so useful here.) So that's my answer: a good pair of wear-all-day sandals and a good pair of wear-all-day boots (that can handle snow, if you are in a snowy climate), in a neutral color that goes with everything (mine are both black). My sandals are Tevas, which are comfortable and wear well. (My boots are a serendipitous yard sale find - I have no idea what they are.) ETA: I suppose if you really just want one shoe, boots are more versatile in a 4-season climate. But I can't live without my sandals - they were my year-round shoe in the south when I was younger - and I wore them at least half the year up north. (I know it's a fashion faux-pas, but I'd wear them with dark socks in the fall and spring - pretty much any time it was above freezing and dry.) I only use my boots when it's too cold to wear sandals.

I'm pretty sure my oldest's "awesome reading but poor spelling" was stealth dyslexia. Despite me teaching her with pure phonics, she ended up reading primarily by sight. Turned out that was because she didn't have the underlying phonemic processing skills to learn to read by phonics. (In 2nd grade, after she was reading fluently, I gave her the Barton pre-screening, and she failed both the syllable section and the distinguishing phonemes section. That was when I realized that her big leap that allowed her to finally learn to read wasn't her brain finally making the phonics connection, like I'd thought, but was her brain making the connections that allowed her to learn to read from phonics teaching *without* having the phonics connection. <sigh>) But by all appearances she was reading well - she was a sight reading "success story", in that she really could successfully decipher words she hadn't learned. She used her excellent pattern matching skills and her good visual memory to make up for her horrible phonemic processing, inattention to detail, and general difficulty with putting things into linear order. But she could only successfully *pronounce* new words that were in her speaking vocabulary; words she'd only encountered in print she would mangle horribly. But she was in 2nd grade with a huge vocabulary - no one expects a 2nd grader to successfully tackle unfamiliar multi-syllable words. But the fact that she was unable to perceive the middle of words either aurally or visually led to her truly atrocious spelling ("inrteuering" for "interrupting") - she was spelling (and reading) off the first and last syllable plus her hazy memory of the word's outline. I did a *lot* of things to work on her spelling (and, covertly, her reading). The only words she could spell were the only words in which she could perceive all the individual letters and sounds: CVC words. Before I realized the extent of the problem, I tried and abandoned several things in 3rd grade. But the following is what worked, starting the summer between 3rd and 4th. To help her learn to pay attention to the visual details of words, I did several weeks of Spelling You See (enough for it to click) and then had her use the SYS color-coded marking system on all her copywork (in WWE2) for a year. At the same time, to help her phonemic processing, and to force her to learn to blend, I did covert blending practice disguised as cursive practice. Learning cursive was hard for her. I've read that you have to read/spell by syllables in order to write in cursive, and well, she could do neither, so I tried to teach her how to do both through custom blending/cursive practice. After she'd learned all the cursive letters and practiced the common phonograms in cursive (in the latter half of 3rd), I had her work through the first 2,000 words in our phonics primer, Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach (starting in 4th). I wrote up all the words using the super-spiffy sound pictures from Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) and printed them out. (She'd already learned the sound pictures from playing with the Dekodiphukan apps.) Then, she'd have to sound out the word from the sound pictures (forcing her to practice blending because she didn't know the sound picture words by sight), write the word in cursive (I coded the pictures to indicate spelling), and then read the cursive word back. She did 20 words a day, repeating when things got tough (notably when starting blends, which were very hard for her to hear), and took about a year to finish through most all one-syllable words. (When she had problems blending the sound pictures together, I'd have her do the Phonics Pathways train blending activity, using homemade magnetic sound picture tiles; I was teaching my middle to read at this point, and used a *lot* of the same materials and techniques with both of them, since they both needed to learn to blend.) I started her on cursive copywork at that point. At the same time (4th) I did REWARDS with her, which was helpful overall, but suffered a bit from being both too hard in some areas and too easy in others. Her ability to tackle unfamiliar multi-syllable words went up, but she was still shaky on blending syllables together - I think learning to visually break up words bolstered her still-weak ability to break up words by sound. My goal between the intense one syllable word blending practice, and learning to blend syllables together into words, was that between the two she'd learn to read & spell any given syllable and learn to read (in REWARDS) & spell (in Spelling through Morphographs, discussed below) any given long word by syllables, and then would have the tools to tackle most any word. One thing with her was that she needed a ton of practice before she could generalize her phonics skills to words she hadn't seen before, so we worked through a *ton* of one syllable words, hitting all the syllable patterns. At this point her spelling improved to "garden variety bad speller", which was an immense improvement. After finished REWARDS, I started Spelling Through Morphographs during 5th (which takes a similar focus-on-syllables approach as REWARDS, only with a spelling focus instead of reading focus), and we've been slowly working through it. Something clicked one-third of the way through (beginning of 6th), and she's a much better speller now - there are a few patterns that still trip her up, but she can spell most things, certainly more than enough for spell-check, and she can usually catch her mistake when she re-reads what she wrote. (I think StM's approach has helped with her linear order problem.) I've also started typing this year (7th), using Touch, Type, Read, and Spell, which takes an OG approach (so yet another covert pass through phonics and spelling). She struggled hard through the first module - something about typing was hard for her - but then things clicked and she's done fine since.

I agree with you that, many times, when people feel overwhelmed by too much to do and not enough resources to do it, there's room to cut helpful-but-not-needful and needful-but-not-mission-critical stuff. I'm not sure it's always a perfectionist issue - where the problem is being unwilling to lower standards anywhere. Sometimes I think it's more of a broader prioritization issue: willing to cut the fat, but they've cut all the fat they can see. So another pair of eyes can help, along with the usual suggestions on how to look at things differently. But recently I've had conversations with women where it becomes clear they really *have* already cut all the fat. They've long since gotten the low-hanging fruit, they've done all the standard things, they've done in-depth research on the non-standard things - all the obvious things and most of the non-obvious things have been tried long ago. They have a clear-eyed view and they've done the analysis, and there is just too much that needs to be done and not enough resources. Their situation just sucks, really. There's no good solutions and the women themselves have a much better idea of the costs and trade-offs of the various not-good solutions than anyone coming in cold. I don't really blame them for getting a bit shirty when they hear the umpteenth suggestion to just "let the non-essentials slide" - they did that two years ago. They aren't wrong that everything left is mission-critical. I have a relentless drive to find a solution, to refuse to admit defeat, to refuse to admit that life could suck like that. But I think that sometimes life *does* just suck like that. And that I can cause more harm than good by refusing to admit that it could - that it's better to acknowledge that an overwhelming reality really *is* inherently overwhelming than to keep stubbornly insisting that it *is* solvable if only you keep trying. Insisting that an overwhelming-but-solvable problem is indeed solvable is offering genuine hope - especially when you can help solve it - but insisting that an unsolvable problem is actually solvable is offering false hope, telling an immensely cruel lie. It's why I pray so much more now - I have a much clearer sense of the huge number of unsolvable problems - and it has highlighted for me how even the existence of solvable problems is a supernatural gift from God.

I completely agree with your overall point here. WRT the bolded: I'm coming more and more to think that the important things shouldn't be taken as given. That the important givens only *stay* important and given by being constantly and explicitly stated, over and over again. There's a saying in my corner of confessional Lutheranism: justification assumed is justification denied. If you aren't constantly and deliberately *affirming* the important things, then you are de facto contributing to their decline. Channelling Alastor Moody, it takes CONSTANT VIGILANCE to keep the important things important.

I agree that it's easier to let things go when you don't care about them. But that's not the same as those things intrinsically not deserving to be cared about. Often I think women - or whoever the party is who thinks a given thing deserves to be done - care more because they understand more. AKA they are *right* to care, because those things *actually do matter*, because those things *actually make a positive difference*, because not doing those things really does lower the quality of life. It's kind of a corollary to the mental load being necessary but non-obvious to the unskilled: how a given task relates to the bigger goals and ends of life is not obvious to all. And it's easy to not care about a task when you don't understand how it contributes to the big picture. But just because you don't understand doesn't mean there's nothing to understand. AKA your failure to understand why something matters could very well be *your* failure of imagination, instead of being a sign of the task's intrinsic unimportance. Just because one party finds it easier to slough off a bunch of expectations doesn't necessarily mean that party is *right* to be doing so. "Easier" doesn't mean "better". It's kind of like the idea that if you have no idea why a law was passed - you have no idea what the point was - then you actually have no business trying to repeal that law. The fact that you can't imagine why anyone could ever have thought it was a good idea isn't a good argument for getting rid of the law, but rather is a sign you need to *better understand the reason for the law* before you start deciding what to do about it. (Else you are on track for discovering the reason for the law the hard way.) Before letting things go, it's worthwhile to consider the costs as well as the benefits. If you can't think of a single good reason why someone would do something, it's a strong indication you have very little understanding of it. (Likewise if you can't think of a single good reason why someone would *not* do something.) On average, women tend to have a greater focus on building and maintaining relationships than men. So it's not surprising that women, on average, would have greater expectations around things that build and maintain relationships (such as remembering birthdays) than men - because they understand more of the value of relationships and the work that goes into building and maintaining relationships. (My understanding is that binding families and communities together was traditionally considered one of the central contributions of women to the common good.) IDK, I don't want to discount the pernicious effect of media on men and women's expectations, or how the binding impetus of doing what others in your community are doing can just as easily be a force for evil instead a force for good. One of the many reasons to re-examine why we do what we do is *because* what we are doing isn't working. But just because a thing isn't worth the effort in our current situation doesn't mean the thing isn't worth the effort, period, or that cutting out the thing doesn't involve a genuine loss, even as we anticipate a net gain. But the whole "if others don't value your expectations then your expectations aren't valuable" assumption - especially in the context of men not valuing the traditional concerns of women - it does seem far too related to dismissing the inherent value of the traditional concerns of women. That in the conflict over how men often don't personally understand the intricacies of women's concerns (and so are prone to dismiss those concerns as unwarranted or unnecessary), there's this implicit assumption that men are *right* in their judgment that traditional women's concerns are indeed unnecessary. Which I reject entirely. Both on the general grounds that it's wrongheaded to judge things you don't understand and on the specific grounds that traditional women's concerns *are* inherently valuable. ~*~ FWIW, I'm coming at this as someone who, in my teens and 20s, *didn't* understand people or relationships and who didn't value traditional women's concerns or traditional female ways of relating. I cheerfully sloughed off every expectation that didn't make sense to me. But in my 30s, I've come to better understand people and relationships, enough so that all those expectations and habits that I dismissed as so much unnecessary effort - I now understand something of their value. After years of being the sort of non-conforming woman who didn't have a lot of respect for traditional female ways of being and acting, I'm now starting to understand the sense and purpose and wisdom of so many of the things I used to unthinkingly reject. ~*~ IDK, it sort of feels like, in this thread, that there's this all-or-nothing assumption about who gets to decide if a given expectation is valuable. Or, more accurately, that a lot of people are assuming that *the opposing side* has an all-or-nothing assumption. It's like both sides are trying to argue that *both* men and women's concerns are of equal value, but they each assume that the other side is coming from a place of valuing one over the other. So when side A argues that a given concern of sex B is sometimes invalid, side B assumes that side A is *comprehensively and universally* dismissing the concerns of sex B in favor of sex A. And likewise, when side B argues that a given concern of sex A is sometimes invalid, side A assumes that side B is *comprehensively and universally* dismissing the concerns of sex A in favor of sex B. When, actually, I think both sides are coming from a position of "both men and women's concerns are of equal value". The difference, I think, is that different sides see different sexes as the underdog. Side A is primed to think sex A needs defending, while side B is primed to think that sex B needs defending. And so side A sees B's defense of sex B as defending the stronger side against the weaker side, while side B sees A's defense of sex A as likewise defending the stronger side against the weaker side. Both sides respond by championing their perceived underdog all the more.

Well, I grew up with an open concept house with a cathedral ceiling, and I've measured every house I've looked at since by that standard. I feel closed in with standard 8' ceilings in the living areas. And I like the living areas all open to each other. Our current house is just about perfect: it's semi-open, with the living areas arranged in a U-shape, and the ceiling peaks in the middle at about 11' (versus my parents', which peaked at 14'). (There's 9-10' ceilings in the master bedroom, which I love, too.) There's a wall between the living room and kitchen, so you can't see the kitchen from the front door or anywhere in the living room, really. I have a little standing desk in the dining room that allows me to see almost all the living areas, plus down the hallway. Most parts of the dining room can see most of the kitchen and living room. The main downside is the comparative lack of bookshelf walls, but we managed to fit our 20 shelves in anyway ;).

Dh's car was flooded once, and the insurance company totaled it. We "bought it back", they cut us a check (probably for whatever the settlement value was minus the salvage value), and then it was on a salvage title, which meant there was no resale value. Also it meant that insurance was liability only. But we used the money to fix the car and drove it for 3-4 more years, until my parents gave us their old car, and then we donated it.

This is part of what reduced my sympathy for the author: there was no acknowledgement that her husband does invisible work, too. As far as the article was concerned, his invisible work was as unnoticed and unappreciated by her as she felt hers was by him. Her detailing all the ways he doesn't think of anything outside himself while she was exclusively focusing on her own problems with nary a hint of acknowledgement wrt the good things he does do: it undercut her point with me. She wasn't acting as she wanted her spouse to act. ~*~ WRT the larger question of, given that so much of what people do is invisible to others, especially others unskilled in that area, how should we live in light of that. Especially since failures are so much more noticeable than successes in those areas. On a small note, if I'm pointing out a failure, I try to bear in mind that there might be a ton of successes I missed. I mean, you only notice the tote that *wasn't* put away, not all the totes that *were* put away. So I try not to go down the "you *never* pick up the tote"/"you *always* leave out the tote" route. One, because it's probably not even true - as I tell my middle, always/never are very strong words and not usually warranted - really think about if they're deserved before using them. And two, because it makes the whole interaction start off negatively and guarantees it will be unpleasant for all concerned. I try to use CM habit-training language - it's both low-key and free of negative emotions plus it hopefully is reinforcing the habit of paying attention to how things should be instead of the habit of only do things when mom points it out. I don't really think of it as "me having to use a special tone of voice" so much as me forcing myself to be polite and keep my anger under control - it's about me regulating my emotions because it's a good work, not because "people won't listen" otherwise. (Usually when I start yelling that no one pays any attention to what I say till I yell, it says at least as much about my refusal to get off my butt and do something effective as it says about those not listening.) Also, I *do* try to pay attention and say thank you when I notice a good job. And I appreciate when people do that with me. Not as a "quid pro quo" accounting sort of thing, but to be kind. To show I noticed and appreciated what they did. (And it ups the positive work-related interactions, to hopefully help offset the occasional negative ones, so that our work-related conversations are a net positive, not a net negative.) And just in general, I try to be aware that, just as so much of what I do is invisible, likewise there's a ton of stuff dh does that I don't see. So I try to assume its presence, just as I hope he assumes the presence of the stuff I do that he doesn't see. As a practical point, to avoid reminders turning into nagging, I do try to make sure that we are all in theoretical agreement about what needs to be done. That way, if I notice something's undone and remind the responsible party, I'm just helping them do the job they already agreed to, not nagging them into doing a job they otherwise wouldn't agree to do. Since I notice more and remember better, it's not a huge deal for me to take on extra mental load there, so long as the person I'm reminding is indeed on board with doing the thing - they just need help remembering, not "help" being annoyed into getting off their butt. (If they start treating my reminders as nagging, I point it out and tell them to cut it out - they agreed this was a thing worth doing, so they need to act like it. We're partners in getting it done, not one person annoying the other person into doing it.)

I agree that the mental load is real. I've really appreciated the cartoon I saw that first made the concept explicit for me. And since mental load is invisible, it *does* go largely unnoticed and thus unappreciated by those who don't know what goes into it. (I think that's true of a lot of jobs, actually. In Harry Potter, our family has discussed Ludo Bagman and the Quidditch World Cup - I mean, *there's* a man who has no idea the mental load that goes into planning it and doesn't seem to think any of it's even necessary - he definitely wasn't appreciating all the hard-but-invisible-to-him work that his staff was having to do. We actually discussed if being his assistant would be perfect or hellish for Percy Weasley. On the one hand, since Bagman handwaves all the details, you'd have free rein to organize however you'd like, and you'd have the satisfaction of knowing you are *very* needed. But on the other, you'd have to be able to live with little praise for doing a good job, since Bagman has zero idea what goes into a good job and basically assumes good jobs happen by magic. And I think that stereotype - of bosses who don't appreciate all their employees do because they have no idea what the mental load is - exists for a reason.) Honestly, I think what I'm reacting to in the article (which seems to be an excerpt from a book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, by Gemma Hartley) isn't the frustration of bearing a disproportionate share of an invisible-thus-unappreciated load. Because I totally agree that it *is* frustrating. I don't mind overmuch hitting the details others in the house miss - because it's a strength of mine, it's a gift I can give to my family plus a sensible division of labor. The problem is that others miss them because they are largely invisible to others, and so while they all enjoy the results of it being done and feel the lack of it going undone, they have no idea that anything *was* done. It's frustrating having one's labor be invisible. What I'm reacting to is *how* the author deals with that very legitimate frustration. It's not that she finds it frustrating - I find it frustrating - but that there's this sense, not just that she shouldn't have to live with that frustration (that it's legit for her to take steps to change it) but that it's unfair that the frustrating situation exists in the first place. That it's unfair that *she's* the one who has to take steps to change it. I especially see that when the the author is discussing her kids, and how she's stuck doing stuff for them because she can't face dealing with their whining and refusal to listen. She says it like it's not part of parenting to deal with kids not wanting to do what they are told. That's my issue, I guess - not her frustration, not her assumption that it's unjust that she's suffering the problem, but her assumption that, since it's unjust that she's suffering in this way, it's unjust that she has to be involved in seeking a solution. It may well be unjust, but, idk, I don't respect how she's responding to that injustice. She seems more focused on blaming others than in relieving the problem. I mean, I think you can use the mental load concept and raise awareness of the impact and effects of the mental load without needing to apportion blame.

Talking about the issue in general - "women don't tend to tell their husbands they need HELP! with this sort of thing in the home until they really, really need it" - not the article in particular. I agree that's a very common scenario, and I tend to see it coupled with "letting it go is *not* an option". And it makes for a really rough situation: the women has nothing extra to give, which means she has no extra energy to teach the task or to turn over the mental load in stages. She's at the point where her only option is to turn the whole thing over to an complete beginner in a "sink-or-swim" way. But even a spouse with the best intentions and effort is probably going to screw it up the first few times - and, really, that's how you learn a lot of the mental load, realizing what's needed through the failures that result from not doing it. Couple that with an absolute unwillingness to let things fall apart, even a little - which is totally understandable behavior in a stressed person - and there's a no-win situation. There's no extra energy to teach others how to do it well, and no willingness to just allow the inevitable initial failures of a sink-or-swim method to do the teaching. I have a lot of sympathy for the woman here - I have totally been there - too stressed to keep doing it but too stressed to do an orderly hand-over and too stressed to handle even the temporary chaos of an abrupt turn-over. But it's an impossible situation for one's family, too - expected to suddenly do a new job perfectly and with no help. Which is why it's a really bad idea here, as in most things, to let the problem hit red-alert status before saying something. But since you can't go back in time to tell your spouse earlier, when you had the energy to deal with the handoff, everyone is just stuck with the current breaking point problem. Which probably means that something has to give, at least temporarily. ETA: I think my point is that, yes, at this red-alert point one really needs help and one's spouse ought to help them. But I think it's unrealistic, and maybe unfair, to expect absolutely nothing at all to change except who's doing the job. The help one's spouse gives ought to be helpful, but not necessarily by doing the exact same job in the exact same way as the original spouse did it. A *comparable* job, yes, but not necessarily an identical job, kwim? I mean, spouse A did it in a way that suited her time and talents; it's not fair to expect spouse B to do it in the way that suited spouse A's time and talents, but instead spouse B ought to be able to do it in a way that suits *his* time and talents.

I think a there's a learning curve wrt taking on the mental load for a new task or area. And that there's a difference in failing as a part of learning to do a new thing well, and failing because you didn't really try to do it well in the first place. Also, that just as people who've never done a task underestimate the mental load involved, a lot of people who've long since mastered the mental load involved underestimate the difficulty in learning it. In so many mental load discussions, there seems to be two threads: no one appreciates how much work the mental load is, and it's ridiculous how people unused to the mental load fail so miserably when initially attempting to take it on. There's this sense, when it comes to *my* mental load, that it's so much work - and unappreciated work, at that. But when it comes to others taking finally taking on their fair share of the mental load, taking some of it off my shoulders, there's the sense that they should be magically good at it, that "it's obvious" what needs to be done, and so their miserable failures are because they just didn't try, instead of trying and failing because managing the mental load well is actually skilled work, and is *not* intrinsically obvious to the unskilled. An example: now that we are in the country, we only go to town once a month for "town groceries". One mental load thing I turned over is making the shopping list. Dh had been remarkably bad about remembering the state of the cupboards and about predicting what will run out before next month - our first few trips we forgot a lot of things, things that I'd have put on the list if I'd done it. But instead of taking over the list, I just let him keep learning. And he has - both in actually taking a visual look at the cupboards while list-making (instead of going off his hazy memory) and in predicting more accurately. He still does it differently than me, but he's doing a good job now. He figured out the mental load. But in a lot of people's stories, it sounds like they take the job back after the first failure - they take it as proof the other person can't/won't do it ever - and in process take away the opportunity of ever learning how. ~*~ I've noticed that with driving, some things are obvious to dh and me, but are apparently non-obvious to some of the drivers we share the road with. Things that fall under the mental load of thinking about the whole situation of all the drivers on the road, or thinking about upcoming driving decisions, instead of only thinking about me and my immediate concerns. (Things that seem really comparable to people's complaints about dhs taking on tasks by only doing the narrow task itself, with no consideration as to how to their execution of the task affects other people or other tasks.) Honestly, I'm coming to the conclusion that a decent-sized chunk of people simply *don't think* when it comes to the larger picture of driving. And, significantly, recent discussions with my dh about his driving habits has opened *my* eyes to a whole world of driving concerns that were pretty much *invisible* to me before. In so many ways, *I* was guilty of being an oblivious driver who just didn't think - because I didn't even know those categories of things even *existed* to think about. Now that I know, I'm trying to learn to pay attention to them. ~*~ I naturally took on a ton of the mental load for our family lives, as many women do, because I was around more to notice more, because I naturally had better EF skills to notice and remember details, because I wanted to make sure it was done right. (I'm the go-to person to ask where things are, not because I make a deliberate point of watching out for others' stuff, but because I just naturally notice and remember where things are.) After a few mental load articles brought the concept to my attention, I realized I might actually be stunting the growth of mental-load-managing skills in my kids. Like with so many things, it's easier to do it myself than to teach them how to do it themselves. I'm now trying to deliberately think through my own process and explicitly teach that sort of reasoning to the kids. Also, my memory isn't what it used to be, so that's been the impetus for me turning over - and teaching - some areas to the rest of the family. People used to just shout out what needed to go on the grocery list, like mom's got the magic list memory. Thing is, I *did* have the magic list memory - I *would* remember it. But now every time people yell out "we need more 'x'", I just say, "Put it on the list!" And they do. (We had some notable failures at first, but the kids came to realize that I was serious - if it wasn't on the list, it wasn't going to be got.) There's some things that I am just too tired to teach - so I just keep limping on doing them on autopilot. Or just don't do them at all. ~*~ I have a differently mental load history than so many women. So many women say they simply *can't* let things not be done, because it makes life ultimately harder for them and everyone. Well, I was seriously depressed for years, hardly functional, and dh didn't have any more house-running skill or interest than your average mid-20s male. The only way dh and I could manage without being constantly mad at each other was to divvy up the chores, do what we each felt like, and let the rest go. A *ton* got let go. The house and our lives were undoubtedly embarrassing (although I was too depressed to distinguish qualities of bad), and regaining mental ground and house-keeping ground was a years-long process. (I still kept the schedule because that was basically effortless for me, even depressed. And I still did the planning, because I wanted control of it, even when I wasn't really up to it.) Unlike all the more functional "but I *can't* accept it being undone" women, dh and I *both* did the "do only what you personally want done" and left the rest undone. And really, that only works (or "works") when you and your spouse are at similar levels of functioning, be it high or low. Dh and my's biggest conflicts in this area came when one person was really trying to improve while the other wasn't. We had to improve together or the resentment started to build. And, honestly, it took a lot of improvement before we were functional enough to for "take on a task only your spouse cares about out of love for them" unselfishness to be a viable option. (That's still pretty hit or miss, tbh.) Even having lived it, it's really difficult to tease apart "can't do it" and "could do it but won't" - the two pretty much went together for both of us. IDK, we were both selfish and incompetent and the two just fed each other. When doing something is hard, you are just less likely to do it, unless it *really* matters. IDK, my experience is that even largely selfishly motivated failure is often not really a deliberate refusal so much as it is a taking-the-path-of-least-resistance failure-to-try. Which often feels like a "can't" to person who failed, even as it seems like a "won't" to the person who asked. It's not a "I don't want to help you" thing so much as a "doing this is hard" thing. Which is both mundanely common and intensely frustrating.

My kids rode in my Ergo till 2.5-3yo.

Both my girls slowed down in 3A - as you say, all that multiplication and long division. They did do 3B much faster. Also, it's not the end of the world to be behind. I did a (kinda failed) experiment with delayed formal math with my oldest, and she started 1.5yr behind and ended 1 yr behind. In her case, I skipped SM6 and went straight to Pre-Alg in 7th (Dolciani), where she is doing fine. But I could have completed SM6 in 7th and done Pre-A in 8th, and then gone into Alg in 9th. My middle (I paused math until she was reading well) started a half year behind and is still a half year behind. With both girls, we just started the next book when the previous one was completed, and picked up after breaks wherever we'd left off. My oldest's situation really did worry me some, the closer we got to 7th grade, because it was my own darn fault, but it did work out.