higginszoo
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Posts posted by higginszoo
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Minecraft and Stack the Countries are popular here.
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I've worked with my church's high school youth group. There is no way the director would consider asking for the kids to go anywhere without letting the parents know where they were going or what they'd be doing (at least in general terms). He might leave the 'who' as 'youth staff and volunteers', but if parents wanted more detail, he'd give it. (There might be a 'don't tell the kids, we want a surprise' factor, but he'd tell the parents.)
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when they were 5-6 we did Vocabulary Vine and Rummy Roots -- Greek and Latin roots, but not full language -- to help with decoding. My oldest chose Latin as his foreign language, the others have chosen other languages, and will likely not have much formal Latin (the one who chose Italian sometimes dabbles in Latin, but calls it 'Ancient Italian').
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My almost - 7 year old is very demanding ... it can come off as cute in small doses, but 24/7/365x7, it's exhausting.
My other three are more mellow, but they're 11, 12, and 13, so no, they are absolutely NOT pleasant at times (especially the 12 and 13 year olds). I'm looking forward to the 12 year old going camping this weekend because I so need a break from her right now.
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For my third, the sling has the same reaction. I didn't use it much with the older two, but by him, it was a necessity. I had to kick him out of it at 3 1/2 when I started having pregnancy complications (he was small for his age). His baby sister never wanted anything to do with the sling at all. Last summer, I was repacking some baby clothes and the sling came out and at 10 1/2, he still looked at it wistfully. He's still small (always will be, I think), but I'm small too, so there's no way I'm lugging him around in it now. It was the same calming/relaxing memories thing, though, I think.dd#2 over 2 years (probably close to 3). If she had her way she'd still be nursing. Sounds weird....but it's nothing yucky...she just remembers it as such a calming and relaxing thing. Sometimes she gets teary about it because she just loved nursing so much. :crying:
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My first one was a preemie, but big enough not to go into NICU. The regular nursery nurses really sabotaged breastfeeding. Once he had a bottle, he went on a hunger strike rather than nurse -- one of my consultants was a nationally known lactation doc, and she had rarely seen cases like ds. In the end, I pumped for about 6 weeks until I dried up. He started solids at 6 mo or so.
Dd a year later was completely opposite, found her way to the food in the first couple of minutes, nursed like a champ. She lost a lot of weight, didn't gain much back, so at 3 weeks, I started with a supplementer. But with a 14 mo old and a newborn, it was too high maintenance, so I went to bottles, did both for 4-5 months before I dried up. (She was eating HUGE amounts by then, 10 oz every 2 hours ... she still is a big eater, though skinny (5'5", maybe 90 lb), and has been tested but cleared for any metabolic issues. She started on solids at about 4 mo, soon after the breastmilk wasn't available anymore.
Ds2 nursed exclusively for 3 weeks without gaining. They did some tests and found that my metabolic issues affected my milk supply. We tried tube feeding me to help the quality issues. Dh had taken a job 1000 miles away, and with 2 toddlers to corral while nursing my newborn and the house was on the market, adding a supplementer to that as a single parent wasn't realistic. He nursed and bottle fed until 4-5 months, started solids at 5-6 months.
Dd was our caboose with a bigger age gap (olders were 4-6 when she was born), so I was able to focus more on making nursing work. She fiddled with the tapes on the supplementer and broke the tubes by pulling (she also prolapsed her cord by forcing her hand with the cord in it over her head, trying to pull out the scalp monitor they put in because of thick meconium and pre-eclampsia). We still bottle/breast fed until she was 7-8 months. She wasn't really interested in solids until 8-9 months ... we tried as early as 6 months.
With my metabolic issues, nursing took a big toll on me physically, and didn't give the dc some of the usual benefits, but they all got at least a few weeks.
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Estes Park (YMCA has a nice camp where families can rent cabins), Steamboat Springs, Granby (on the back side of Rocky Mountain National Park), Winter Park ... we usually stay in Frisco, near Breckinridge, because dh's parents have 1/3 share in a condo there so it's free, but it's a little drive to any attractions.
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Yeah, I think I'd go sooner rather than later to a teacher who is more adept at handling little kids, especially wiggly little boys.
We had a piano teacher who came to teach all 3 of my older dc when they were 5, 6 and 7, continuing until they were 8, 9 and 10. If one of the younger ones (usually the middle one, a girl) had wiggle issues, she'd just make the assignment for practice and move on to the next child and give the one(s) capable of longer focus that day longer lessons in the allotted time block. My oldest (who has always been more focused and serious) progressed very quickly this way (long lessons for him), but the littlers didn't get as frustrated, nor did she get frustrated with them, and they probably progressed better than they would have if they'd been made to sit through the whole lesson because they stayed enthusiastic about playing.
Maybe you could discuss having a shorter lesson with him until he grows into being able to focus for the standard lesson time.
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I am supervising a couple of college courses for my oldest (dh is grading one), but if he were in ps, he would only be in 9th or 10th grade at most (8th grade by age in many states). Since his work and his sister's work is more high school than not, that's how I voted.
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Maybe it's that I know your dc, but my first thought wasthat it looked like something your dd would pick out. So even though it's blue, I could see it working for either gender, especially with your children.
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Money. I was going to put both of my middles in Catholic school for 2nd and 4th. We did send dd (4th grade), but just couldn't swing the finances for the 2nd grader, and we had a great homeschool group, but it was ALL boys (unless you counted the one high school girl, my toddler, or an infant), so dd got to go to school where she at least had a chance to be around other girls. We belonged to a different parish that we loved, so had to pay the active Catholic, but non-parishioner rate, even though our pastor campaigned to get us the lower rate by offering to pay a subsidy.
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It's karate graduation night, and things always go long ... so Chinese takeout, I think. As far as I know, only one child has voted (whoops, as I'm typing one other child has come and gotten the menu).
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My 6 year old uses a basic cheap IKEA table. The rest of the dc are at the picnic table that dh grew up with -- standard 'redwood' with two long benches. The little one will be moving up soon, I think.
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We bundle. It's $80/mo for home internet, a mobile internet hub (can go anywhere we can get a Sprint 4G signal), and home phone w/unlimited calls, long distance. I think that the way they have it structured is it's $30 for the home internet, $30 for the phone and $20 for the mobile hub, but I think that any one service would be $40 by itself. (This is through Clear.)
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Yes. One neighbor has keys to my house. Another neighbor has keys to HER house and knows where she keeps the keys to my house, so she could get them if the other neighbor wasn't home. When both neighbors are gone the key-keeper neighbor provides keys to both other houses so that my dd can care for the animals at the other houses (all we have are fish ... well, and as of recently, some worms and crickets and pill bugs in my dd's science experiment). As to the borrowing, I'd probably text first and ask permission that way. I know that one neighbor has used the other's oven on a holiday when her oven broke.
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Dh's cousin is married to a UCC minister. She works a lot with inner city homeless people and addicts closer to the suburb where they live.
My impression of her church friends that I met is that they were mostly intellectuals, generally liberal, with strong interest in social justice issues, and cautious to avoid legalism in following the gospel (the concept behind the rules is more important than any rules themselves). They reminded me a lot of my UU friends, but with a more distinctly Christian feel than UU (I've had UU friends that have been Christian, and others that have leaned more toward Buddhism or Wicca in their spirituality).
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Oh good. My older two are signed up for this in March when it comes to our area. They're doing Honors High School Biology, but keeping up with the labs has been tough, so I'm hoping that the hands-on aspect of the intensive will help drive concepts home.
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Yep, since they're teeth that are scheduled to come out in the next couple of years anyway, I'd go with the extraction and spacers, which should be an option. Leaving them and dealing with an abcess is more risk than I'm willing to take, but root canals on teeth that should be coming out relatively soon don't make sense to me, either.
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The asterisk only comes up if there is a girl whose family objects to the use of the word God. In that case, that particular girl is allowed to substitute something else ('good' is one suggestion that I've seen), and the rest of the girls with no objections still say God, so if they're saying it all at the same time (usual), you wouldn't really even notice the one girl saying something different. I've been involved for a total of 20 years, and it has never come up -- even my Wiccan Girl Scout leader one year just went with God as a simplified version of her beliefs and let it go.
The Daisy program is centered around earning petals -- so they do activities that equate with each part of the Girl Scout Law. To make the world a better place, they might plant flowers for a nursing home or pick up trash at a park. To use resources wisely, they might talk about recycling and do a game with that or go to the recycling plant, To Respect Authority usually means a trip to the Police or Fire Station for a tour ... a lot depends on the individual troop leader, and I have never really seen any of the purported national agenda pushed on me as a girl member (even at international and national events as a teen), on my own girls at council activities or in their troops (their leaders have generally been more conservative than I am), and as a leader, I have felt no pressure to go beyond anything other than what is written in the Scout Law as I choose to interpret it with my troop. This year, I have a group that is functioning as Brownies, but technically, I'm a catch-all homeschool troop for Daisies/Brownies/Juniors for a large area (the south end of my county and possibly a chunk of the north end of the county below).
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My 12 year old shares a prepaid phone with her 11 and 13 year old brothers for when she's out and might need to call us. She has an iTouch that she can text on if she has wifi (bought by her uncle for her). If she (or our 13 year old) wanted to buy her own phone with prepaid access, we'd probably let her at this point, but it's not NEEDED enough for us to justify us investing in a phone or plan for her. (I think that my 13 year old is considering this option at the moment but hasn't decided to make the investment yet.)
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They're not allowed to text during their school day (shorter than standard), and they're not allowed to text friends who are in school while they're in school.
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Once or twice a week for 2-4 hours seems reasonable to me. Evenings are busy for our dc, which means we're busy providing transportation. Sometimes we'll turn carpool runs into a date if one of our olders is available to stay home with the youngest ... maybe stop for ice cream after dropping off or on the way to pick up ... or we'll do the grocery run alone together. It's time alone when we can talk. As far as a real date where we don't have anything productive to do, once every other week is what's realistic with our schedules and the kids'.
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My current orthodontist is fine with parents going back as long as there aren't siblings tagging along, too (there have been incidents with roaming siblings). My one in orthodontic treatment at the moment is 13, and having me with him actually feeds his anxiety, so I stay out anyway. The doctor is the dad of one of his scout friends, though, one of the dads who goes on quite a few of the campouts, so ds is pretty comfortable with him. When ds and dd had early phase orthodontia the last place we lived, I'd go back and bring my littlest, who stayed on my lap and chattered to the technicians and doctor -- she entertained them so much that they gave her a shirt of her own just like the ones they gave the patients.
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Too much time spent in line for me for the money, I haven't ever gone and come out wanting to go again (only been twice). And with kids who run on the small side, only one would be able to go on all of the rides, it's not worth the investment to us. I remember being very frustrated by the same thing. I was a very small 5 year old, and ended up standing in line for the same few rides over and over because they were all i could do (this was back pre-Epcot, even though).
As an East coast Navy kid, we lived near Busch Gardens every few years, and I liked it better. Even on the trip when I was 5, I remember liking Busch Gardens Tampa more than Disney World, comparing them side by side in the same week (we went to Disney first).
Do you have local family on your FB page or just friends?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
My only local family is my cousin. Yes, he's on Facebook, and that's even our primary means of communication (he lives downtown and I live in the suburbs), other when he comes up to visit.
None of my relatives post anything particularly racy, though dh's 18 year old cousin can post very silly stuff sometimes.