A gift certificate to have someone come clean her house! Also, if you know her friends and family in the area you could organize a food train...basically people sign up for dates and on their day they deliver a cooked, ready to eat meal to her house. My friend did this for me when dd was born (c section) and it was wonderful!

My favorite for toddlers was my Ergo. Hands down it had the best support. I used to wear my son on my back for naps at work (I was lucky to have a job where he could come to work with me). In my Ergo, I was able to wear him on my back until I was 5 1/2 month pregnant with DD and he was 2 years old.

Dh still goes into the kids room to play with their Legos...and he is 36...so I am counting on the lego stage lasting a while longer ;-)

I pretty much always spell it out for them. My son is a very reluctant writer and it's not worth it to me to risk discouraging him from writing by frustrating him with spelling. The only time he is really on his own is during AAS lessons (obviously, lol) but even then I remind him of the rule if he forgets. My daughter is only 4 but she loves to write. She prefers to try to sound things out on her own and rarely asks me for help. She actually gets upset if I try to help sometimes. She also rarely spells anything right, lol...but there you go.

My son really can't stand it either. We have tried to use it on and off since kindergarten. At first I thought it was too much writing, so we came back to it when he was older, but in the end it's just boring and totally feels like busy work to me...especially since we use another phonics program already and were using it as a supplement. I kept feeling like I needed to make him do it because I have the books sitting on my shelf but I am totally going to let it go after reading this. THANK YOU all of helping me give myself permission to do so! ;-)

We are a soccer family! Both of my kids have played club soccer for the past year, and ds played AYSO the year before that. This fall will be our first true taste of the competitive side of it. Ds just got put on the roster for the U8 team and his first practice with them is tomorrow. They will be picking A and B teams this week and I am trying hard not to be a total nut case and to just relax about it, lol. DS is definitely WAY into it. He plays in the yard everyday and gets upset on days he doesnt have official practice. We even had to get him a nerf ball to use in the house. I have this video I took of him a couple of months ago standing at the table "boxing" his nerf ball while eating his breakfast! Lol. He literally has a ball with him 24/7. Dh has been involved in coaching him from the start. Dd likes it ok, but I am not sure she shares ds's enthusiasm for it. I think it's a great sport. I am a little nervous about the competitive games...we went to watch one last season, both to support our friend on the team and to get a glimpse of what we are getting ourselves into and it was INTENSE. I am glad we got to see a game and prepare mentally before ds was out there.

I did this for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it was so much easier than I thought :-)

Sounds good to me! We make gifts for each other for Xmas. The kids usually get one new thing from us. We always get lots from grandparents, so I don't feel they need a ton for us. I also always make my kids give away toys they no longer want as gifts for their friends that they may want to give something too, that way I don't have to give gift to other kids. For our adult friends I always make something...usually a baked good of some kind.

I love AAR. Ds6 has done levels 1 and 2 and will start level 3 in August. Dd4 has done pre level 1 and is a few lessons into level 1 now. Both of them have had issues with b and d reversal and dd also has issues with p. DS is just now getting significantly better at telling them apart. I think it has more to with his age then where he is in AAR. Also, I don't think it would have helped hem to delay introducing those letters, they still would have had the problem (ds has had the issue for over 2 years now). Also, I think they would have had problems with it no matter what program we used to learn to read. So, I think you should choose AAR if you like it and feel like it's a good fit for your dd, but I wouldn't worry about the b, d, p thing. I couple of things I did that seem to help: I made a poster with "a b c d" on it. I drew smilie faced in the b and d and explained to my kids that they are facing each other and talking to each other. I leave this up and they look at it frequently as a reference. I also talked to them about how when you make the sound 'b' your mouth makes a line and the letter b begging with a lines when you make the sound 'd' your mouth makes a circle and d begins with a circle. Aside from that I just remind them when they come to it or guess wrong. Ds has gotten better at it slowly and steadily. Dd is still really young, but I assume the same will be true for her.

My grandma's name is Goldie. I can't see that one ever being popular again.

Just a little in the first trimester with my first. I was so sick with my second that I couldn't even hold down water and had to take medication. Even then I could only hold down water, tea, and broth. It got better after the first trimester, but never totally went away. :-/

I have a niece named Drina, which I really like. I also really like Adelina.

We are out A LOT. Actually it's 4 days a week right now, but it will be 5 when soccer games start back up again. Ds6 plays club soccer, so that's mostly where we are. But dd4 also does a once a week ballet class. We also do coop every other week and occasionally just go to a friends house for the day so the kids can play and the mommies can talk over coffee :-). It sounds like a lot, but honestly it doesn't really feel like too much for us. I think it just depends on you and your kids. Also, we live in a place where everything is really close to us, so we don't spend a lot of time driving to all of these things. That's is big I think. If I had to spend hours in the car everyday that would get old quick.

My kids are 6and 4 and they are usually completely asleep by 8:00. We usually start the whole getting ready for bedtime routine at 7:00. I mostly do this because I need them asleep at a descent hour so that I have a couple of hours to recharge without kids, and to dh and I have some kid free time together. They wake up whenever they wake up since we don't have anywhere we have to be in the morning. Usually me 6 year old is up by 6:00 and my 4 year old sleeps later (usually around 8am).

I add paprika to mine to give it a little extra flavor.

I hadn't heard of that book! Thanks for sharing that link :-)

Well, dh has to get up for work at 4am...so we don't coordinate. ;-) He usually goes to bed around 9pm, I usually go to be around 11 or 11:30pm. As I said, he waked up at 4am, and I am usually up about 7am.

I love that you can keep reloading it over and over once your $25 is paid back too. The girl I know who has been doing it for a while now only put in $25 at the start, but she keeps relending it out once it's paid back and not she has loaned over $500 just by lending out that original sum over and over. It's so cool. My son came up with the idea this afternoon to have a garage sale to get together some money to put into KIVA. :-)

I just wanted to share this link: Www.kiva.org A friend of mine has been doing it for a while with his daughter and I am thinking of making it a summer project for my kids to save up some money to participate in it. It seems like a pretty cool way to help some people out. I love that you can search by country and see the people's stories and what they plan to do with the loan. Also, it's great that you don't have to have much $$ to be a part of it :-) makes it more feasible for kids to participate.

Thanks you! This is going to be so helpful for us!

Great! Thx :-)

Thanks. That's exactly what I needed to know :-)

I am wondering if the Zaner-Bloser 2C student workbook has a review of manuscript writing before going into cursive? If so, how long is the review? My son is begging me to order him the cursive book for next year. He really wants to learn, which is great. His printing is pretty good for a 6 1/2 year old boy I think, but I would still like him the practice it a bit. So, I am debating if I should buy both the 2M and 2C books, or if there is enough manuscript writing practice in the 2C book that I could just use that one, especially since we will be doing more writing in other subjects next year. Thanks!

We also had a bit of a lag time between learning to read and being fluent enough for reading to be even remotely enjoyable for my son. We have finished AAR1 and just finished AAR2. Something's we did that helped: Went back and read the AAR1 books even though we were on level 2. This helped his confidence a lot. I tried to alternate a challenging AAR2 story with and easier AAR 1 story. This also helped me see that he had made progress ;-) I am planning to go back through the AAR2 books this year while we are doing AAR3. Also, my son absolutely loves the cookie game Merry mentioned in her post. I also have the Games with Ziggy book and you can use those games with any of the levels of word cards, so we still use those games a lot, along with the Ziggy puppet that my son is still very fond of ;-) We have even taken breaks and done nothing but play games for practice for a couple of weeks when things seemed to get too frustrating for him. I almost always practice the cards in the form of a game. It's rare that we just flip through the stack. I only do that if we have less than 10 cards for review, but we usually have more than that (more like 20ish). I also use the games to review cards from the mastered section. For the fluency sheets...we have gone a bit over the top with the games. My son likes to make up stories, like there is a dragon who is attacking the castle and the knight has to read all the words to defeat the dragon. Then he crossed off each word as he reads it. Or he will make up two characters who will battle by reading two different lines of words. The winner is the one who gets the most words right and if they tie they have a rematch, lol. Some days this drives me nuts because he often takes as long coming up with the story as he does doing the reading, but I have to remind myself that it completely changed his attitude toward the fluency sheets and really improved his reading. He used to dread those sheets and now he enjoys them and has a smile through the whole thing. So, there you go, lol. Mostly I would just say that it will come. I remember waiting forever for my son to go from knowing his letter sounds to blending, and we had to wait forever again for hi to get from blending to fluent reading. Hang in there :-)

These are awesome! We are just starting level 2 so I will be keeping an eye out for that one :-) Thanks!