I haven't been able to upload my pictures, as the files are too big. I will try later. We have spent the last year fixing up a 100+yo house that hadn't been updated in 60+ years. We picked neutrals for multiple upstairs rooms for speed (2 bds, bath, and hall, plus staircase). Upstairs, we went with what I call "sky" colors. The neutral is a pale blue, I think called "waterfall mist." Our bedroom is a much darker blue, and our 12 yo picked black. They all look very sharp with the hardwood floors and white woodwork. Downstairs is going to be rich earth tones, but our layout is quite different, and I think those colors in your place would not work as well. The place we are leaving is pale yellow, also with wood floors and white woodwork, but I have grown to dislike it. It does look good empty. Speaking of empty, I assume you will show it empty of furniture. I think the colors in an empty house show differently. I worked for crate and barrel back in the day, and I remember some stuff from the design meetings. The catalogs usually featured very on trend colors, especially in kitchen wares. But, they said that in general, year after year blue was the most common kitchen color in American houses. But I don't think I have ever seen a blue kitchen in real life. In your situation, I might just pick a theme from a catalogue or magazine and just be done with it. I can't answer the other stuff right now. Out of energy.

I have a 12yo child who was diagnosed with anxiety by 7yo. It was tricky to recognize. In some ways they appear fearless. My child started public school at age 3, and parents were invited to stay as long as we wanted on the first day of school. So, I told them I would stay as long as they wanted. Most parents left within the first hour. My child was not really exhibiting anxiety, just curiosity. Whenever I said, should I go now?, my child said, no not yet. I was there through lunch and nap time and playground time, etc, and I was still there when the other parents returned. I was really nervous about day 2. The teacher said we should take 5 minutes max to settle them in. When we got there, my child turned to me and said, this is not your day to stay, you should go now. I got a quick hug and a wave. What?! Since we had been through the whole routine, there was no anxiety about being there. When there were out-of-the-ordinary events, like a school concert, my child was sent to the library along with the autistic boy in their class. I did not know about that practice until I showed up for an event and couldn't find my child. At that age, there was no diagnosis, and the teachers didn't see it as a problem. My parenting philosophy generally involved stating expectations up front, and they were usually very compliant. Problems would creep up when expectations and reality did not match, but I try to do think-out-loud problem-solving as calmly as possible to deal with the unexpected. At they get older, I hold back more in the moment, and let my child lead where appropriate, though we often have a what-if conversation on the way to a new place, and we have designated safe spaces in stores that we visit regularly, like Target. We both have major sensory issues, so we need to be flexible about some stuff. One psychiatrist we saw (briefly) last year said I should try not doing that planning/discussion, thinking that it may set up false expectations, or that they would become reliant on their expectations, but honestly, he never had to get anything done in the company of this child! At age 10, we got evaluated by another psychiatrist who said the behavior didn't match any ASD diagnosis. I think with really high IQ kids it can be difficult to tease out what is going on. My child has recently identified strongly with the diagnosis of Asperger's, after reading about it online, though no doctor has applied this diagnosis, and I have not tried to pursue it. So, at the moment, they treat with a psychology resident, with CBT, for anxiety and misophonia, which is basically an intense hostile fight/flight reaction to certain sounds and related visuals. So back to your question, push more or push less, I would have to say I spend a lot of time thinking about scaffolding, looking for ways to help them succeed. I don't force much, but I do a good bit of either/or negotiating, with various consequences, and I try to avoid making those consequences feel too punitive. If they want to visit a particular store, but they are too anxious to go inside on their own, if I can't find a parking spot, or I have to run my own errand and don't have time to go in, they may not get the thing they wanted, but they are not in trouble. But I try to give them more autonomy in places they are comfortable, hoping that using the Target self-check-out on their own will eventually lead to the confidence to try the dreaded corner store while I am outside. Little steps. Unfortunately they remember the "failures" more than the "successes." The professionals all probably think I am too accommodating. A couple of weeks ago, the psychologist was telling me how she had been thinking she had made a mistake in letting my child leave a session when they got overwhelmed by a noise in the hall. My child has only stepped out twice, out of maybe 20 visits with her. The psychologist thought pushing them to stay and discuss their feelings would have been better. I disagreed, saying that now that my child knows they are not forced to stay, the anxiety level on future is actually reduced, because the office begins to feel more like a safe space. Maybe next time something like that happens, the two of them can talk about it, or they can try to use another coping strategy. p.s. They tried Lexapro, and my child hated the way they felt, so they started to throw out the pills when I wasn't looking. That was a bad scenario, so we dropped it for now.

The list from BBC America has one in Vienna, VA: The Pure Pasty Co., located at 128 Church Street Northwest, Vienna, VA, is topped up with savory pasties like the traditional style, chicken cordon bleu, curry, lamb, and serves savory pies like steak and kidney, and pork. You can sit and eat or have it to go. The pasty comes with a twisted closing that you can use as a handle, and even walk and eat. Ta-da. I want them all....Unfortunately I have the flu, and couldn't hold down a banana I ate last night. At least there is a place in my state I can visit when I am better.

This popped up on my Facebook feed yesterday, so I just had British meat pies on my mind. I totally grossed out my vegetarian child describing the last one. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170322-how-a-pocket-sized-snack-changed-the-english-language?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook

From BBC America, Where to find scrumptious savory pies in the US

My father was stationed there while I was in high school. When I went back years later on my honeymoon, I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to visit, and how to do it on the cheap, while island hopping. In today's dollars, we spent just over $3000, staying on 3 different islands, alternating hotels and camping. We flew in from the east coast, adjust your price accordingly. Perhaps you could get a straight flight/hotel package for a similar price, but we were looking for more of an adventure. We flew into Oahu and stayed at a modestly priced hotel near Diamond Head, a couple of blocks from the beach, with a balcony and a nice ocean view for the first two nights. We mostly recovered from our wedding and our flight, while doing a few touristy things at a leisurely pace. Then we got a cheap rental car, picked up the camping gear we had reserved and our camping permits (which were super cheap), and headed north. We stayed at a quiet beach campground, which was amazing. We did not stay on the beach for the day, as it was enough for us to have a couple of peaceful hours in the morning and evening, and we hopped in the car for side trips during the day. After 2 nights there, we turned in the car at the airport, and hopped a flight to the Big Island. We brought the camping gear with us, and got another cheap car when we landed. The campground spot we had reserved was gone, under an active lava flow! The park ranger found us another place to stay that night, thankfully, which was a cabin near the volcano park, where we went hiking the next day. The park is pretty cold at night, given the elevation, so we headed back down to the coast to tent camp the following night. We flew to Kauai next, staying at a hotel for one night to enjoy a night of relative luxury, but then repeated the tent camping with day trips, again using a cheap rental car to get off the beaten path. Then back to Oahu to return the gear and head back to real life.

I've done this for my daughter before. I purchased a yard of pretty ribbon, cut it in half, and singed the ends to keep it from unraveling. I used some safety pins to put the straps where I thought they should go, and then had her try it on and then adjusted them until they looked just right, and I hand stitched them in place. If you cannot get to a fabric store, is there an arts and crafts store anywhere near you? Places like A.C. Moore sell spools of ribbon for a few dollars each, and have lots of choices in different colors, textures, and widths.

The colors of the Irish flag are green, white, and orange. The green is said to represent the older, Gaelic tradition, the orange represents the (Protestant) followers of William of Orange, and white is supposed to represent the lasting peace between the two groups.

Yes, paper for most meals, for now. I have been in some stage of moving for most of the last few years. I have packed and unpacked the dishes so many times! Currently, we have waiting more than a year for the contractor to finish the next place we will living in, and all the nice, matching dishes are all ready packed and moved. I kept the chipped and mismatched stuff to use while we wait, and slowly but surely, breakage has left me with 1 dinner plate, 4 salad plates, and a handful of bowls of different sizes. I am too tired of moving stuff to go dig up the stuff I already moved, so dc and I mainly use paper, and dh uses THE dinner plate. Also, I send (and reuse) plastic utensils with school lunches, because once every couple of weeks, a spoon never makes it back home. I can manage if a plastic spoon goes missing, but don't want to lose the rest of my silverware.

For the city I live in, the median household income is $55,000, and the average household income is $85,000 The city in which my child attends school has a median household income of $68,000, and an average household income of $86,000. My immediate neighborhood's median income is lower, about $40,000, but the neighbors are mostly young, mostly single, living in apartments. Last time I checked, there were only 4 school-aged kids in this neighborhood. .

Baby spinach, strawberries, avocado, toasted almonds, goat cheese, vinaigrette

I use baby spinach, so the stems are negligible. I start with the extra large package that takes up a whole shelf in the frig, and after I steam it I end up with enough to fill a small deli container.

10 inches of snow out at my dc's school. Looks like about half of that here at home (so far) 12 miles east of the school.

Usually, I don't buy anything with straps that thin, but if I did, I would wear it with a cami with a built in "shelf bra"

We were not able to get it done via insurance. We did get testing done twice though, without being charged for it. The first time, we enrolled in a multi-year study at a research hospital, culminating with 2 days of neuro-psych testing at age 6. The second time, at age 11, a doctor suggested we ask for CORE testing through our child's school, and the school included WISC testing in their evaluation. editing to answer, did it help? Hmm, the first time, it was useful for us, but irrelevant for our child's school. At that age, the teachers and principal were of the mind-set that we needed to get our child adjusted to the school's program, and not the other way around. The second time, in middle school, the report from the evaluation specifically recommended that teachers find ways to differentiate beyond what they usually did. Some have, some haven't, but at least there is more differentiation built into middle school. It did help us get our child out of a social-thinking workshop that a small group of students got placed in. Our kid hated it, and said "just because I am not neuro-typical doesn't mean they need to train me to conform to their expectations." We were able to argue that an academic "stretch" workshop was more in line with their own neuro-psych report.

I am seconding the recommendation for Chew on This by Schlosser. It was assigned at my daughter's 4th grade ps. She became a vegetarian while reading the book, and she was feeling quite charged up about learning more. We started homeschooling shortly after that. I'm not saying the book did all that, but it was definitely part of the arc of dd's story.

I made things more challenging for myself when and where I could. In college, I got most of my introductory classes waived through various methods, based on various test scores, and I took a bunch of CLEP exams too. The first university I attended even allowed students to sit for a one day writing composition evaluation test, so I was able to take American Women in Literature for my first class instead of English 101. I took a lot of classes outside my major (economics). I read each course catalog cover to cover, and really branched out, and sometimes I would hunt down a professor and get permission to enroll. When my second university started a new museum studies program, I took all of those classes, when everyone else in the program was an art major. I also took a bunch of philosophy classes, and met a bunch of hard-core thinkers that way. I worked all through college, including a position at the school newspaper. I got to know a big cross-section of people that way, and attended lots of interesting events. I am very introverted, but a press pass and a camera were great tools for helping me get around. I also learned a bunch of cool technical stuff there, like how to develop black and white pictures in the lab. I took advantage of summer programs at other schools to try out even more stuff. I read like crazy. I traveled when I could.

I remember wearing a skirt one day as a fairly new high school transfer student, and a boy I did not know approached me to tell me, as discreety as possible, that when i was standing with the light behind me, he could see the outline of my body. I remember rolling my eyes and saying "you found out my secret, I have legs." We became friends.

Your post made me think of the Math Prize for Girls talks given by Richard Rusczyk of AOPS. Here is the transcript of one of them, which is a bit on the older side, but has a lot of information in it: http://mathprize.atfoundation.org/archive/2009/Rusczyk_Problem_Solving_Presentation_at_Math_Prize_for_Girls_2009.pdf

Agreeing with anything by Sandra Boynton Everywhere Babies was one of my dd's favorites, and shows many different kinds of families with babies Another hit was a soft photo album filled with family pictures

So, this story is not about RHD, but anyway: When I was 15, my father, who was apparently experiencing a mid-life crisis, went out to get a loaf of bread. He took the family's one and only car, a station wagon. He returned a few hours later, driving a used 2-seater Porsche, having traded in the family car. We were a family of 4. There was a shelf of sorts in the back, and my brother and I were forced to sit on that shelf, without seatbelts, whenever we went anywhere. Even on military bases, where we had to drive through check-points, and we were told to "look like" we were wearing seatbelts, and cover our laps. I was never allowed to drive it, of course, though within a year my mother got a new job and bought herself a car that I was allowed to drive. I have to say, I really resented that my father would put his desires for a car above the family's real needs. My parents split within 2 years after that, though I think the writing had been on the wall for a while at that point. So RHD is not as extreme, but how would this acquisition affect them?

Well, if it is just to save a few thousand dollars over a standard vehicle, and not because he has his heart set on a specific car, then I would point to various costs: 1) the resale market for a RHD version of something widely available in LHD is going to be very slim, 2) it takes just one accident to wipe out the savings in the original vehicle cost, 3) the intangible costs in loss of convenience for the family.

My dh has one, but that is because he wanted to own a specific car from the Mad Max movies, which is an Australian Ford Falcon, and thus it is a right-hand-drive car. There was an issue with registering the car, because the person who imported it and sold it to him provided a photocopy of the paperwork where the import stamp wasn't fully legible. That was incredibly frustrating, because dh couldn't exactly re-import it and get a new stamp. He eventually solved it via back-channels at the DMV. So, be careful with the paperwork. Certain car parts can be a real pain to get, but I suspect that is more a function of the age of the car (it is from the 70's) and its rarity. Right-hand-drive had no impact on the insurance. Lots of people assume there must be a law against right-hand-drive vehicles, but there is no such law where we live, and as others have pointed out, postal trucks are set up that way. There are always curious stares, and double-takes. There are some issues with visibility, so dh attached an additional mirror to help with that. Toll booths were a pain, so he got a transponder for it. For us, it is a third car, and mainly dh's "Sunday drive" car, though he likes to use it more often for day-to-day driving in the good weather months. Our other cars are from 2003 and 2004.

I joined this site 5 years ago this week, after reading TWTM, 2 years before I started homeschooling full-time. My dd has been at a B&M middle school for a year and a half, but, honestly, she could need to come back to homeschooling at any point. She has a neurological condition that makes being at school difficult. This fall she will apply for high schools, some of which are by audition, some are by lottery, some are by exam scores, so it it a bit out of our control.

When dd was little, I generally signed her up for groups where she was on the youngest end of a range. She is already young for her grade (born 6 weeks before grade cut-off), so she is almost always the youngest in the room. In grade 5, I sometimes bumped her up to a grade 6 group, if it was knowledge-based and she had the pre-reqs, but around age 10, dd became much more age conscious, and she does not like to be grouped with older kids/teens. She would do something for grade 6-8, but would no longer do something for grades 6-12, because that age range is too wide.