Just made the November menu...who hoo! Monday 2nd: Chicken Bean Rice Burritos Tuesday 3rd: Lasagna Rolls Wednesday 4th: Chicken breasts, cous cous Thursday 5th: Cheeseburger Soup Friday 6th: Shepherd's pie Saturday 7th: Stromboli/Mac and Cheese Sunday 8th Lunch: Hearty Bean and Rice Sunday 8th Dinner: Pulled Pork sandwiches Monday 9th: Fajitas Tuesday 10th: Spaghetti Wednesday 11th: Beef Roast or Meatloaf (depending on what's on sale) w/Hashbrown potatoes Thursday 12th: White Chicken Chili Friday 13th: Stuffed Peppers Saturday 14th: Date night (out for dinner for us/kids at a friend's house) Sunday 15th Lunch: Black Bean Soup Sunday 15th Dinner: Heavenly Ham and Potatoes Monday 16th: Fish Tacos Tuesday 17th: Buffalo Chicken Spaghetti Wednesday 18th: Pork chops or roast w/Mashed potatoes Thursday 19th: Wild rice soup Friday 20th: Chili Bake Saturday 21st: Potluck, not sure what we need to bring Sunday 22nd lunch: Sloppy Joes Sunday 22nd dinner: Creamy Beef and Noodles Monday 23rd: Tacos Tuesday 24th: Turkey dinner (have to have some at home since we are traveling for the holiday) 25th - 28th: Traveling Sunday 29th dinner: Turkey pot pie Monday 30th: Turkey enchiladas

One mom who was very obviously pregnant and taking two other little ones out for ToT held out her own bucket and said, "I'm eating it for the baby." That was creative! :-) I don't really care who gets the candy either. I used to get annoyed at the older ToT'ers because when I was a teen I definitely felt like I was too old to go out by about 13-14...but hey, these days I just buy plenty of candy and give it out to whomever shows up. (Though I admit to giving obvious grownups or teens that aren't really trying to have a costume only one piece of candy instead of two...LOL!).

I'm starting to wonder too what the regional or maybe social class differences are in registry info included or not in a wedding invite. I have received a few dozen wedding invites over the years, almost all for weddings in the upper Midwest, and I would say the vast, vast majority included the registry info somewhere (not typically printed on the invite itself, but as others have said, on a separate slip or on a website that was referenced on the invite for further info). I guess I fall into the camp that I am glad this is a "rule" that isn't followed in my circles and/or in my region. I am happy to buy a couple something they want or need. It doesn't make me feel obligated to send a gift to my distant cousin I hardly know who probably was told by her mom to invite absolutely the whole family, even the ones that are quite distant. We have received invites from co-workers of DH or old friends we haven't seen in a long time that we wouldn't really know what they wanted otherwise, and might not be sure who to ask about a registry. I can't imagine having to bother the bride and groom to ask where they are registered...they have better things to do when they are planning a wedding than to have to answer that simple question over and over.

DD11, DS4, and I are all cats. I don't normally dress up but those two insisted! DS6 is a wizard - he says, "not a Harry Potter wizard, just a regular one." :-) DS8 is going as the blue birds from Angry Birds Epic. In that version of the game the three blue birds are a ways stacked on top of one another, so he is a stack of three birds - the top one is his hat and the other two are made from foam board he will wear like a sandwich board. DH always dresses up too, but his costume is always a last minute surprise. All he would tell me is that this year it might involve a trip to a store for some electronics and a bit of computer programming!?! I can't wait to see...

My DD can dawdle or get sidetracked pretty easily on some days too. I make it a rule that there should be no "fun stuff" until after schoolwork is done (playing with friends, email, video games, crafts, pleasure reading, etc), which should be a motivator in and of itself. But sometimes it is not, and DD dawdles just doing nothing (or does something like read her literature selection for an hour, reading more than what was assigned, to the detriment of getting other work done). One way I've tried to combat it is by encouraging her to think about what she wants to do later in her free time. So she reminds herself she wants to see if a friend can play or she has a craft in mind to do after school and that helps her redirect herself a bit. Sometimes anyway...;-) Since I really want her to learn to overcome procrastination and dawdling, I do "let her" fail in this (not to say I am not reminding her to stay on track, but I am not holding her hand anymore either like I do my younger kids) so that she feels the pain of still having work do do at 4 or 5pm when her brothers are relaxing or playing with friends. If we have an activity, she still gets to go (unless it was something just our family was doing like a trip to the park...then I might be mean and tell her to stay home). So if it is guitar lessons or a meeting or something she still gets to go, and has to work again afterwards. I get tired too, but I have just decided to not let it concern me if she is still working. I don't stress, and I check her work the next day if is too late for me. So far, the latest she was ever working was 6:30 (the time we usually eat dinner). I think overall she is dawdling less, having felt the unpleasantness of still working in the late afternoon/evening.

Added Writing Strands 3 for DS8. - "Most Wonderful Writing Lesson" just turned out for me to be too planning intensive for me to pull off along with everything else. We'll keep partnership writing along with it. Taking a break from Miquon for DS6 to do parts of Right Start B (not just the right start games like I had planned). I think we'll get back to Miquon, but I really like some of the place value work in RSB, and didn't want DS to miss out on that. I also like the clock and money practice in RSB. I think that's it!

I think it depends a little bit on the age of your kids and what kinds of "extras" your kids like. I have used MOH with younger kids (though my DD is now on her 2nd go-around with volumes 2-3 this year, and she is a middle schooler now). I fit MOH into my own preference of how to do a history rotation. We do all of Volume 1 and the first Q. of Volume 2 in our rotation "year one" by reading 4 lessons per week for about 32-34 weeks (sometimes slowing down to 3 per week toward the end of the year). Then in year 2 we do the rest of Vol 2. and about half of Vol 3 -- doing 3 to 4 lessons per week. Last time around (when DD was in early elementary) we stopped with MOH at that point and switched to exclusively American history for 2 years. This time around she may do the rest of 3 and all of 4 over the next two years (7th-8th) depending on her preference. My kids are not so much into "assigned" hands on projects or lapbooks or anything like that right now, so my main planning is literature. I used a variety of sources to pull together my own list that roughly matches up (both last time around when DD was in 1st-2nd grade and this time around with a middle grade list when DD was in 5th-6th). I used the suggestions given by MOH in the appendices but my own sources as well. To be honest we don't do the quizes or anything either. DD often just tells me about what she is reading. DD has never been a huge fan of writing, and she is being challenged in a good way with her writing curriculum, so we are not doing written narrations or notebooking either. That's probably not how "most" people do MOH, but it is what works for us. DD loves history and could read history/historical lit books all day if I let her! I included my boys in our MOH reading last year, but decided to try SOTW with them this year. They are not as into history as DD, so I liked the idea of a bit less reading for them. The readings seem to get longer and more detailed as you move from Volume 1 into Vol. 2 and 3 of MOH.

I usually do about 30-35 minutes with my DS8. He really wants me to sit with him on all but the easiest pages, so it is somewhat limited by my available time. If we do more than that, we don't have time to finish our "together" work before I need to work with DS6 on his math and reading. Some days that 30 min. is plenty for him and other days he would definitely do more if I had the time.

Is it possible they aren't doing FLL at all but doing a different Robotics competition? I wouldn't be surprised if there are some 4H only competitions outside of what FLL does or just different competitions entirely. When I looked at the 4H robotics stuff, it looked like their curriculum isn't even Lego robotics, so maybe they have competitions focusing on other types of Robotics?

Ok, lots of these are funny...bur do you actually yell things on Halloween or are these hypothetical suggestions? (Real question...I don't think I've ever yelled anything on Halloween). Oh, and I would suggest yelling, "We're out of coffee" or "The espresso machine broke down!"

I find it interesting that in other areas housekeepers charge by the job -- I feel like that would be much better than what we've seen around here. We've hired out cleaning a few times and it has always been an hourly charge. One service estimated a house of our size would take 4 hours. I said, fine, I was willing to pay for up to five hours of cleaning. I gave them my priority list and left (aka -- focus on the kitchen and bathrooms, only do the other rooms if you still have time). When I returned five hours later, the kitchen was in shambles, they had done first the things I had said to do only if there was time, and one bathroom wasn't done at all. I was hosting a gathering at my house the next day and didn't have much "choice" other than to let them finish the job for several more hours (since I had other things to do to get ready, and didn't feel like I had time to take over where they left off, nor did I feel like I should have to do that). I complained to the owner of the service and wasn't charged for all the hours the crew was there...but boy, was I mad. That experience has made me really leery of hiring cleaners who charge by the hour, but like I said...that seems to be the norm here.

Housekeepers are making more here, though maybe it's about the same for a sitter hired through a service. An individual who does housecleaning here would probably charge $20-$25 per hour. We've never paid more than $15/hr for a sitter, but they have always been college age or younger (mostly teens). I see housekeeping as heavy, gross work (maybe because I don't like to do it? Or because I usually have only hired housekeepers when I had a lot of work that needed to be done?). Watching my kids for two or three hours seems easy in comparison. I might view it differently if it was a nanny that was going to have a big influence on my kids for a long period of time. But as long as the sitter is someone who is reasonably trustworthy (and not going to put my kids in an unsafe situation), their time spent here is not usually all that difficult as I am just expecting them play with my kids for a couple hours -- not cook, clean, etc.

We don't hire a sitter very often -- much more typically we "swap" sitting with other families (I'll watch their kids for a night, they'll watch mine another night). But when we do we usually pay $10-$12 per hour for a teen that we have to pick up and drop off...and would pay $12-$15 for an older teen or college student that can drive themselves. We've never hired through a service though -- these were sitters we knew from church or found via word of mouth from other families. At this point since DD is 11, taken the Red Cross babysitting class herself, and has taken care of one of her younger brothers on her own for short stints (doing things like watching youngest DS for 20 minutes while I drop off the older boys at an activity), she is practically an "assistant" to a teen babysitter and it makes the job easier for them.

DD11 does her own, unsorted All the boys laundry gets washed together I sort DH's and my laundry into heavy weight and light weight Towels/rags get their own load Tae Kwon Do uniforms get washed as their own load since I am more paranoid about keeping those white. :-)

My DD11 is doing it this year for sixth grade. She just finished week 9, and it is so far, so good! She has struggled a bit with the "scientific" chapters, but those chapters were the only ones she even needed any help on so far. The readings are at a good level for her. Overall, it is hard to see how she would have been mature enough to do it last year. I think the readings would have been a tad too difficult and the level of work would have been overwhelming. We did Treasured Conversations last year, and I felt like that was excellent preparation for WWS1.

I just scanned through the replies, and it looks like you've already gotten some great advice. My DS8 is now in book 4B, and we've rarely had as much trouble as we had in that first chapter on the toothpick problems. I am very, very weak personally in visual-spatial intelligence (I nearly failed a college "intro to Engineering design" class because, among other things, I just could not look at a shape and draw what it looked like from the opposite view.). So, I couldn't really "see" the solutions either, and really my DS was generally better at solving those problems that I was. I don't think anyone's degree of success in that chapter is necessarily an indication of how successful they will be at doing the other chapters, since the visual problem solving uses some very different skills than the more numerical problem solving.

I see this to some degree...and I also see among a totally different group of people I know the distrust of mainstream medicine (and psychology, etc) and the belief that pretty much any problem you have could be fixed by the right diet, product or non-mainstream treatment. Slight hyperbole, but you know what I mean. I don't have any problem with people pursuing those things, but it's not the path our family is pursuing. We're currently waiting for a neuropsych appointment for one child, but I have friends who keep asking me why we aren't trying this diet or that product to deal with his issues instead of waiting on that eval. As I read this thread I imagined how they are sitting around their crunchy lifestyle forum or whatever saying, "I know these people whose kid OBVIOUSLY has problems and they just won't try the diet changes I was suggesting!")...lol.

We updated. No issues here, but I also don't notice any big improvements. We had third party app giving us a classic desktop/start menu with 8, and we don't need that with 10. But that's about all I've noticed.

Another thing I wish someone would have explained to me ahead of time about 4H (at least here) is the importance of how proximate your county office is. We are in a large metro area at the edge of about three different counties, so it seemed reasonable to join a club that met a reasonable distance from home (20 minutes), but happened to be in another county. However, the county extension office was about an hour from our house without factoring in traffic. We weren't able to take advantage of any county wide activities (some of which would have probably enriched our experience quite a bit), since I wasn't really willing to spend an hour+ each direction driving. Unfortunately there are few general purpose clubs close by in our home county since our county office promotes an Urban 4H program where clubs focus on only one activity and/or are limited in membership to kids from specific schools or other demographics. I briefly considered starting a club but I didn't want to navigate the confusing structure of 4H on my own.

4-H was a flop for us too. I've heard there are good clubs out there, but it didn't work out for us. There were no "project groups" or "project leaders" at all in our club. Basically, the club was come, participate in a nearly two hour meeting that was mostly "business" and maybe one club member giving a presentation. Any projects you do were totally on your own. The difference between joining or not was that if you join, you could show a project at the fair. But your kid certainly wasnt going to get any help or learn to do something new.

I have heard that with 2nd edition, the difficulty in B is a bit higher and it isn't quite as much of a direct starting point as it was in first edition. So if you are considering 2nd edition, you might want to give RightStart a call to discuss your specific situation. But I would think most likely B is still ok.

I voted "other" because I think you could find a decent sale before Christmas (Black Friday?), and because I can't imagine not having a tree. Just read the comments and saw you will be out of town...you should still check the online sales. We got one from an online sale one year (Target) and it had free shipping.

What a bummer. You would think there would have to be some more "relaxed" teachers out there who are still capable of teaching well. We found my DD's current guitar teacher with word of mouth networking after her previous teacher left town for a leave of absence (and we weren't sure the chemistry was quite right for us anyway). Our current teacher just teaches a handful of students in her home and doesn't advertise or anything but she is well qualified and a good teacher. But she isn't a teacher I would have found by googling or calling studios.

Some my DD11 has enjoyed recently: Land of Stories series Mysterious Benedict Society (and its sequels) Wollstonecraft Detective Agency (first of a planned series) The Detective's Assistant Half Upon a Time (I think this is a series as well) Mr. Lemooncello's Library (this has a sequel too but I can't think of the title) The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch (First one in the series is called "The Name of a This Book is Secret"...lol) These are all along the mystery, spy, or fairy tale theme. On a different note, my DD who seems to have similar tastes also likes the Percy Jackson series and others by Rick Riordan.

Not just under the couch cushions...but shoved into a small crevice adult fingers bare fit into under the cushions. At least, we found one of DH's phones in a spot like that (three weeks after we replaced it, unfortunately).