Probably? General revelation and special revelation aren't really terms my tradition uses much; I've read about them and I *think* they apply, but my understanding of them is wrapped up in the theory I'm testing here. IOW, how generic you connects those terms to my question is actually really pertinent to what I'm trying to find out. I'm trying to figure out how "mixy" people see the supernatural and the natural, particularly in terms of what that means for the possibility and "normality" of God's beyond-natural presence and activity in the natural world. If that helps any.

Working supernaturally through natural means totally counts as working supernaturally for poll purposes, so long as God's supernatural work is driving the process and is occurring right now (and not only in the past). What doesn't count for poll purposes is where God's supernatural presence is behind natural laws in such a way that it is functionally indistinguishable from His absence - that generic you doesn't believe that God does anything different from what natural laws would have done anyway. Also, believing that God supernaturally initiated natural laws at creation that then operated apart from continual, ongoing supernatural involvement doesn't count for poll purposes, either. Basically, I'm trying to get at whether people consider God to be supernaturally active in the world in a way that makes a concrete, material difference. If that helps any.

My question has to do with what you believe God is doing *supernaturally* on earth, and in believers. Specifically: which Person or Person(s) of the Trinity (if any) are supernaturally present and active out in the material world? (God's presence/activity in and through the sacramental elements counts here, including Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist.) And which Persons are supernaturally present and active within believers? *Supernatural* is key here - if you believe God is responsible but works *purely* through natural means, then it doesn't count for the purposes of this poll. If possible, I'd love posts giving a brief explanation of your answer - what's each Person of the Trinity doing and not doing, both out in the created world, and within believers? (I have a theory about a trend in the answers.). Eta: please include your denomination if possible. Feel free to ask for clarification as needed. Also, I'm not looking to debate answers - just to see what they are and try to understand the range of answers. Thank you so much for helping me out :). ETA: In response to a comment, working supernaturally through natural means totally counts as working supernaturally for poll purposes, so long as you understand God's supernatural work to be driving the process and that supernatural activity is occurring right now, in the present (and not only in the past). What doesn't count for poll purposes is where God's supernatural presence is behind natural laws in such a way that it is functionally indistinguishable from His absence - that generic you doesn't believe that God does anything different from what natural laws would have done anyway. Also, believing that God supernaturally initiated natural laws at creation that then operate apart from continual, ongoing supernatural involvement doesn't count for poll purposes, either. Basically, I'm trying to get at whether people consider God to be supernaturally active in the world in a way that makes a concrete, material difference. If that helps any.

Since I mentioned the phonetically-arranged sight word list a few times, here's the link: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html :) Even though working through it didn't make library readers work for fluency practice, it has been helpful in other ways. She can "use" her reading skills in daily life a lot more. A biggie is that she can now read instructions in her math workbook without help, which makes her far more independent in math. (Before she was independent on the math, but needed me right there to read her the problems.) She enjoys being able to read beginning readers, and just in general I find she's better able to tackle the random stuff that comes her way. I wouldn't *start* here, but after a solid beginning, it opens up a lot to be able to read the standard "sight words".

I read it several years ago (there's a free pdf on eric.gov), and I found it interesting - thought about modifying it for a pure phonics-only approach. I was hesitant about the grammar and picture clues when I read it (and reducing decoding to using phonics "clues" alongside other non-phonetic clues), and subsequent experience teaching my girls has only confirmed it. My oldest was the whole language poster child - naturally used grammar and picture clues to bolster her weak decoding skills - and ended up being a sight reader *despite* my teaching her a very pure phonics-only approach (I am covertly remediating that in her spelling). She heavily resisted sounding out and hated words in isolation (no context clues to aid decoding), and I cannot imagine how much worse it would have been if she'd been officially *encouraged* to use grammar/picture clues *instead* of decoding. (I say this now, but I admit, when I was teaching her and watching her struggle so much with phonics - we were a full year on CVC words - *knowing* the whole time that she'd *fly* if I did whole language - I regularly doubted myself and wondered if I should really stay so strict with phonics-only. But looking back, I'm *so* thankful I stuck to phonics-only. She subverted enough of my phonics teaching as it was, picked up enough bad sight habits as it was - I only wish I knew then what I know now. But I'm running her through the exact same exercises as middle dd - billed as spelling/cursive practice instead of as reading practice - and it's helping her out a ton. (Her spelling has been upgraded to garden-variety bad instead of the off-the-charts horrifyingness it used to be, and I live in hope it may one day be genuinely *good*.)) ~*~ I think there's a lot to be said for grammar and picture clues when it comes to *comprehension* - just not in place of *decoding*, kwim? And intuiting grammar clues on the fly is very helpful for fluency - so long as your decoding is strong and can quickly raise a red flag when your grammar expectation turns out to be *wrong*. My oldest had zero comprehension issues - used comprehension to bolster her weak decoding skills (and to subvert my attempts to have her exercise her weak decoding skills), so I never worried about teaching them to her. With my middle, who has been far less ready to turn to picture clues and slower at using grammar clues (though I've noticed her using grammar expectations recently, anticipating what the text will say based on context clues, including sentence structure), I've wondered when/if I should explicitly bring them up. So far all I've done is explicitly discuss what a pronoun is referring to - teach her that a pronoun can reference something in a previous sentence - and practice identifying them. (One of the reasons I love Let's Read - they work in that sort of grammatical structure pretty early and provide a lot of practice.) But I do that in the context of comprehension, not decoding. Reading is absolutely more than decoding - but that doesn't mean it's ok to sideline decoding so long as you can comprehend something without it, kwim? ~*~ So I've used bits and bobs of the book in my teaching, but I didn't use the actual method. Part of that is my aforementioned disagreements wrt using non-phonetic clues to supplement *decoding* - instead of to help with *comprehension*. But part of it was that, idk, the method sounded neat and all but required a lot more work to set up and record-keeping and all than I wanted to do. (But I'm pretty sure the method I fell into uses at *least* as much record-keeping - it just somehow is more intuitive and all for me.) And in retrospect it would have never worked for my kids anyway (not as a phonics-only approach, anyway), as they needed one pattern at a time with a lot of practice, and going straight to uncontrolled text would have been too much. There's an interesting (free) approach to using Bob books to teach reading that seems a lot like a phonics-only version of Teach Your Child to Read with Children's Books: http://www.teachingwithbob.com/

My oldest dd read Timothy Zahn's Dragonback series and Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series in 4th. I've read and enjoyed them both myself.

Let's Read was written by a linguist, and it shows - he paid attention to all the little details, far more than any other program I've seen (with the possible exception of Webster's Speller). So many phonics programs introduce plural 's' without bothering to distinguish between when the 's' sounds like /s/ and when it sounds like /z/ - it doesn't tend to trip up neurotypical native speakers, but it can mess up kids who struggle (or non-native speakers) - but our program clearly teaches them separately, which I appreciate so much. There's many other examples, too, where too many phonics programs just gloss over or flat out ignore phonetic differences, but our program notices and keeps them distinct. And also, I've noticed that they gradually introduce grammar patterns in the practice reading - they are carefully building up sentence complexity and teaching grammar cues just as much as they are teaching phonics. The authors just have put so much expertise and knowledge and attention to detail into this program - it's spoiled me for most anything else ;). (My poor dh suffers from my frequent rants about crappy, lazy, substandard so-called "phonics" readers :lol:.)

I'm using Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach: https://smile.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhart/dp/0814334555/ (I have the 1961 edition, not the 2010 edition - idk if it makes any difference). It has an introductory chapter with the history of writing systems (very interesting), and then a discussion of how to use the book. The book's approach is an interesting combination of whole word and phonics (teach words as wholes, but in a progression that develops intuitive phonetic knowledge), but I go with the sound-out-and-blend traditional phonics approach instead. ETA: But I've found that the hallmarks of their approach - one pattern at a time with lots of practice, including practicing distinguishing between "minimal pairs" (man/min, man/mat) - works really well with kids who find blending a struggle (like mine) or who tend to guess or ignore small differences (also like mine). The bulk of the book is a carefully-thought-out progression of reading material (learning the most common sound of each phonogram first, with plenty of practice before introducing alternate sounds) - it's very much learn to read by reading - starting with the -an family and working through all the short-a CVC words, family by family, and then doing the same with the other short vowels. Each lesson has a list of new words to learn, all which follow a particular phonetic pattern, and then fully decodable reading practice (sentences, then paragraphs, and later stories) which use the new words plus previously learned words. The first 36 lessons are on CVC words (teaching about 270 or so words); the next section does blends (~18 lessons and 450 words) and common consonant digraphs (~17 lessons and 450 words); the next section does common vowel digraphs (~30 lessons and 550 words). That's the first 40% or so of the book; after that begins alternate and irregular spellings. For the "regular" spellings, they include a *lot* of words, common and uncommon, so kids get a lot of practice with the common spelling (I've looked up several that *I* didn't know). But for alternate and irregular spellings, they only include common-ish words worth learning. It doesn't explicitly teach any rules, but implicitly teaches them (purposefully) through its carefully arranged patterns, which makes it very easy to include them if you want. (I only just started to appreciate the rules as such - learning via pattern instead of explicitly applying rules was very much up my alley - and I've noticed that my kids are helped very much by first learning individual patterns with lots of practice before moving to mixed practice.)

Just to complicate things (lol), I do teach phonograms, just not all at once. I teach the phonograms as they come up in our (traditional, arranged-by-pattern) phonics program (so just one sound at a time - really cement the first sound before adding in the other sounds). I have a phonogram chart for reference - a filled-in one on one side and a blank one on the reverse - each of the girls has a copy, too - and as we learn new sounds, we fill in the blanks. It's especially helpful when you are doing lots of informal, hodge-podge learning, because it both lets you know what you have and haven't covered, plus it helps organize all the bits of info into a cohesive whole. (It's been especially helpful with our whirlwind phonetic tour through the Dolch sight words - it helps dd7.5 see how all those new patterns fit into the overall picture - especially how many of them are really very outlier spellings.) I keep the charts handy when we are doing reading or spelling, and the girls are free to use them as references whenever they need to. (I'm actually teaching the words in our main, traditional pattern-arranged phonics program in a WRTR-style way - I wrote them up in sound pictures and coded them to indicate which spelling to use, and the girls use their charts to look up the spelling. After they've spelled 50 or so words with that particular phonogram, it's well on its way to being memorized. And having to sound out the words in sound pictures forces my sight-reading oldest to work on her blending. It's spelling-your-way-to-reading for my middle and reading-your-way-to-spelling for my oldest ;).)

IDK if any of the above blather was actually helpful :shifty. To summarize, my thoughts on when to start readers that aren't correlated to your "teaching reading" program are to start when your kid is far enough along that they have the skills to be able to sound out (with help) an unfamiliar word, instead of having to learn it by sight. Also, that your kiddo is far enough along that they've learned at least 90-95% of the words they'll see in the early lessons. And that you are far enough ahead in your main program that you won't quickly get into a bunch of unfamiliar words in the readers (or the readers are well-enough correlated with your main program that they do things in basically the same order). Or when your kiddo really, really wants the boost of being able to read "real books" (like mine did), and then you bootstrap your way into somehow satisfying the above criteria to make the readers work even when they aren't on speaking terms with your main program. (My dh has heard *so many rants* from me about so-called "phonetic readers" that *aren't*.) ETA: Also, here's the link to Dekodiphukan: http://www.center.edu/dekodiphukanPage.shtml

Both of my girls have needed a lot of practice, too. I've used Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, which has a *ton* of practice - very comprehensive word lists plus extensive sentences/paragraphs/stories for practice. The fun factor's not high, though - for my oldest I put the first 12 or so lessons on the kindle with pictures on each page, and for my middle I made magnetic tiles (Dekodiphukan sound picture tiles and AAS-style phonogram tiles) and we built the words before reading them in the text. (If you have an iPad, Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) is free and awesome, with a high fun factor (if you don't have an iPad, the print version is free for downloading). It teaches reading by teaching the 44 sounds of the English language as sound pictures (/s/ as a hissing snake and /z/ as a buzzing bee, for example), which are learned painlessly through a fun rhyming story. After learning to read and write with the sound pictures, they use a phonogram chart to teach which spelling goes with each sound. My kids have auditory processing issues and those sound pictures have been *wonderful*.) Wrt development leap vs practice for fluency, so far I have one of each. Something clicked for my oldest after about a year and she went from sounding out cvc words and consonant blends to reading everything in a couple of months. Otoh, my middle has been going the slow and steady route, and needs quite a bit more fluency practice. (From the beginning, my oldest preferred sentences and paragraphs to single words (more context to help her weak decoding), while my middle preferred single words to sentences (less for her weak decoding skills to have to deal with).) I just bought several old linguistic reader series to use with middle dd for fluency practice (Merrill Linguistic Readers, SRA Basic Reading Series, and Linguistic Readers (the latter starts out much harder than the first two). She likes reading "real books" more than reading out of our big reading book. (Eta: my oldest has needed quite a bit of fluency practice wrt decoding multi-syllable words and breaking words into sounds for spelling (her spelling was truly horrific) - at least as much as her sister - it just feels different when your fluency practice comes *after* you are fluently reading, kwim?) With my middle, I brought in readers when she was far enough along in her main book that I could teach sight words phonetically using ElizabethB's chart on the Phonics Page (when she was solid on sounding out even complicated one-syllable words (cccvccc blends), and so could sound out any combination of sounds, and was comfortable with the idea of two-letter phonograms). Our main program does barely any sight words ('a' and 'the' are the only ones in the first 1700 words), and delays learning cvce words longer than many programs, and while I really like the pure phonics-only approach, that did make finding readers she could read a trick and a half - I was having fits with trying to find phonetic readers that more-or-less lined up with our main book. Last April I started phonetically teaching her the sight words on the Dolch list so she could read the "standard" beginning readers at the library (as well as more of what she comes across in her daily life), but that's slower going than learning each pattern slowly and logically (with lots of practice) as she does in her main book. And honestly it wasn't doing her all that much good - the popular reader series are just too far off anything we are doing - the ones she could decode had too few words per page to help with her fluency (although they did help with her confidence). But I did come across other linguistic reader series this summer and ordered a whole bunch used, and so far they have been just what we needed. Starts off with plenty of words on the page, but very simple phonetically, and follows the same basic progression as our main book. One thing I like about the linguistic approach is that it provides a *lot* of cvc and CCVC/cvcc practice (more than I've seen from any other method) - really builds that foundation rock solid - and my kids have really needed that. I have noticed that the readers I bought do introduce more sight words than my main book - comparable to what the bob books do. And after realizing my dd had a 1500 word reading vocabulary yet couldn't read the most basic of non-phonetic readers (demoralizing for us both), I understand why the vast majority of phonics programs do teach some sight words. I'm still pretty anti-sight words, but avoiding them does have a price. I do like the logic of the vertical phonics approach, but neither of my girls could have learned that way. They have very much needed the teach-by-patterns approach of traditional phonics, and with plenty of practice with each pattern before introducing a new one.

I don't think we can say that. It's one thing to thank God for an injustice being remedied - He is the author of all good, after all. But it's another thing entirely to say that an unremedied injustice staying unremedied is God's will - because injustice is sin and is *never* God's will. Why does God allow injustice to persist for a time in this life? I don't know, but it's *not* because He wants injustice to persist. God is *not* the author of sin.

My third baby didn't wait for the doctor - the resident broke my water around 9-10cm and he was born two minutes later. I remember the nurse or resident saying something about "can you wait for the doctor?!" but I pretty emphatically said No!! and that was that - they got down to the business of catching the baby. I just cannot fathom forcing the baby to stay in like that :svengo:. Wrt c-section rates, that hospital had a 46% section rate, which really worried me (but it was where my high risk practice did births), but actually turned out to not be a bad thing. I talked to one of my nurses about it and she said the hospital was unhappy with that rate and was actively working to reduce it. And certainly the posters around supported lower intervention births (I spent a lot of time there getting non-stress tests and such, so plenty of time to read all the various things on the walls) and the nurses were great wrt my doula and birth plan. I had a good birth there (so much different from my first hospital birth, where I "wasn't permitted" to move at all during a pitocin-induced labor, which pushed me to have a home birth with my second). Wrt hospitals treating the moms like children, I didn't have any problems with that that I noticed with ds in the special care nursery, but when he had to go back to the hospital right after coming home, I did notice just how much *respect* I got from the pediatric nurses and doctors as his mother. They treated me as a full partner in his care - no hint of me-as-patient cluttering things up (honestly I'm pretty sure it never really connected that the mom of a 4 day old infant was herself 4 days out from giving birth) - and it was so *different* from the complete non-entity I was when my oldest was in the nicu (at a different, far worse, hospital). (My dd was in the nicu for 36 hours and the *only* information I got from anyone at the hospital about her was from two nurses gossiping over my head like I wasn't there. I didn't even get to *see* her at all in that time. I was upset about that for her whole first year.)

Some links to SMSG texts: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=School%20Mathematics%20Study%20Group (easy to find which text you are looking for and view online, but idk how easy to download/print) https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Smsg+geometry+with+coordinates+teacher%27s+commentary&ft=on (Eric.ed.gov has all the PDFs for smsg online and downloadable as PDF, but searching went better when I could get the exact title from the other link)

My results were: Score for Beast Academy: 3 Score for Math Mammoth: 6 Score for Math U See: 3 Score for Mathematical Reasoning: 6 Score for Miquon: 6 Score for RightStart: 8 Score for Saxon: 8 Score for Shiller: 6 Score for Singapore: 15 Score for Teaching Textbooks: 0 And Singapore Math is indeed the math program we use :).

Thanks to this thread, I just had a realization: part of rape culture is this sense that there's this thin line between consensual sex and rape - so that all it takes to go from consensual sex to sexual assault is for a person "go a little too far". And on top of that, often there's a sense that the line is blurry, so that people of good will can't even always tell exactly where it is in any given situation. And so it makes it feel like *anyone* could be at risk to "accidentally" take a step over the unclear-to-begin-with line - because who hasn't gone farther than they meant to (in something) in a moment of stupidity or lowered inhibitions. And I realized that I had sort of had that assumption in my head. But actually the path that leads to sexual assault is an entirely different path than the path that leads to morally good sex. (Which I realize that sexual assault prevention advocates have been saying over and over - I get it now.) Even rape culture acknowledges that good people don't sexually assault their partners. But rape culture assumes that sexual assault happens when you "go too far" along the sexual activity continuum - being a good person means that you stay on the "right side" of the line. And that makes sexual ethics focus on where the line is and how to avoid going over it. But when you see the "consensual sexual activity" continuum as *entirely separate* from the "sexual assault" continuum, then "being a good person" in the realm of sexual ethics involves both refusing to take a single step on the path to sexual assault *and* also affirmatively walking on a path that leads to moral sex. Which is the point of affirmative consent: to not just avoid forcing unwanted sex on others, but to actively seek to walk another, better path. It makes "being a good person" involve more than just "avoiding going too far" - to involve seeking the good in addition to (completely) avoiding (even a hint of) the bad.

I think it sounds awesome :). The way I've seen the footnotes done is the usual "author, title, page number" followed by ", author's translation". So, for example, "Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 65, author's translation".

Here's one (that I have) that's $10 on Amazon: http://smile.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-2-Color-Desktop-Abacus/dp/B001V9ACMK?ie=UTF8&keywords=rightstart%20abacus&qid=1463089530&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Lingua Latina itself has three sets of exercises at the end of each capitulum (chapter). Pensum A is 10-15 lines of Latin prose in which you need to fill in some missing endings. Pensum B is 10-15 lines of Latin prose in which you need to fill in some missing words (including the correct ending). Pensum C is about 10 questions, in Latin, about the reading, and you are supposed to respond in Latin. IMO all these would be worth doing, even if done orally for a quick review. (I've found that when I've internalized the Latin, I can just read out the Latin lines and almost automatically fill in the right ending/word.) But writing out the Latin is worthwhile, as well. (And it allows you to better check your work.) Each capitulum is divided into 2-3 sections (lectio), plus a grammar section, and the Exercitia have 3-4 exercises for each lectio, plus 1-2 exercises for the grammar section. So there's 11-12 exercises for each capitulum in the Exercitia, in addition to the three exercises for each capitulum in the text itself. They are similar to the exercises in the text: fill-in-the-missing-ending grammar practice, fill-in-the-missing-word vocab/grammar practice, and reading comprehension questions that also give practice in Latin composition. It's *extra* practice, but I don't think it's substantially *different* practice than what's already in the text. Since your student has already presumably mastered the grammar, and just needs to learn to think in Latin-as-Latin, probably just reading and re-reading the text is the main practice he needs. Lingua Latina has no translation work - everything's in Latin - all the input *and* all the output. The idea is to facilitate being able to think and work *in* Latin. It helped me get over my wrong-headed notion that you translate in order to find out what the text says; rather, you understand the text *first* and then translate. Makes so much more sense that way. I really struggled in Latin once multiple meanings for each case were introduced - couldn't figure out *how* you knew which one applied in a given case??? Well, you figure it out the same way you do in English - context. But as I couldn't understand the Latin without translating it - *all* I had were dictionary definitions and formal grammar rules to try to puzzle out the meaning (and that wasn't remotely sufficient on its own) - it seemed like a catch-22 to me: I had to know what the Latin said in order to know what the Latin said??? It was a major revelation to me that I could understand Latin like an actual language ;). But so long as you can read and understand Lingua Latina as Latin, you could then use bits of it for translation practice. I do think there's a lot of benefit to translating between languages - just so long as you can think and understand both languages *without* translating.

My oldest is left-handed. We did Smithhand and she was able to learn it without trouble. It's a slanted hand, but she naturally writes it upright; it looks nice and legible written upright and she writes it smoothly.

Aside from Spencerian (which I love but idk if it's practical for us), my favorite hand is Smithhand. I appreciate both its appearance and how it is easy to write neatly. Dd9 is a lefty with several symptoms of dyslexia (and it took her years to be able to print neatly), but she has a very nice, legible cursive hand.

Same here, with my middle dd - I call her the grade she'd be in school, and so she just turned 7.5 and is at the end of first grade. (And it is weird, because my oldest had a birthday a little *before* the cutoff, and she was 7.5 for the latter half of *second* grade.) And dd7.5 also isn't reading fluently yet. In her case, it's because we spent a full year on learning to blend CVC words, and then a half year on learning to blend blends ;). (She failed the Barton pre-screening - didn't have the phonemic awareness to learn to read phonetically - and so we had to explicitly build up the pre-reading skills that most kids develop naturally or with a few weeks worth of effort. She now has the PA skills of an early 2nd grader - we're making progress :thumbup:.) I was worried about her being behind, so I looked up some "reading benchmarks for first grade", in Straight Talk About Reading, and at the end of 1st, kids are supposed to have a reading vocabulary of 300-500 words. And the thing is, dd7.5 *does* have a reading vocabulary of over 500 words - she's (over)learned ~280 CVC words and ~450 CCVC/CVCC/CCVCC words, and can sound out any other word following those patterns :thumbup: (and let me tell, you, we worked *hard* for that). But she only started multi-letter phonograms at the beginning of April and we haven't done *any* sight words (minus 'a' and 'the', which I taught phonetically). Which means that her 700 word reading vocabulary is missing a *lot* of the most common words - and she hasn't yet learned the phonics needed to decode them - so that while she can fluently read controlled text covering what she's learned, she still can't read early readers (which assume kids learn a lot of irregular common words as sight words early on). So she looks a lot worse off than she is - but it's because of the scope & sequence of our reading program instead of her difficulties. But she knows what she knows very well, she's built a good foundation, she's making good progress - and in a year's time, when we've finished our reading book (and she'll have learned how to sound out over 4300 words), she'll be right on track for the end of second grade. ETA: My older dd took off with reading at one point in our book and so we quit phonics. But later she had trouble, and it was because she hadn't ever really learned those things she hadn't been taught ;) (and so I have her working through her old phonics book as cursive/spelling practice). So in your shoes, I'd want to evaluate if she was having fluency trouble with things she'd been explicitly taught and had practiced, or if she's stumbling over things that she knows in some words but not in others, and maybe that's because she never really was explicitly taught that concept.

I used to never write in books, because it was a "thing" for me, too. But in college I got in the habit of taking notes in the (nice, big) margins of my textbooks and appreciated the convenience of it, and now I'm in theory willing to write in books. No highlighting, though - I still have a thing there - although the highlighting in my dh's books doesn't bother me. (Drives him nuts, though, when he's reading my books and can't highlight them.) Even so, I don't actually write in most of my books, though - unless I'm reading a big hardback that stays open on its own at the table, it's just seems so *inconvenient* to write in a book. I need a nice, hard surface to write on, and for the book to stay still, and most of the time I don't have that. (And I always write lightly in pencil - it's not that I'm going to go through and erase them, but that somehow it just seems less obtrusive.). There's only one book that I'm currently writing in (a big philosophy hardback that has biggish margins and can stay open on its own and has *so much* to think about that it's helpful to bracket important bits of text and jot down thoughts in the margins as they come). Most of the time, though, I usually journal. Whenever I hit a really good quote, or I have thoughts that want to get out, or I want to muse about some point further - I go over to my computer and jot it down. Usually I let the interesting thoughts or quotes percolate until I have enough in my head that it's worth putting down the book and going over to the computer to get them down. (And then I usually bang out a couple of thousand words of musings about them.)

I was terrified of dogs as a kid. As an adult it's mostly mellowed out to a slight wariness (except whenever a dog does something unexpected/maybe-possibly-aggressive, then I'm right back to fear again), but I'm still not a dog person, really. I am kinda of a corgi person, though. Dh's family are major dog people, and when I met him, they had the sweetest, friendliest, most well-trained corgi ever. He was the first dog I truly wasn't scared of. I knew when I married dh that he wanted to keep a dog around, and I was ok so long as they were corgis. But tbh, as cute as our guy is, if it were up to me I'd still choose no dog over dog. I'm soundly outvoted by the rest of the family, though ;).

I was waiting for someone to mention corgis :wub:. Granted, idk anyone else in our area with one, but everyone seems to think our guy's all kinds of cute ;). We managed to get ours for $850 last summer (did have to drive 2.5 hours to the breeder, but that's not bad), and there are many corgi rescue societies; granted, there's a lot more people wanting corgis from the corgi rescue than corgis being rescued, but my sis-in-law is connected with the corgi rescues groups and seemed to have no problem finding available corgis when we were looking. Maybe friend all the regional corgi rescue groups on FB and your dd can get to know the people involved - have corgi fun even if y'all don't end up getting one of your own :). (As for the actual question, I'm not very good with breeds - only size and color ;). I'd say half the dogs in our area are biggish short-haired dogs, and the other half are various smaller dogs with longer or curly fur. Lots of help, I know ;).) Our corgi at least runs pretty fast - my oldest can run with him pretty well. But maybe that's more a jogging pace for an adult/teen, instead of a running pace (as it is for my 9yo).