http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2474887/Is-Marias-REAL-family-Bulgarian-mother-quizzed-police-birth-records-suggest-gave-away-baby-Greece.html Looks like they found the mother. The results are not in yet but she has so many of the features of the siblings like the forehead that I think she is. So she was born to a poor Bulgarian mom and was sold cheaply. She has albinism. I always thought that people with albinism had no color and white white hair and pink eyes but I guess maybe you can have a milder form?

I'm glad he has started to write! My son just turned 5 and he can't write and not only can he not write but he cannot draw anything recognizable or color neatly either. He does mazes but he is sloppy about those. I am a little worried about it. He is in the school district for speech and I told them I had concerns about his writing and asked if they could observe him. An OT observed him and said he has a bit of a weakness but he is fine and they will send some worksheets. I don't need worksheets lol. The school he will go to has strict expectations on handwriting so I am a little worried. Hopefully he will do similar to your son.

You don't need to see a pediatrician or get a referral to contact Early Intervention. I would call your local Early Intervention office. You can also go for a private evaluation since you have good insurance. The school district doesn't take kids until they turn 3.

It is very very cold here on Halloween night. I usually go trick or treating with my friend and both of our husbands come to help in case one of the kids gets too cold or cranky. When we get home if there is a trick or treater we will hand out candy. When I lived in a condo we never had a trick or treater come so it was a non issue. I am not big on decorations and I leave the light off when we are trick or treating. There is always quite a bit of houses without lights on and I never think too much of it.

Right now due to circumstances it is not a good time to get pregnant. I don't know if I will ever be in a good place to have another but I am not ready to be done so I wouldn't do anything permanent. I hope that I will be able to have 2 maybe 3 more down the road but my clock is starting to tick so who knows. I don't feel done but there is a good chance I am. I always pictured myself with tons of kids. Then I was a nanny while I was going to college and my plans changed because I saw how hard it was to care for kids all day. ;) Being a parent is a lot more exhausting then I imagined but I love watching little personalities develop. I love love babies but I know that stage is fleeting and that you need to want to do all the stages. I am sure it will be hard to have a house full of teenagers but a few years down the road I love the thought having lots of family who are forming their own families and making their way in the world and having the possibility of more grandchildren.

DD's school uses the Spalding method. I love it for a school! The neighborhood schools in my district all use Houghton-Mifflin and I wasn't impressed by what they were describing and from what I hear from friends with kids around my kids age. It was very sight word heavy. I would prefer Saxon over Houghton-Mifflin I would think but I don't know much about Saxon for reading.

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I used hwot with my oldest when she was 5. I was trialing homeschooling and was undecided about public school. I didn't know where we would be living or what school would be like there and I loved certain aspects of homeschooling. We ended up staying where we were and she got into my favorite charter school. Handwriting was hard for dd but she benefited from learning one letter at a time and getting corrected and she did well with instruction. Then she went to kindergarten where they used a different style and different paper and she did struggle quite a bit for a while. She eventually got through it and learned the new style but I feel like she wasn't allowed to improve because it was almost like starting all over. Now she in 1st and struggling again. Her school expects good handwriting but she writes more and it is harder to correct the problem. My son is struggling with learning to write more then dd and I won't be using hwot with him. I am going to teach him using the letter formation and 3 lined paper the school uses. I did buy the small chalkboard and will start with wet dy, try before we use paper but I will be using the letter formation the school uses and when we start using paper I will use 3 lined paper. The biggest challenge was not the slightly different formation of letters but the paper.

Both my girls are skinny. My oldest refuses to wear jeans so she wears leggings and fleece pants. Some of the fleece pants brands can fit skinny kids. For my youngest I just look for pants that are not big in the waist. I try everything on before buying.

Last year in kindergarten I sat next to dd and had to walk her through what she had to do for her homework. For some things I had to help her like when she had to write sentences and spell and punctuate everything correctly. This year she is doing everything independently and doesn't need my help. I do a brief look over and have her correct her mistakes. She isn't graded on homework though and I think since it doesn't count as a grade it is better for her to know she made a mistake right away and correct it so she knows the correct way. The overall goal for me is for them to get more independent over time with homework. I think it is good for kids to take full responsibility even for the mistakes but I am also torn because I also see it as a way to help her learn things that she is struggling with and she may need one on one time to learn. I don't know what I will do as she gets older. For now I have her correct her mistakes because it doesn't count towards her grade so I like having her correct the mistakes when it is still fresh in her mind.

My confirmation came too!!! I could only get one for one of my daughter's but that is okay the other is a little too young anyway.

A friend posted about this on facebook. There was only one doll left when I woke up this morning. Darn Alaska timezone. I got my first confirmation but not the second. I am really hoping it wasn't sold out by the time I ordered and my second email doesn't say that they couldn't process it. I called and there is no information yet and they said it will take several hours. There are none left now.

I did end up calling and we had a brief conversation where I asked how she was doing and mentioned I noticed her getting some bad grades. She told me she is doing fine and she is listening okay but she is very careless and rushes through her work. She also mentioned that her handwriting is sloppy. Now that I gotten her work back she is just being careless. Nothing she gets marked wrong on is something she doesn't know how to do by showing how she skipped over something or what she was suppose to do. She is getting things wrong because she is skipping over things or rushing. The math is easy for her at the moment but she is making mistakes and it is affecting her grade. I talked to her about looking over her work and making sure she isn't skipping things and making sure she is following the directions. It is driving me a little crazy that she isn't struggling at all at the moment and still isn't getting a great math grade but I don't know what to do about that. Oh well.

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I heard somewhere that 1/3 of Finish Kids are already reading when they start school and another 1/3 have excellent prereading skills. The language is also a lot easier to learn then English. Singapore is very much into early learning. It is funny how the very different approaches of the two countries have really good results.

I like the national geographic level 1 and 2 readers even at those levels they have a lot of information in them. The Magic School Bus level 2 readers were good at that stage too.

I switched around a lot with both kids and I do think it can get to be too much but sometimes what you are using just doesn't work so you need to. If I could do it again I would switch less and stick with things a little longer. My son is 5 and he is struggling a bit learning to read. I know he is still young and it could be just that but I think it is something else too. He had an articulation delay and I think it is related. He will learn but it is going to take a lot of practice. My now 7 year old dd struggled for quite a while. She could sound out words but had no fluency. I tried several things and one day it finally clicked and progress was faster. My ds is having a harder time then her even when she was struggling but he is younger too so it could be that. He a very bright little boy with broad interests, a great memory and ability to comprehend. It would be helpful if he could read and write but for now I read a lot to him and scribe for him. At least he loves being read to. Reading simple sentences with simple words isn't exactly exciting to him but once he gets past that I know he will love having the ability to read. He will get there eventually but I have no idea when that will be. I used reading bear with both of my kids and it definitely wasn't the magic bullet for them. It was useful for my dd but my ds needs a lot more then reading bear. It is a great resource and I do recommend it to people to try but it doesn't work for every kid. My son does okay sounding out the words on reading bear but it doesn't translate into reading sentences or to later readings of the words in isolation. I think using reading bear got him sounding words out with pauses and that has been a very hard habit to break. He can do it without the pauses but the consistency isn't there. I am thinking of stopping the switching around and sticking with AAR for now even if he isn't flying through and he gets a little stuck but of course that can change again ;) I also think I will use meet the sight words with him too eventually. I was debating that but I think that will help him.

Thank you. She does read lots and lots of the step into reading books at all the levels and picture books. I have lots of those in the house. She can read several in a setting really fast during reading time. I wanted some more longer books too and to hopefully find a read aloud that she might enjoy. I am going to go through these suggestions and write them down then I can search for them at the thrift stores and used book store with her or take them out from the school library. I read her The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, Started Little House with her but she didn't want to and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I read her Charlotte's Web and she was pretty neutral about it. She actually doesn't really seem to pay attention or enjoy most books I read to her or audio books. She isn't as into the Magic Tree house books as much as the Magic School Bus and Droon which she is reading on her own. Her favorite seems to be Droon at the moment. She actually can finish more then half of a Droon book in a day at school some days. She is allowed to read library books after she finishes her work.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. A lot of them do look like books she would like.

I'm looking for ones she could do herself and ones for me to read to her. She hasn't liked any of the books I read to her. I would love to find something that I could read to her that she would like. The list above is all books she read except Charlie and the Chocolate factory. I did read her My Father's Dragon a while back and she was pretty indifferent towards it. She wasn't getting into it.

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I got AAR1 for my son a while ago but I wan't loving it at first. His blending was really choppy and the fluency sheets were just too frustrating. I been using a hodge podge since but I pulled out AAR again and I realize I do like something that is open and go and I can follow. I just break the fluency sheets up on the board now. I will finish AAR1 but I am not sure about getting 2 and 3 because of the cost. I will look for used copies before I need it but even used it is expensive. What phonograms does AAR2 add? What reading level will it get you too? Will it be enough to start reading books at around the first grade level at least and start doing the multi-syllable section in reading pathways?

My oldest daughter and my youngest daughter are the same way. I almost feel like it is pointless to read aloud because she isn't actually listening but I do keep doing it. She can read well on her own but she still doesn't seem to love it and the vast majority of what she reads is fluff. She can't concentrate on the books I read to her. The only book she sort of got into was Charlie and the Chocolate factory but only the first few chapters and then she got bored. I love reading to my son because he sits next to me and takes everything in and enjoys it. He likes a lot of subjects and gets curious. He even enjoys reading classics.

My older kids both still read a lot of short books or picture books so they read a lot of books yearly. There is no way I could count. I keep track of page numbers for the school. Last month she read 2000 pages and this month she is getting a better start then last month. I try for a minimum of and hour a day of reading. My oldest daughter picks mostly fluff to read. I wish she picked more substantial reading but I don't want her to hate reading either. I read to the kids every night to and I try to read more substantial books but I don't know what would count as classic literature. My son has broad interests on the other hand and he does like to listen to the classics. He can't read on his own yet but he is interested and enjoys things more then my oldest. My youngest is ready for chapter books and she seems tp pick all fluff too. I try to slip in the newberry and calicott picture books but she has been all about listening in with her brother to the truck books, books about butterflies and the magic school bus picture books.