See, mine don't bicker. Instead they cooperate to come up with new, unwise plans (let's push the one-year-old on the full-size swing! Let's turn the fridge up to the coldest setting and see what happens! Let's line up the Furbies and see if we can get them singing a Furby chorus! Let's put eight types of random kitchen ingredients in a glass, mush them together, and see if we can convince the little one to drink it!)

Didn't we already have this discussion in the previous thread? Did that one get locked or something?

Well . . . that's kind of how common law works. Once SCOTUS makes a decision, the lower courts are obliged to apply it unless they can distinguish the facts in some way.

Almost 300

I was just thinking, wow, my kid who used to take my entire bathroom apart is really pretty cool now that he's six. So he cut his own hair today. That was awesome.

Ah, the joys of small children in groups. There's always at least one agent of chaos, someone aiding and abetting the agent of chaos, and I'm not supervising the way I did with just my first kid because I'm changing a diaper and teaching someone to read. AFAIK there's no link between being a particularly chaotic kid and a later career as an axe murderer ;) If there is, please don't tell me. I'm already having a rough day.

I don't usually post in cc threads because I'm not Christian and have little to say on it. I don't think a cc thread is a good place to start comparing Jesus Camp to North Korea. I think the comparison is ridiculous and I'm neither Christian nor North Korean.

I am Canadian. You cannot generalise Canada to the US. Suppose I have a child who wants to do a career that is available at UBC and at our local lower tier school, Random University College. UBC engineering runs about 10K a year. It's in the city so most people commute, and tuition is their major expense. Engineering (I'm playing pretend because as of right now I don't know if any UCs have engineering in my area) would run about 4K a year at Random UC, given the cost of other programs there. Like most major Canadian universities, UBC is located in the city. Since half of the total population of my entire province lives in the Lower Mainland, tuition is far and away the major cost. So putting my kid in UBC for all four years costs me an extra 24K. If I do 2&2, I'm out an extra 12K. My kid can make a very significant contribution to those kinds of costs. Do I believe that a higher prestige school with the first-five-year boost is worth 24K? I think it's definitely possible. When my American friends are choosing a more or less prestigious school, they're talking about 200K or more of difference. They're talking about an entire (albeit modest) _house_ of difference. I think it's unusual for the prestige bump to be worth 200K unless you're talking about a real bottom-of-the-barrel school vs. a really good one. That isn't usually the choice. It's usually some version of fine vs. slightly better.

Very intensive. Also didn't work for dyslexic-ish dd. Tried R&S. You'd start with Spelling 2. Switched to Apples & Pears which requires me to read things out loud and check things, but at least there's no tiles. Plus it works for dd. But I won't go back to AAS with following children unless I really have to.

I am a lawyer. The vast majority of lawyers are humble plodders doing a mediocre job of what they do. People generally go into law because it's something you can make a living at doing a good-enough job. As opposed to, say, being a cellist. You have to be a really, really good cellist to make a go of it. Maybe I just have low standards. For an awful lot of things, good enough is good enough. Re: State school. AFAIK the evidence available right now does not suggest that the same person who is choosing between a state school and an Ivy realises benefits equal to the extra expenditure at the higher prestige school.

My time is pretty dear to me, and so when someone really had to come over and it turned out they just wanted to pitch me something, I did feel pretty put out. Also, increasingly stuff being sold is wrapped in a little package of fear-mongering woo. No, I don't believe your product will cure cancer, or ADHD, or really anything else. I don't believe that continuing to clean with Pine Sol is poisoning my family and I don't think I need to eat your super food or that eating it will make me live to 112. It's like a host of weird pseudo-science Amways popped up. And I feel a bit bad for these people because they're putting in so many hours and so much money and almost never do they make the same amount of money that they would have using that time to stock shelves at minimum wage.

Also, my understanding of that passage in the catechism is that all people are saved via the Catholic Church but not that all people must be members of the Catholic Church to be thus saved. But not a Catholic. So take it for what it's worth.

It is very questionable whether it is possible for one human being to "brainwash" another, even in a Japanese internment camp or a lunatic cult. Nothing you could or would do to your child in your own home will brainwash them.

It Works wraps -- I thought they were a girdle? That's not what it is? I totally thought that people were selling a MLM Spanx.

Mine is young living oils, which if my fb is to believed, cure everything from dyslexia to cancer. Not exaggerating.

I blew out a classic and almost blew out a pro before moving to a commercial mixer. The only way I'd use a kitchen aid now is to get one of the Hobart models from before whirlpool took them over.

I'm a lawyer, but if one of my kids got his electrician's ticket, I'd be pleased. I can't see "hoping for more" as wanting my kid to do music or art or academics or real estate or law over electrician/plumbing/HVAC. None of these things involve being Speaker of the House or Pope. They're just alternate ways to earn a living.

In the recent past, there were very few law school spots. So very few people got into law school and most people had to go somewhere else and do something else. Now, the US has enough law school spots for everyone who wants one, but the bottleneck is at the other end. If you go to a _competitive_, top tier law school, you are going to be fine. If you go to Golden Gate U, you are taking your chances. It's much harder to have a start-up medical school than a start-up law school so that hasn't really happened for doctors the same way. "Architects. Writers. Journalists. Academics. Musicians. Artists. Real estate agents."? These have always been professions where people had to hustle, a lot, for work. Journalism is not a lucrative field. Neither is writing. Neither is music. The starving artist is a stereotype. Real estate agents have very low barriers to entry and so there is a lot of competition for listings. Some jobs, like PharmD, are worse off. I don't know any unemployed nurses though.

I have four children. The second responded perfectly to discipline, and I thought, wow. I have got this _down._ I know what I am doing. By 15 months or so I didn't have to follow after him because he always came right back when called. This is the type of child this kid is. Less than two years later I had another boy, and that boy started screaming three days after birth and came up for a for the first time breath at four or so. The fourth kid seems to be heading the way of the second (thank heavens, I'm tired). I do not regret being gentle with my difficult child. I do not regret being kind to him. I regret some of the times I have not been kind and gentle. I am forging a relationship with a person, not training a dog. And he's becoming a human being, bit by bit. Which you wouldn't know if you saw him in Wal Mart on a bad day.

Other than the novelty value, I don't see why this is desirable. Super markets are a useful way to get food to people who live in higher density areas, and there are lots of reasons we have tended as a people towards higher density than we used to. But as an interesting project for a year, similar to cooking through Julia Child or sewing all your own clothes? Sure, whatever floats your boat. But then if my son came up with a high intensity, extra-work project for me, I'd say no. Or today, "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo go to bed."

Also, you can't just change the locks and evict someone who lives as a tenant in your home. You have to go to civil court; That's what a "civil matter" is.

Uh, here you have to pay a live-in nanny. You can arrange to deduct a certain amount for room and board, but you can't just not pay someone for working. It actually kind of bothers me that they say they've done this several times. I'm not sure that's legal. It's not here. She's a loon, but it's unpleasant to think that other people have been working under illegal conditions.

I don't think it's excessive, although I think "Europeans do it" is a great justification. The French have a very high rate of alcoholism (responsible for 49K deaths a year versus 88K in the US, and France has, what, 20% of the population?)

Continuing to do AAS along with A&P with my daughter would not have been confusing. It would have been less than useful, though, because unless you're moving reasonably fast through AAS then I've found there's a lot of claw-back. Also AAS was making me hate life, so it had to go. Where is she in AAS? Is she completing what you've done so far with a high degree of accuracy, or was she struggling? If she's having vision issues that you investigated, does she read well and it's just spelling? I think the problem is that if your daughter is naturally a very poor speller, in general, the best programs for addressing that do require you to be involved. I think it has to do with the instant feedback that you can provide as you watch her complete the work. I get the four kids thing (I really, really get the four kids thing). Yesterday I looked at something I need to get done and mentally decided it could wait until my youngest was school aged. You know, the one who isn't due until fall :) To me, this would be worth rearranging if there truly is a serious spelling issue. Adults don't need to be perfect spellers, but if she's not good enough for spell check to catch what she's doing, that would be worth rearranging almost everything to me, because it's core academics. Especially if its tied to a vision/reading issue.

We actually made spelling the top priority for awhile and it really helped. Could you do that for a few months in the summer, while you're not using the regular curriculum? Spelling doesn't take that long. Can you make it the very first thing you do in the day? I totally get that AAS is hard to get done. Lots of little pieces + lots of little people = misery for everyone. But it actually turned out that a lot of the problem I was having getting AAS done was that what we were doing was too hard for her. She wasn't getting it and it turned into torture. The only way to make it work would have been to do more spelling, not less.