Yes, I'm definitely going to tell her to look in to K12. However, I have heard from some homeschoolers that it is very time intensive, and she is hoping to piece something together that doesn't take several hours every day. Historical fiction, online math program . . . something that can be done here and there over the course of the year to keep her kids up to speed. She is willing to have them work through both summers to make up the time.

We used to homeschool, but my kids are now in school (6th and 3rd grade). A friend of mine who has never homeschooled is going to pull her rising 6th and 7th graders out of school for a year to travel. She wants to make sure they stay current with our local school (middle school - CA), and is looking for some recommendations. I've never homeschooled these ages so I'm not sure exactly what to recommend. They will be traveling in an RV, so online options would be great, or options that don't require tons of books. I'd love any suggestions I can pass on to her. Thank you! P.S. - I miss it here! I used to be on here alllll the time. I miss homeschooling so much, but my kids love school, so it looks like I'm done for the time being. :(

Ah, that's the piece I was missing. I had forgotten about breaking the powers up into individual factors to make it easier. Thank you everyone for the tips - I'm going to need it to get through 6th grade math!

My son had a math problem that said: There are approximately 7 to the power of 10 people living in the U.S. About how many people is this? I really didn't know how to approximate this, and certainly would want a calculator to solve it. Am I missing something? And while we're at it, is there some trick to finding the square root of large numbers? For instance, the square root of 529, without a calculator? Thank you!

So this past homeschooling year, my kids connected with two siblings in their science class, and instantly became fast friends. It became an almost weekly event to get all 4 kids together, and the mom and I would chat and hang out, and a grand time was had by all. In May of this year, she decided to put her kids in school. They no longer had their weekly science class together, but they still came over to our house once a week after school for a writing class the boys had been doing together, and then would play like crazy. The past month or so it's been hard getting the kids together just due to scheduling issues - conflicting camp weeks or travel schedules. She's expressed a desire to connect, and so have I. My younger son's birthday party was today. She had rsvp'd yes, enthusiastically, weeks ago, when I first sent her the invite. Then she mentioned it again last time we talked, in the vein of "We'll be out of town but back for the party, and look forward to seeing you then." I texted her this morning just to say that we were looking forward to seeing them at the party today. Didn't hear back, and they never showed up. No email, no phone call, nothing. The party was at 10:30 this morning, and it's now 8:30pm. She is notoriously late, and over the year I've dealt with the constant calls about being late or changing meeting spots and the like, but she's never out and out no showed. My kids keep asking why their friends weren't there, and I have no idea what to tell them, other than that I just don't know. So, would you call her? I'm kind of pissed, to be honest, which is why I feel kind of hestitant about calling. Not only is it just rude, but we held the party at a lego center and we were limiting it to 10 kids so we didn't have to pay extra per child charges, which meant that there were other friends ds couldn't invite because he wanted these friends there. It feels a bit like a turning point in the relationship for the kids. My kids will be in school this fall, as will hers, but in different areas (she lives about 20 minutes away). It will require some effort to keep the kids seeing each other, and if this is any indication of the effort she's willing to put into it, I'm wondering if maybe this is a sign to just let it die, which would be really sad for my kids.

My 7yo wants to start a website so I figured the easiest thing would be to do a blog, but we are running into constant frustration. Blogger.com makes me set up a complicated Google email account, and I can't get it to stop asking questions and just let me start a blog. We tried Tumblr, but apparently I have an old blog on there that I started and never did anything with, and it keeps defaulting everything to that blog instead of the one we are trying to start, and I can't figure out how to delete the old blog. We tried Weebly, but it was too hard for him to use. Any ideas? I don't want to have to answer a bunch of questions or give a bunch of personal information. We want to upload pictures and links and post text. Thanks!

I'd like to know about this as well.

Ds11 took my mom's dog for a walk around the neighborhood, and dh and I were out in front of the house. All of a sudden I hear a guy around the corner talking really loud - not yelling, just inappropriately loud. My ears perked up for a minute, and then I heard him say "You're what, about 10 or 11?" I turned to dh and said "You need to get over there, I think someone is talking to ds." It's not like I would panic anytime anyone spoke to my son, but the inappropriateness of the man's volume made me worried he was drunk or something. So dh walks (too slowly, IMO) around the corner. I can't hear or see what's going on. After a few minutes I grab my phone and head over there. I see dh and ds standing there, talking to a guy with no shirt on holding a dog. (Granted, it was over 100 degrees today, but the no shirt thing kind of made me even more paranoid.) Dh and ds start walking back across the street, and ds starts telling me how this guy is going to give him a ride in his Mustang! OMG, I thought I was going to freak. I asked ds what happened, and he said that he was standing on the sidewalk admiring the red mustang when the guy came out of the house and started talking to him about it, saying he would give him a ride sometime but that he would have to ask his parents first (so okay, maybe he wasn't trying to kidnap him). That's about when dh showed up. I told ds that as soon as the guy came out and initiated the conversation that ds should have ended the conversation and walked back toward the house. I also told him that he was never to get in that car, ever, ever, and that he absolutely did not have our permission. He apologized and we went inside the house. I see dh sitting on the couch looking upset, and ask what's wrong. He says "I'm such an idiot." I ask him why, and he says that while he was standing there with ds, the guy said "I'll give you a ride sometime, what number do you live at?" (We live in a culdesac, this guy is around the corner on the main street.) AND DH GIVES HIM OUR HOUSE NUMBER! After all these years of pounding it into my kids' heads that they never ever give out their address to a stranger, their dad does it right in front of him! Plus, now the guy has our house number! Now, granted, if the guy really wanted to know where we lived, he could have easily just seen where ds returned after the walk, but OMG!!!!! Dh is having a talk with ds right now about the mistake he made.

She can't live here forever. It's been pretty stressful, and the situation has made me pretty resentful and angry. So if not buying anything, it's going to be a crappy apt out of the area. I feel like if we are going to have to sacrifice so much to take care of her, I'd like there to at least be a possible upside for us.

I actually forgot an important detail in my OP - we have purchased a home before, so we would not qualify for a Fannie Mae 3% down program. My mom would, but would need us to cosign because her income is not enough to qualify on her own. So put it in our name entirely, we would have to come up with about $20k. My mom would have no problem puttng in her will that I inherit the whole thing, but I can see that going south in a myriad of scenarios. I can just see my sister using that as a reason to not help my mom with her monthly expenses. The reality is that my mom is going to need financial assistance from me at some point. Even if she lived with us she would still need money for groceries, medical care, her car, etc. And our house is not really set up well for her to be living here. And with the rental rates around here, I just don't know how realistic a rental situation is. The senior affordable housing is so overwhelmed that we can't even get on a lot of the waiting lists. So if we are going to be scrambling to support her any way, I'd like to at least have our house back to ourselves.

This is currently a hypothetical situation, but it's something I'm anticipating in the next few years, and am wondering what your thoughts are on it. My mom moved in with us about 8 months ago as she could no longer pay her rent. She doesn't have any retirement or assets. She has a small savings account. We are looking into buying a cheap condo for her. We would either buy it in our names or cosign for her, whichever helped her/us qualify. We have a few reasons for doing this: 1. Rents here are extremely high (one bedroom apartments start at $1500) and the mortgage and related expenses on a condo would end up being less than $1,000. 2. Waiting lists for senior/low income units are all at least 3-5 years. 3. We want her to have some stability, and if she just moves into another rental we never know when she would have to move again. 4. While she is still working now, that could slow down or end at any point (she is 71) and we will have to help her with monthly expenses. We would rather be paying towards a mortgage/asset we own than rent. 5. She's never owned before, and I think it would be nice for her to have that experience. Right now money is extremely tight for us, and even cosigning for her worries us, as if she did have a big drop in her income, we would really be scrambling to make the payment, and don't want our credit/our house to become at risk. So, if we are able to make this happen, I'm wondering how my sister factors into this. She is in school right now, has no income, and has it made it clear that she has no intention of helping our mom in any way. Long story, I've posted about it before - she didn't even help her pack when she moved in here. It's all been left to me. So here are my two questions about "fairness": 1. If the condo was in my mom's name and we cosigned, do you think my sister should have any claim to the asset when my mom passes away? 2. If we buy it outright, and there comes a point when my mom is no longer working and needs financial help, my sister has made reference to not thinking it was fair that she contribute to my mom's care if we (dh and I) are benefitting from having our mortgage paid. In essence, she is saying that be (theoretically) giving my mom money, she is paying into an asset of ours. Again, this is all hypothetical, but we are going to be exploring the purchase idea over the next few months, and I'm curious about what others think my sister's fair claim would be on this potential asset, and if it would still be fair to expect her to come up with some money every month to help my mom.

If the show had been just for him I would have canceled it, but that's not fair to ds7 or dh who spend money on the tickets. Ds11 is a good kid, but he just gets himself so overly worked up about things and it ends up blowing up on him. I appreciate his passion and determination, but he just does not know when to stop.

Dh bought tickets to take the two boys to a show this afternoon. Yesterday ds11 invited his friend, who is 13, to go the show with us and spend the night. When we heard about it, we tried our best to get tickets, but there were none to be had. So we told ds that his friend could still spend the night but we would pick him up after the show. Ds was disappointed, but seemed to understand. This morning at about 7:15, ds comes bounding into our room, wakes us up, and tells us he's figured out how his friend can come to the show. Basically his idea is that his friend uses ds7's ticket. I told him that that would not work because I have to work, so ds7 has to go with them. He whined about it a little bit, I told him again it wouldn't work. Then as he got out of bed I told him, in very clear exact words "Do not wake your brother and start negotiation with him about giving up his ticket." He said ok, and then proceeded to go do exactly that. So I told him that we were canceling his sleepover. I never cancel playdates as punishments out of respect for the other child's feelings, but the other child is 13yo, so I'm thinking that maybe this is not the same as a 6yo. Ds11 is devastated, and is being as dramatic as possible. I feel awful canceling his sleepover. Please tell me I did the right thing, and if not, there is something else I should have done in punishment for him defying me.

In my experience, the chewing will get better. After about a year our puppy knew not to chew anything in the house other than her toys. Stuff left in the backyard, however, is still a problem. The licking is tough. Our dog is a licker, and I don't like it either. I've been told by a trainer that it's a tough one to break. You can teach a dog "off" but licking is a personality issue. She even had someone return a dog to the shelter because they couldn't handle the licking. Barking I don't know about.

Wow, I had almost the exact same thing happen. One of dh's closest friends of 25 years died suddenly last August, and my sister spent the next couple of days calling us and wanting to come over to "process events" because she had "gone through the same thing." An acquaintance of hers had died of the same disease a few years back - an acquaintance she was so close to, by the way, that she didn't even know he had died until she ran into another friend 6 months later. It really angered my dh, who had just spent 48 hours in the ER with his friends family. I just did my best to ignore it. (And told her that no, she could not come over to process her feelings about this situation. :glare:)