same, I'd eat the chicken, but IDK what taco dip is - is it mainly sour cream? I'd toss it in that case. Chicken I'd just make sure to warm up hot enough to kill any bacteria on it. either in the oven or even just overheating in the microwave. But, we live in a cold place, and it's below 70 in my house, especially at night.

My 3yo DD likes to quote daniel tiger, "When you gotta go potty, stop and go right away!" once she stops fighting me and resigns herself to using the potty. But it's still a fight most of the time. Signing time has a song with the phrase "uh, oh! it's an accident" that she likes to quote too. She knows it's ok to have an accident, but I stress that it's so much better and cleaner and nicer and fun when she uses the potty. And that she's so big and I'm so proud of her. Up until recently, my approach was to be kind and just use praise. I've changed it up a bit. When she's in underwear or cloth training pants, I get visibly disappointed in her and she says "mama are you sad/mad?" if she asks if I'm mad, I tell her "no, I'm just sad because I thought you were so big and you use the potty now - next time you will?" And I'll totally use cold water to wash her off, rather than letting her have a fun warm bathtime, especially if she refused to use the potty 5 min before the accident. She has had a few periods of me thinking she was trained, but we went back to diapers many times after I found myself cleaning up too many messes. That said, my DS could sit on the potty before 1yr and was poop trained by 9mo, but it wasn't until he was 4 or 5 that he was able to go completely on his own. I do remember him being 5 and still having daytime (pee) accidents. Rewards, praise, etc. nothing was working for DS until he just decided he was gonna do it on his own.

decorate shirts with fabric paint/markers

My DH does this with my car too. It's an ice scraper. Let it live in the car, please. It might snow tomorrow.

No way! The stuff would never leave my house. I don't even stick around at the donation center waiting for a receipt. But we don't itemize out taxes either. Is there a reason why your dad wants you to keep track of everything? Is he trying to make sure you don't get rid of something that he has forgotten about?

On any day, that is crazy. I think you're fine for ignoring/blocking him. Let your DH deal with him.

Inside the broken microwave. The cupboard above the fridge. The shelf in my closet. The back of top shelf of the art cabinet (I'm the only one that goes in there.) I used to keep my emergency stress/pms dark chocolate in my nightstand drawer. Then I kept it on a shelf in my closet. I now keep it (and any other sweets in the house that were purchased with the intent to last more than a day) inside of a file box with a combination lock 😞 I'd consider stashing something like christmas cookies in a box in my car's trunk.

If at the end, the food I made was not even touched, I'd be pretty upset. But if everything got eaten and it just meant I had a bit more leftovers than I had planned? I wouldn't mind. The more variety the better.

And even if she doesn't have ADD/ADHD, it's quite likely that the techniques that are used to help a kid with ADHD complete the task at hand will help your daughter. Ooh, and figuring what kinds of things work for your daughter, now, before you begin homeschooling, will make the transition that much smoother. Homeschooling is the best thing for my DS who has ADHD, but the distraction that is having a younger sibling at home while he's trying to work is quite the challenge.

I don't really aim for time or aim for content. But, once we've spent a certain amount of time on X, we're done. I try to select a reasonable amount of content for the amount of time I want him to spend on it. With time, you sort of figure out the sweet spot. As an example, for math, I aim for a minimum of one lesson a day. But on a good day, or when he's already familiar with the content, or when we are able to skip through things that he already knows, we might do 2-3 lessons. Some days are not so smooth. We might put math away after 10-15 min of struggle, knowing we can pick it up tomorrow when he will likely be in a better mood. Or maybe he tried really hard to focus but I could tell it just wasn't happening, so we put it away after 30 min even though he's only gotten 2 questions done - or less. OR, he's having a low-focus day and keeps giving in to the distractions so I have him work for 45-60 min. He might get the whole lesson done, he might get 1.5 lessons done, he might only finish 4 questions. I always just play it by ear. For reference, my DS does have ADHD and possibly other issues.

I didn't read all the responses, so I don't know what exactly your plan is: re: transitioning to homeschooling. From the posts I did read, I got the sense that you either suspect or know your child has ADHD. In my experience, PeterPan and others on the LC board always give a lot of good advice when it comes to learning differences. I wanted to chime in here to say, try to break up the assignment rather than having her do it all in one sitting. It's a lot to write, and it's boring. Can she do 2-4 words a day to get it done through the week? Have you tried talking to her teacher to tell her you do not want loss of recess to be a punishment for incomplete work? I do agree with others that this sort of assignment is more busywork-ish than it is necessary. 😞

Can someone tell me about Easy Peasy? I looked at it, and it's not for us, but wondering if anyone has had a good experience with it. Or a bad experience. Any experience, really. 😄 A friend of mine is unhappy with the environment at her kid's school, and is thinking about pulling him out but she wants something that is all planned out for her. She's under the impression that online public school is going to require a lot of catch-up work at this point in the year. She also has a bad experience with one of those online schools - too much busy work, too much time commitment, etc. I'm wondering if easy peasy is something I should bother suggesting to her. She will likely put him in another private school next year.

The guide book is the best part of beast academy! I also caution against skipping it. Beast isn't like Singapore. Sometimes they take a "long way around" approach to teaching the "why" of the concept they are teaching. One day I gave DS an assignment from the practice book, and assumed he'd be able to do it without having to read the guide book. I couldn't even figure out what was supposed to be done for that activity without the guide book. I didn't like the practice book. I was able to borrow it from our library before deciding to purchase it, and for that I'm grateful. My DS isn't a workbook type - he's more the oral type - and it was just a LOT of pages for him. What singapore does in about 4 pages, beast does in 20 pages. Of course, you may find it is perfect for what you want it for. We ended up JUST buying the guide books and letting DS read them as he would any other comic book in his free time. He loves them and will read them just for fun.

If you're Muslim (or not opposed to Islamic stories), I recommend A Cup of Mint Tea https://www.amazon.com/Cup-Mint-Tea-Arabic/dp/0985922613/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1543639596&sr=8-5&keywords=a+cup+of+mint+tea+book The author is a native English speaker, so I would assume it's written in good Arabic. I don't speak Arabic, so I haven't read the Arabic version, but I have quite a few of the English volumes. In English, there is some difficult vocabulary, and no pictures, but I've read the book aloud to 6-10 yr olds and they enjoyed it. I typed "Arabic Books for kids" into amazon and found some books that might be what you're looking for. Many of them seem to be written originally in Arabic. It looks like NoorArt.com has some too. Again, I don't have any experience with them, but wanted to try to help since you hadn't gotten any responses yet.

I want to thank all of you in this group. Although I wasn't so active in the forums this past month, I never would have been able to even start writing without all of the help and encouragement from you ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

I won!!! And it's actually a story that I can see going somewhere after some heavy editing XD I'm so excited about the fact that I actually wrote a rough draft of something, that I got a story down that actually sort of makes sense. I've never done anything like it before in my life! Congrats to everyone who tried NaNo this year!!!!

When I first introduced my DS to embroidery (he was around 6) I used plastic mesh (the proper name for it is escaping me right now) and a plastic yarn needle (and yarn). When he was around 7, I showed him how to use a metal needle, thread, and a thicker fabric - like thin fleece or felt for hand embroidery. I drew a simple picture on the back of the thin fleece and he used straight stitches to trace it. (Mix of regular stitches and back stitches). I got a yarn loom a couple of years ago, when I had given up on figuring out how to knit. I ended up learning to crochet faster than I was able to figure out how to use that loom, lol. So the type of loom is important!

Label things in the house preferably in English and Spanish. List of common phrases (particularly ones you tend to say) in english and spanish, maybe even with pictures for quick identification. I'm going to assume you're planning to homeschool him (if not, the school will probably provide ESL lessons) The Writing Road to Reading. I've heard it's great for ESL people, and I've used it from the beginning to teach my son how to read and spell. I even use it with my ESL husband, and it's really helped him with reading/pronunciation. English spelling/reading is tricky compared to Spanish, as I'm sure you are aware. WRTR or some other phonics curriculum will likely be helpful for him. Although you are going to be working on his English skills with him, please work with him to keep up and improve his Spanish skills too. Just like you would encourage English skills in an English speaking kid - give him books in Spanish to read, give him programs/movies in Spanish to watch, get him classes or tutors who will teach him higher level Spanish vocabulary, writing skills, etc.

My jaw just dropped (thank god the fruit flies are gone, lol) I wish I had thought of that one!

We had a horrible infestation of fruit flies last year.. or maybe the year before that. It was terrible! They managed to infest the kitchen + the upstairs bathroom. I felt like I had to hold my breath just walking into either of those places so I wouldn't end up breathing them in. I made tons and tons of vinegar + soap traps. The soap breaks the surface tension and causes them to drown when they try to land on the vinegar. But it wasn't enough. I hung fly paper and made vinegar +soap traps and stuck balled up fly paper strips in the (disposable) fly trap cups I had made to trap the super smart flies that were all like "I love that vinegar smell, but heck no, I'm not falling for that trick!" and on top of all that, I was putting bleach down all of the drains every few days (something I read about the eggs needing a few days to hatch - that way i figured i'd be killing all the eggs and preventing new flies from hatching. I'd put the bleach down the drains (making sure it was at least a combination of bleach+water to coat the full sides of the drains, and also I would do it when we were about to go to sleep or leave the house - so I knew we wouldn't be rinsing the bleach out of the drains. Everything moist had to go or be dry, didn't want to risk eggs being laid and hatching. Towels, sponges, even piles of clothing were washed frequently. I'm sure all of the efforts helped somewhat, but I didn't see a huge difference until winter when I was able to kill the last of them. They reproduce slower in the cold, apparently. It was a horribly traumatic experience, and now I get mad at DH for buying fruit, lol. Mangoes and bananas seem to be the main culprits in our house.

I only have 173 words so far for today, wont get much of a chance to sit down and write until later tonight.

I'm up to 11,478 as of now, so a tiny bit behind. I feel like my story is just about done. And it's a mess. junk. ? probably editable junk though. and super excited about the word count! I don't think I've ever written a story this long before. My MC developed a tiny bit over the course of the story. He started out as a blah cardboard cut-out. He's still pretty blah though. IDK whether to go back and give him a proper personality from the start or to start over with something more grown-up/dark. My original story is modeled after magic treehouse books (in length and voice), and i'm feeling annoyed by the style, lol.

I'm at 2324 for today, and over 5000 for my total word count. Hoping that 3000 is a realistic goal for me for today. Would like to get a bit ahead.

Inspiration: I've been telling myself I can have a sweet after 1000 words, or 500 words. I need to standardize this before I end up giving myself treats after 50 words and gaining 30 lbs in the month of november, lol.

Thanks for the tag! I had a hard time finding this group last time I logged in to the forums and just sort of gave up at the time. I had 1874 words yesterday and have 1242 new words today. I want to get at least 500 more words before I call it quits for the day. I've been mostly writing all day, lol, in between kid interruptions. I'd like to be getting at least 2000 words a day, and will try to do more on the weekends when DH is home.