Or any knowledge about what "cancellation activities" are? My dad had a stroke last Oct, and his speech therapist gave him homework from this book, only she didn't give any instructions and what to do is non-obvious from the pages themselves. They're "Cancellation Activities", on pages 101-115, under the "Attention" section. Each page looks like a word search - a 30x30 letter grid - and the page headings just say "Cancellation Activity - Letter 1" and "Cancellation Activity - Letter 2" and such. Earlier this therapist gave him word searches where she'd had him circle all the H's, say, and cross out all the O's, for example. If all else fails, Mom's going to pick a few random letters and have him do the same thing on these sheets, but first I'd thought I'd see if anyone here had a better idea of what he's meant to do. TIA

One thought about the rural in-between area and your dh working from home: what's the high-speed internet like? We live in a rural area, and the options aren't super great in town (very small town) - middling dsl and (new) cable, plus mediocre satellite options, and outside of town there's only satellite. Even cell reception's not that great. We ended up living in town in large part so we could have decent internet.

Susan Wise Bauer

My oldest dd is a lefty, and she calls it "rock, paper, scissors," as does my lefty ds. My righty middle dd and I also call it "rock, paper, scissors". None of us have heard it any other way. Offhand I'd think family/friend/regional influence affects the name more than handedness.

We have a just-barely-adequate system, that breaks down some during winter (when southern winter alternates with short periods of winter-winter). We have no entry way or closet or anything convenient like that. Instead, we have a jacket/bench/shoe holder thing next to one side of the door, and boot trays next to the other side. The jacket holder is sufficient for jackets, but not for winter coats - they have separate command hooks stuck to the side of available bookcases (ds's is across from the back door, while the girls' are on the shelf right next to their bedroom; dh's and mine fit on the holder). The dining table is right next to the holder, so jackets often overflow on the chairs there and have to be pared back <sigh>. On the bench is a laundry basket that holds sandals, and the two shoe rows hold the kids' closed-toed shoes plus my boots (just barely - constant overflow and paring back issues). The boot trays hold one pair of "quick access shoes to take dogs out" per person - mostly crocs and sandals, but boots when winter is particularly winter-y (crocs/sandals go into the basket then; boots are stored in closets most of the year). We have two baskets, one each for summer hats and winter hats/mittens, that sits on the dog crate next to the front door.

I didn't even know ceiling fans were considered "bad" - I considered ceiling fans in all the rooms as a *selling point* when we bought our FL and TX houses. (In our rental house in IL we ended up buying floor fans for every room, which is way more "unsightly" and annoying.) Here's one more reason why I'd be a poor fit for those reno shows - you'd have to pry my ceiling fans out of my cold, dead hands, lol.

When we lived in suburbia, I was driving 20min one way three nights a week (one dance/gymnastics class per kid) and 5-10min one way one night (piano for 2 kids). I never went home in between; I mostly read in the waiting area, but sometimes I'd walk to the library to entertain youngest. Now that we live in the middle of nowhere, I drive 45min one way for dance/art one night (we dropped dance because of covid, so I'm just reading for an hour now, but last year we were there for 3.5 hours), and 1hr one way (in the opposite direction) for piano lessons (we are there for ~2.5 hours).

Watching this last night, I thought the same. I watched a documentary on 60s space program a few years ago, and Wernher von Braun exploded a *lot* of test rockets in trying to develop the Saturn vehicles.

Gotcha. I was thinking in terms of ACEs and such.

How does stored trauma relate to stored stress? I spent a couple of years in a very stressful situation that I dealt with by hardcore ignoring all the stress and related unpleasantness, and then a decade after that doing the same with daily stress (plus a few extra stressful situations), till my daily "resting" stress level was at constant red alert status, and I was also completely disconnected from noticing my stress reactions. During normal elevated-stress situations, I'd think I "felt fine" while also biting everyone's heads off for no particular reason. It culminated in my going from "feeling fine" to abruptly sitting on the floor crying as I was trying to pack for a trip (a notoriously stressful thing for me), although I didn't connect it to a decade's worth of ignoring and stuffing stress at the time. I later started a mindfulness stress relief program because my thighs were so tense that I couldn't sleep, and after a few weeks realized I had *tons* and *tons* of stored stress. Anyway, I started working on stress relief and started feeling physical and emotional signs of stress again. But my question is: would TRE be helpful? I never thought of the original situation as traumatic - it never felt traumatic because I was working so hard to avoid feeling any of it - but upon thinking it over in light of this thread, it probably was. (It was being severely anxious and depressed and engaging in a slow-motion flunking out of school over not being able to get things done.) Given that I couldn't handle external demands for years because of the trauma (ha!) of having failed to meet them in school and also that I had reoccurring bad dreams about it for at least a decade, I suppose it does sound like trauma of a sort. There's been a half-dozen things since that probably qualify as trauma-ish, though I didn't think of them that way because a) I ignored all bad feelings during them (except for the most recent, which was after I relearned to feel stress, and was the most stressed I've ever (consciously) felt in my life), and b) they were all ok in the end, so it seemed like all's well that ends well.

My dh did that, on an older Kindle Keyboard, and it removed the ads but still shows "Turn on wifi to get new ads" at the bottom of the home screen - drives me nuts, but dh doesn't mind. He removed them because we wanted to let it be the kids' kindle, and some of the ads were for racy books. That super annoyed me when I ordered my paperwhite during the black friday sales - artificially limiting the stock of non-ad supported kindles so as to "encourage" people to buy the ad version? Not cool, Amazon. (It must really be a money-maker for them.) Instead, I waited 6 weeks to get ad-free one (though they actually got it to me in about 3 weeks - underpromised and overdelivered, which is better than the reverse). In many way, it's the principle of the thing, for me.

My oldest appreciated his answer :). That said, beltway *is* a common term for us, in that the (non-DC) big city we go through to get to grandparents has a beltway. I explained it as the road goes around the city like a belt (i.e. makes a complete loop). In our case, we already had a Loop, so I'm guessing the newer and outer one is the Beltway to differentiate it.

Ours is copyrighted 1977 (Pre-Algebra: New Edition), so I don't know how it compares to newer editions, or which edition you are interested in, but I can snap a few pics once my dh is home and I can use his phone. What is it about Dolciani Alg 2 that you don't like? I have a 1965 edition of it, and on the surface the main difference between the two is that there's a bit more white space in the 1977 Pre-Alg. Otherwise it looks similar-ish at a glance. (I've taught the Pre-Alg book, but not the Alg 2.) I did really like the Dolciani Pre-Alg, though - nice, thorough, rigorous review of arithmetic from the ground up, exactly what my dd needed.

Exactly. We moved back to TX a few years ago, after nearly a decade in IL, and three winter storms, in one week's time - it was *exactly* like being back in IL, only without plows and salt trucks. (Waking up to 0F temps on Tue? I didn't even know that was *possible* here - and it was over 15 degrees less than the already ridiculous low predicted.) We have a hill going out of our subdivision, and it was impassible for anything but 4x4s for a solid week. Up north I look at a hill like that as a liability wrt ice, but it never occurred to me it would matter here. I mean, last month's snow was a once-in-a-generation event for our area, and it all melted within a few days. We lost power for five days, and we also couldn't go anywhere but on foot - and thankfully we still had our good winter gear, so that was a live possibility. But where would we have even gone - for the first few days *all* the roads were impassible - would anything even be open? All we had was what we had in the house. And it turned out that was enough. But most of what we needed we had for other reasons, not for winter storm prep - we easily could have not had it. And the real kicker, for me, was that we also lost cell service for four days. Without an unpowered landline, we had no way to contact *anyone*, for any news about anything. I was ready for losing power, but not for an extended loss of cell service. But, yeah, this was insane - we never in living memory *ever* had anything like this. We mostly don't even get winter storms at all here. My sister's NY colleagues were asking her if it really was as apocalyptic as the news was making it sound, and she was like, "Yeah, it actually is rather like an apocalypse."

Not what quite you're talking about, but my knitted wide scarf/narrow shawl feels just like a blanket you can wear - so very warm and comforting. But it's also easy to put on and take off, and it's stylish enough to wear out. It's about 16" wide by 7-8' long (but the dimensions are flexible, as you can pull it wider or narrower - it easily pulls to 20" wide, which gives good coverage when sitting), made out of bulky yarn (a color-changing muted rainbow yarn, in my case - matches everything), knitted in a garter stitch ,with 2" tassels at the ends. When I'm sitting I can put the ends over each leg (reaches just past my knees) and it's just like a blanket. When I'm standing, it's just like a long scarf (I wear it as a scarf with my coat going out), ending just past my knees. If I want to do things without the ends getting in my way, I throw each end over the opposite shoulder and it's long enough to stay there. My mom bought mine at a craft fair, but it's an easy knit.

I pretty much never get gut feelings about people, but I did have the instant "would not be surprised at all if this person were a serial killer" gut-punch about exactly one person. Weirdest thing. It was at college and we were in the same major, so we had a lot of classes together. Minus the gut feeling, he was a pretty nice guy and we were friendly acquaintances, actually <shifty> - I mean, I'd not have gone anywhere alone with him (seemed like the bare minimum logical reaction given the gut feeling), but we tended to chat before/after class and such, usually with another acquaintance. I never really knew what to make of the sheer contrast between his generally likeable nature and that gut feeling, and mostly ignored it, albeit uncomfortably. The gut feeling never really went away, though; it dulled if we spent regular time together, but would hit with full strength after an absence. And it hit like a freight train at the thought of introducing him to my little sister. But I still have no idea if my feeling was actually justified - never saw or wondered about anything in particular, even with the feeling putting me on guard.

I think I'm going with something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/617478816/elven-dress-lord-of-the-rings-dress?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=galadriel+dress&ref=sr_gallery-1-3&cns=1 Barn, country-casual - that sounds nature-themed to me. And who's more in touch with nature than Tolkien's elves, right? But, of course, white *is* the color for a wedding, so maybe this would be a better choice: https://www.etsy.com/listing/734823103/lady-galadriel-lord-of-the-rings-white?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=galadriel+dress&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&cns=1

He was thinking more a hockey stick magic staff and blasting rod, but I bet it would be even more excellent if he combined the two looks into one.

DH thinks he needs an ankle-length black leather duster for the occasion.

I've been using the DuckDuckGo browser on my tablet, as an alternative to Firefox (because Firefox is a memory/battery hog). I like it well enough, although it appears that keeping multiple tabs open is just inherently a battery hog <sigh>. No search issues, in any case.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years and thankfully haven't had any issues like that. I just tried your " kids sitting positions" search on my DuckDuckGo, and I had no problems - everything on the first page was just fine.

Well, using these links from IXL, Math 1 appears to have five geometry chapters (basics of geometry, reasoning & proofs, parallel & perpendicular lines, transformations, and congruent triangles), Math 2 appears to have six geometry chapters (relationships within triangles; quadrilaterals and other polygons; similarity; right triangles and trigonometry; circles; circumference, area, and volume), and Math 3 appears to have one (geometric modeling). So, assuming the links are accurate and your class did indeed cover all the chapters, it looks like you should have had almost all of geometry in the Math 1 and 2 courses you'll have taken.

FWIW, my dh took both geometry and alg 2 in the same year (in TX) to get back onto the accelerated track, so that's an option. WRT disadvantages of skipping geometry: I'm assuming the Math 1/2/3 sequence is integrated algebra and geometry. Wouldn't you have had 1/2-2/3 of geometry from taking Math 1&2? If so, then you might as well go into alg 2. Although if you feel shaky in Math 2, it's not a bad thing to move to the normal track and start wtih geometry. It's definitely better to master through Pre-Calc than to be shaky through Calc. Also, geometry would be on SAT/ACT, so that's a factor. What textbooks are you using in Math 1 and 2? ETA: I found these links for CA integrated math - do they match what your classes are doing? Math 1: http://www.mrmathblog.com/integrated-math-1.html Math 2: http://www.mrmathblog.com/integrated-math-2.html Math 3: http://www.mrmathblog.com/integrated-math-3.html

Looking at his mistakes, they both involve choosing the wrong vowel spelling for sounds which have a *lot* of options. (Plus he forgot to apply the phonics rule associated with hard 'c'/soft 'c' that would have narrowed down his options for the /er/ sound to "er" or "ir".) Is that his usual issue? I mean, he successfully hears all the sounds and picks a phonetically legit spelling for each of them, only he often picks the *wrong* spelling, especially for vowels with a lot of choices for the spelling? And does he tend to misspell words the same way in the same document, or does he have several different spellings for the same word in the same assignment? So he's done a workbook program and a studied dictation program. Both are pretty visual-centric, and he did fine with the programs, yet it sounds like he still has problems visualizing the words when he goes to write them "in the wild". I do see dictation recommended a lot for getting spelling skills to transfer to "in the wild" spelling - Spelling Wisdom didn't seem to help at all, though? IEW's program is more auditory-centric, so it would be a different thing to try. I know I read on here recently about someone who had spelling success with having their dc do spelling orally. Before you start another spelling program, perhaps you could try making a list of the words he misspells in the wild and have him spell them orally with you several times over the course of a week or something? Or does he misspell too many words? It might also help to have him do the Spell to Write and Read technique of "think to spell", where you don't schwa unaccented vowels when spelling, to help you remember the spelling. Like with "certain", think /ser-tAYn/ to remember the "ai" spelling. It might also help to have a chart with the most common spellings for a given sound listed in order, so when in doubt, he can go with the most common spelling; e.g. for /er/, "er" is the most common spelling, more common than "ur", and it would have helped him with "certain". ~*~ In terms of high school bootcamp spelling, most programs I know of take a morphographic approach (spelling by units of meaning, like "real + ize + ing"), which is also different from what you have tried. I've done Spelling through Morphographs, a year-long course, with my older two in middle school, and I do really like it; unfortunately it suffers from educational pricing and the price of used copies fluctuates a lot - sometimes it's about $40-50 for each of the two presentation books, and sometimes it is way more; right now it is $40 for book 2, but nearly $200 for book 1 <yikes>. Megawords is one I've seen people use for high schoolers and is supposed to be good, and it's in print. Apples and Pears is another program good for remedial spellers, that uses a *lot* of repetition to help cement spelling.

In the engineering college at my school (Texas A&M), every engineering major had to take two semesters of chemistry (also two semesters of physics). I was glad I wasn't seeing it for the first time in those classes. Might want to check the major requirements at the schools she's interested in.