Ours had an extender for the part that you could stack the records on and then they'd release down one at a time. Here's one for the same generation ... dh has his phone set to a chime sound when his phone needs a charge. I tell him that Tinkerbell says that it's time to turn the page. :laugh:

Some friends had those. We always had the cylinder adapter that adapted the record player to the record instead of the other way around.

Congrats! I hope to join you by the end of the year. My 14 year old Life scout has 3 partial merit badges to finish and his project. He's SPL right now, so the Eagle advisor has been laying off of him for the time being, but his term is up at the end of February. My 12 year old is already First Class, so he's on a pretty quick pace, I'm guessing that he'll slow down (and that's not a bad thing IMO), but he seems to be Eagle-bound at this point as well. (Their dad is an Eagle, and while he is VERY careful not to pressure them, there is kind of a bar set.)

Thanks for reminding me ... like you, probably, we're on a B week only in this area (I go to the NW Travis county site) ... we enjoy the chance to try things that we maybe ordinarily wouldn't try. My littlest has found that she LOVES brussels sprouts and kale, based on our BB shares, and is planting her own now.

Agreeing that the McHenry course isn't that terribly time-consuming. The 4 days history and 1 day geography would probably work well. My dd did it last year in 7th grade, and it really didn't take that long. She found it a lot more engaging than Runkle (which is what my boys have used for middle school geography -- though I documented it on oldest's high school transcript).

It is and always has been a special treat, once, maybe twice a month at most, when we're eating out. But we don't have a lower age limit -- once they were eating table food, the occasional sip of soda is allowed. We do have them switch to water after one serving -- no soda refills. I used to limit them to non-caffeinated sodas, and now they generally stick to that by habit, even though I don't limit what they order now that they're older.

I like the 'can't afford what I charge' answer. There are only three children not my own who I'd consider homeschooling (two of the three, we're the ones who would raise them if their parent(s) couldn't). All three live out of state, and all but the one have competent parent(s) right now. We decided that the one case where we might pursue custody (the child is in the courts system in his state) would be too disruptive to our existing children, and that at a high school level, even if he did end up with us, he might do better in our local public alternative school. The other girls would fit in well academically and socially with our girls, though they are in traditional schools now. If we had moved to MD, I would have seriously offered to homeschool one of them and worked out the legalities with mom (she would have had to be the responsible party). The other one is my niece, and yes, my s-i-l has joked about moving closer to us so that I could homeschool her -- it's legal in our state to do that, but not in hers (she could homeschool her own child, no problem, but for now has gone with private schools, the same ones that I might use if we were to move there). My brother is settled into a really nice job, but doesn't have a degree, so moving is more difficult than with a degree. I tease them about the 'homeschool' decor of their house. My brother painted a chunk of their foyer with magnetic blackboard paint and framed it as a blackboard. In both of those cases, I think that we could work out things that would be difficult with most families, but even more so with non-family members -- things like goals, discipline, philosophy ... things that would absolutely prevent me from ever considering homeschooling some random stranger's kid. :glare:

Both. Our local community college has good programs for high school aged children that is part of our paid for public education. Those credits can be transferred to a 4 year state school and/or an AS is taken for credit toward a 4 year degree at the non-state run schools. Even with scholarship funds, the fact that we have three children in a 30 month span who will all be college-aged together, taking the free/cheap credits are worth it so that they can fund their education through the bachelor's or master's/doctorate level.

I had to vote other, because it's really about half and half recently. My dh doesn't like it when I leave, but he's a snorer, and staying was resulting in completely sleepless nights for me. So usually I migrate to the (somewhat) quieter guest room (I sometimes have to put the radio on in there to drown out his snoring). Currently, our youngest is occupying the guest bed,(she has a top bunk in the girls' room usually, but had surgery and needs a lower bed for the moment), so I'm kind of stuck in my bed, and between getting up to take care of the little one and coming back to the chainsaw in my bed, I am really, really sleep-deprived. Sometimes when the guest bed isn't an option, I'll take a mild sleep aid, but as Mr. Chainsaw sleeps like the dead and 'baby' needs middle of the night care right now, that really isn't an option.

A bit to my surprise, yes. My eighth grader has a pretty good vocabulary (so I figured that she could define it), but her spelling skills have never been particularly good. She has been making more writer friends online lately. I guess that it's paying off.

Several years back, one of my bffs' ds was diagnosed with OCD, and we had a lot of fun diffusing the shock of the diagnosis for her with a series of comments we called the 'up side of CDO' ... this sort of thing was one of them. Not only did this kid have his life all in order, but he was happy to share his organizational tools/skills with his friends (the rest of our dc), but as the ring-leader of the group, sometimes they actually followed him when they were at home. I remember asking M to make a schedule for my older two for school. They followed his better than mine (for a couple of weeks, anyway).

Our furnace broke before Christmas, and since we were gone for 2 weeks before Christmas, I decided to wait until I got back to report it (rather than explain to a contractor why I didn't want it fixed for 2 weeks because the house would be empty). So we had fires going and were all bundled up for a couple of days until the heating guys could get to us. We live in central Texas, so I knew that things like the pipes were not a danger. I got a good laugh at myself when the guy finally came and looked at the thermostat. We were all 'surviving' the 65 degree temperatures in the house. I know a lot of people (not in Texas) who keep their thermostats set there during the day (lower at night) ... WE did when we lived in Colorado and Utah. The air conditioning guys messed up when they put our unit back together (we were up to 85 in the house this summer when that broke -- nothing like the 100+ degrees my New Orleans ancestors dealt with before air conditioning). We're now up to 72 degrees. Funny how quickly we've come to expect such a narrow temperature range.

I like Bethany Hope.

We just did a week in a mountain cabin without internet -- it was a long week, and some things fell through the cracks because I had no way of dealing with them ... so while I like to avoid it on vacation, having it available is a big plus. A washer, dryer, and dishwasher are really nice, but not dealbreakers, though a drying rack in the bathroom or kitchen for hand laundry would be a nice amenity if a washer (or dryer) weren't included. I'd probably pick the fireplace/stove over the TV ... we used it much more than TV on our last vacation -- the bedroom TVs didn't go on at all, and the sitting room rarely. We're a family of 6, so the pullout couch would make the difference between us considering the property or not, as that's a major search criterion... when given a choice, we prefer to have the singles and pullout separate from the queen, but that isn't necessary, just a preference. DVD would not be important unless there were a rental place nearby, as North American region DVDs probably wouldn't play anyway.

I've been to northern Europe in July. NOT cold (I don't do cold, either), gorgeous. I voted on the assumption that either vacation would take place in the same timeframe, and because it sounds like you'll have plenty of opportunity to go South Florida again some other time.

Dh is home and in the way. We'll start tomorrow, which a few local people have declared mean, but we were away on vacation starting on the 13th, so it's getting to be time to get back to a routine.

My ds started earning high school credits at age 11. At 14, he would be a freshman, but has more than half of what he 'needs' to graduate. He'll start dual enrollment next year, but at the rate he's going (It's still difficult to say 100%), he won't be ready to live away from home at barely 17. It's ok. He has lots of options. He can fill a year with electives, take a 5th or 6th science class, take even more dual enrollment credits, do 'work-study' all year, or graduate and take a 'gap year' to work, which is a reality for a lot of kids anyway with the skyrocketing of college costs ... we've been saving since birth, but he might still not have enough with 3 younger siblings coming up, two right on his heels. For now, he calls himself a freshmore ... this reflects his age (freshman), but that he's working ahead (sophomore-junior level classes for those that we outsource), and also the fact that as he's gotten older, he's come to recognize that 'grade levels' are completely arbitrary and artificial and don't really mean anything anyway. If he changes his mind and decides that he just must move forward sooner rather than later toward a particular goal that requires early graduation/college start, he can do that, but if not, he's not going to be hurt any by being 'ahead' and then waiting for others his age to catch up a little.

I always had this problem, and boots helped some. Best thing I did for my ds was get him in therapy/casted/surgically released young (he had some work done locally as an infant, and then we traveled to Shriners later). I had my own surgical release a couple of years ago and oh my, the difference in my shoes, in how my orthotics actually WORK now is something I never imagined.

I tried to send my 7 year old to a 4 day, 3 night Girl Scout camp the past two years (ages 6 and 7). Apparently, it isn't a popular option because neither time met the minimum number of girls, so the camp didn't happen. My older dd would have been there at a week-long camp, and they would have seen each other for meals and camp-wide activities. My older two each went to a 3 night camp with their magnet school class at the end of third grade. The camp was owned/run by the school district and their regular classroom teacher was their main counselor. That was a great introduction to sleep-away camp for each of them. From there, they moved to regular scout camp --- older dd when she was 9 and the boys, who are a bit more sensitive, when they were 11. In all of those cases, it was a week-long camp an hour away. Dd didn't have a great experience that first year, but we switched camps and she loved it when she was 10.

There are a lot of factors that go into it ... how comfortable the child is with the idea, the mental state of the grandparents, etc. My dc spent time with grandparents, usually together in 2s or 3s, starting at about age 2 or 3. Now that the mental status of one grandparent seems to be deteriorating (though it isn't something discussed -- maybe BECAUSE it isn't discussed), I probably wouldn't feel comfortable sending them now, 10 year later. I had to advocate for them too much during the last family visit. The other grandparents really want to do something with all 5 of their grandkids at the same time, but I think that there's a good chance that my s-i-l would end up tagging along with them for at least part of the time (dn is the youngest of the crew -- just 3 years old).

:grouphug: I'm sorry it's been that kind of day. It probably is part of one of the issues that he has going on, but like my mom used to say, that is an explanation for the behavior, NOT an excuse for it. Stick to your guns, Mama. You're doing the right thing, even if it feels kind of rotten right now.

Wouldn't bother me ... we have a few duplicates in our family and it doesn't bother me. (The only other little girl born in our church the year our youngest was born had the same name that they 'stole' from us ... the college nursery worker talked about how easy it was to remember the toddler girls' names LOL.) We had kids before the rest of our generation, but if we thought someone might think that they had 'dibs' on a name, we asked the person in question (dh's younger sister) ... we both used the same name as a middle name, but ds and his cousin are 12 years apart, so I don't think many people even noticed. Youngest dd, s-i-l, m-i-l (and m-i-l's mother and HER mother) all have forms of the same name. If s-i-l has a dd, I have a feeling that they might use a form of that name, too ... dd is almost 8, so she and that cousin would be at least 8.5 years apart. We did avoid our first choice with younger dd because dh's uncle and aunt have a little girl 8 mo older than her and they used it (family name). If they hadn't been so close in age, we wouldn't have had a second thought about it, but we figured it would make things confusing, since that branch tends towards not using nicknames, and the girls would have had the same first and last names. Two of f-i-l's cousins (on the other end of the generation, closer to our age) have children a few years apart with the same name (one of the boys named after his dad, and so is the nephew) ... it does get mildly confusing, but everyone just considers it a natural consequence of using family names. My middle name is after a great-aunt, the matriarch of my maternal grandmother's family. I am the oldest in my generation, and have her name as my middle name, but have gone by that name off and on my while life (it beats the made-up name sometimes) ... I have a cousin 2 years younger who has the same middle name. The next girl cousin in the family has that name as a first name, as does the first girl in another part of the family (we're all grand-nieces of the honoree ... everyone who had a girl named the first girl in some way after this favorite aunt) ... the two with the same first name go by different nicknames. While I was known by one of these nicknames sometimes as a young child, I am 8+ years older and never lived in the same city as this younger cousin, so it was never an issue ... though it might have been if I used the name more often, as we married men with the same last name.

I think that there are other ways to expose him to other kids in more controlled environments than putting him in ps, where there is little flexibility and no control as to the crud the other dc are bringing in. We have been in a group activity where it was made clear that due to an immunosuppressed sibling of a participant, if there was even a question of crud, please stay home. This was in a hs setting, and a vast majority of the participants happily complied. As a child with chronic pain (but no immunosuppression), being around other dc did help me to push myself through some things, but that can be done through other activities -- scouts, sports, art classes,robotics league etc. -- things that when he really is having an awful day, he can skip. Having a child in ps with (fewer) special needs, it wasn't long before I was getting tons of notices for his lack of attendance/being signed out too much, even though most of his appointments were for services that the teacher demanded that he have to stay in her (specialized) classroom, but that the school district couldn't/wouldn't provide.

Definitely out of touch. My earliest was actually my second (of 4), who I felt at 11-12 weeks and dh felt from the outside at 13 weeks. She was a bit of a firebrand though, especially as a fetus. I spent a week in the hospital at 33 weeks for kidney bruising ... the only explanation that we could come up with is that she was kicking THAT hard. I was induced at not quite 37 weeks when she did it again. My oldest and youngest I definitely felt at or about 16 weeks, and dh could feel them from the outside by 20-21 weeks. My third is really, really mellow, and has been from the start. I didn't start feeling him until 20 weeks and he couldn't be felt outside for another 6 weeks after. He often had me worried because of his lack of movement, but I was definitely comparing to my previous pregnancies, and he was completely different from his older sister (only 17 mo age difference).

:hug: I'm sorry. I understand about your dh feeling bad about judging his parents for their utter disregard for safety. We went through a similar thing all week. The allergy part was actually him (they got a Golden Retriever, who they take everywhere with them, in spite of dh's asthmatic reaction to dogs) ... it looks like we may be off to the doctor yet again because after a week of exposure, he's just not bouncing back. But he was taught never to contradict his parents, and still won't, even when his health is on the line.