Ok, now I'm worried. I'll give the allergist a call tomorrow and ask about the epi-pen. The office is closed now. I don't think her pediatrician would call in a prescription. When he referred us to the allergist he told me he thought it might be a contact reaction since she had no problem with swelling airways and only reacted where it actually touched her skin. When we were at the allergist yesterday all he said was to continue to keep nuts away from her and went over her blood work. I know the office is busy on Thursdays because it is the only day he is in that town. His office is actually in another town, but he comes to the town closer to us one day a week. I was going to call tomorrow anyway to see if he'd write a prescription for an air purifier so our insurance would cover part of the cost of that. Thank you for your concern and advice. This kind of allergy is new to me. ETA: I'm not sure he does know about the previous reaction (the throwing up). We were sent to him because of the swelling of her lip the one time. I know at our first appointment we went over a bunch of questions. I was there 1 1/2 hours that time. I was so overwhelmed with it all that I can't remember if I did say anything about it. I think I did, but I can't be sure. ETA: She will have the skin test for the hazel nuts. I really don't want to lose Nutella for her. She is so picky with eating. She was eating only pb sandwiches and Nutella sandwiches. Now she's basically only eating crackers, corn, and fruits. She's dropped down to just 28 pounds again. But I will do what I have to for her. I have already decided there are some things my other children participate in that she won't because of a lack of monitoring of food allergy kids. For instance, DS was given food with food dye in it even though I filled out a paper stating he couldn't have it. Luckily, his reaction is only behavioral. Thank you everyone so much. This is very helpful. I've been feeling overwhelmed with this since her reaction the day after Christmas and it makes me forget to question things.

This has gotten long. I'm hoping someone who has BTDT can offer some advice or insight. So we've started testing on DD. She's 2. The environmental allergy testing is finished. She's allergic to dust, dust mites, and pet dander. The doctor recommended an air purifier for her bedroom and in the main living area where she spends most of her time. I've looked at them. The top rated one by Consumer Reports is $300. I do plan on getting one for her bedroom. I just don't know if we can swing getting a second one right now. She seems mostly congested in the mornings rather than throughout the day. I figure that it won't be too long before we're outside most of the day so the one for the living area can wait until closer to fall. Am I doing a disservice to my child by waiting on that one? I don't want her feeling miserable, but she doesn't seem to be. I'd get the whole house one since we have a forced air system, but we plan on moving within a year and I don't want to put that kind of money into this place. He talked about washing her bedding and stuffed animals every week in hot water or using a special detergent for dust mites. I'm fine with that. She is still on a vinyl toddler mattress so that is good. I'm not ripping up the carpet in her bedroom here. I'll make sure to have no carpet in her bedroom after we move. The doctor did say that cloth furniture is really bad. If I have to spend money anywhere right now, I'd rather replace the furniture. Ours is as old as I am so I'm sure it's probably really bad for her. I really don't like the vinyl furniture. Is there any other options to help her? He also suggested we get rid of the cat. Our cat is 10 years old. She doesn't even climb the stairs anymore. I'm thinking it would be really traumatic on the cat. However, if it would really help my DD the cat would be gone. The only reaction I've ever seen her have was to dogs. She breaks out in red bumps from them. So if you read through all this, what are your suggestions? Any other recommendations? Should I be more concerned about her environmental allergies than I am? Thank you.

Thank you so much. I'm sure I'll have a lot of questions once we know everything we're dealing with. The only nuts they've said so far are walnuts, pecans, cashews, Brazil nuts, and almonds. The only reason they are doing the skin test for hazel nuts and coconut is because I routinely use coconut oil and she loves Nutella sandwiches and she has had no reaction to them. She's really missing her sandwiches. We were told to stay away from all nuts in any form until the testing is complete. She's a very picky eater so she's been losing weight since she can't have her Nutella or peanut butter sandwiches. We didn't get an Epi Pen yet. They want to finish up all the testing before getting into discussing how we're treating things yet. He didn't feel we were in dire need since the kids are home with me all the time and I can monitor what she has. The only issues he addressed were her environmental ones since we are done testing those. He did say her pickiness could be because of allergies so I'm not trying her to eat anything she says is yucky. I feel bad because I kept trying to feed her eggs cooked different ways. :crying: She kept spitting them out and saying they were yucky, now I know why. She has had cashews and walnuts before and threw up within minutes of having them. I had thought she just didn't chew them up well enough. Then the day after Christmas, during a snowstorm, she bit into a piece of candy that had either walnuts or pecans in it (she didn't eat it) spit it out and said it was yucky. Within a minute she was throwing up. I just thought she was getting sick and put her in the tub to wash her. Her upper lip swelled up so much it was touching her nose. It finally dawned on me she might be allergic. I gave her Benadryl and took her to the ER. The normally 20 min. drive to the ER took us an hour because of the snow. Luckily by then the swelling was going down. She never had problems with breathing or anything, but she also didn't actually really ingest it either.

Thank you so much! I really needed to hear this.

Thank you for the replies. I updated my original post with the results.

Thank you! I know he's already ahead of the public school in some areas, but he's behind in the reading. I just worry that someone is going to question how much we're doing. He's only behind in the reading because I focus on phonics and the public school focuses on sight words. He can figure out an unknown word while the public K kids here can't. I wonder how long I need to be homeschooling before I stop questioning myself. I am really good at defending it to others, just not myself. It must be the teacher training I had in college. :laugh: I just told him what we're going to be doing from now on and he said, "Good! Just the fun stuff!"

I started out the school year with studying the United States along with reading, writing, and math. He's not into it anymore. Tell me it's ok to just focus on math, reading, writing, and phonics work. We're using Hooked on Phonics, ETC, Singapore Math, and Zaner-Bloser handwriting. We do some fun art projects with Artistic Pursuits and fun science experiments. So is it fine to drop the US history and geography? We'll still play with the puzzles but not much else. I guess I just need someone to say I don't have to do a lot of extras with my K child and just focus on the basics. I want him to still like school and right now none of us are feeling the love. :crying:

They did tell me it would be done on the back. I was told not to give her any meds at all for 1 week prior to the test. They said nothing about numbing cream, but I assume I can't put anything on her. All this because she had a reaction to a piece of christmas candy. She hasn't been allowed to have peanut since then either. She loves peanut butter sandwiches and is losing weight because she's a picky eater. I just can't wait for this to all be done. Thank you everyone for your experiences. I'll bring the Kindle Fire and let her play the Daniel Tiger game she loves. Hopefully that will distract her.

My 2-year-old goes in for allergy testing on Thursday. A couple weeks ago she had 6 vials of blood taken for allergy testing and now she's going for the skin test part. Anyone BTDT? I'm just wondering how bad this is going to be on her. She's being tested for 19 different allergens, food and environmental. UPDATE: Thank you everyone. She was tested for 24 different allergens. She reacted to eggs, but I was told she can still have trace amounts in baked foods. Her blood showed an allergy to milk, but not her skin so she can still have that. :hurray: Her blood severe showed signs of an allergy to nuts, especially walnut and pecans but also cashews, brazil nuts and almonds. He isn't even going to do the skin test for nuts. He said it would be too dangerous. :ohmy: He will be testing for hazel nuts and coconuts because she has had them with no reaction. She is also allergic to cats, dogs (we suspected this one), dust, and dust mites. She appears to be fine with peanuts. She needs to go back again in two weeks and be tested for 24 more food allergens that we typically bring into the house. I'm not too worried about the dust and animals. That only causes some congestion. It's the nut one that really worries me. He said her walnut ones was 100 times higher than normal and pecans were 90 times higher. I'm not sure what that meant and I was so tired this morning from being up all night I didn't think to ask more questions.

Thank you. I don't plan on adding a lot, but they like to be read to throughout the day and I want to have some books on hand that goes along with the time period we are studying. I'm going to check on inter library loan. I'm not sure ours does that.

I will be starting SOTW Ancients in the fall with my 1st grade and K children. We have a very small library (think small house converted to library) in our town. I'm having a hard time finding books to go along with what we will be studying (at their level) so I will be buying some. I'm looking for some suggestions on which books to buy. In other words, what are some good books for my kids age level that would go well with SOTW Ancients and would make a good addition to our library? Thanks. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm typing with a horrible headache and three kids running around. :001_smile:

I had this happen recently with a gray Crayola crayon. From the look of the clothes, it appeared that my youngest DD had hidden it in the foot of her footed sleepers. I tried a variety of things that have been listed and nothing worked. I guess gray is harder to get out.

Thank you everyone for your advice. A few of you questioned about the mowing. We looked into planting some kind of ground cover on the front bank. The problem is that without a deep root system the hill would erode away and the house sits very close to the edge. I have called around to get some prices on things that would need done to be able to move to where the trailer is located. The water system we'd need isn't as expensive as we thought. The sewage is what we were really concerned about because of the regulations. If you pull out the old trailer and put a new one or a modular in, as long as we only go with a 3 bedroom place we don't need to do anything. If we want a 4 bedroom then we'd need to have a test done to see if the system that's in there would pass the regulations for what is required for a 4 bedroom. If it passed fine, if not then we'd need a new system. If we sell the house we live in now then we could use that money towards putting a new home on the land. My brother works for a modular home place and we can get his discount. The only problem is we'd need to sell this place first. I'm not sure where we would stay between selling and having a new house set. We are on a time schedule though if we are going that route. The regulations on the septic change if the place has set unoccupied for a while.

We'd get a pretty good down payment if we could sell both. Places have been selling slow here. If we sold the trailer there would be a huge fall out from his side of the family though. I don't know if he's ready to tackle that. MIL just passed away in Nov. and he was really close to her. My kids already have too much crap. My mom insists on bringing them something every time she visits. We do have the option to buy a smaller house at a discounted price on flat ground. There is no yard though and the layout is very bad. We could either have a room to eat in or a living room, but not both. I've spent some time today looking into if we could add a second story to that one. I'd still like a yard for the kids to play in. The second bedroom is so small DH & I would have to downsize to a twin bed. :laugh: That could be funny! We do want something that will work for him in later years and that is why we were thinking of going to a one story even though I don't like them. I do think selling both would be a better option and then finding something else that would fit us better. The housing around us is horrible though. There either is no yard at all, a yard that is a horrible hill, or they want too much for the house. This is frustrating! :cursing: I know his mom wanted to help him out by leaving the trailer to him, but it is just costing us more and really isn't right for us now that we have three kids.

Mine is slow. I thought it was my connection until I tried other pages. I'm glad it's being worked on. Thanks, John. I haven't been on in a while and was surprised by the changes.

DH inherited his mother's 1984 single wide trailer. It only has 2 small bedrooms and it needs a lot of work. It is in a great location for us. I'm trying to decide if we can make this work for our family of 5. We would have to downsize A LOT. If we could sell the place we are in now we could use that for a down payment on a newer modular to put there. We would probably have to live in the smaller place for about 2 yrs before we would be able to afford all that would need to be done for a new place. I'm trying to decide if we should and could live in a tiny place like that. The girls would share the master bedroom, DS would have the smaller bedroom and DH & I would be stuck in the living room. We do need to eventually move form where we are because of DH's health. He has osteoporosis in his spine and we live on a hillside where he has to raise and lower a push mower on a rope to mow our front lawn. Our backyard is a hill as well the he has to push mow, this takes about 2 hours to do. It's too steep for me to do it. We have 32 steps to get up to our house. Right now we are paying bills on both places and we can't afford to keep up two places so we need to get rid of one. Any thoughts?

Thank you all. I looked over everything and I will be going with Mr. Q. It seems just right for my kids and I can start with the Life Science for free.

I had been looking at three main ones I liked; Apologia (thought it might be a bit boring for my kids), RSO (thought the kids would love the experiments), RS4K (my kids liked the looks of the book). I had never seen Mr. Q and it looks really great too. So many choices! :ohmy:

I was wondering if I could get recommendations for a science curriculum for 1st grade. My Kindergartner child will be sitting in on the science with my 1st grader in the fall so I would like something they both can do. They both love hands on activities. Right now their favorite subject is science and I want to keep science fun for them. So anyone have some recommendations for me? Thanks.

Now I know why she keeps calling me. I must not have opted out enough times. How many numbers does she have? Every other day she calls.

Harry Potter movies Dirty Dancing Grease White Christmas It's A Wonderful Life Stand By Me The Stand Day After Tomorrow Newsies Rigoletto As I look at this, that is a very odd list.

On The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot, the moms think the kids are just playing make believe and not really going anywhere. Why can't Scootaloo fly on My Little Ponies Friendship is Magic? The thing that bothers me the most about kids shows now is how dumb the parents are made out to be in most of them.

I'll never be a good parent in anyone's eyes and I don't care! I have people say we're too strict and we don't let our kids have fun. I have people who say we're not strict enough and let our kids walk all over us. My kids are happy and healthy. They listen some days and other days they seem like they can't hear a word I'm saying. Some days I need them to do as I say with no questions. Some days they aren't feeling well so I let them get away with a little more. I don't care what anyone thinks anymore. I'm going to parent the way I feel is best for my family. I will try to ignore what others feel a need to say. I pray I don't tell them to look at their own family before they give advice. :D I'm not perfect and I don't care! Anyone want to join me?

Thanks. I'll talk with her and see why she wants lesson plans. Maybe she doesn't know you don't need them.

My friend is beginning homeschooling her daughter who is in 9th grade. She is using LifePacs. She needs to write up lesson plans. I am wondering if there is any site for those in NY like the askpauline site for PA that can help her with this. Any suggestions for her would be very helpful. Thanks.