By bodywork do you mean exercises for retained reflexes, or something else?

I wouldn't have a problem with that for the wedding itself. It might be a little much for the reception, but I think it would be fine to ask that guests please refrain from posting any pictures taken til after the reception (I would assume they have some sort of reason for this though). Of course you couldn't control whether people actually followed the request or not.

I got the results of my 10 YO's developmental vision screening today. For ocular motility, it said he can adequately perform pursuits eye movements and saccadic eye movements, but his ability to do some other eye movements (it didn't specify what they were called) was very weak. In the area of accomodation/eye focusing, it said he has some difficulty rapidly shifting focus from distance to near, and focusing at near for sustained periods of time. In the area of binocular integration/eye teaming, it said he had moderately decreased stability in eye teaming. It said he had no problems with visual information processing skills. They recommend 24-30 sessions of vision therapy to work on these items, at a cost of $120 session along with a 6 hr round trip drive with 6 kids: Monocular activities designed to equalize the focus, tracking, and pointing of each eye Binocular work to improve eye-teaming efficiency while focusing, tracking, and pointing Guided reading therapy to improve the eye tracking, eye teaming, and speed of fluent reading Visual-spatial tasks to develop integrated sequential and directional concepts Visual motor tasks to improve body awareness and control, visually directed fine and gross motor skills, and hand-eye coordination Inter-sensory integration skills through visual-auditory-verbal matching The original information I received when we did the screening was that they have 9 areas related to vision that they work with, so they are still wanting to work with him on 6 of those areas, and also that they typically recommend 30-36 sessions of VT. What they're recommending for my 10 YO seems like overkill to me. They're basing his need to work on spatial awareness on getting a low score on a test of reversal frequency recognition, and on being slow to copy sentences in another test. Is it even reasonable to expect a dyslexic child to do well on those particular tests? They were told that he's dyslexic. I also don't understand why he would need to work on inter-sensory integration if his visual-sensory integration tested as being strong to very strong. They said some people do bi-weekly sessions instead of weekly, but still require the same number of sessions, which doesn't entirely make sense to me because what's the purpose of doing two weeks worth of homework if it's not actually improving the outcome over doing a week's worth? Why not just do the homework once or maybe twice the second week so no gains are lost? I'm not sure I'm even willing to do that drive more than once a month except in the summer, but I don't know if they'll work with that. I can call and ask them some questions on Monday.

,Our hand vacuum died a couple days ago, so I need to get a new one. We use a hand vacuum mainly for vacuuming the stairs, vacuuming the edges of rooms (with a wand attachment), and vacuuming under couch cushions. Any recommendations?

My younger 3 like her. Idk about the older ones. But then, we had a sitter this summer who they all liked, but she was utterly incapable of being firm or basic child management like not letting a 2 yo run out the exterior door any time he wants. She just trailed along behind...sometimes well behind....the then-2-yo as he ran around doing whatever he wanted, and it was worse with the older ones, so we had to let her go (and we did talk to her a few times but she couldn't seem to do anything differently). So yes, I do want them to like a sitter, but she absolutely has to be able to manage whatever kids she's actually responsible for. We hired her primarily so she could watch the 1 & 3 yo's while we do school. That's 3 hours of her day. That was the NEED. She is handling that reasonably well, and maybe the spots that aren't being handled well like the 3 yo being allowed to wander off once the 6 yo joins them, could be handled differently if I'm very clear about what I need done in those situations. The other hour was a WANT, so I could have a bit of downtime while the kids ate lunch and then spend some time with just the littles. She's not able, willing, whatever to manage the older ones so I'm not able to do the WANT things with that last hour, which I think is primarily what people are telling me I'm being unreasonable about (ie the way she interacts with the older ones). But really, I don't feel comfortable taking that downtime away from everybody when I know the older ones are not really being supervised, and that time they spend ignoring one adult bleeds over into their interactions with me later and makes things more difficult. I just don't think it's unreasonable to want that extra time to actually benefit me or my family if I'm going to be paying her to be there for that. So either I need to tell her I don't need her there for that last bit, and if she quits she quits, or find something else that she's willing to do during that time that does actually benefit us. Maybe she could stay til 2 just one day each week and I could run errands with a couple of the older ones, and leave at 12:30 the other days. I don't know.

This seriously makes me laugh. My household is much more likely to be described as chaotic than regimented! You have no idea how much trouble I have providing structure and being consistent. It is so hard. What you are calling regimented is being done out of necessity. I simply cannot make, say, kids doing chores, happen reliably any other way than to say, "Chores have to be done before you can eat breakfast." It provides the motivator of them wanting to eat, and the consistency of it happening before something that we do regularly (eat breakfast). This summer my kids ate breakfast when each of them wanted to more or less due to 2 of them having online reading tutoring at 2 different times of the morning. Chores got done extremely sporadically. I tried saying they couldn't go outside and play until their chores were done, and I couldn't enforce that. I tried finding another time of day that would work to get them done, and didn't find one. They certainly aren't going to just volunteer to do their chores (and they get paid to do these particular morning chores). As I said on the other thread, if my DD was responsible enough to do her chores on her own, she certainly could do them at a different time of day. But she can't, and I want these chores done, so she has to do them when I can actually make chore time happen. (And the windows are only one of her chores because she gets a different chore for each day, and I needed one more, so I added the windows to her list when I couldn't think of anything else that really needed done on a weekly basis.) I find it ironic that every time I've posted asking for what to do with my kids, and every time a thread on another topic turns into people telling me what they think I should do with my kids, at least one person tells me I need more STRUCTURE. Yet here I am being told I am way too rigid and authoritarian.

It's not that they're getting out of their seats to get silverware, or refill a glass, or grab the ketchup. It's that they're getting out of their seats to run around the house, eating while running around, or getting up to run around and be wild when they're supposed to be eating.

I don't think I run a particularly tight ship. If I do something a particular way, it's generally for a reason, like I've tried doing it five different ways and only one really worked. It gets really chaotic, and really messy, if 5 kids are all making their own lunch. Also, it's virtually impossible to get them to sit at the table and eat if others are running around making their food, because I can't really supervise 5 kids going several different directions. I dislike having chocolate milk stains on my carpet and crumbs everywhere, so I want them to eat at the table. I know in my baby-sitting days, parents would tell me what they wanted the kids to have for lunch or dinner. I always assumed that that is what they wanted all their kids to eat for lunch. How is this any different? In my book there's a difference between someone being relaxed about letting kids eat what they want at lunch, and telling a kid to do or not do something and then doing nothing if they don't, or letting a 3 yo run off while she plays with a 6 yo when she was specifically hired to watch the 3 yo at all time while we're doing school. I do think she has a good bit of autonomy. She can do whatever to keep the 3 yo, 1 yo, and 6 yo occupied, as long as whoever she has is staying downstairs so we can do school upstairs. I might give her a direction two-three times a day at most, something like saying occasionally, "3 yo's been asking to do puzzles/play these games", or "6 yo has speech therapy today at 11:30. Are you okay with staying here with 1 yo, 3 yo, and 8 yo?" or "They can have sandwiches for lunch." I let a lot of things go that are not the way I would do them or prefer them done. That doesn't mean I'm ok with letting absolutely everything go.

I advertised for this on Care.com, craigslist, and a local FB childcare group. It was listed as part-time nanny/mother's helper. I got zero responses from actual nannies. I got several responses from moms with school-age kids looking for work while their kids were at school, several from 20-22 yo's who I didn't think were likely to have enough childcare experience/life experience, and from a few people who didn't actually meet the criteria (ie weren't available one week every month due to another job, wanted to bring their own child, didn't have their own transportation and wanted me to transport them to and from). I could look to hire someone else and end up in the exact same situation. How on earth could I guarantee that anyone I hire will actually be willing to be firm and follow through? We did specifically ask her that and tell her that they would test her and she said she could handle it.

I do. Initially I was in a different room during lunch. Now mostly I'm in the kitchen (making my own lunch, putting school stuff away) and she's in the dining room with them. But if someone gets out of their seat, I expect her to say something FIRST since she's right there at the table, and that's not happening.

I'm thinking I will just have him review the Barton rules this year and otherwise give spelling a break. We've spent the last 5 years working intensively on reading and spelling. I think we can focus on other things that need to be focused on this year, like vision therapy and retained reflex work.

She can't come earlier. I could ask if she could stay later if she's more than...5 minutes? 10 minutes?...late. Idk how much time late should be made up. If she would be willing to do dinner prep from 12:30 to 1 I would be thrilled with that. I really dislike making dinner. I'll have to think about how that could work some more (I don't have a lot of make-ahead recipes).

*Please don’t quote” I did say in the OP that I'd prefer to keep her. I'm not unwilling to compromise or be reasonable. It's just a big jump to go from having a once-a-week sitter where sometimes we can't do it, sometimes they can't do it, sometimes someone is sick, people take vacations or there's a big holiday and we skip a week, and no one expects to pay or be paid when there's no babysitting that week...to an expectation (it seems, though we never discussed this) that the sitter will be paid no matter who skips what or for what reason. DH will never agree to enrolling 3 YO in preschool so it's a moot point. I can just see some advantages of doing that. I feel comfortable enough with her being at the house. I just have a hard time with feeling like I can't stop school and go to the park, for instance, or decide to take a day off, because I still have to pay her for that time. I'm not saying this is her fault, and I understand that it's not reasonable to expect her to go unpaid because I want to change something last minute. But I do dislike feeling like I just can't do those things because I'd be wasting the money that she'd be getting paid when she wasn't actually doing anything at all. I think I feel less willing to give on some things because I'm a little bit frustrated overall. When we hired her, we said that she would primarily be watching the 1 & 3 YO's, and would watch the 6 YO also once his school was done for the day. We also said that we wanted her to supervise lunch and after-lunch-chores. We told her that we needed someone who could be firm and that the kids would test and see what they could get away with. She agreed to all this and said she could be firm and she thought she could handle them. She does great when she just has the 3 YO, which she does for about 2 hours a day because the 1 YO naps. She doesn't have the 1 YO a whole lot anyway because he's just starting to warm up to her and is still unhappy with her a good part of the time (which is not her fault and I don't hold it against her at all, and he's not much trouble anyway). But when the 6 YO joins her, often she'll start doing something with him and not pay much attention to the 3 YO, and he'll come bother me or run around without supervision. I do feel a little frustrated that she makes very little attempt to manage the older ones. I did give her a discipline tool, giving them breaks (short time-outs basically), and told her to only tell them once and then give them a break. They are used to taking breaks and I don't think they'll make much of a fuss about taking them, and if they do, I told her to let me know. But she's only very rarely (like once or twice) giving them breaks and mostly telling them something once and then letting them do whatever. I haven't talked to her about every single thing but I have talked to her about some things and I feel like I'm mainly getting excuses and not changes. Me: "They need to stay sitting in their seats at lunchtime." Her: "I did tell them to sit down." Ok...but you have to do more than tell them, you have to actually follow through and have them sit down (and I did say this to her, a bit more politely, and didn't see any difference). Walk up to them and tell them again to sit down, tell them to take a break, tell me...something other than once and done. Yes they can be really difficult, but at this point this isn't a case of "she's tried hard to get them to listen to her and they're not doing it". I do need to sit down with her and go over what I'm expecting her to do with the kids again and see how that goes. I'm just not real optimistic that anything is going to change with the way she interacts with the older kids based on what I've seen so far. And I've already made changes to what I originally wanted her to do because she didn't seem able to handle the lunch stuff (and I asked her if she was willing before changing her duties, because I didn't want her to feel she had to do something she hadn't originally agreed to do). And the Friday thing...we were up front about wanting her to work the occasional Friday and she agreed to that. If she'd said that she was going to need to find regular work on Fridays, or that she already had a job on Fridays, that would have been ok. It wasn't a deal-breaker. But she didn't say that, and she didn't even let me know afterward that she was going to find Friday work and thus wouldn't be available on Fridays, she just said that now she has another job on Fridays, so that does bother me a little bit that she did it that way. I don't mind overlooking occasional lateness. I just don't want it to turn into her scheduling all her kids' doctor, dentist, etc appts at 8 am, or regularly needing to drive her husband somewhere, and expecting it to be fine if they run late and she shows up late. Same for bad roads...a business expects their employees to allow extra time for weather-related driving delays if it's a common thing so they can be at work on time, and so do I. Once in a while is not a big deal, but I don't know yet if it will turn into an every-time-the-roads-are-bad thing.

Maybe I could negotiate the 1/2 hr less per day in exchange for it being a weekly or monthly pay rate instead of an hourly one. I wouldn't mind keeping the hours the same if I felt it was useful for her to be here the whole time, even if she was doing something other than kid watching for a bit, but right now I feel like the last hour that she's here is mostly a waste and I'm shifting things around in a way that isn't really great for my family in order to accomodate her being here.

When she's not yet responsible enough to stay on top of her own schoolwork or her own chores, then she has to do things in a time frame that works for me, since I'm the one who has to ensure that these things actually get done. I'm not willing to spend all afternoon, every afternoon reminding and checking on her to make sure she gets schoolwork and chores done, which is what happens when she doesn't get those things done in the morning. So I don't think it's unreasonable to require her to do those things at the time when it's relatively easy for me to make sure they get done (which is at the same time as everyone else is doing those things). And she does need to be ready by 8:30 because we do family subjects over breakfast, so she needs to be there for those. Other families may find it reasonable to let teens operate on a different schedule than everyone else in the family, and that's fine. But it doesn't work for my family.

The almost-11-year-old does about 10 minutes of vacuuming in the mornings + taking out the trash. He gets up around 7 or 7:15. All my kids except DD get themselves up, usually by 7:30 at the latest. The 1 yo gets himself up around 5:30 in the morning (sigh).

Really it would be a lot simpler, and a lot cheaper, to send the 3 yo to preschool or daycare for a half day. He's the one who makes it really difficult to get school done. But DH doesn't want him to go to daycare, so we have to have someone come to the house to watch him.

Hmmm, yes, that might be helpful to figure out as far as hourly vs. monthly. I think maybe she considers that we're paying her weekly. But we did specifically discuss an hourly rate when we hired her. What we discussed as far as illness was that she would come unless they have a stomach bug. We didn't specifically discuss influenza but I already didn't have her come three days last month because we had a flu-like illness and I didn't want her to catch it, and she was paid for all three days. As far as if she is sick...idk. I wouldn't want her to come if she has a stomach bug or flu symptoms, and probably not if she has a bad cold. She said her kids don't miss much school because of illness and her husband stayed with them last year every time they were sick, so I'm assuming her kids being sick is a non-issue. If she cancels because one of hers is sick I'm not going to want to pay her for the day. We did discuss public school holidays in general (like MLK Day) and she said would work those days, but we didn't specifically discuss Thanksgiving, Christmas break, or New Year's.

I'm more concerned about how often I'm going to have to worry/think about whether she'll be late or not. There were three times this week when she was late or said she might be late--one weather-related time, one school-meeting time, and one day I forgot about when one of her kids went home because the school said they were sick. So I'm wondering, is there going to be one family-related late start time or possible late start time per week? And there's likely to be at least one bad road day per week starting in a month or so...so is she potentially going to be late two out of four days per week? That's my concern. And I'm not looking to censure her for the two times she was 10-15 mins later, I just want to know what reasonable expectations are. That's why I'm asking here. If it's reasonable that something might "come up" once a week for her to be 10-15 minutes late, I can't say I'll be thrilled, but I won't say anything if that turns out to be the case.

Yes, we did. But we also specifically hired her to do certain things from 12 to 1 (supervise lunch and then supervise kitchen clean-up) and those things aren't happening.

*Please don't quote as I may delete later for privacy.* We have a part-time nanny/mother's helping coming 4 days/week from 9-1 (so 16 hrs/week) to watch mainly my 1 & 3 yo's while I do school with the others. We've only had occasional baby-sitters before and I'm not sure how to handle some of the things that are coming up with the nanny. We do not have any sort of contract with her, and there are a lot of things I didn't think about discussing before she was hired. She does a fair job overall, great in some areas (she's good with the 3 yo) and not so great in others. It probably would be difficult to find another nanny, so I'd prefer to keep her. We are paying quite well and I think she would like to keep the job as it would be pretty difficult to find something else paying this well in this area (just saying this for people to keep in mind as they respond). For one thing, I don't know how to handle Christmas break pay-wise. She has 4 kids herself, preschool to middle school age, and their break will be from December 23-Jan 1. We'll take Christmas week off ourselves, and I really don't want to pay her for Christmas week when she won't be coming and, I'm sure, would like to spend the time with her kids anyway. Is it fair to tell her (now, so she has lots of time to prepare) that we won't use or pay her for that week? We already had a situation where we were going to be on vacation for a day one week and two the next, and she asked if she could be paid anyway and I agreed to have her come a different day one week (to make three working days for that week) and pay her for the other two. I'm willing to pay her for 4 days Thanksgiving week even though we'll only use her three. I'm also willing to pay her for one "free" day the week of New Year's. We'll probably do school the 1st-3rd that week, and I thought I'd tell her I'll pay her for one extra day and she can choose whether to come on the 1st or not. I won't pay her for the 1st if she chooses not to come, so she can get paid for 3 days that week or 4 depending on whether she wants to work on the 1st. Does that sound reasonable? Also, when we hired her, it was for M-Th (because we do light school on Fridays) and we said we'd occasionally want her for a Friday instead of one of the other days. She agreed to that, but a couple weeks ago mentioned that she had another job on Friday now. I feel a little bit frustrated that she won't be available that day when she originally said she would. If there's a week when we plan to take a day off M-Th but do a full day Fridays and she's not available on Friday, should I still need to pay her for the full 4 day week? I'm also not sure how much leeway I should give as far as her being late due to weather or family stuff. She's worked for us for 5 weeks, and there have been 4 times so far when she said she might be late. Twice she was 10-15 minutes late (once due to bad roads and once due to a meeting for a child at school not being done early enough). The other two times she said she had to drop her husband off in a different city. I believe she was on time one of those days and a few (like 3) minutes late the other. I want to be reasonable, but at the same time we're paying her to be here at 9 and I'd really like her to be here at 9. I can see being late once or maybe twice a month, but it seems like it's going to end up being more than that. I don't mind her being late on the first day of really bad roads, but this is Montana and we're headed into winter and...there will be many days of bad roads. What seems reasonable as far as making allowances for weather or family needs and lateness? And third, I'd like to start having her leave at 12:30 instead of 1. When we hired her we told her that we wanted her to supervise all the kids eating lunch so I could have a bit of down time, and she agreed to that and said she could be firm with them. That hasn't worked out because she mostly lets the older ones do what they want during lunch. (People can debate about whether it's reasonable to expect her to watch the older ones; in my mind, when I leave the 1, 3, & 8 yo's with her for 75 minutes while I take the 6 YO to his speech therapy...10 yo went with us...and she's supposed to feed them sandwiches for lunch, and I get home and the 8 yo's says he made himself a plate of nachos instead...she should have prevented that. I don't expect her to try to make him eat a sandwich, but I do expect her to tell him that nachos are not what's for lunch, and insist that he doesn't make himself some. She doesn't do anything to prevent the older ones from doing what they want except tell them once not to do something, and then let them do it.) Since that wasn't working out, I asked her if she would be willing to make lunch instead and she said she didn't mind, so I've been having her do that. Then I intended to sit with them while they eat. But I don't end up sitting with them because she's here and she sits with them, and if I did sit with them, she wouldn't have anything to do while they eat anyway. She does clear and wipe off the table after lunch (her choice, I didn't ask her to) which is nice but lunch clean-up is the older kids' job anyway so it's not something I actually need her to do. (We had actually wanted her to supervise the older kids' doing lunch clean-up so I could spend a little time with the younger ones--this was agreed to at the time we hired her--but since they don't listen to her I dropped that idea pretty quickly.) So I really don't need her to be here from 12:30 to 1. It would actually work out better if she wasn't here because I would feel more free to do what works for us as far as lunchtime and lunch cleanup, instead of trying to adjust the way we do those things so she can be here that whole time. But I'm not sure how to say that we don't need her after 12:30.

She is quite attached to the cat. I think his destructiveness was largely boredom at being mostly confined to her room. He now has a cat door and can roam the house. She doesn’t really seem to mind his biting and scratching, which is part of the problem, because she doesn’t do much to discourage it and does things that encourage it like teasing him with her foot.

It rotates. Two days a week she cleans two of the bathrooms (quick clean, just toilet, mirrow, sink), one day she cleans the stovetop, and one day she does the living room and dining room windows. These take her 10-15 mins a day. Friday we do lite school and she has a bigger chore that varies.

She could actually sleep til 8 if she’d get up and get moving. She’s capable of getting ready, taking care of the cat, and doing her chore in 30 minutes, and she occasionally does. But she prefers to lay in bed for 20 mins after waking up, daydream while getting dressed, putter around in her room, etc and so she has to get up a lot earlier if she wants to have time for a very slow start to the morning.

I think I will try letting her be responsible for getting herself up and ready, with the consequence of not getting to eat til after our family studies are done if she doesn’t finish her morning stuff by breakfast time, and see how this is working after a couple of weeks. She dislikes missing breakfast. She knows this is the consequence, but normally I check on her at least a couple times to remind her to get up and get moving. It is a bit of a pain to have to check on her or wake her up because her bedroom is in the basement at the very back of our large house. (Which bedroom she has is not flexible for a number of reasons.) If that doesn’t work, maybe I can find a wall-mounted alarm clock that she (or the cat) can’t lose. She is not responsible enough to get her work and chores done if left to do it on her own. And it does not work for our family’s schedule for her to be sleeping later or doing her chores later in the morning. She has early afternoon activities fairly often and needs to have most or all of her schoolwork done by 12:30 to accommodate those. They all do math after dinner to make time to get everything else done in the morning. It is very difficult to get her to do any remaining schoolwork or chores after afternoon activities, and requires a lot of reminding and monitoring on my part if it’s going to happen (and even then one or more things frequently don’t get finished). She could have more freedom and flexibility if she were more responsible, but she’s not, so things have to be done on a schedule that works for me since I’m the one making sure they actually get done. My other kids are normally up by 7:30 at the latest, usually closer to 7, so I rarely wake them up. They also move a lot faster than she does in the morning so they don’t need to be up as early as she does. The older 4 all have chores they’re required to do before breakfast. The chores just don’t get done if they aren’t done before breakfast.