How about a Food Chemistry unit? I have this bookmarked http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/articles-by-topic/food-chemistry.html In the lessons & activities section, the 1st link takes you to a page with a bunch of easy food science lab activities the Carb link is broken (just takes you to the cheese page again) but there is still a fair bit of stuff here... Also, the Naked Science page at Cambridge has a Kitchen Science section. The carrots link from the link above goes there .. it's worth staying there & checking out a bunch of the other activities http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/colours-from-carrots-staining/ eta - oh I see now Space Station had already suggested Kitchen Science. Sorry, didn't read all the replies... :D

:grouphug: for you Jane

I do not recommend this at all & esp not for a child who is in 2nd grade. No way would I be fooled. They're not plants, they have distinct personalities, likes & dislikes. And where will you find a hamster the same age & coloring? We usually have some in rescue & I try to keep tabs on what's at our local shelters at any given time but finding a perfect match would be hard. Plus if you're getting another adult - which you'd have to to look and act remotely like the deceased one - it will also have a shorter life, so you're just kicking this can down the street. Deal with it. Deal with the tears, the heartache, the pain. Don't deprive her of this opportunity to grieve. & when her heart's a bit better, start looking around shelters & rescues & adopt a new one. Now that you know who the vets that see pocket pets are, you'll be better prepared for animal emergencies down the road.

Just remembered Sam had a longer blog post about meditation & specifically about vipassana http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-meditate LaughingCat - I agree there's some blurring of terms here with mindfulness being different from meditation being different from mindfulness meditation & yeah, I had the same exp as you wrt to catching the wandering off and not having had it explained as really being key. I think some of the earlier meditation practices seemed to promote a more trance like state which has not been achievable for me. Vipassana is something I can do. Sam's post has a link to this The Mindful Child - maybe that would help ?

Yay, went away for a bit & came back to a bunch of notifications aka little dopamine squirts :lol: !!! squirt, squirt, squirt. No wonder some of us are addicts....

Did Zumba last night. Found out we have 2 more classes in the Wed eve set & then it breaks for 5 weeks. A bunch of us were all :scared: How will we survive for 5 weeks without a Wed night class? We're talking with the programmer & some instructors to see if we can fill up that break. I can see why people end up joining expensive gyms because I'm tempted by the ones that run year round, no exceptions.

There are a fair number of mindfulness meditation programs which are not religious at all & do not mention Buddha. If you want to get a sample of a very simple mindfulness meditation which IMO would be simple & appropriate, check out the 10 min one by Sam Harris here. Sam is a long time meditator but you may know him as also an ardent atheist. There's no religion or woo in this meditation - it is extremely secular. http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/mindfulness-meditation you could also try & Again, there's no woo, no talk about religion or god. fwiw, IMO, headphones & a meditation like this is ALL you need, no need for a program or curriculum or anything else. Assuming the content is acceptable to you & the voice is acceptable to the person doing the meditation, you don't need anything more. Just do this, every day, maybe work up to twice a day & then when comfortable, seek out longer ones or just try doing it on your own. There's nothing more to it, other than sitting, focusing on breath, letting thoughts arise, noticing that your mind has started to wander, coming back to breath. Rinse, repeat. Everybody's mind wanders. Everybody gets uncomfortable, stiff, itchy, bored etc. Know that it's normal. Catch yourself & return to the breath.

Where was the option â—¦ I live for likes & obsessively check my notifications to see if anyone liked something I wrote because some days it's the only validation I get ? (asking for a friend...)

There actually is published research on essential oils, including for various conditions. if you check pubmed, you get tons of hits. The problem is weeding out decent research. Many of the new journals are absolute junk. (for a list of predatory journals see for here for example ) The journals sound legit but many of them don't do real peer review. "recommend that researchers, scientists, and academics avoid doing business with these publishers and journals. Scholars should avoid sending article submissions to them, serving on their editorial boards, reviewing papers for them, or advertising in them. Also, tenure and promotion committees should give extra scrutiny to articles published in these journals, for many of them include instances of research misconduct." It's hard to sort out legitimate research & just outright fraud.

essential oils are so skin sensitizing... I can't have them anywhere near me.

Just for comparison, a 45min pet sitting visit here runs about $30 but that includes the sitter driving to your house. I'd say $50 sounds reasonable for what you're describing.

oh goody, I guessed what would be #1!!!

True. But for me it makes it much clearer at 1/2 are under 100. Medians are just "crisper" in my head... :)

rising on a point of fact wrt IQ The *median* score is 100. Median, not average. About 2/3 of people fall between 85 and 115.

I don't follow dog fancy because I'm not into the beauty pageant part of the dog world but I love beagles! I'm already planning out my future dogs and there will be a beagle somewhere there :) Miss P is from BC Canada btw :)

Fwiw, the exp in this house about mmo's and the multiplayer portions of other games is that it's not the adults that are trash talking- it's the 11 yo brats. You can hear it in their voices, they're kids. WOW is T. But none of us play it .....

Yes, I have in the past and I was going to go back to my counsellor in Jan but she's off on extended post op sick leave and I haven't yet decided which of the people she recommended in her absence I should call. I think having a trained outsider to talk to, to get an outside perspective, to talk about life decisions and transitions, to help reframe certain issues, to get assistance with some cbt techniques ... it's so incredibly helpful. This life thing isn't always easy. Mental health pros and life coaches and counsellors are very valuable to me. Those of you who do this work - thank you. You make a difference.

Educational psychology?

I know but where does it end? French fries are vegetables! Walking from living room to bathroom is aerobic exercise! jk. Sort of.

ugh, true that. I've only had pantry moths once but that was enough, thank you....

I definitely think that's so. Similar thing happened with the physical exercise targets. Nobody was meeting them so they dropped the targets, just so we could now say more people are exercising! Um, no. They're not.

sorry, yes, it was just a turn of phrase. I was alluding to the jocks I know who turned into fat. Some of them still think they're 'just big guys' but they're just plain fat. They're eating the same as they used to when they were 20 & running after a ball for hours. Now they're lucky to play a couple hours a week, their metabolism has slowed & they've put on a lot of fat. Those pecs now are flabby fat covering some shrivelled muscle & let's not talk about the beer pouchy bellies... So it's not that muscle turns into fat literally. It's that muscle atrophied and the fat grew. I find bmi extremely hard to judge with the eye. My dh is smack in the middle of the bmi charts but he's very tall and slender and people constantly tell him to gain weight. I'm at the lower 1/3 of my healthy bmi & still carry a muffin top. I don't think anyone looking at us side by side would guess that I had lower bmi than he but maybe binip you're better at this than I am LOL. And when I was at the top of my bmi, kissing the overweight line, I don't think I looked overweight. I've looked at the photos & I still don't think I looked close to being overweight.. I'm not good at this stuff so I need the scale & the charts :)

Hi binip, I don't see how it isn't about order? Wouldn't they still be hungry eventually? You get your portion and that's it. Wouldn't they eventually want more food? Like perhaps need a bigger evening snack/meal? Then they'd have to go find food in the kitchen or the leftovers in the fridge. I think if a kid was really not hungry after a dessert then I'd think that dessert portion was too large. It either fits or it doesn't & I don't see how it could fit *after* a meal but not before a meal. I would worry that if that's the case, then they're getting into a pattern of gorging: being really full from dinner but really desiring this special treat & stuffing it in. That would be worrisome to me. We only have so much dessert so once you've eaten your portion, it's done. With cake, usually there are several pieces/person & each person decides when to eat theirs. I might save mine & have it for breakfast next day. I sometimes give mine away to the naturally skinny & actively growing people in the house ;) dd might take it to school or work. Ds (currently 6'4" and growing every minutes) might choose to eat all of his at once. The next day he has none. It all balances in the end. Maybe it helps that I don't think about balanced meals? I don't even try to think of balanced days. I just sort of think it balances out over the week. We do tend to be health conscious, we've always had some sort of "food plate thing" posted on the fridge and I've always encouraged our kids, right from the beginning, to look a the guidelines and think about how to nourish themselves. For the past few years, this is the thing on the fridge I personally tend to overdo the grain/starch side for ex. so I need the visual reminder to balance out my daily rations. I do think there's a lot we need to teach our kids & guide them about wrt food, and esp the predisposition we have as humans to like sweets & certain slippery mouth texture things. We've always just talked a lot about how somethings are good for the mouth but not so good for the rest of us. We talk about how we feel if we eat too much out of one category of food, whether we notice the effects; whether even if we don't notice the effects right away, maybe we notice over a period of weeks. Fruit is our dessert over 50% of the time. Cookies or a baked thingy would be about 2x a week. Sometimes we don't have anything at all. I guess it goes without saying that we've never had the 'finish that dinner to have dessert' rule... I think if faced with a child with severe dessert issues, I'd be inclined to just not have it at all or to serve only a variety of fruits.

The only time this makes sense is if you buy things in giant bags the size of a toddler & store them in your longer term storage, and put just a moderate amount to have on hand in the kitchen. I do this with flour, sugar, rice etc. Otherwise, I think it's absurd to transfer the contents of a perfectly good container into another container....

snipped LOL Ah well. You know the whole ymmv but in my house again the answer would have been. "Yup. Go ahead." because I don't care what order people eat their food in. Maybe if it was something that requires my help & I've already started eating, I'd say, "please wait till I'm finished, ok?" If it was a huge issue, I'd start serving dessert first. Or making the kid a tray like you get in institutional meals where everything is there at once & you can pick which order you eat it in. And if I was really concerned, I'd make sure that the dessert was almost always stuff like fruit or puddings or sorbets. In general actually we tend to have fruit But even if it's fruit crumble or a chocolate cake or a brownie... - here, have your portion. Don't want your dinner now? Well, then make a plate, cover it & put in the fridge for when you get hungry. Maybe it's because dessert is my favorite part of a meal. When I go out I especially plan my meals around dessert & sometimes all I'll have is salad & the dessert. The thing in the middle is just a waste of time & calories lol....