By "sin" I just mean "something morally wrong", not specifically a wrong against God (although my tradition does hold that all wrongs against fellow humans, against creation, against ourselves, etc., are also wrongs against God). The point I was trying to make was that forgiveness is for wrongdoing; if there was no wrong, then there is nothing to forgive. (And in fact people often are offended at the idea of either offering an apology or receiving forgiveness for that very reason: they don't believe what they did was wrong, and therefore they have no obligation to apologize and no need to receive forgiveness - because you only need to be forgiven if you did *wrong*. No wrong, no forgiveness needed - or wanted.) I completely agree that human forgiveness has tremendous power. "Forgive others as you have been forgiven." Forgiveness is central to human relationships. And so it can be very hard on people who feel they have done wrong, but the people they wronged, instead of forgiving, instead insist there is nothing to forgive in the first place. It's well-meant - would it not be offensively wrong to forgive them when they did nothing wrong, did nothing that needs forgiveness? But it denies them that tremendous power of human forgiveness.

FWIW, there's a dark side to insisting that her mistakes aren't moral failings - it denies her grace and forgiveness. Forgiveness is for sins, and if her mistakes aren't sins, then they can't be forgiven. So how is she to deal with them, if there is no forgiveness for them? As well, there's such a thing as sins against conscience, things that aren't inherently sinful, but if a person who mistakenly believes they *are* sinful does them despite believing they are sins, then that person *does* genuinely sin, even though the action itself is fine. It sounds like that's where she is: regardless of whether her mistakes are inherently sinful, she believes that she *has* sinned. But no one will offer her forgiveness, but instead, with the best of motives, everyone just tells her it doesn't matter, it doesn't make her any less of a good person. But rightly or wrongly, she's convinced that what she's done *is* morally wrong, and *does* make her less of a person - aka she's sinned against her own conscience. My tradition, Lutheran, is very big on grace and forgiveness, and with sins against conscience, we tend to forgive first and educate the conscience second. Learning that what you thought was wrong is actually good doesn't erase the guilt from having done something you genuinely believed to wrong at the time, and in fact the guilt can prevent you from moving on. Only forgiveness can remove the guilt - and that's why we don't deny forgiveness to anyone who is repentant. Even if the action itself isn't something that needs to be repented of, their guilt for doing something they (erroneously) *thought* was wrong still needs to be dealt with - and only forgiveness can do it.

My youngest is similar - strong-willed with phonemic awareness weaknesses - so teaching him to read has been like pulling teeth. I actually red-shirted him (he's a summer b-day); we sent him to the church's pre-K during what would have been his K year, and then hs'ed K the next year. He's finishing up 1st grade now, as a 7.5yo. We're still on CVC words, actually, though he's finally overcome most of his phonemic awareness issues; I ended up restarting the phonics primer from the beginning at least three times, if not four, as he hit walls. Based on his older siblings, there's only one more major hurdle to go, blending consonants (both my girls needed a *ton* of focused work to learn to hear the separate sounds in blends and to actually blend the separate sounds together). I've had success incorporating sound tiles and phonogram tiles (AAS has phonogram tiles, I think AAR does as well) - they both help with the weaknesses plus ds likes them. In your shoes, I think I'd either start AAR back from the beginning, doing it as written; or else follow EKS's advice and start with a dyslexia program. (I ended up using our phonics primer as a base ("Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach")- it has a really excellent word list, very thorough and incremental and logically arranged by phonics pattern, along with a ton of phonetically-controlled connected text - while heavily modifying how I teach it, incorporating ideas and techniques and such from other programs.) If you have an iPad, you could try Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can). It's a really neat approach to phonics that starts with 44 sound pictures that visually represent the sound (such as a hissing snake for /s/ and a buzzing bee for /z/). It teaches the sounds through a neat rhyming story; most are very intuitive, and the rest make perfect sense within the story. We all had them memorized within a few times through. All the sound picture work helps prevent and remediate reading-by-sight, and also really emphasizes reading and spelling by sound. It's a lot of fun, and it's free for the iPad. (If you don't have an iPad, all the print materials are also free to download.) I use the apps as a supplement, but I've incorporated the sound pictures into the core of my reading/spelling approach.

Two of my kids are lefties. It was pretty apparent by the time they were four or so - they defaulted to their left hands for most things. (And ds also defaulted to doing cartwheels and such left-handed.) But so far they haven't had a problem using the mouse right-handed - my oldest even games that way. I thought about left-handed scissors and teaching them to write left-handed (I can write with my left, which was a big help in figuring out how to teach them), and the pros and cons of knitting/crocheting left-handed (you have to transpose the patterns mirror image), but mouse positioning didn't occur to me for years and years. And by that point both of my lefties had been using the mouse right-handed for years without issue.

2500-3000mi/month for dh and me combined. Dh's work commute is 180mi/wk, church is 60mi/wk (2 round trips), and kid activities are 270mi/wk, so a little over 500mi/wk of regularly scheduled activities. Then dh has fluctuating additional work-related driving, and we go into town once a month (~140mi), plus other one-off trips, so I'm guesstimating 2500-3000mi/mo. We live rurally, so it's a long way to everywhere.

And, see, to me the SM workbooks *have* gone up in price. It used to be $25 for the wb and IP together on RR, but the past few years each book has gone up a dollar or two each year - with three kids in SM, it's probably $30/yr more than it was when I started. That was an increase of 20-25%, and I kind of grumbled each year to see the new higher price. But that's still nothing like the 200-300% increase you're talking about <jawdrop>.

He is risen indeed! Alleluia! "Jesus lives! The vict'ry's won! Death no longer can appall me; Jesus lives! Death's reign is done! From the grave Christ will recall me. Brighter scenes will then commence; This shall be my confidence."

I did not. Probably because I read them fast, but also, I think, because the absence of religion seems to be the dominant feature of most "set in real life" movies, books, and stories (not to say that HG is set in real life). I'm surprised by the *presence* of actual religious influence, not its absence. Growing up, all the twaddle series I read had the same absence of religion as HG: all the Sweet Valley series, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Baby-sitters' Club, Thoroughbreds, plus a dozen others - all religion-free. The twaddle-y TV shows likewise had no mention of religion: Full House, Home Improvement, Step by Step. For more contemporary examples: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Arrow TV show, Psych, Monk, Chuck, Leverage, Sherlock, White Collar. Shows willing to be controversial or shows that tried to explore important topics would have occasional episodes that involved religion, but your fluffy, feel-good books and shows? As starkly religion-free as HG. I only tend to see plot-relevant religion in speculative fiction and fantasy; and even then, I'd say more sci-fi than not is religion-free, and in more fantasy than not the religion is window dressing - there to add atmosphere, but it doesn't impact how characters actually live or the direction of the plot. (Even Harry Potter, which has so many Christian themes, still doesn't have any overt religion - no overt religious beliefs or practices appear anywhere, no character is a devout believer in anything religious). And even stories where religion is pertinently present - a real force in the world and in the characters' lives - too often the religion is either the enemy or something to overcome.

It doesn't really surprise me, because there's a lot of Christian themes in HP. There's even a Bible verse on the Potters' graves - "the last enemy to be overcome is death," which is from 1 Corinthians 15:26. So I always pictured the British wizarding world as having a similar proportion of Christians as Muggle Britain.

Do you know why she is too slow, or what particular areas slow her down? Is she automatic on her add/mult facts? I know everything takes my kids longer when they aren't solid on their facts. (Also, I've noticed a connection between being automatic on mult facts and fraction *understanding* - that if you can't automatically see the relationships between factors, it's hard to even understand what's going on with fractions with unlike denominators.) If she's solid on understanding (minus fractions), then maybe drill sheets would help. This site has a ton of free worksheets: https://www.math-drills.com/. She could start with add/mult facts, then move to add/sub without regrouping, add/sub with regrouping, single digit mult/div, multi-digit mult/div. Also, as HeighHo pointed out, what's the likelihood of the test format itself being an issue? Either tech issues in general, or having a lack of scratch paper to work out one's answers on, or other issues inherent to a computer-based math test (vs a paper one).

We just moved to Middle-of-No-Where Texas, and the driving is taking some getting used to. Dance is 45min away, twice a week (in Small City, which still has a population larger than our entire county), and piano is an hour away once a week (in the opposite direction, in the outskirts of Medium City). In looking for opportunities, I went from "gee, that seems kind of far" to just being thankful I managed to find good teachers at all. (Especially for piano. I swear, none of the good music teachers advertise beyond word of mouth. I eventually looked up piano teachers who were part of the state music association who were within 100 miles of us - a grand total of four - and emailed the only one who had contact info available.) On the plus side, there's no traffic and hardly any traffic lights; 55mi to piano, and only two lights. And it's convenient, being in Small City twice a week - plenty of chances to pick up odds and ends at Wal-Mart/Lowes/etc. (Otherwise we go monthly into Large College Town an hour away for our big shopping runs. Also our big library run - I paid for an out-of-system library card there.)

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.