I agree with Pamela. A teen should be allowed to start making their own decisions. This is part of their training to become adults. Present the benifits of Spanish, but let her decide. Besides, you never know where she'll end up. In some fields, French is the better language to learn.

I was talking to my PA (physician's assistant) about a research conference her office holds regularly. She said it really hampered her in evaluating the quality of the research papers. Since my health depends on a lot of these scientific studies, I'm glad that others in the group do have a good statistical background. My dh is also constantly ditching news reports because of the quality of their statistics.

My ds(15) only wore gym shoes until we got him a sports jacket, pants, tie and men's dress tie shoes. He now wears everything but the tie to church without prompting.

Many societies have set marriage up front to include multiple wives for one man. Others have concubines in addition to more than one wife. In some societies, a man is expected to marry his dead brother's wife even if he's already married. Other societies gave lip service to monogomy, but winked at affairs. There is even one society where the wife has multiple husbands. (That is the exception because of very poor resources in that land. I believe the husbands are generally related to each other.) It sounds to me that marriage has very rarely been truly expected to be monogamous throughout history. And when we read some past threads hear about the appropiateness of male-female friendships on these boards, you may get the idea that many people here don't expect a monogamous relationship without a lot of barriers set up betwwen the sexes.

You don't? Lesbians can easily have children via a willing male or artificial insemination. Males might find a woman willing to carry a child for them, or they might adopt and unrelated child. Alternatively one partner may have a highpaying career that involves a lot of moving and the lower payed partner has trouble getting a career going. Therefore the lower paid partner is a dependent of the individual whose career they follow. I've seen this happen with heterosexual couples more than once.

But lawyers can't draw up documents permitting/requiring health insurance coverage that's subsidized by the employer. Also a lawyer can't draw up documents that permit a "stay at home" partner to get social security benifits or the tax benifits of filing taxes jointly. Nor will the will allow the partner to inherit the property free of taxes. There are some tricks that can be used to reduce the taxes, though. So our society has structured many things available to heterosexual couples that a lawyer can't get around for homosexual couples. Marriage is the standard way to gain these benifits. A civil union would be an alternative.

I was also anticipating that the cooler year would lengthen the growing season for them.

This sounds very different from what I was imagining. That will make spending it on general family needs much easier.:001_smile:

Run, do not walk, to see a doctor.

This is great! But I'd be trying to show that I'm spending the money mostly on my disabled child. Food expenses, some housing and utility costs and the the child's educational expeses fall into this category. But I'd be careful of spending it on your educational expenses and setting up for a private business (unless you can prove that it allows you to work from home mostly for the benifit of your disabled child), The back payments may give you a bit more leway if you can show that you delayed these other expeditures in order to pay for dc's direct expenses. I don't have experience with these things, but I'd just be naturally careful in how I used this money.

Why are you trying to harvest them now, unless you want small onions? They still have about 2 months or more to grow in your area.