We did Touch Type Read and Spell. It's pricey, even through HSBC, and it took the girls two years to get through (4th-5th for middle; 7th-8th for oldest) - they each restarted the program after hitting a wall - but it worked and they can type effectively. I don't know that it's fun, exactly, but it wasn't *un*fun - the girls never minded doing it except when they were having difficulties (which we solved by starting over). It is very simple - it's 24 levels with 30 modules per level (or something very close to that), each module taking about 5min or so. I had the girls do 3 modules a day, four days a week - they could be new or repeats - and we continued on until we were done (a little over 1.5yrs for oldest, nearly 2yrs for middle). It focuses more on accuracy than speed, which I thought was good - no temptation to sacrifice accuracy to hit speed targets; in fact, there are only accuracy targets, no speed targets at all. (And my girls both freeze up very badly when timed for stuff like that.) I chose it because it's OG-based, and good for kids with dyslexia; I figured they could use the slow, steady approach to typing as well as another pass through spelling. Oldest dd hit a wall very early in the program - in Level 1 or 2 - something about typing was hard for her (not a surprise and why I went to the expensive big gun program first). But after a restart, something clicked and she, maybe not *sailed*, but plodded steadily through the rest of the program. Middle dd initially did better than oldest - she didn't run into difficulties until around module 5 or 6; it was rough going for a while because she refused to start over - insisted on trying to keep going even through it was driving her to tears - but she eventually listened to me and gave the restart a try, and she was successful from there on. (It took awhile for her to accept that the goal of the program is to learn to type, not merely finish the program - that she wasn't failing to start over, because there'd be no point to finishing if she still couldn't type at the end.) They both write on the computer frequently and effectively, so I'm pretty pleased. I reminded them frequently about looking at the screen and not the keyboard, but I didn't police it. ~*~ What kind of problems is she having? What does "not getting it" look like? And does she find the programs themselves hard, or the programs are easy enough but it just isn't transferring?

I wouldn't want to turn an 11yo loose on fanfic sites b/c of adult content, as a pp said. But wrt comments, you can moderate comments on Archive of Our Own (AO3) - if you set up the account (use your own email and not share the password with him), you could turn on comment moderation and spike anything bad before he could see it. I think you can moderate comments on fanfiction.net (ff.n) as well. (Those are the two sites I am on.) Both my girls write fanfic, and I've toyed with asking if they want to post some online - I've shared curated fanfic with them, but I haven't turned them loose to find their own stuff. Even with ratings and such, plenty of 18-22yos aren't very good at it - I've seen plenty of rated-PG stuff that had super intense violent situations.

We all love the Harry Potter audiobooks here - Jim Dale does such a good job. There's a few interpretive choices he makes that I don't entirely agree with, but it doesn't take me out of the story, and he gets so much just spot on. Most of the audiobooks I've listened to are kids' books. IDK if I'm not a discerning audiobook listener or if I've just been lucky enough to have always gotten good readers, but I've never listened to one that took me out of the story. Most of them were classic books or really popular books - ones where the publisher would go to the effort of getting a really good reader. (Or readers, in the case of dramatized ones.) In addition to Jim Dale, I especially enjoyed Ramon de Ocampo's narrating of Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz books. Usually I prefer to read instead of listen, but he was *so good* that I think he improved the already good books with his reading. He *is* the voice of Alcatraz for me.

Not a lot - like others, we mostly have all the things already ;). Got a new planner for middle and oldest, and a new wall calendar for me. Need to get new Expo markers, because we go through ours ridiculously fast <sigh>. I got a paperwhite last Black Friday, and I love it. While I don't mind reading on my tablet, I wanted to use it less - less staring at a backlit screen, less distraction from the internet. And it has worked out really well - three-quarters of what I read can go easily on the Kindle, and it's easier on both my eyes and hands (tablet got heavy after a while). And it fits well in my purse, much less obtrusive than the tablet - it's easy to take with me. Now I just use the tablet for pdfs. (In theory you can have Amazon convert pdfs to kindle files; for simple files it works well, but if the file has boxes or pull-out quotes or footnotes or such, it doesn't convert well, or didn't when I last tried several years ago.) I don't use it for school, though, because most of my school files are pdfs and display nicer on the tablet. Kids do read school-related ebooks on our old kindles, though.

We don't have TV either. We used to get a month of YouTube TV during the Olympics; it was pretty nice - we could stream live TV and also watch replays - but it was just too expensive this year ($62 or something like that). So we are trying the $10 no-ads subscription to Peacock TV, NBC's streaming service, which has its pros and cons, but the price is definitely right ;). The main con is that there seems to be no way to actually stream the broadcast TV feeds - I managed to stream one once, but haven't been able to again. A related con is that I find it extremely unintuitive to navigate - what it wants me to watch (streaming highlights and interviews and background info) and what I want to watch (actual events) are not at all the same thing, and it's hard to tell whether what I want isn't offered or is just buried somewhere and I can't find it. Certainly, the PeacockTV's station offerings do *not* match what those stations are actually broadcasting. But, despite those cons, there is a big pro (aside from the price), and that is their replay offerings. They are embargoed, so that you have to wait a day before they are put up, but they are very nice. They show the whole event, some with "station breaks" where ads would have been, but some with no breaks at all. And minus the synchronized diving final and the opening ceremonies, very few breaks - not more than every 30min. So we don't get to see *all* the things, but we do get to see quite a few things - and we can do so at whatever time is convenient. It's not perfect (and I'm still unthrilled that it won't let us stream live broadcasts) but has definitely been worth the $10. ETA: PeacockTV and/or NBC online has a free option, that gives you a 30min "temporary pass" to livestreams. IDK if there's a daily/monthly limit or anything, but it does get mad about ad-blockers.

On the one hand, it's too much of a hypothetical to have any real idea. But playing around with the thought a bit, IDK, I'd think I'd be open to remarrying, but unlikely to actually make a real effort at dating. I like being married, but I like my own company, too - and I definitely don't like the whole "meeting people" process. But if a good man fell into my lap (the way dh did), I think I'd seriously consider it, at least.

A few thoughts: *My rec for most immediate thing to do next would be to finish out elementary SM with 6A/B. You both enjoy SM, it's going well - there's no reason *not* to do 6A/B. *And while you are doing that, you can start thinking about where you want to go for alg/geo/etc. 6A/B probably won't take a whole year - I think middle dd finished it before Feb - and then you can start either the Pre-Alg or Alg book in whatever sequence you've picked out. *WRT AoPS, I'd be hesitant about doing it with a student who doesn't have a passion for math (unless they've been really bored with other math programs), because it's pretty intense and if your student doesn't have a passion for math, they might not want to put that kind of time and effort into the subject. But it's not too expensive to try just to see. (I tried with my oldest and it definitely *wasn't* a good fit, but I don't regret trying.) Also, if you try AoPS, I'd definitely rec start with Pre-Alg, not Alg.

I was wondering that, too. My oldest is on track to have four piano courses in high school, but she didn't start playing in high school. She was at late intermediate/early advanced for her "first" high school course, so I wouldn't want to name it "basics", kwim - it gives a false impression of what she was doing. I'd only want to use "Beginner Piano Basics" if it was in fact her first year playing at all. Could you get away with something like Piano Literature 1: <major composers/time period studied> Piano Literature 2: <major composers/time period studied>, etc.? e.g. Piano Literature 1: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart Piano Literature 2: Debussy, Rachmaninoff It would be easy enough to strip out the numbers, too, so that it's just Piano Literature: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Piano Literature: Debussy, Rachmaninoff - but I agree with pp that it would be really nice to show progression. I mean, in some ways the composers can imply a progression, but it's nice to make things explicit. ~*~ IDK if this is a good idea, but for dd I was thinking of including a list of major pieces played in each year (comparable to a list of major works studied in lit), which in your shoes would be another way to show progression.

IDk how long it is in general, but a classmate of my niece had/has it and she was in the hospital for several months.

I think difficulties in spelling and difficulties in writing cursive can go together. I've read that effectively writing in cursive requires a person to be able to spell by syllables instead of spell by letter, and that's certainly been true in our experience. And dyslexics are less likely to naturally develop those skills. For us, difficulty in cursive uncovered some weaknesses that also affected reading and spelling. And so I ended up teaching cursive in a way that helped remediate those weaknesses (which was way more intense than the usual approach). Our cursive program, Smithhand, taught by strokes, so after learning a given stroke and the letters which that stroke made possible, instead of moving to words (as the program did), I had us then learn all the phonograms those letters made possible. Once we'd learned all the letters and phonograms, I moved to spelling our way through the phonics book, 2,000 one-syllables words, having the kids orally break each word down into its individual sounds and then write it in cursive. (These words mostly all used the top spelling for a given sound, so they could just work on their sound-spelling correspondence and not have to get into figuring out or remembering which phonogram to use for a given sound; if there was any question, I told them.) After that, we moved to simple studied dictation in cursive (using Spelling-You-See in direct defiance of its instructions to use print, lol), while also working on learning to break words into syllables and combine syllables into words, and to spell by syllable (using Rewards Reading, also done in cursive). After all that, they could read and write cursive fairly well, and also had a big bump in reading and spelling ability. I'd recommend giving your ds the Barton student pre-screening(it's free and pretty quick). Barton is a reading program targeted for dyslexics, but the pre-screening is looking to see if a student has the necessary underlying skills to learn phonics. (My oldest failed it as a fluent reader - she was largely reading by sight, not by phonics.) Amongst other things, it tests for the ability to divide oral words into syllables - if he can't do that (my kids couldn't), he's going to find both spelling and writing in cursive very hard.

True - I was assuming she didn't care about spoilers, but if you do care, OP, that's something to watch out for - there are lots to go around in the later movies. In that case, might as well start with the Phase 1 movies (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, etc.).

My dh says nope, lol. But given that we are grading on a curve ;), I was thinking Black Panther, and maybe Ant-Man and Ant-Man & Wasp. Black Panther has an interesting story and moral dilemmas; the two Ant-Man movies are the most fun imo, and also they feel more character-focused to me - it's like a "smaller" story in a good way - you stay in mostly one city and the characters are so much fun. Dh says maybe Doctor Strange. He also said that it wasn't surprising that Avengers didn't do it for you, since it "throws 20 characters up on the screen" - you don't have time to get to know people plus it makes for super-large action scenes.

I'm really sensitive to the height of my pillows (I've always travelled with my own pillows). I used to mix-and-match the pillows in the house to find two mostly-flat pillows that together were the right height, but after my latest set got too flat and I was waking up with knots in my neck every morning, I splurged last year on this pillow: Eli & Elm side sleeper pillow (Eli & Elm, Amazon - the Eli & Elm site has 20% off for the 4th). It's curved in a U-shape at the bottom, which I *really* like. (When I was pillow shopping, and learned that such pillows exist, I realized it might be just the thing for me, because I was constantly trying to tug my pillows to snug around my neck without getting them under my shoulder.) The filling's a nice mix of soft and firm - firm enough to not sink into but still feels soft to lay on. It also has a zipper to remove/add filling, to customize the loft - but it's also good for rearranging the fill as, because of always sleeping in the middle of it, it inevitably smooshes out from the middle to the edges over time (which is essential for me, because I need it nice and fluffed in the middle.) When I bought it, they didn't have a pillowcase to go with, so I just used a king-size protector and pillowcase, which has worked out very nicely. I've had it for a year and I'm still pleased. The neck knots quit happening, and also the tension in my face has relaxed a lot - I hadn't realized how much the badly-suited pillows were causing that till it relaxed with the new pillow. And I can doze again - I had been getting up as soon as I woke up just because it was too uncomfortable to lie there. I did have to learn how to fluff it effectively (punch in the sides forcefully, flip it over and punch it again - so I alternate which side it up every night), so I wasn't needing to unzip and rearrange the fluff every week or so, but once I got that sorted it's been the perfect pillow. I'm primarily a side sleeper, but it's comfortable to lay on my back, too. (The one downside is that it makes snuggling up to dh in bed harder, because you sleep in the middle of the pillow, not at the edges, and so it keeps me at a certain distance - no spooning up.)

That, plus I think your conversion from cu ft to gallons is wrong. When converting from cu ft to cu in, you only multiplied by 12, instead of 12x12x12=1728 (you wrote 231 cu in/ 1 cu ft, actually, but used 12).

@Carol in CA said it so very well ❤️ . I'm a lifelong member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and I love the liturgy - "he who sings prays twice". I'd strongly recommend giving it more than just one Sunday to get to know it before giving up on it - it takes time to get used to new things, and there's a lot going on in the liturgy. So much of what I love about the liturgy comes from being formed by it over time (I sing the songs from memory during my daily life). To learn more about what's going on, here's an explanation of the parts of the liturgy from the LCMS website, and an explanation from an LCMS church embedded in the service text (pdf); if you wanted to become more familiar with the music, here's recordings of all the liturgical music at the LCMS website (likely the church you visited used Setting One or Setting Three; if you saved a bulletin it probably says which). If you like videos, here's one about the liturgy as spiritual warfare (~4min), and here's one explaining about how to use the hymnal (~11min). (I find it a bit unnerving sometimes just to be at an unfamiliar church in our denomination - how do they do communion??? and such. Often the "not knowing how something goes" part of unfamiliarity adds to the discomfort; just learning how something works helps something feel more congenial.) ETA: My dh pointed me to this nice Liturgy 101 page. And I found an interesting interview on "Introducing American Evangelicals to the Historic Liturgy" (~60min). ~*~ Interestingly enough, there's been a ton of chatter over the past decade about how younger people are being drawn to more traditional forms of worship. It's beautiful, sublime, rooted in history. And it's very theologically rich - the service reenacts the Christian life in miniature. I came to appreciate the liturgy more through my interest in theology.

Actually, it sounds like he's got good math intuition - he saw a useful alternate way to solve it, and his instincts were spot on - he knew what he had to do. It shows good understanding and flexible thinking 👍. It's just that his calculation skills weren't up to the task doing it correctly. My oldest was this way: she saw the relationships well, knew how the numbers fit together, but had problems getting the calculations right. I agree with HomeAgain about using visual models - letting him work out the facts he doesn't know with manipulatives over and over (and over and over). Let them keep proving it to themselves. It's what I did with both of my girls when we were drilling mult facts. If they couldn't remember what 6x8 was, for example, they'd pull out a bunch of counters (fake jewels, in our case), make 6 piles of 8, and then either skip count the piles, or put them together into piles of ten for easy counting, or whatever other way of making sense of them they wanted to try. They got all anxious about being timed, so I didn't worry about speed as much as getting them able to figure it reliably enough to be able to see relationships at a glance in long division and in fractions (aka effective number sense). You could also work on mental math techniques - our program emphasized "making tens" to add - when adding 7+8, for example, you think of it as "8 needs 2 more to make 10, which leaves 5 left over, which makes 15". It's a super helpful technique and I use it myself a lot. (It also meant that the only add/sub facts that needed to be memorized were those up to 10, which were a lot easier to learn.) You can also combine it with RightStart's emphasis on 5s. You can see quantities up to 5 at a glance, and then you think of 6 as 5&1, 7 as 5&2, etc. - more quantities you can see at a glance. The program I used (Singapore Math) has set of supplemental mental math workbooks that you could do alongside your regular program: Level 1, Level 2. I'd rec starting with Level 1 - it's below level for him, but it sets the foundation for the rest, and easy confidence building can be a plus.

I read the infographic differently. There's three separate aspects: probability of transmitting, probability of disease, and disease severity. (I found the entire infographic here; it's from Mar 4, so advice may have changed in the interim.) In the unvaxxed/mask:unvaxxed/mask scenario, the probability of transmitting from either person to the other is "lower" - makes sense, since both sides are unvaxxed and masked. Probability of disease is likewise ranked as "lower" for both, and disease severity for both could be anywhere from asymptomatic to severe. In the unmasked unvaxxed:vaxxed scenario, the possibility of transmission from unvaxxed (blue) to vaxxed (pink) is "high", which makes sense, because there's neither mask nor vaccine reducing transmission risk (while the risk of transmission from vaxxed to unvaxxed is "lower"). However, *despite* the high possibility of the vaxxed person being *exposed* to the disease from the unmasked/unvaxxed person, the probability of them actually *getting* it is "very low", and the likely severity merely "asymptomatic to moderate". I'm reading the infographic as saying that masking alone and vaxxing alone are about equivalent in terms of *you* not infecting *others* ("lower" risk of transmission in both cases, although "lower" with an asterisk for vaxxed, acknowledging that, as of Mar 4, prelim evidence suggested vaccines reduced transmission 50-90%), but that vaxxing alone reduces your risk of *getting* covid ("Very low" for vaxxing alone versus "Lower" for masking alone) as well as reduces your risk of the severity (topping out at "moderate" for vaxxed versus "severe" for unvaxxed). There are several other scenarios at the link, with the "best" one being everyone is both masked and vaxxed, but vaxxed/unmasked being the next best.

Dd14 and dd12 got their second shots today. So far, just sore arms, about like it was with the first shot at this point. They had a hard time sleeping the first night after their first shot because of how sore their arms became, but it was better by the end of day 2. So we'll see how it goes this time - I'm thinking of offering a Tylenol before bed so their arms don't keep them up this time. They are eagerly counting down their two weeks.

So, when I first read this, I thought "I don't really think of Louisiana as being full of 'select large cities', but whatever, you found it". It wasn't until I was telling it to my dd that I realized you meant Los Angeles, lol.

I understood her to mean a trial of vaccine vs Covid - that if you compared a group of vaccine-getters to an equivalent group of Covid-getters, the Covid-getters would have had far worse symptoms than the vaccine-getters, including for kids and teens (i.e. even though kids who get Covid have, on average, less severe symptoms than adults who get Covid, kids with Covid would still, on average, have more severe symptoms than kids who get the vaccine). Thus her assertion that getting the vaccine is definitely better than *actually* getting Covid, even if getting the vaccine might not be better than a 5% chance of getting Covid.

Yeah, my engineering profs *hated* when people failed to notice that they'd forgotten to change their calculator from degrees to radians; they'd get something ridiculous like sin(Pi/2) = 0.03, but instead of realizing the problem and changing formats, they'd just blindly write it down. I talk to my kids a lot about sanity checking their answers. I think you're on to something here. Our Pre-Algebra and Algebra texts are from the 60s, and expect everything to be done by hand, and so are designed that way - that all the calculations expected are pedagogically useful. The one problem my dd did that really didn't deserve to be done by hand was from a state test (that did allow calculators, although it hadn't even occurred to me that it would till she hit that one problem) - it involved decimal multiplication and long division, and wasn't worth the effort to do by hand. All they really wanted to test was the ability to know what to do with the (ugly) numbers.

I can say that this is very real. I was an engineering major, and we joked about how we'd all lost our mental math skills because everything was either 2+2 or something insane - we had little practice with more-difficult-yet-still-reasonable numbers. (It was embarrassing to play cribbage with my grandpa at 19 - I was so. stinking. slow. at adding that he'd end up just doing it for me, whereas in middle/high-school I could keep up fine.) Also, in my high school honors math classes, people joked-with-too-much-truth about pulling out their calculators for anything more than 2+2 - and they did, too, and their calculation skills, both mental and pen & paper, declined accordingly. My oldest is in 9th, doing Alg 1, and we don't use a calculator. And honestly, ime in algebra there's really not much that requires one - everything's pretty straightforward with good number sense, and using a calculator too much disrupts the development of good number sense. There's some apparently-hairy fraction calculations that can be done easily if you use some number sense to cancel things out, but if you just plug them into the calculator you'd miss it entirely. And even in pre-algebra, for most of the calculations that took my dd a really long time, it wasn't because the numbers just sucked, but because she missed how they could play nicely if she did the problem differently. ETA: There was only one problem she had in middle school that really didn't deserve to be done by hand, but she'd already done most of it by the time I realized how annoying and pointless it was to calculate <oops>. Like a pp, I'm more of a "calculator for a particular problem that deserves it", instead of allowing blanket calculator use. If the numbers just don't play nicely no matter what you do - it's just going to be a nasty brute-force calculation - then by high school I'm fine with using a calculator for that. But using a calculator regularly, on things that are kinda annoying but also can be simplified to an extent too - well, that's how you lose your number sense and your mental math skills. Right now it doesn't occur to my dd to seek out a calculator - she expects to do things in her head and by hand - and I'm glad. I watched my fellow honors students get calculator dependent really fast, and it took a lot of contrarian effort on my part to resist, to force myself to try to do things in my head and by hand before reaching for the calculator. (And then of course I joined them in college, so embarrassing.) My mental math skills are better now, after years of teaching elementary math (where I deliberately resisted using the answer key, but instead raced my kids to the answer), than they've been in years. I like that.

I missed the second poster - I saw one poster say that people she knew in two states were getting it in two-week intervals. FWIW, I'm in TX, and it's all been four-week intervals for Moderna for everyone I know - that poster's experience doesn't match mine at all.

My 14yo and 12yo got their first shot 4.5 hours ago. They didn't ask for ID (although my 12yo is nearly the same height as my 14yo - an elderly man getting his second shot commented about my having twins). Both of them have sore arms, but nothing else so far.

We're scheduled at Walgreens, and while they say they want a photo id, they also say they won't turn anyone away for not having one.