Don't be afraid to be a pain and call about the appt! Son was recently referred to a cardiologist. The referring doctor said they sent in the referral and that we should wait to be contacted by the cardiologist. Weeks went by and we did not hear anything. I called the referring doctor and the office personnel resent the referral (they said the original one did go through). After a couple of more weeks I called the hospital's cardiology dept, had my call sent to a few different people and ended up leaving a message on an answering machine. Still no reply! I called the cardiology scheduling line and they eventually found the referral and set up an appt for the same week. I wish I had just called the scheduling line directly right away. Son's results were fine, but in the mean time, it was pretty stressful worrying he had a potentially fatal heart condition! Other son had a referral to a dermatologist--he was having horrible eczema flare up like we had never seen before. It was scheduled for 6 months out. I started calling every day for a cancellation and he was seen within a week instead. Same son also had an appt with a pulmonologist rescheduled by the office and when we went to the appt, they had no record of his appt. Appt wasn't able to be rescheduled until the end of Oct. this is just a routine follow up but I am still surprised it is so far out. We live in a state with an unusually high number of doctors and we have a large research U hospital in our town. I do think we have received excellent care, but the logistics of scheduling has been frustrating. Good luck with scheduling appts. and wishing your family the best of health!

This would be good planning! When our empty nester neighbors moved in across the street they moved the WD upstairs to an unused bedroom. If you can plan now for a future location of the WD I think that would be a good compromise. Have a desk now in the main floor but have plans later to move the WD up either to main floor or even second floor. If you have teens at home now, they can do a lot of the laundry hauling.

I think this would depend mostly on the arrangement of the rest of the main floor. If that desk space was needed, I would out the WD in the basement. Do you have other places on the main floor where you can put in a small desk/command center? This is something I currently lack in my home on the main living area and I really miss having a central area with calendar, bills, etc. We have a separate office but it is a bit out of the way and I have gotten into the habit of stacking up mail and "dealing with it later" and waiting until the stack becomes a messy heap before I deal with it. I would not like having a basement WD but here it is very common (midwest).

IS she a junior or a sophomore this year? If she is a sophomore, be aware that the PSAT/SAT formats are changing for her class. I agree that SAT/ACT is primarily regional.

I have two 2e kids. We started homeschooling when the oldest was half way through grade 1. My kids are now high school age (one is a senior and one is a junior--they are close in age). I was initially reluctant to homeschool them. I felt overwhelmed and confused. But my older son, in particular, was miserable in grade 1. He tried so hard but much of what they expected of him was simply not working--it was not even appropriate for his mind. He also started to feel as though he was a failure, hated math and loudly declared that he would never learn how to read. My younger son is also dyslexic but not nearly as severely as my older son. Two people influenced our decision to homeschool. One was the ps special ed teacher. She said that son would not receive any services until he was academically two years behind (at that point he was not behind the basic guidelines at all but something was clearly wrong). Additionally, she said that the way schools taught, including special ed programs, simply did not match a certain segment of children. She felt that services the school had to offer still would not meet son's needs. Second was the educational psychologist who evaluated older son. She said that we could try various programs (she mentioned many used for dyslexics) or alternatively, she suggested we just wait and let son's "parts all catch up with each other". We tried skill remediation and it was a nightmare. I had much self doubt and crises of thought (am I ruining and dooming my children?? etc). I often thought of the psychologist and felt in my gut that really giving the kids time to grow up and develop without a lot of academic demands was the right path. This took me a couple of years to accept though because I had a pretty strongly entrenched idea of what education should look like. Once I gave up many of those notions, we developed our own picture of learning and it involved a lot of discussions, a lot of input (reading, listening, watching virtually every documentary in the library,) and a lot of doing (building pulleys, counting coins, measuring our yard, cats, green beans) etc, especially for the elementary years. We did not do a lot of worksheets, busy work, required assignments etc. My son learned to read around age 9 without any kind of special program. He listened to numerous audio books and I think this helped him learn how to read. I credit Artemis Fowl and Eragon in particular because he listened to the first ones in the series and then read the later ones. Homeschooling has allowed my kids to grow into strong independent learners. I honestly do not think they would be where they are now academically and emotionally if they had stayed in school. I write that hesitantly because I do not want to make ps out to be the "bad guy". I have a great deal of respect for the hard work teachers have put in on my children's behalf. I do think, however, that as the special ed teacher said, a segment of kids are not well served by the ps methodology particularly in the younger grades. Both kids started to attend out public high school 2 years ago in order to take advantage of advanced science classes and computer science. This was a scary decision for all of us. We had no clue how well they would do in public high school after years of basically unschooling (or interest led schooling). Well, once they learned which way to orient a piece of paper and where to put their name, they flourished. Younger son has decided to stay at the high school and will probably complete the next two years there. He is in a mix of regular, honors and AP classes plus an independent study in data structures since he finished AP Computer Science last year and his teacher offered to do more programming with him. Older son is basically done with what high school has to offer and is homeschooling his senior year. He is taking 4 classes at the university here, two second year math classes and two second year physics classes ( he took AP Calc and AP Physics at the high school). I know he would not be on this advanced math and science path if he had stayed in public school. I think he would likely still feel like a failure as well as feel that no one understood him at all. For my kids, it turned out that it didn't matter if they learned the way I taught because I finally stopped trying to teach them things and instead focused on helping them learn. OK, that sounds kind of paradoxical and contradictory, but I saw a huge difference in our house between trying to force work on them and working on activities that enhanced learning. By middle school my kids were staring to warm up to more structured work. I really do not think they were even ready for it prior to that. Kids CAN go on to high school level work without repetitive drills and worksheets and practicing this and that over and over and over again. They can learn critical thinking and analytical skills without using a curriculum or a text book. One day shortly after we started homeschooling, we went out to lunch mid day. Son did not want anyone to know we were homeschoolers. It finally came out that he thought we were homeschooling because he had basically *failed* at regular school. Now, he was totally on board with homeschooling and hugely relieved, but still in his mind he had the notion that we had to resort to it because there was something wrong with him. OK< so some people might say there is something wrong with him. But I decided to present it to him as a continuum. If you look at a continuum of the color red fading into white, you see it passes through many stages or phases. In a large portion of the continuum the color is neither red nor white, but they are still valid and interesting colors. We talked about schools being set up in such a way that they had to teach as many kids as possible and they simply didn't have the resources to meet the needs of all the different shades of learners in the class room. Also, I read portions of the book The Gift of Dyslexia to my son. I read that book and thought the guy sounded really out there. My kids listened to me read it and said, "That is exactly what my mind is like!" Good luck with whatever you decide!

Thanks we are definitely looking into this. They do have odd start dates but they actually work out fine for son.

Hmm interesting. I wonder if many of them homeschool their children.

:iagree: Low end CSA's here are $125 per month and only during summer and we do not live in a high COL area. I guess she must live in a very low COL area?

So does this mean I am going to have to take my own photos of David Tennant?

I initially found CC quite off putting but it is still a great resource. IF you have specific questions, particularly with fin aid, that is the place to ask. Also, it has been comforting to read threads about high stat kids going to a variety of schools. This has helped me realize my kids will likely be challenged at any number of schools. And finally, I have read a few threads from desperate students with no choices or limited resources and the CC community has done a wonderful job providing the info those students need to find a good college solutions. Sometimes these students come back a year or two later and express their thanks to CC posters for helping them along the way. Really has been quite inspiring.

Kids like a lot of fruits and veggies but I was surprised by raw green beans and fig newtons.

dp

Mental illness Both sides of the family have members with severe mental illnesses. My kids seem very healthy in that regard, but I know it can onset later in life.

I see a difference between individuals or groups reacting to posts and moderators deleting posts of a certain type even though said posts do not break board rules. I would like to continue to see the message boards as a place where diverse groups of people can come together for a variety of reasons and be, for the most part civil. I don't think a bit of reflection on trends on group dynamics should be avoided. But I am just a sporadic poster and perhaps overly idealistic ( not that the two are related!). I have enjoyed many threads filled with witty repartee on a variety of silly topics but I really value the forums for the honest support, varied opinions and basic information on life in general and homeschooling in particular. Take care all! ETA: I am not talking about whatever went down in the social groups.. I am not talking about friends saying such and such posts were deleted. I am talking about reading threads and then seeing posts deleted without being able to see that the posts broke any rules. Some posts, with a variety of worldviews, I can tell break board rules and get deleted or edited as they should. Others I cannot figure out why they are. Sure, I may be more sensitive to noticing certain trends, but I do not believe that makes my observations irrelevant. I do think this issue is related to some members leaving. Members whose contributions were valued and who will be missed.

Avast ye maties--have a swashbuckling good time!

I appreciate the different perspectives. DH and I have spent some time deciding on baseline rules do we can be consistent. This is a whole new world for us.

We live on a quite road...I always park in the garage and back out. Last winter I started to back out and LO and behold, someone had pulled into the driveway behind me in order to turn around. What a shocker! Thankfully I didn't hit them. But anyways, I hope you and your DH can humor each other a bit over this.

We have a peculiar situation and I don't really want to go into the details as it gets way too personal too fast. Please share with me, rules/expectations from families with teens who are allowed to date and who actually want to date. Especially interested for a 16 yo girl who has had a lot of freedom and responsibility but a terribly rough few years, generally honest and is trusting of other teens (not always adults though). Can they meet boys at the mall? Invite them over? Go over to the boy's house? Go for walks alone? Go somewhere with them after school? ?? From a mom of teen boys who aren't interested in dating who has found herself in a totally new situation!

I haven't been on much and all this is quite a surprise to me. I have seen threads where comments by athiests were deleted. This has included posts that were definitely not rude or containing any kind of personal attack, but they were strongly expressing the posters beliefs, which were not aligned with any kind of faith. So while yes, people come and go from various message boards , I had already been wondering if there has been a slow moderator "creep" against non-religious views being expressed and that does concern me. I know political posts are forbidden, but will it also end up that posts, no matter how nicely put, that contradict a religious viewpoint are also forbidden?

We visited Grinnell where the tour guide said that each year students vote on whether or not to have coed bathrooms. IF one student objects to it being coed, they go to single gender. She didn't feel that students who objected to coed were given a hard time about it. This was the first time I had given any consideration to the bathrooms at colleges.

We used one of the middle school kill gallon books. They helped DS write better constructed and more interesting sentences and it was even enjoyable. I do not think they are particularly good for SAT or ACT review though. I'd look into one of the SAT grammar review books such as ones by Erica Meltzer.

We gave our kids smart phones around age 15-16 when they started taking DE classes. We got rid of our land line around the same time. Prior to that none of us had cell phones and DH and I got iPhones at the same time. It was our decision and the phones were gifts. We pay for the contracts. Our kids use and enjoy their phones but they wouldn't mind if we decided to end the contracts especially since they could still use wifi. When we first gave them the phones they were kind of lukewarm about them actually but now they use the phones for a variety of tasks. My older son uses his phone extensively for his homeschool classes--including skyping to group classes and watching online course videos. Yes he could use our computer for that, but he is also taking classes at the university so being able to work in between classes or on the bus has been time efficient for him. I do think it is pretty expensive and we do discuss the value vs the cost. DH just wants us all to have them for a variety of reasons. I feel more ambivalent about them but I am also the family member who uses the most of our data package. I definitely enjoy having the phone and it has helped me out if a few situations (such as last week when we drove to a home school program only to find the building had been removed but we were able to look up the new location and make it to our meeting). I suspect we will continue to pay for the kids' phones through college at least.

I guess I should have been clearer. The govt does already provide " a legal mechanism for couples to formally commit to each other " and it is by marriage. Your views of morality and sin have nothing to do with it.

Phew, thanks! I have actually been checking it a lot whereas on the pc I hardly ever like posts...just so easy on the phone though. I see I can't even edit a post. Or else the option is well concealed.

DH and I had a civil ceremony and we are legally married. No religion was involved. I do not think religious groups have a monopoly in marriage or anything. I am honestly confused here.