I'd be shocked if the movie had higher than a PG-13 rating. It would just be a bad financial move to do so.

I'd usually put it on in the morning, and then check her during diaper changes. If the area was wet/sticky again, I'd wipe the area with a wet washcloth, dry it, then apply more powder. If it was dry, I'd leave it and wait for the next diaper change.

Have you explained to her the process for doing it? It might not be that she lacks the knowledge, but just doesn't understand the process. I know that I find myself assuming, all the time, that DS should be able to do things because I know he has the ability to do all the steps. I forget sometimes that if I don't actually explain the process to him, and walk him through it a few times, he may not be able to apply what he knows.

I had this issue with my DD last summer. She was HUGE (22 lbs. at 4 months). She used to get that cheesy, stinky red rash in her neck folds whenever it was hot. I did end up, on the advice of an RN friend, using powder on her. The big issue is making sure they don't inhale it, if you're using baby powder. I'd always put it on my fingers, first, then just rub it in her little neck fold. It seemed to help a lot. She never really needed it anywhere else. She had (and still has) lots of leg and arm rolls, but those never seemed to get irritated the way her neck did.

What I've found is that schools tend to focus on the really big things, the Revolution and the Civil War in particular. Everything else gets rushed through. I also know that, when I was in high school, you never made it through the whole textbook. You'd get about 2/3 of the way through the pre-Civil War book, and then about 2/3 of the way through the post-Civil War book. So, you ended up just entirely skipping significant portions of American history, and giving huge portions nothing but very superficial coverage. A few caveats, though: I wonder if the test itself is designed to test what the students would ideally know? I know that standardized tests are designed in different ways. Some are designed to cover what they presume the average teacher will be able to cover in the year; others test what would be covered in an ideal curriculum. Also, I don't think we can say anything about a decline in history knowledge based on this. From reading the article, scores haven't dropped. They've been consistently low since the testing began.

I would say that, if you knew him well enough to broach the subject with him directly, all of this would be true, and it might be good to say something about how the pictures could be perceived. However, I don't really see any reason, if you don't have that relationship with him, to inform his mother. It sounds like both he and his sister are adults, and I think it would only be appropriate to discuss the pictures with them directly.

I'm increasingly of the mindset that it's fine, if the parents feel it is the best option, to "force" a kid to homeschool. I mean, plenty of parents force their kids to attend public school or private school, and do so with no guilt at all. I'd probably seriously consider my child's point of view and use that as part of the decision-making, but if DH and I ultimately decided it was best to homeschool, and our child still wanted to be in school, I'd have no problem with forcing the child to live with our decision.

Playdates for my kids are important for me. Nearly all of our playdates are with my friends' kids, so I go over, too, and we all hang out. I think I'd lose it if I didn't have that social outlet. I think you need to figure out how they fit into your family's needs and schedule as a whole. I can totally see how the age gap between your kids makes things rough. Are there any moms who just have littles who might be able to bring their kids over for a playdate sometimes, and stick around to supervise, while you do school? You could join them when your son is working independently, but give him your attention when needed and still know the littles are being supervised.

DS7 -- affectionate, smart, strong-willed DD1 -- cheerful, independent, lovable

If you look at the amount of time we lock people up for for various crimes, and the percentage of our population that is incarcerated, it's very difficult to find a country that acts less mercifully towards its citizens.

I think, though, that the story fails to take into consideration 1) the increasing number of jobs that require college degrees simply because they can, not because such degrees are really necessary and 2) the rapidly increasing cost of college and ensuing rapidly increasing student loan debt that students are taking on to go to college. Both of those taken together, to me, creates a situation in which, while it probably can't be said that a college degree is worthless (you need it to get nearly any decent job today), it can be said that we're screwing over young people by putting them tens of thousands of dollars into debt before they've even begun their adult lives, and when there aren't many jobs available that will provide a sound economic return on that investment.

In practice, though, does it work this way? I look at the U.S. for example, where we are extremely unmerciful to criminals, and have far more draconian laws than pretty much any other nation. We certainly don't extend more mercy to those who are merciful.

I think justice is about setting things right. Obviously we can't always do that--you can't undo a rape or a murder--but I think that making things right as much as is possible should be the ultimate goal of justice. Even if somebody needs to be locked away for life, for the good of society and because the crime was that serious, I still think that justice demands that that person not be written off, and that a healing of both the victim and the criminal be the goal. I think punishment has a role to play in that, but I don't think punishment and justice are the same thing. I think revenge is all about punishment. Revenge, to me, seeks to punish without seeking to restore. Can we have justice on earth? I don't know. In small cases, sure. If somebody steals something from me, and then apologizes, repays me for the item or replaces it, and changes their ways, and our relationship is restored, then I'd say we've seen justice at work. But when we're talking about things that can't be "fixed," I don't know. I saw a story on the news the other night about a woman whose son was murdered when he was a teenager. The person who murdered him (another teenager) spent 20 years in prison, and she was able to forgive him and got to know him. He's been released, and he now lives next door to her (she helped him get the apartment) and they see each other every day. It sounds like he has truly changed, and that she has really found peace. To me, that seems about as close to justice as you can get in that sort of situation. (And obviously the fact that the perpetrator was truly repentant and showed evidence of real change was a big part of why things turned out like they did.) Would I be able to respond like that? I don't know, but I'd hope so.

It's also bad for consistency as a parent. I would end up giving him such severe consequences that there was no way I was going to really follow through on them (and they weren't consequences that it would have been right to follow through on). We'd both get to the point where we were just reacting out of anger and frustration. I think the really important thing, for me, was to realize that I was the one responsible for keeping DS's behavior from escalating. He is a kid and doesn't have the skills to do so. It's on me, as the parent and adult, to remain calm and keep things from getting out of control.

I've dealt with situations like that a lot with my son. I used to feel like I had to punish EVERY act of disobedience/defiance/destructiveness. So, if DS did something wrong, and got a time-out, and then called me a name because he was angry, I'd up the punishment. Then he'd get madder, and do something else, and I'd up the punishment again. Soon we'd be in these cycles where I'd keep upping the punishments (we generally don't spank but at times did resort to spanking during these cycles), and he'd keep getting madder, and I'd feel the need to punish his expressions of anger by escalating the punishment, and he'd get madder again, until I had forbidden him from doing anything fun ever again and he was completely furious. At this point, I accept that my DS has a temper and is still not old enough to be totally in control of it. So, if he does something wrong, and gets a consequence, I don't add on additional consequences for his expressions of anger over the punishment, I just ignore it. I generally always make a time-out part of the consequence, so that he can be alone to cool down and not have a chance to do anything destructive. So, if he does something that makes me, say, take away video games from him for the day and have a 10-minute time out, and then he turns around and yells at me that I'm the worst mom in the world and he hates me and I'm mean, or if he throws something, I'm really, really tempted to punish him again for that attitude, but I do what I can to hold my tongue, ignore the outburst, and make sure we follow through on the consequences I'd set out (time out and no video games). This seems to work pretty well for him. Granted, he's older now (turned 7 last month), but more often than not, after being in his room for 5 minutes he'll be calmed down, and by the end of the time out he'll apologize to me, without prompting, for his outburst and will seem genuinely sorry about it. I've seen less escalation in his anger the more that I've been as conscious as possible of keeping my own emotions in check and putting the focus on following through consistently with the original consequences, and basically just ignoring any outbursts he might have in response to them. At 4, if destructiveness is a problem, I'd probably make sure the child's room had nothing in it they could hurt themselves or others with, and carry them in there for a time-out, so they didn't have a chance to start being destructive.

My parents were (and are) practicing, open-minded Catholics. Honestly, they were just very typical nice, suburban, middle-class folks and I had a very typical nice, suburban, middle-class upbringing. My dad had various management positions at a phone company, and my mother stayed home with us until we were in school, then subbed for a while, then went back to work as a preschool teacher, which she did full-time for about 20 years. They both took education very seriously, and both loved to read and loved books: my mother was an educator and had worked as a children's librarian before having us, and my father was an English major and loves to read and would write (not very good, by his own admission) novels in his spare time. I think they were very good parents. They were interested in our lives, but not overly controlling or too involved (definitely not helicopter parents). They had rules but were never overly harsh. Some of that may have been that my sister and I were, I think, relatively easy kids to parent. I think I was spanked twice as a child, and I was never grounded. I was the kind of kid who would be reduced to tears by a disappointed look from my parents, so that probably made things a bit easier for them. I'd say I'm somewhat similar to them as an adult. My parenting style is definitely somewhat similar. I'm not Catholic, but I am Episcopalian, so that's pretty darn close. ;) I don't doubt that my own interest in education comes in large part from them. I think the major place where we differ is that my parents are VERY conventional people. If there was one thing that drove me crazy about them--particularly my mom--when I was growing up, it was they were always very concerned about appearances. It wasn't the kind of home, thankfully, where things were horrible but you had to put on a perfect face for the outside world, but what the neighbors (or their friends or our relatives) thought was definitely something that my mother took very, very seriously. That always bothered me. And I do think that probably some of what I've chosen for my adult life, including homeschooling, has been a reaction to that. I definitely don't feel bound to the conventional the way my parents did, and in some ways I think their insistence upon the conventional probably leads me to take the opposite position and rebel against it.

Just to throw in another POV on this article and the parallel being problematic, the situation in US prisons right now is atrocious: prisons are massively overcrowded and underfunded, and many states are being forced to change their policies because of the many human rights violations taking place because of that. I think that to compare the experience of public schools to that of prisons is to ignore the very real plight of prisoners right now, many of whom are being held in deplorable conditions.

The problem is that height can be measured a lot more objectively than intelligence. IQ is not the only or even necessarily the best way to determine intelligence. It's one attempt to measure it, not the definitive way to do so. I don't doubt that IQ score and innate intelligence are correlated. But, I wouldn't be willing to say anything more than that, and I certainly wouldn't say that an IQ score is an accurate, objective descriptor of somebody's intelligence. Knowing that somebody has an IQ of 120 doesn't provide you with the same kind of clear, objective information about their intelligence that knowing that they are 5'4" would give you about their height.

My DS likes Math War and Sum Swamp. I was having a lot of trouble with him getting stressed out when drilled about math facts, and then freezing up, and these games seem to have helped a lot. We play instead of drilling, and it seems to take the pressure off.

I don't tend to think of justice and mercy as opposed, ultimately, at least when we're talking about them in a religious/biblical sense. Both, I think, are about making things right and healing what's been broken. In general I don't think of justice as being about punishment; punishment can and may need to be a part of justice, but it's not the whole thing. True justice is the setting right of things. Honestly I'm kind of heartbroken over some of the responses here; taking reasonable precautions to protect yourself and your family is one thing, but to me cutting all ties with a friend over one act, no matter how heinous, is another. I would not, personally, want people to decide, based on the worst thing I've ever done, that I am irredeemable, somebody to be written off, or otherwise have them define me by that act. Maybe the worst thing I've ever done isn't as bad as this crime, but I don't think that really matters; what it comes down to is that I don't want to be defined by my worst action, and I'm not willing to define others that way. I'd be more concerned with the person's attitude than with the specifics of the crime. Is the person aware that they did wrong? Is he accepting responsibility? Is he looking to change so that something similar doesn't happen again? Is he repentant? If those things are true, then personally I wouldn't feel right cutting off contact. People make mistakes, even really, really horrible ones, and still can change. I think there's certainly a need for firm boundaries, especially at first, but I don't think cutting off contact with somebody serves either justice or mercy.

They also usually have one or two "learn to knit" kits that provide yarn and instructions for beginners who want to make some simple items. I'm going to be a dissenter and say that I'd probably start a beginner off on circular rather than straight needles. You can knit flat on circular needles, just like you can with straight needles, and you don't have to worry about dropping a needle when you start a new row.

So many reasons here, that just added up to homeschooling being right for us. I've always kind of liked the idea of homeschooling. I was just so, so bored in school. I didn't have a terrible school experience overall--I had friends, I feel like I was well-prepared academically, I liked my teachers--but I was just really bored and felt like I could have learned more, and more efficiently, on my own. So the idea of homeschooling always appealed to me, but I didn't think it was something I'd actually do. When it was time for DS to begin school, our options were homeschooling, private school, or a charter school. We live in Detroit, and our kids would be attending the Detroit Public Schools if they went to public school, and that just wasn't an option for us; I think a very good argument could be made that Detroit has the very worst public school system in the entire nation. (I teach at a university in Detroit and saw the outcomes of a DPS education, and that just made me that much more convinced that it wasn't an option.) Private school was out because of the cost. We decided to try a charter school. DS went for about three months, then we pulled him. It just didn't work for us. There was too much focus on standardized testing. There was too much homework. We felt like we didn't have enough time together as a family. Things were stressed and hectic. DS was reading way above grade level and they had no idea what to do with him. He was always in trouble--partly because he's just kind of a trouble-maker but partly because he was so bored--and was starting to hate school and to tell us that he was a bad kid. We were able to homeschool, so decided to give it a try. It's just worked out really well for us. I like it for so many reasons: I can tailor the curriculum to fit his needs and interests, I can go at his pace, I can provide a positive and supportive influence, I get to have my kids around all day, we can just be together as a family at night instead of worrying about getting homework done and then rushing to get DS in bed so he'll be ready for school the next day. It is just a nice fit for our family.

This. If it was my sister, and I didn't have to travel, and she was cool about the possibility of my not being able to make it, the reality that I'd be quite miserable and would probably want to spend as much time as possible sitting down with my feet up, and if she was flexible about what I would wear, I'd do it. For anybody else, or under any other circumstances, I'd attend if I didn't have to travel, but I don't think I'd be physically up to being in the wedding.

Right, and it's quite possible that the admissions officer might not even be aware that 10 years ago the test was scored differently. It's possible this guy just didn't know what he was talking about, but it's also possible that the admissions person was unclear about the change in scoring, especially if he'd just spoken to somebody instead of going through the formal admissions process. But I'd be pretty certain that no college, anywhere, has a 1560 on the old test as the minimum SAT score required for consideration, and certainly not state schools.

Cheddar doesn't melt very well, but if you combine it with monterey jack, it melts much more nicely. So a cheddar jack mix can work. (That's what I use in mac and cheese, quesadillas, and burritos.) Swiss slices and munster slices also melt well.