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.

Weird - also in TX, and it's been a four week spacing for Moderna for me, dh, and dsis. My vaccine card said anywhere from 24-42 days.

I was able to make appointments for my 12yo and 14yo on Saturday at the town 45min away, on a day we were going to be there anyway, instead of waiting for when we were going to be in bigger town 70 miles away (in a month) or make a special trip there (like dh and I did). They are nervous but determined, because they want the benefits of being vaccinated. Also, today was the day of my second shot (Moderna). Unlike the other times, we were able to combine our regular stocking-up trip with it; for my first shot, we ended up going less than a week after we'd done our big stock-up trip <doh>.

I was discussing this with dh, and he was wondering if the positives were found on rapid tests or PCR tests, because the rapid tests, as we understand it, are looking for antibodies. So we wondered if it's possible for vaccine-induced antibodies to be found by the rapid test - anyone have any thoughts?

Martin Luther's Small and Large Catechisms would be good. The Small Catechism gives brief (but very apt) explanations of each commandment, while the Large Catechism gives more extensive commentary. Luther also has a hymn he wrote to help teach the commandments that is very good, These Are the Holy Ten Commands - I used it while teaching a Sunday school class on the commandments. As well, Luther's A Simple Way to Pray shows how to pray the commandments (as well as the Lord's Prayer and the Creed) - the method it illustrates meshes very well with the more polished explanations of the Small Catechism.

Yeah, when you really dig into rhyme, there's all sorts of nuances (I found it very overwhelming). Rhymer (an online rhyming dictionary) lists six different kinds of rhymes you can search for on their site: *end rhymes (shoe/blue, cat/hat) - beginning rhyming starts here, I think *last syllable rhymes (timber, harbor) - that would be your action/application, I think *double rhymes (conviction/prediction) - where the last *two* syllables match *triple rhymes (transportation/dissertation) - where the last *three* syllables match *beginning rhymes (physics/fizzle) - same initial consonant sound plus same first vowel sound - useful for finding initial alliteration, initial assonance, and front rhyme *first-syllable rhymes (carrot/caring) - same sounds preceding the first syllable break Plus there are masculine and feminine rhymes; masculine rhymes are rhyming words with a stressed final syllable, while feminine rhymes are rhyming words with an unstressed final syllable. But preschool rhyming is usually just end rhymes - anything that has the same ending sound rhymes, no matter how many syllables precede that sound.

This was much like our experience with oldest. At four she couldn't rhyme to save her life - when I'd try to do little informal rhyming activities with her, she'd just stare at me with no comprehension of what I was trying to ask her to do. Despite my teaching her with strict phonics, she ended up reading almost completely visually (although with great speed and comprehension), with extremely horrific spelling. Turned out it was because she didn't have the phonemic processing skills needed to learn to read phonetically. We did a lot of homegrown remediation, and her spelling improved from horrific to garden-variety bad to pretty decent (not more than one or two misspellings on a page) by 8th grade. And she can rhyme (I checked, just to be sure, lol). OP's ds sounds like he's doing better than my dd was, though - he can do it with her even though he can't do it on a test alone - and that might be less a phonemic processing thing than just not being ready for the more abstract testing (which I wouldn't worry much about). OP, if I were you, I'd keep an eye on your ds's spelling and continued progress on reading, and read plenty of nursery rhymes and children's poetry, but otherwise not be too concerned.

That's good. Boy, this is *not* what Dad planned to spend his retirement doing <sigh>. You know how some people retire and realize they have no idea how to spend their days? Not Dad. He's been working on and off on a research project my whole life, and he was looking forward to doing it full time. And he was, too - he'd been really pleased with how much work he was getting done. And he only got 5 months of it before this stroke came out of nowhere <sigh>. But on the good news side, they're setting him up a workbench in his home office where he can work at it in his wheelchair, as they don't think he's up to standing for long periods in the hot garage where his current set-up is, at least not right now (though they're hoping that'll change in the next few months - he's definitely making good progress at relearning to walk, which was his major stated goal). I was really worried he'd never be able to get back to his experiment - I know Mom was too, and undoubtedly Dad as well. So it's encouraging that they're taking steps to get him going at it again. I suppose none of us know how well he'll be able to do with just one functioning arm, but at least it's his dominant one. Here's hoping, anyway.

I'm assuming without proof that's not an option - that they don't have the number or whatever, because otherwise it's the obvious option - but I'll check when I talk with them, just in case we're all overlooking the obvious, lol.

No, we don't have a copy, but the speech therapist has a copy. She gave Dad some of the reproducible worksheets from it, only she forgot to give the directions. Since they won't see the speech therapist till Wed and Mom doesn't want to delay the at-home practice so long, I'm trying to see if anyone here happens to know what the directions might be, either because they know the book or because they know what "cancellation activities" are. In my googling, it seems that the basic directions they followed for previous activities - circle all the H's, say, and cross out all the O's, for example - are basically how these sorts of activities work, and you can start looking for pairs to increase the difficulty. The therapist gave them no particular letters to look for with these worksheets, but I suppose just picking random ones and going for it - Mom's fallback plan - sounds decent enough.

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.