Even easier (at least for me) is to subscribe to all the posts to which you reply. You can do this individually on a post-by-post basis using the thread tools button at the beginning of each post, or you can set your user profile to automatically subscribe to each post you reply to. I chose to get email notification, so when you replied to this post I got an email that said it was a reply to this thread and gave me the body of your post; it also had a link to bring me back to this thread. If I didn't want to mess with emails, though, I could get online and look at my User Control Panel to see my subscriptions and see if there's any new action. In other words, I'm also addicted to post subscriptions. So many addictions for one forum, sigh. I'm spending way too much time here dealing with all these fun things.

Love the "New Posts", too! Don't worry about the emoticons. Use what you like. Either way it gets your point across. There are various ways to set up your viewing of posts -- threaded vs. hybrid vs. linear. Different people choose different options, and there isn't a "right" and "wrong". Some people switch back and forth depending on how long the thread is. I LOVE subscribing to threads. I set up my account to automatically subscribe me to any thread I reply to, and to send me email notification if someone else posts in the thread -- it also sends me the body of the post (not the header title). I sometimes also select to subscribe to threads I haven't posted in -- that's an option in the "thread tools" button at the beginning of the thread. That way I can follow discussions without having to search them out -- I can click on a link in the notification emails that brings me directly back to the thread I'm interested in, right at the point that I left off reading, so I'm poised to read all the new posts (I view in linear -- not sure how this would work in hybrid or threaded). The "search" function is great for researching curriculum. You can search the entire board with the big red SEARCH button. Each forum also has a search button. And each thread has a search button, so you can pull up individual posts in long threads.

You know, my sister-in-law thinks my husband (her brother) is awful because it doesn't give me a lot of stuff for Mother's Day and my birthday, and doesn't take me out to eat, doesn't take me out on "dates". I think we're gradually getting the message to her that I HATE going out to eat, and really am not interested in bunches of "stuff", am not interested in "date" nights because I'd rather have family nights, etc. It has taken years and years for this to start to sink into her head -- she and I are very different, and if my family showed me love by doing for me the types of things she wants done for her, well, I'd be appalled and feel very unloved. (I hope that last sentence made sense.) No, you aren't a bad mother. Your family knows how to treat YOU, not some other concept someone has of you. If I'd been through a boatload of medical problems, as have you, the last thing I'd want to do is fuss about Mother's Day. Frankly, I'd find it depressing, and dearly hope my kids and dh would have enough sense to act more like yours did.

Oooh, that's the perfect Mother's Day *or* birthday! Fortunately, dh and dds have figured that out. So, we came home from church and ate soup out of a can (my choice -- I hate eating out). Then they worked on painting dd's room, while I puttered around cleaning the kitchen, then cutting out a pair of capri pants. It was a perfect day, sigh. The kids even cleaned up all the Playmobil in the basement. Dh also gave me a new hose reel for our garden hose. I hate rolling up hoses. And dd gave me a gift certificate good for one clean room of my choice, LOL. My family knows me so well!

Now, see, I never looked at the General board on the old boards -- I was K-8 all the way. But these days I'm all New Posts all the time. And I find myself more likely to answer the posts from the General board. I guess I was a secret General board fanatic, and didn't even know it myself.

We got ours last week! We've looked it over, and are ready to start tomorrow. As far as how it looks: a lot like Latin for Children (enough that dd is a little worried that she'll start confusing the 2). To me it looks like a solid program that will give dd what she's been looking for -- some grammar explanation to fill in the gaps from Rosetta Stone. She is SO excited to get this! I was surprised it came with a pronunciation CD -- for some reason I thought that needed to be ordered separately.

Hmm, the monsters are the same as in the Greek myths, and plenty of people read D'Aulaire's Greek myths to their kids. It could be, though, that the presentation would add fuel to the imagination. It's one thing to picture a monster somewhere in ancient Greece, and another to picture it in the Gateway Arch (although in the latter case you can explain to the child that there's NO WAY you could fall out of the Arch into the Mississippi, so it's obviously a silly story)

I am using The Easy French with an 8yo. We have the 2004 version -- I'm not sure if it's been updated since then. Here's a random list of observations: There isn't a lot of drill with this. Some words are repeated through the course --- things like gentille, Bonjour, s'il vous plait, oh la la (which is vocab in just about every other lesson), but others are mentioned once or twice and left to be forgotten unless you decide to make flash cards and review. I think it's entirely possible to work your way through the entire course and only retain how to say hello, please, thank you, and oh la la. Good use of idiomatic phrases, like "mes chouettes" for "my sweeties". Lots of cultural info. Heavy Christian content. Not usable if this is offensive to you. The use of only 2 women's voices to depict multiple characters is sometimes confusing. One of the speakers mispronounces the word "library" (in English), which upsets me all out of proportion to the error. We were charmed by the cat in the beginning -- the cat talks to the little girl. We thought it was a great story line. Then the family moves away, leaving the cat with nary a backward glance (I like to think it belonged to the neighbors, and they didn't just abandon it) and they move to Canada where they get a dog. The dogs don't talk. It's really an uneven story line in that regard, starting out with talking animals. The worksheets are scanty, and have no answer keys. In the first lesson (or maybe the 2nd), dd was to classify words as feminine or masculine. Some weren't obvious, and I have no clue. We are also using Rosetta Stone Spanish with 12yo dd. She's all the way to unit 6, and really starting to dislike it. She doesn't like the lack of grammar, so we've added in CAP's new Spanish for Children. The French program would be pretty much exactly like the Spanish. I think you'd need to mix it up with something else. I don't think The Easy French would be the type of thing I'd use with Rosetta Stone, though. I'll come back later if I think of something else -- I've gotta go take care of some other things.

Dh is reading the 4th book aloud to the kids (who picked their screen names of Thalia and Annabeth because of the series) even as I type this. Actually, 12yo dd stayed up late last night and finished the book already. Which was really annoying because I wanted to read it myself. Their best neighborhood friend hasn't quite finished her copy of the 4th book yet. She just turned 10, btw. (Dh wanted to rename our black cat Zoe Nightshade after reading these books.)

Overly. A couple of years ago we were new in town and didn't do much of anything insofar as organized activities outside of the home. We got LOTS of schooling done, but were sort of lonely. Flash forward: Irish Dance (on a competitive level), swimming, youth group, choir, more Irish Dance, piano, Scouts, and did I mention the Irish Dance? And classes at the Science Center and Zoo, which I count as science. And probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of. Like Irish Dance performances or weekends spent at Irish Dance competitions (I'm scarred for life). They'd like to take horseback riding lessons and violin and all sorts of other things, but, really, when? and how shall we pay for these lessons?

Shoot, you can't quote things that are in the title of a post, so I can't capture the bit I'm answering. Anyway, no, rancid doesn't show up first as smell, at least not for me (and I have a pretty sensitive nose). For me, it's a bitterness that catches in the back of my mouth. BTW, my mom grinds the seeds and then refrigerates some until the next day for use. In that short time I can taste a deterioration. It's just ... nasty. I also have trouble eating mass produced products that contain chopped nuts, because I can always taste how rancid the nuts are. Really takes the fun out of eating a candy bar or cookie.

:cheers2:Happy Birthday!:cheers2:

I keep my unground flaxseeds in the refrigerator. I don't own any pre-ground, since it goes rancid so quickly. I used to keep them in the cupboard, thinking they'd keep okay as long as they weren't ground up. Then I happened to use some for some sort of raw flaxseed cookies where the flaxseed carried much of the flavor, and, eeeeewwww! RANCID. So I threw out that bag and got a new one to keep in the fridge. I'll admit, though, that I seem to notice rancid flavors more than most people. (I haven't tried them straight up to see if they've gone rancid in the fridge, mostly because :ack2: I'm afraid to.)

St. Louis. Formerly northwest Ohio.

Our teacher prefers that the kids keep taking over the summer. She doesn't want them to digress. But the teacher's going to England for a couple of weeks, dds have two weeks of dance camp and several dance competitions, work camp for youth group, etc., so it will be a light schedule. We pay by the week, so it works out.

I got a Prentice Hall Science Explorer that smelled like it was owned by a chain smokin' middle schooler. I left it open to various pages for a few days, and the smell dissipated. But, of course, that takes a lot of room to leave a bunch of books open, plus the Science Explorers are easy to do that with since they're thin hardbacks.

Wow, I thought mine was huge at 60. And a lot of those are things I don't really want to own, I just want to read someday. Although some have been on there so long that I no longer care ... I did go through the other day and delete several things.

Your Six Year Old: Loving and Defiant. According to the author, Louis Bates Ames, most 6 year olds act this way. It's sort of like 2, but bigger and louder -- they're going through another push for independence. Her theory, by the way, is that this happens about every 4 years. I didn't see it so much at 10, and we haven't reached 14. However, I read her book the year I had a 6yo and a 2yo, during which I thought I was going nuts. It was really helpful to know that some of it is just being 6. She has books on 4 year old, 5 year olds, 7 year olds, etc.

Hmm, I was just wondering this today myself. :lurk5:

This makes the most sense to me. Of course, I'm a person who, when reading books for personal pleasure and edification, will stop 80-90% of the way through a book and declare, "okay, enough of that," and toss the book aside. In other words, I feel no need to finish books, whether they're textbooks, novels, non-fiction or whatever.

That's how I was taught, too Ooooh, ink remover! Why am I so excited about this? I'm totally okay with the idea of a single-line strikeout, but I really want to find the ink remover and get some. I would think white out would be too lumpy to rewrite over when using a fountain pen. Plus you'd have to wait for it to dry. Or maybe white out is formulated better these days -- I haven't used it for years. BTW, I remember my older siblings typing on a typewriter, and if they didn't have white out or correction tape they had to simply strike out the mistakes or else try retyping until the page was perfect. I don't know why this sprang to mind, except it's an anecdote about the history of making and correcting mistakes.

I've heard people make comments both ways -- that they work great, that they're useless. They happen to work for dh. I administer the shots myself.

Many historians think that knitting was originally a guy thing, and women horned in on it later. It's traditionally taught to all children in Waldorf schools in grades 1 and 2. It's really pretty good for brain development. So, overall, not such a wild idea that they learn.

If y'all get these pens and discover that the nibs are horrid or something else is wrong with them, could you let me know? Because, really, I'm clueless. An analogy: I thought I knew what marzipan tasted like, and then someone gave me some Niederegger marzipan, and I realized that the stuff I'd eaten before really wasn't that great. By the same token, I think this is an okay pen, but really, I have no basis of comparison.

So, the implication of the original post seems to be that there are people whose houses are NOT a disaster. :confused1: And that non-disaster is a "normal" state. Hmm. I learn something new every day.