I think there's something to this. I do think most Christians would agree that salvation *begins* at a single moment in time (conversion). And that most would also agree that the Christian life involves a lifelong process of "working out our salvation with fear and trembling". So I think most Christians would see the Christian life as involving *both* a single moment in time *and* a lifelong process. As well, I think most Christians would see the Christian life as involving *both* God's grace *and* our responding with good works done in faith. But does *salvation* involve both a single moment in time and a lifelong process? Or is it both started *and* completed in that single moment? Do we receive God's saving grace throughout our Christian life? Or is God's saving grace given just once at our conversion? Does *salvation* involve both God's grace plus our works-done-in-faith? Or does it involve God's grace alone? Is the Christian life (which involves *all* of *life*) centered around salvation alone? Or does the Christian life involve salvation plus works-done-in-faith? When salvation is a lifelong process, it functions naturally as the sole top-level category of Christian life, encompassing both God's grace and our response of good-works-done-in-faith. But when salvation is a moment in time, then for all its doctrinal primacy, there is substantial temporal, logical, metaphysical, and practical distance between salvation and the rest of Christian life, between salvation and good works. And in practice this seems to go hand-in-hand with rejecting a sacramental view of reality. It certainly weakens sacramental practice, because why receive the sacraments frequently when you've no idea how the saving grace given in and through them fits into the Christian life? My experience is that non-sacramental views of reality changes how legalism and works righteousness are understood. In talking with non-sacramental Protestants, I've found that many of them have no idea how the sacraments could be anything *but* works-righteousness. Is a human physically doing something in Holy Baptism? Check. Then Baptism involves works and thus to say Baptism saves is to say that works contribute to salvation. For grace to be grace *alone*, it has to be given immediately (without physical means); grace given through physical means (water and Word) and so received by physical means (hearing the words, having water poured over you) is inherently grace mixed with works. There's this assumption that anything that a human does physically is a "work" in the works righteousness sense. So for something to be 100% God's work, there cannot be any human action involved at all (not just no *meritorious* human activity) - which means there can't be any physical *means* involved at all. Which pretty much eliminates a sacramental understanding of the sacraments as well as a sacramental understanding of creation (where the spiritual is united to the material). I'm not sure a "salvation as a single moment of time" theology, that has that sort of big, huge separation between spiritual salvation and physical good works, would have a clear place for virtue ethics, which assumes a tight connection between our material bodies and our immaterial souls. (Also, I think the rejection of a sacramental view of reality can lead to equating the immaterial and the spiritual, and separating the two is pretty essential imo to keeping virtue ethics from going hardcore legalistic.) However, I think we Protestants can distinguish (not put distance between, but distinguish) God's work of salvation and our response to His work of salvation while still holding that we receive God's saving grace continually in our Christian lives - and thus keep salvation as the sole top-level category of Christian life. This, along with a sacramental view of reality, helps to maintain the primacy of God's saving work along with its tight connection to the important-yet-secondary nature of our response to salvation in our Christian lives not just doctrinally, but also temporally, logically, metaphysically, and practically. The issue of how our works (done body-and-soul) relate to our salvation (which likewise affects both body and soul) has already been worked out, and there's a natural place to slot in virtue ethics, with its tight connection between our material bodies and immaterial souls, under "important-yet-secondary".

I think not connecting our physical lives with our spiritual lives would be a foreign thought to most all Christians, sacramental and non-sacramental alike. Ime most Christians yearn for the deepest, strongest connection between the two they can conceive of. But I do agree that non-sacramental assumptions about the nature of reality tend to place much greater limits on what sort of connection can be conceived of than sacramental assumptions. My own experience is that modern assumptions about the separateness of the physical and spiritual can deeply affect even sacramental Christians, warping their understanding of their tradition, making sacramental practices less and less comprehensible and less and less central to living as a Christian. (It certainly did me - I've always been as sacramental as I could imagine, but for most of my life I labored unknowing under modern assumptions that seriously limited what I was capable of imagining. And those false assumptions that weakened my understanding and practice of the sacraments weakened a lot of other central Christian beliefs and practices, too.). But even a weak and tenuous limited understanding of the sacraments provides a qualitatively different starting point for viewing the world than does a rejection of the sacraments. The sacraments are one of the last parts of the pre-modern view of reality still alive and viable in the modern West - being part of a sacramental tradition still gives a stronger line to the past than most non-sacramental Christians have available to them. And it can give general you a leg up in understanding other pre-modern beliefs, like virtue ethics, because it's not entirely foreign to you. My experience has been that most proponents of virtue ethics in classical Christian education have been from sacramental traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian) and I do think there's a connection.

Interesting thoughts! And I want to respond with all the words ;). I'm kind of responding in random order. I believe that all good comes from God. So unbelievers who are outwardly good, good before the world (although not before God) - well, their virtue *is* an unmerited gift of God, just like the virtue of believers. Just like God gives life to *everyone*, and still takes care of us, and gives rain to the just and unjust. "And He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, spouse and children." *Everyone* needs God's continual unmerited good gifts for *everything*. "In Him everything lives and moves and has its being." Whether we acknowledge it or not, everything good in this world comes from God's active, spiritual, supernatural work in creating and sustaining His creation. Everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, can and does receive God's temporal gifts - and as virtue is built up and lived out *by* creatures *in* creation, it's a temporal gift. (Which doesn't mean it's not *also* a spiritual gift.) ~*~ In the above description, my tradition (Lutheran) would be more or less on the Catholic side of things wrt the role of Holy Baptism, in that we do believe God gives saving grace in Holy Baptism and that infants can have saving faith, and we are raising our kids from the perspective of their being fellow believers. I disagree about "pursuit of virtue is the process of partnering with God as one grows in faith" though. I think. My tradition has the idea of two kinds of righteousness. There is our righteousness before God (coram Deo), which is called passive righteousness, because it is 100% God's work. This is salvation by grace through faith in Christ Jesus. We are united with Christ, so that everything we have is His and everything He has is ours. He shares all our sin, which dies with Christ on the cross (and unlike Him, our sin *stays* in the grave ;)), and we share in His righteousness and His resurrection. Christ's righteousness, shared with us, allows us to be reconciled to the Father and to once again have spiritual life, to be connected to the Source of all life and righteousness. And so our passive, saving righteousness, which connects us to God, is the foundation of our active righteousness lived out here in creation, before the world (coram mundo). Now everyone, whether spiritually alive in Christ or dead in sins, is capable of doing outwardly good works in the world to an extent, is capable of civil righteousness (and these good works in creation are all the work of God). (Outwardly here means temporally (versus spiritually) good, *not* that it only involves the material body and excludes the immaterial soul.) And these works are not capable of changing *anyone's* spiritual state before God, are not capable of contributing to one's salvation, whether a person is spiritually alive in Christ or dead in sins. (But one's spiritual state before God is quite foundational to one's active righteousness - our passive, saving righteousness transforms our merely temporal civil righteousness into a spiritual-and-temporal sanctifying righteousness.) I think that *everyone* - saved and unsaved - faces the temptation to rest in their good works as evidence that they don't need any outside help to be good. And so everyone needs to hear the Law - to hear just how high and stringent the standards for being truly righteous are, so they can realize that no matter how virtuous they are, they aren't without sin. And likewise, I think that *everyone* - saved and unsaved - faces the temptation to look at the sinful wreckage that is their best attempts at doing good and being good and see it as evidence they are unredeemable. And so everyone needs to hear the Gospel - to hear the good news that God *knows* we can't be good enough and that while we were yet sinners, He sent Christ to die for our sins and give us new life in Him. Also, since *all* our good works, all our virtues are the work of God - whether we are believers joyfully participating with Him or unbelievers unknowingly and unwilling doing His will, all God's good done for us and through us is an unmerited gift from Him - idk that I think teaching our unbelieving children about doing good things is somehow more inherently prone to getting twisted into moralism than teaching our believing children. I mean, what's the alternative, *not* teaching our unbelieving children to do good things? To me this issue is more making sure we teach *all* our kids about doing good things in a way that is faithful to the Bible, to how doing good things is supposed to fit into the life of a Christian (as a loving *response* to God's gifts to us, not as a means of meriting God's gifts to us). Because *all* of God's gifts - salvation plus everything else, including the ability and desire and opportunity to do good works - are *unmerited* gifts. But maybe I am coming from a sufficiently different POV that I don't quite get the issue. (I do think there may be something to differences between the *timing* and *circumstances* of salvation having a role. Believing that an infant can be given faith without choosing, without knowledge, without understanding - without anything, really - involves a different view of mankind and how man can be affected by forces outside himself (also a different view of faith). And that might be pertinent.) ~*~ As a Lutheran, we'd say that if your virtue training causes you to not see yourself as a sinner, then you're doing it wrong ;). I suppose I see being a sinner as having an eternal *cause* which has temporal *effects*. The eternal cause is that we are separated from God, the source of all life and righteousness and goodness and so we *lack* spiritual life and righteousness and goodness (the results of original sin). And this spiritual *lack* results in both a temporal lack of goodness and a temporal existence of positive evil. Virtue training is about mitigating the temporal effects to an extent. Even if it could be done perfectly (which it can't), we'd *still* be no closer to God than we were when we started. Because no amount of mitigating the temporal effects of being separated from God can change the fact that we are separated from God and so are in desperate need of Christ. But in any case, we are limited in how much we can mitigate the temporal effects of sin, because so long as we live in this sinful world, we *will* sin (even after conversion). No amount of virtue training can wholly eliminate our sinning, and no amount of practicing of the virtues can erase our past sins. We Christians are at the same time both saint and sinner. And so Lutheran devotional practice is centered around daily repentance and forgiveness. It's all-too-easy to forget our *continual* need for Christ, and so it's important to regularly examine ourselves, confess our sins, and then receive and rest in Christ's forgiveness.

In terms of the work I require for word problems, I started by requiring equations (a huge deal), and then added on an answer in a complete sentence (not that much of a deal). When my dd was a reluctant writer, I would have accepted an oral sentence, but somehow or other, it was the first writing that she started being happy to do. (I have been trying to add on bar diagrams, but the reluctance is high. I think I've required enough she can do them, and I'm leaving it at that.) One problem we've had with IP with my reluctant writer is that the type in IP is smaller than in the wb, with more problems per page and less white space. In retrospect, a lot of our IP problems were to do with the format, not the math. She improved tremendously when I got her a graph paper notebook and if she didn't think she had enough room, she could do the problems in there. Still, she suffers from too many problems on a page, especially when they are somewhat computation-heavy or otherwise somewhat more difficult. I haven't really come up with a solution to that, other than having her do just a few of the problems on each page per day, instead of a few full pages per day. That helps a bit.

The *extra* practice book is the same level as the workbook and is for kids who need more practice than tb/wb. But the *intensive* practice book is more *difficult* practice of what has been learned - it goes deeper and wider than the tb/wb. We run IP a semester behind the tb/wb, and generally the tb/wb is clear sailing for my girls, because of all the work they've put in with IP. My oldest and I struggled together through two step problems in IP 2B - there was weeping and gnashing of teeth ;) - but she's not met a word problem in the tb or wb she's had any trouble with. I would definitely drop the wb before I dropped IP. My girls do have to work hard on IP - they aren't ones to sail through it - but I think it's worthwhile enough that we continue it even though it takes up a fair chunk of time. That said, with my oldest I *did* start out using just the tb and IP, until we hit a wall in adding/subtracting with regrouping in 2A. I then added in the wb, and the change was good for dd - I think I probably should have been using the wb with her all along (while she grasped the concepts fast, she needed more procedural practice; she's 2E and it took me a while to realize her resistance to procedural practice wasn't just that she was conceptually bored, but also that the procedural practice was actually *hard* for her), and I've started with tb/wb/IP with my other kids. A practical thing about doing just the tb and IP is that the IP book isn't divided into exercises like the wb, but is just divided into chapters. So it works best ime to teach the whole tb chapter to your dc (and that works best if they generally don't need more practice on each section than the tb provides to learn the next section), and then assign the whole IP chapter for practice.

It's been a hard thing for me to grasp, too. There are so many things I've bashed my head against for months or years that seem so *obvious* once I finally see them. One of my first light bulb moments was when I realized that the answer to the question "what does the Bible say about how we should live" is The Ten Commandments (as the summary of the law, one of the chief parts of the Small Catechism). So obvious in retrospect, but that was a question that troubled me for several years - can't teach the good if you don't know what it is. FWIW, I think modern Western assumptions kind of disconnect "good" (and true and beautiful) from reality and so drain it of most of its meaning. AKA we've had help in finding the good hard to understand. I'm rereading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, where he argues that morality in modern Western culture is seriously disordered - that we have only disconnected bits and pieces of old moral schemes that we have no idea how to fit together into something coherent. IMO a lot of the contemporary appeal of virtue ethics is that it is a line to the past - it's a coherent moral scheme from a time where people *had* such things - and it can help us learn moral reasoning that has been lost to us. AKA one of the reasons it can be so hard to wrap our brains around virtue ethics is because the assumptions behind it are very foreign to modern Western culture. After Virtue was one of my first introductions to alternatives to modern Western morality, and it was mindblowing. I barely understood a third of it - enough to become aware of my modern blinders and the nature of modern moral thinking, but not enough to understand the older alternatives. After three years of reading and research on the differences between ancient and medieval and modern assumptions, I am now able to understand a *lot* more of what MacIntyre is saying about the nature of the older forms of moral reasoning.

As I understand it, virtue ethics sees three parts to morality and living a good life: *untutored-human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be *human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-fulfilled-its-telos (fulfilled its true end) *the moral precepts which enable man to pass from one state to another And the virtues are the habits which enable a person to fulfill the moral precepts and so make progress toward fulfilling their true end as a human, toward becoming fully human. Christianity says that the ultimate end of humanity is to be united with God. And that sin is what separates us from God. And that no amount of striving to live in world as a righteous person would do will *ever* get us even one step closer to being reconciled to God (and so truly righteous). Trying to get closer to God or to become more spiritual through our own efforts is moralism. So, whatever the place of the virtues in human life, it *cannot* be to overcome the spiritual and eternal effects of sin - aka the virtues cannot in any way assist in our salvation. But what about the temporal effects of sin? Is there a place for the virtues in how we live out our faith in creation? I'd say yes. Here's how I think of it. It's a commonplace that who we are on the inside (our soul: mind, emotions, will) affects what we do in outwardly, in the world. Virtue ethics says that that connection goes both ways: that what we do outwardly *also* affects who we are on the inside. What we *do* affects who we *are* just as much as who we are affects what we do. And so virtue ethics is about building character from the outside in. In building up the habits of acting as good people act, we shape ourselves into good people. However, as Christians, we know that being a temporally good person doesn't do a dang thing in helping us become *eternally* good people. Virtue ethics describes how good temporal actions build up good temporal character; Christianity describes how no amount of good temporal character can do anything to make us eternally righteous (whether before or after conversion). However, once *made* eternally righteous by grace through faith in Christ, we are to live out that eternal righteousness in our temporal lives. Being a good person before the world doesn't contribute to our eternal life (which has already begun now), but our eternal life absolutely contributes to our being a good person before the world - and as Christians, we *are* to be good people as God defines good. Doing good works in the world *is* indeed good. And when we are spiritually alive in Christ, our temporal good works become *spiritual* good works as well. Practicing the virtues doesn't make us more saved and it doesn't make us more spiritual - but it does make us temporally more able to do good in the world. And that's a good thing both temporally and spiritually :). ~*~ One thing that gave me fits for a while on this topic was confusing the material/immaterial distinction with the created/spiritual or temporal/eternal distinction (especially wrt the body/soul distinction). I assumed that the "outwardly only" good works in Paul meant "the body's outward actions were good, but the soul's inner state was bad", and that the contrasting being good "inwardly" meant that the soul's inner state was good. And since "being good inwardly" required forgiveness of sins, that didn't play nice at all with virtue ethics' focus on building up good character in the soul through doing good actions with the body. Sounded like trying to be saved through your works. But I eventually disentangled that unbiblical dualism from Paul's Biblical distinction between outward temporal-only good works that can be done apart from God and inward spiritual-and-temporal good works that can only be done when reconciled to God, and realized that material creation could be spiritually united to God, too. Outwardly only good works are those done body-and-soul apart from God; inwardly good works are those done body-and-soul by those reconciled to God. The connection between material and immaterial creation is entirely separate from the connection between creation and the spiritual (meaning "of God"). And so virtue ethics' two-way connection between the actions of the material body and the character of the immaterial soul is entirely different from, and doesn't impinge on, the one-way connection between God and His material-and-immaterial creation.

According to the answer key I have, they are indeed wanting the answer as a whole number and remainder. And looking at the textbook, they are practicing estimating the quotient and fixing the estimate as necessary to get the exact answer. The answers in the examples are whole numbers and remainders (where they are leaving the remainder as the last result of the subtraction, and aren't even bringing it up to be part of the answer proper as R <whatever>). Does that help?

I have mused about this, too. A book I read and loved is A Case for Character, by Joel Biermann - it explores whether there is a place for virtue ethics within Lutheran theology (spoiler, it says yes, there can be a place ;)). Here's the website for the book, which has helpful summary videos for each section of the book (which I think are accessible without having read the book) and a Bible study: http://acaseforcharacter.com And a blog I love had a post recently on virtue ethics, that addressed some of the questions you raised, and had a link to an article that went into more detail: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2017/09/virtue-ethics-christian-life/

We're all wondering *why* does the bf keep showing up at stuff where Tap is present (like the birthday cake thing), when he doesn't like Tap and everyone involved knows it. I was wondering if his coming to the birthday cake thing is his way of trying to be nice and keep up a relationship (such as it is)? Aka, does he feel like if he avoided doing things with Tap his *avoidance* would be seen as rude, as him rejecting his gf's family? So maybe he grits his teeth and comes - just like Tap grits her teeth and invites him - *because* he's worried that to do otherwise would be rude. And just like Tap is dreading having to invite him, maybe *he's* dreading having to go.

My first thoughts were these. Be polite, maybe not talk to *him* since he made it clear he doesn't want you to, but otherwise quit trying to cater to his issues - instead, try not to let him and his issues change how you interact with everyone not-him. Act in such a way as to minimize the negative effects of his presence on the gathering, but without *enabling* the negative effects of his presence. Easier said than done, of course. But this made me think: maybe doing your best to act normally in a not-normal situation sends the wrong message - that it normalizes something that *shouldn't* be normalized. That by quietly trying to minimize the negative impact of his issues - whether by catering to them or by trying to minimize their impact without catering to them - you are effectively saying that his issues and the way he is dealing with them is within the bounds of decent behavior. Which is being a good hostess if someone's not-normal situation is in the annoying range (like minor kinds of rudeness or thoughtlessness or general difficultness). But when trying to accommodate someone leads to enabling or normalizing someone's seriously wrong behavior (like abuse or ongoing life of crime) - well, maybe some things just shouldn't be accommodated. Idk which one is which here, but I agree with other posters re: the existence of red flags. And this resonates with me, too. Whether I ignore-without-enabling annoying issues, or openly point out unacceptable issues - I don't want to be the one to drive a wedge between me and my dd. I don't want to be the one to force the choice: me or him. Now, I likewise don't want to bend over backwards to prevent *him* from forcing the choice - no teaching that the response to unreasonable demands is to cave lest even *more* unreasonable demands result. But idk, somehow I want to be polite to guests, while not enabling annoying things nor ignoring unacceptable things, while also not being the one to force my dd to choose between me and the annoying-maybe-unacceptably-acting bf. Easy, huh. :grouphug:

"When Nathan came back to the world, the packages from UPS had already arrived, the driver staring blankly at him to take one of them off his hands." I agree, that last part isn't working for me, either. Part of it is that the last bit seems awkwardly worded to me - the combo of "staring blankly" and "take one of them off his hands" doesn't mesh for me - I want to put a "waiting" in there. Also, the verb tenses don't seem to match. The action in the first part is all completed (had already arrived), while the action in the second part is ongoing (staring blankly). And since the action in the last part is expanding on the already-completed action in the middle, it seems like the action in the middle isn't really completed like the wording says it was. If that makes sense. I think I'd fix it by saying something like: "When Nathan came back to the world, the UPS truck had already arrived and the driver was staring blankly at him, waiting for him to take the packages off the driver's hands. Still don't know about the "staring blankly" wording, although I think I get the image the writer is going for.

My sil is like this. In her case, it is because she's paranoid about her kids overeating and becoming fat like her (I know this for a fact, because she says it straight out). It's hard to deal with for a lot of reasons, especially because she doesn't usually allow her kids to have any of our snacks. (I'm very strict about never eating in front of people without offering to share.) So my options are to let my kids eat in front of her hungry kids, or to let my kids go hungry - it's kind of a lose-lose thing :(. And it usually comes up because that side of the family isn't very good about planning and things *always* take longer than expected. I always carry snacks and water for me and the kids (because we need them), and for outings with them, I even take stuff for dh (who usually doesn't need anything). I have plenty to share - but the cousins aren't allowed to have any. When the kids were younger, I ended up just letting them eat in front of their hungry cousins, as much as it bothered me, because my kids were too young to deal with hunger well nor did they understand why all of a sudden they couldn't have their usual snack. (Kind of justified it under the notion that "different parents do different things" went both ways. In SIL's defense, she never complained about my kids having snacks.). Now that my kids are older, they understand waiting till they aren't in front of their cousins, and it's usually possible to do it.

My great-great-grandmother's dad abandoned her and her mom when she was really little. Her mom remarried and her second husband pretty much raised her. Now, I know this because the story was passed down. But how easy would it have been to just not say anything about the deadbeat dad? And to just let people - including my g-g-grandma - assume the dad-in-everything-but-name was *the* dad?

Pretty much our only vacations are to see family. (This is how I grew up, so it's normal to me.) We don't have a lot, but we have enough to drive down to visit our family (both dh's and mine) every other year. (We alternate between us going down and dh's family coming up. My family is financially better off than dh's, and they come to visit us every year.). It's about a 1,000 mile drive, and I think our costs are between $500-$750 (mostly travel costs, because we stay at our parents' houses (and they stay with us when they come)). So far we've had three "staying in a hotel" kind of vacations, all with extended family (and all to FL, oddly enough). Two of them we did regardless of whether we could afford it (we didn't save up for the trip, but were able to pay for it out of savings, versus putting it on a credit card), and one was paid for by my parents (anniversary trip to WDW). The two we did regardless of whether it was a financially good idea were to do with dh's grandma: one was taking the kids to see her while she was still in good health, and the other was going to her funeral. Idk if I'd have gone into debt to do those, but I did think it was worth spending a decent chunk of our savings (about 25%) to go see her while we still could, and likewise going to her funeral was worth the unexpected expense (about $1000). (I was actually the driving force behind coordinating a trip with dh's family to get all the great-grandkids down to see dh's grandma, even though it was his family.)

Fwiw, if you compare the average tax paid by the bottom 50% ($540, which is 3.45% of the average AGI of $15,679) to the average tax paid by the top 1% ($387,793, which is 27.16% of their average AGI of $1,413,492), the top 1% pay about 719 times more in taxes than the bottom 50%, while their income is about 91 times more. (I calculated this using the info from this page: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2016-update/ - I took the total AGI for each category and divided it by the number of returns to find the average income, and then multiplied it by the average tax rate to find the average tax.)

I did a teaching-reading-through-spelling sort of thing with my middle dd, and she spelled all her reading words before she got to them in her reading lessons - the spelling worked as pre-teaching. She spelled the words and then read them back to me. It was very successful. Can he read the words he spells to you? Or is he able to spell but not to read what he spells? If he can read back to you what he spells, then his spelling is actually helping with his reading. If he can't, then I don't think it's doing any harm, since he enjoys the process, though it might not be worth spending overmuch time on.

I did till I got married and then I snuggled with dh ;) (and later snuggled with three kidlets) - took him to college and everything. I still have Cat (I got him for my second birthday) - right now he lives on my desk by my monitor. Now that I rarely have kids in the bed (and have been feeling stressed as of late), I might bring Cat back into the bed. I snuggled with dd11's Teddy for a nap (she'd left her on my bed), and it was surprisingly comforting. Kid wise, the two oldest each have particular animals they sleep with (and dd8 also has a menagerie all along the edges of her bed). Ds6 occasionally sleeps with one of his animals - but only about half the time, and he rotates through about half a dozen different ones. None of them slept with a stuffed animal till they were no longer sleeping in our bed.

I think you're doing fine wrt introducing your dd to better literature. But to me the above is a red flag - that she could use some more reading *instruction*. You are absolutely right that difficulties in reading harder words can prevent kids from seeking out harder books, even if they'd otherwise be interested. Both of my girls have needed to work on advanced phonics skills - mastering the more complicated phonograms and how to sound out unfamiliar multi-syllable words - even *after* they were reading fluently. To me it sounds like your dd could benefit from that as well. I did REWARDS with my oldest (and am doing it with my middle). It involves orally blending syllables together, learning the most common sounds of multi-letter phonograms, learning common prefixes and suffixes, and then learning to put all those together to break words into word parts and then sound out and blend each word part together to read long words. REWARDS can be somewhat pricey new, but I was able to get an older edition on amazon for under $15 for both teacher's guide and student book. ETA: Here's the links and ISBNs for the books I used (teacher's guide is somewhat more used now than it was when I got it): REWARDS teacher's guide (ISBN: 978-1570352712) - https://www.amazon.com/Rewards-Teachers-Guide-Multisyllabic-Development/dp/1570352712/ REWARDS student books (ISBN: 978-1570352720) - https://www.amazon.com/Rewards-Reading-Excellence-Development-Strategies/dp/1570352720/ Another option is ElizabethB's syllable-based program. It does much of the same thing as REWARDS, and it's free online: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/syllablesspellsu.html . She has a few threads here about it.

With my oldest, I started spelling in 3rd grade. She was reading fluently by the end of 1st, but for reasons I can't remember, I didn't start spelling in 2nd. Or else I did try, and it went really badly (she was a reluctant writer at the time, and also really horrible at spelling), and I waited till 3rd to try again. Oh, I think it was because I was doing LiPS with her in 2nd - hoping she could spell better once she could hear and manipulate phonemes better. With my middle, I actually did the whole "teaching reading through spelling" thing. She was an eager writer, and reading was coming slowly and with difficulty, and I ended up doing a kind of makeshift Spalding spelling that worked to pre-teach her reading words, starting halfway through 1st and continuing till spring of 2nd. It worked great wrt teaching her to read, but the spelling part didn't stick at all. (Although to be fair, I was working at a reading pace, not a spelling pace - we did 36 words a day, focusing on one or two new phonograms, and reviewed every word at least once, and upwards of half a dozen times for troublesome words.) Anyway, she was reading fluently by spring of 2nd, and I started spelling-for-spelling once we quit doing phonics, starting back at spelling words with consonant blends.

With my youngest, the resident did something rather like that to get some bits and pieces of the placenta that hadn't come out - it was probably the most painful part of the birth.

Thankfully yes - the ceiling collapse was the last of it, and everything got fixed and sorted, and it's been pretty smooth in the two years since. There were a lot of Money Pit jokes for a bit, and my sister did *not* find them funny - she still doesn't find the jokes themselves funny, but she can laugh at her extremely unimpressed reaction to those jokes now ;).

I'd describe my own confident-with-anxiety experience differently. I'd say I don't just *seem* confident on the outside, but that when I am confident-seeming, I generally really *am* confident at that moment, inside and out. And that coexists with times where I'm a puddle of anxiety-ridden goo on the outside as well as the inside. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean people who don't know me well would recognize my anxiety-driven avoidance behaviors for what they are, but I'm living out my anxiety just as much as I live out my confidence - I personally don't tend to be anxious on the inside while confident on the outside. Instead I alternate between an inside-and-out confidence (which sometimes includes pre-performance butterflies) and an inside-and-out anxiety (outwardly the anxiety manifests as stress and avoidance and general on-edge-ness and being easily overwhelmed by things).

I tandem nursed with both 1&2 and with 2&3. (In fact, my middle *always* tandem nursed - my oldest weaned the day my youngest was born.). So I tandem nursed for over 3 years straight (and nursed for 9.5 years straight). I nursed straight through pregnancy both times - it was hard in that my nipples were extra sensitive during pg, but the older babies in question were extremely attached to nursing, and it calmed them like nothing else, so overall I found it worth it. Actually tandem nursing was easier than nursing through pg for me - just held a kid in each arm. The newbie didn't care about close quarters, and my older was happy to snuggle close. I didn't have any health issues with it, and I made plenty of milk, although I did have to make sure I ate enough (and I could anything I wanted and still lose the baby weight). Had to limit nursing for the older somewhat, because when my milk came in the older one would spoil their appetite with nursing. I appreciated that tandem nursing kept the older baby from being abruptly "replaced" as the baby, and provided a nice time for the older one to bond with the newbie. I'm glad I did it, and I'd do it again.

Remember that time my sister closed on her first house, just in time to have an historic rain event that dumped 12 inches in 12 hours? And remember how she first discovered there was a leak in the roof when the ceiling in her bathroom collapsed? (Not a hurricane, but it still got a name - Memorial Day flood - and it's been on my mind recently because of Harvey (all the articles referenced both the 2015 Memorial Day flood and last year's Tax Day flood). And that wasn't even the only thing that went wrong with her house in the first week of ownership - before the roof leak and ceiling collapse, she discovered the upstairs air conditioning didn't work and there was no access to the ductwork, and the plumbing backed up, water all over the kitchen, and the plumber pulled out hundreds of baby wipes.) Prayers for all affected by Irma :grouphug:.