higginszoo
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Posts posted by higginszoo
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I generally say it's whatever grade that we have them in for Sunday School, etc. For some, this is their age-grade according to ps ... for two, it is a year ahead of that.
To reconcile the fact that it's his first year in high school youth group, but he'll only likely have 3 years of high school, ds is calling himself a freshmore this year. (He has been following age-grade, but has been working on high school for a couple of years now, and is almost halfway through his credits, so will likely graduate in 3 more years.)
Little one has been a year ahead for Sunday School for a couple of years now. We'll keep her there as long as it's a good fit, but if the age gap starts showing as she gets older, will move her back.
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We allow last name ... my kids don't answer to just last name generally. My older three have had a good enough sense of stranger danger, etc. by 10-11 that at that point, we allow first name as well. My boys have Boy Scout nametags and my little guy's black belt for TKD have first and last names. But in both cases, parent wishes are respected, and he has friends in both scouts and TKD who have some shortened version of their name due to security concerns. My youngest is much less circumspect about such things than her siblings were at her age ... I can see us needing to limit this more with her if things keep going the way they are so far.
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My brother bought one for my 7 year old. It's not something that I would have bought her myself. She already had a history of generally being careful with things. It just isn't where our financial priorities lie, though. My boys had previously saved on their own to buy iTouches with their own money, which is generally the approach that we take with anything like that.
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I'll send my youngers (generally early risers, though sometimes my 11 year old is starting to sleep late) into the bedrooms to dress/get ready for the day/do morning chores at 10 if the teens aren't up yet. That usually gets them going.
I like how our local schools start the little kids first, then the older ones (middle school actually starts after high school, but they're both over an hour after elementary), as it seems to fit adolescent sleep patterns a bit better. I offered the older ones the chance to room together and put the littler ones together, but they chose to stay with same-gender roommates instead, so with that comes a need to accommodate earlier, more 'normal' sleep patterns and compromise a bit on what they'd rather do. Between the mess factor and the late hours, I was a little surprised that they didn't go for the room switch, but it's not a decision I felt like imposing on them, either.
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Congratulations on your not-so-little new niece. I hope that mom and baby can be reunited soon. With the transfer, it sounds like there were likely some undetected gd issues, but those things can usually be resolved quickly for both mom and baby.
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Not a raincoat user, but I hear that the best swimmers tend to run at the front of the pack, so to speak ... and some might not even wait for the starting gun. So from that perspective, I don't find your situation particularly unexpected.
Congratulations on your surprise package!
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Usually between 9 and 10 ... some nights, his activities keep him up later. If he's home, he's in his room soon after 9, but they talk and read in there for a while.
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SeerSparks28254
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My older kids had rest time in their rooms for an hour or two every day until they were 7 or 8 ... it wasn't necessarily rest time for them, but for me. Now that they're bigger, I can go off and take my own quiet time in the afternoon.
When they were little was definitely the hardest.
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I've seen it both ways. In my family, we usually bring the casket (or now urn as cremation becomes more popular) to the gravesite, but the actual burial is later. To me, this makes sense, especially given the burial style that is used in New Orleans, where my family is from. The same raised gravesite holds many, many people. I believe the first person to be buried there was my grandmother's oldest, stillborn brother. He has been followed by his siblings (there were 5 more, including one with the same name who died in his 20s), some of their spouses, and at least one nephew (my stillborn uncle). The space is about 3 coffin widths wide, but I would estimate that there have been 15 people buried there. Because of this, as they dig in to make space, it's not uncommon to come across other remains, which wouldn't be something the family would probably want to see. The same with other branches of the family in crypts -- bringing the casket to the crypt is enough for most people, as there are other coffins already in there. I do remember peeking in when my other grandfather was buried, but that crypt only contains my grandfather and his parents.
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Unbearable? No. They get to the point where they're really, really uncomfortable, but that could be past the point that you want to go before getting in. I had weeks of prodromal labor (labor that doesn't progress) with my younger two. The docs had me take a warm bath, and said that unless it was the real thing, that would slow it down.
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If your skin tone is similar to the pictures, I think that the top one looks better. I think that the bottom one would look better on someone with lots of warm brown tones in their skin already. Both are very pretty ... I like the birds and some of the details in the top one, too.
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currently dd(15) shares w/ youngest ds(8) ~ they're my messies & the middle two share ~ my neatniks. This has cut down on the number of disagreements a lot.
I've broached the topic of switching to olders and youngers, as the 11 year old and the 7 year old are in really messy phases right now. The olders, who will be 13 and 14 this summer, decided that they'd rather stay with their same gender sibling than share with each other (fair enough), so things stand. Almost-13 has actually gotten messier lately, which is one reason why her taking over one of the other bedrooms is off the table. We currently have a bed in there for out of town guests (doesn't happen often), shelves with craft supplies (mostly hers), and younger ds's desk, because he prefers to have a space to go off by himself (interesting to me, because he is the one who MUST share a room -- when his brother leaves for more than one night, he bunks in with his sisters on their floor), while the others prefer working in common areas.
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First -- pumped, then bottle-fed, didn't cosleep
Second -- combo of bf and bottles, didn't cosleep
Third -- combo -- coslept when dh wasn't there (he moved 6 weeks ahead of us when ds was 4 weeks old).
Fourth -- combo -- coslept almost exclusively until she was almost a year old.
I did find it more convenient to nurse at night when they were cosleeping, but the bigger factor was that our youngest was (still is) a terrible sleeper, and it was easier to settle her back in when she was right there ... when we put her in the crib, I was having to get up and tend her many times a night. If she was right there, dh or I could usually resettle her without fully waking up ourselves.
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For me? Because I've never had anything that I've had a strong conviction that I want something in particular on a specific place on my skin forever, especially when it's going to hurt to get it there.
For others? Well, I've seen a lot of people with some pretty tacky ink -- either badly done or just not well thought out. I've seen other people with beautiful artwork, though. But I'm not universally against other people having it ... I tend to be live and let live, though.
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We choose to have our children share bedrooms. We have 4 dc and 5 bedrooms, so they don't have to share, but we think that the lifeskills that they're gaining by having to compromise with someone that way are valuable, so we use the other bedrooms for other functions. We may eventually split the girls, because the 5 1/2 year age difference can be a lot to overcome (not impossible, f-i-l shared with his brother who was 14 years younger), but the boys are barely 2 1/2 years apart and will likely share as long as they live with us. When they were little, all three shared. There was a time when we considered a short-term assignment that would have meant living in a two bedroom high rise apartment -- they would have all shared -- oldest would have been 10-12, youngest 4-6. They would have gone out to school during that time, partly because there would have been good choices that we don't have here, and partly because it would have been a pretty tight space to try to have a homeschool lifestyle (though I know that some do it).
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As a test administrator, it is usually VERY, VERY clear in the instructions to administer the test that that sort of behavior is strictly forbidden.
If a child seems frustrated with a particular test question, I make a general announcement that it is ok to move on and come back to a question later, and that it is a good idea to check your work anyway if you finish with time remaining. This is true whether I have a group or it is only one of my own dc.
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Ok, my information is 20-30 years old, but I used to camp there as a Girl Scout in junior high and high school.
The beach is nice for wildlife study, there aren't very big waves, but I don't know if it's how it's situated so close to the mouth of the bay, but the water was gross. We used to go around to the ocean side if we were actually going in the water. I remember taking bikes on one trip, and we did basically the whole park. Last time I drove through a couple of years ago, it looked like they had some kind of historic preservation site that I only have vague memories of from the mid-80s.
I remember canoeing, but not whether we were able to rent the canoes there or whether they were brought out for us.
From what I saw on the site, it looks like any site with 20ft Std. is good for tent camping, and it said that those sites are assigned upon arrival, not on the website.
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Lack of affordable options for daycare is one of the reasons I transitioned to SAHM. Sure, it was tough financially at first, but with three children under three, my $40K salary wouldn't cover daycare, much less gas and the other incidental expenses that come with being in the workplace (clothes, the occasional lunch meeting). That was 11 years ago, so I can only imagine how it has gone up.
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It depended on the child, here, too. My oldest still remembers some books that we read, and we did the early cores younger than recommended. My middles were older, and don't remember any of it. We didn't continue with SL, because it just wasn't clicking with enough of the dc, and it was too much of my budget to buy new cores for the one child, especially once they closed the forums to new core owners and subscribers only.
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If he's truly accelerated in math, you might find that Saxon just moves too slowly after a few weeks or months. For children who catch on to math concepts quickly, I have had much better luck with MEP and Miquon. My dc used Miquon starting at about 3, at a pace of about a book a year through the first 2-3 books, then picked up the pace significantly after that. I've used MEP at various points from level 1 through GSCE prep (where I did have to cut out a lot of repetition), and it has also worked well for my mathy kids.
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somebody usually uses the ironing board for something (ds1 for CAP uniforms, dd1 for sewing), but less often than once a month. It gets stored in the laundry room, but there is no room to actually use it in there.
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You'll need the teacher's book and the student book. The program has also expanded from when I used it.
The chalkboard they sell is a little more durable than ones you can get at a craft store, but sometimes you can find one at a craft store for a dollar, which can make it worth the savings -- make sure that it's 4 by 6 inches or 3 by 5 inches -- no smaller or larger, and that it is REAL SLATE, NOT PLASTIC -- the dollar store sells plastic ones, but they won't work for the methods the program is going to teach.
I agree that you can easily use foam board to cut out letter pieces -- I even used cereal boxes for one set -- they worked for many activities, but lacked the thickness that was desirable for others.
We used a little dollar store magnetic erase board with my youngest for some of those activities, since she was the last child and I didn't want to invest in more equipment at that point (in the middle of a move when I needed to keep stuff down to a minimum).
Little golf pencils like they use at putt-putt or IKEA can be useful, too -- you don't need a whole case or anything, but while you can break crayons and chalk down into the 1-2" pieces to work on grip, it's more difficult to adjust pencils so easily.
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Definitely 911 for threatened suicide.
House Hunting... How many houses did it take?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
It has varied (we've bought 5 houses) ... the first few were local moves, and so we'd look at 3-5 a weekend for 4-5 weekends.
The others have been out of town, and we've always seen at least 10. For this last one, we had 3 days, and saw 26 houses. The 26th is the one that dh had his heart set on from the beginning (the owners were taking it off the market so a showing was difficult to get), and that's the one we ended up buying.