An article from the Smithsonian about new free lesson plans available on indigenous cultures. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/inside-new-effort-change-what-schools-teach-about-native-american-history-180973166/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR0_eBi_pxwYyw8ml9s6w-j9Y3cTiQYMJmsy4A5tfrpI0fMp25SvIKscx54 Here's the direct link to the lessons and resources page for the museum https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/resources.cshtml They have options for various grade levels.

An article from the Smithsonian about new free lesson plans available on indigenous cultures. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/inside-new-effort-change-what-schools-teach-about-native-american-history-180973166/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR0_eBi_pxwYyw8ml9s6w-j9Y3cTiQYMJmsy4A5tfrpI0fMp25SvIKscx54 Here's the direct link to the lessons and resources page for the museum https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/resources.cshtml They have options for various grade levels.

Mine is in a 4 person on-campus apartment this year, individual bedrooms, bathroom for every two people. When we got to the dorm, we discovered it was one of the handicapped-accessible units so the bathroom assigned to the bedrooms for herself and another roommate had a roll-in shower instead of a tub and no cabinets in the bathroom. We had to run to Target to get a set of plastic drawers. I've also warned her to be prepared that if they get in a transfer student who needs the accessibility mid-year she might end up needing to move. If they are responsible for their own bathrooms, check to see if they need a shower curtain and hooks, and bring toilet paper and hand soap. Even if they don't have their own kitchen or bath, at least a small bottle of dishwashing liquid is useful to be able to wash any dishes they use in their rooms.

Mine is a sophomore at a school with a bit over 16K. She did really well, and found her group through several paths--martial arts club (she's been training since age 6), a creative writing class, a volunteer group, and being in the honors college. In her case, since she is more of a minority in this area in several ways (just not racially), being in a larger school gave a larger pool of potential paths to fit in and find her place. As part of the search process, we took a close look at clubs and organizations on each campus that would be supportive and how accepting/supportive vs. just tolerant the campus administration and overall atmosphere were. Things like the campus newspaper (often accessible online), looking at lists of clubs, checking out activity notices on campus bulletin boards, etc were helpful. We wanted to know the key groups were actually active and not just a name on a list. Her biggest concern with a large school was being in huge classes. That's primarily a concern in the general ed classes. It helped that she'd been in community college classes for two years, so got most of her gen eds out of the way in smaller classes there. The honors college also offered a way to get those requirements in smaller classes (20 vs 100+).

If it helps, I had a conversation with Davidson College's admissions people about 4 years ago and asked whether DE or AP was preferred. Davidson is listed as "most selective" in the US News rankings and not known to be very homeschool-friendly. In our case, DE is taught at the cc with regular students and tuition is free. In order to get AP, we'd have had to pay something along the lines of $600-$900 per class plus books and AP fee for an online class, so DE was a lot more affordable and gave in-class experience. The admissions person said that the important thing was to explain in the application why the choice between the two was made. They don't accept CLEP at all. My daughter didn't end up applying there, so I can't give a report of how she would have fared.

Mine is going from a traditional double dorm room with bathroom down the hall to an on-campus apartment. She'll be sharing with three others, one she knows and the other two they think will likely be freshmen, as they haven't been assigned yet. The school lost a substantial amount of housing due to the hurricane (a set of apartments had to be torn down a year earlier than expected) so things are a bit jumbled. She's excited that she'll have her own bedroom with a *door she can close*! 🙂 They'll have a shared common room with couch and chairs as well as a full kitchen, so we're going with a meal plan the first semester that works out to about 5 meals per week but can be added on to if needed. We can re-evaluate for the spring. She and the known roommate won't have cars, but they do have friends with cars and there's a shuttle that includes a local grocery store. It's about $1k more expensive per semester but hopefully some of that will be offset by lower overall food costs and not having to rent a microfridge. She's already eating some of her meals in her room even with the required unlimited meal plan for freshmen. I'm anticipating primarily having to send a few more kitchen items, since the bed size is the same. We've been decluttering our kitchen and putting things aside for her "moving out hope chest" anyway, supplementing with thrift store finds, so I expect a lot will come from that. I like the safety net of on-campus living still at this point.

Thanks, but that's one of the sources I checked when I went looking for the Moravian candles. They're how I found out that, to my surprise, the Moravian candles are 20% beef tallow: "As with all of our candles, they are hand poured in North Carolina using a mixture of 80% pure beeswax and 20% beef tallow just as our colonial ancestors would have used. We use only 100% cotton wicking to insure clean burning." Given the percentage of our congregation who are vegetarian, they wouldn't work very well for us, I'm afraid.

We have considered checking with the local beekeepers' association to see if they have anything that might work.

If your church or house of worship uses beeswax candles in a fair quantity and you are in the US, where do you get them? I'm trying to find resources to transition our church from using paraffin to beeswax. We currently use primarily small votives and tealights, along with a few pillars and dinner-sized tapers except for one candlelight service a year where we use a lot of short tapers, but are open to a possible change in the mix. Our main use is a sand table set with multiple votives, a single pillar, and two tapers we use as lighters, but we are considering whether it would be more practical to shift to something like a couple of large sand bowls and go to the longer thin candles that are more the size of incense sticks. Bonus would be if the source is near to NC to cut down on transportation costs. Being close to a number of Moravian churches and having participated in several Lovefeasts, I did check some of their suppliers, but the ones I found are 20% beef tallow, which wouldn't work for our congregation. We are a mid-size Unitarian Universalist church, but are open to secular or religiously-affiliated suppliers of any group. My best current option seems to be either Holy Nativity Orthodox Convent in Massachusetts or Saints Mary and Martha Orthodox Monastery in SC. Thanks!

You might find it under the term "catalog rights."

At all the schools I've seen, you should be under the requirements that were in the catalog for the year you first enrolled, even if they changed the degree requirements later.

DegreeWorks is no guarantee, you still have to monitor it closely. My daughter went into a medium-sized state school with a bunch of DE credits, including two semesters of college-level ASL. This was in addition to the two years of high school Spanish and two years of high school Latin (started in 8th grade), so the ASL wasn't needed for either high school graduation or to meet college admission requirements. When she asked the college, she was told that the ASL would cover her foreign language gen ed requirement (two semesters of college level foreign language *or* at least one semester of a language if studied for high school). Cue first run of degree audit to check how credits transferred---ASL is listed as her high school language and shows she needs another language class. She emails the registrar, they agree it is incorrect, and fix it. Latin is now correctly listed as high school foreign language, and no more foreign language needed. Check DegreeWorks and it's fixed. Cue another run of degree audit mid-semester to start thinking about classes for next semester--back to listing ASL as high school language, need another foreign language. She contacts registrar again, they agree it's incorrect, fix it, and it shows up correctly in DegreeWorks. Cue another run of degree audit after end of first semester--back to ground zero--ASL is high school language, need another foreign language, get it fixed, and it shows up correctly. Cue most recent run of degree audit to see how changed classes impact---rinse and repeat---ASL is again high school language, foreign language required, and one of her classes is not showing up as meeting a particular competency requirement although it is listed as an option for that. Back to the registrar's office...... Very frustrating, and obviously a programming issue. Lesson for us is you can't depend solely on the college software or your advisor, you have to have a deep understanding yourself of how things work for your degree so you can stay on top of it, and it becomes even more important if you are going a bit out of the box--dual major, transferring in credits, etc.

It actually worked out fine. They did end up with two microfridges, but as they are in a corner room that's a bit larger, it worked out spacewise. They have gotten along fine, not best friends (which was never expected) but occasionally doing things together. The roommate is involved in dance team and likes to go to a lot of parties where my daughter likes more time in the room, so no big issues there and my daughter gets some alone time, something she's used to as an only child. They're in a class together this semester and sharing a textbook. They both have found friends to room with next year. Housing for next year has been a bit of drama, but not compared to last year (at least so far!). Evidently previously UNCW has opened housing applications by class, so with staggered times. This year, for some reason, they opened it up to everyone at the same time, resulting in lots of issues in being able to get into the system, getting booted out repeatedly when trying to pay the housing deposit, and all application spaces filling up in about 3 hours. Luckily both my daughter and her roommate made it in, though it took my daughter about 2 1/2 hours and a *lot* of stress. Some of her friends weren't that lucky and had to sign up for the waitlist. That was last week. Today, they have been given time slots to try to sign up for specific rooms. The roommate got in earlier, so hopefully they'll be able to get in at one of the apartments with individual bedrooms, which is what they want. They're shooting for a two-bedroom, but may end up paired with randoms for a larger apartment or in a traditional dorm. I'm just glad they'll end up somewhere on campus, even if it's in another traditional dorm. I did point out to my daughter that RA's are guaranteed a room on campus......

Thanks for the additional suggestions. I forgot to add that I also have access to BJs.

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of, particularly with kids. The turn out is pretty low right now, so trying to make it appeal to as broad a base as possible. It looks like Krusteaz does a gluten-free as well. Anyone tried that one? It'd be good to have that as well. I know one family who does gluten-free did it last month and brought a separate griddle to do those.

Thanks, it looks like they're in the area. Would the buttermilk one be the safest bet for a large group? I personally like whole grain versions of basically everything, but I'm a bit concerned it might not be as popular as one made with regular flour for those who don't do whole grain regularly?

What's your favorite just-add-water pancake mix commercially available in the US that isn't Aunt Jemima? We make ours from scratch at home on the rare occasion we have pancakes, so I'm not up on the various brands. Because it's being served to the church family, I'd rather it were commercial so that anyone with food concerns could easily check the ingredients. I need to feed about 10-20 (along with regular and veg sausage and fruit), so a regular package is fine, doesn't have to be industrial-sized. I have fairly easy access to Walmart, Target, Trader Joes, Harris Teeter, Publix, Aldi, Lidl, Food Lion, and Lowes Foods. We've started having a monthly pancake supper at church and I've offered to buy the pancake mix in an effort to find an alternative to the Aunt Jemima mix that one of our younger members has been using. I know that they changed the logo back in 1989 so she probably doesn't realize the context, but there are still plenty of us around who grew up with the "Mammy" image and all the negative connotations for that. In a church that is working hard to try to address issues around race and white supremacy, it sends the wrong message, IMO, at absolute best a tone-deaf one. Thanks!

The property tax is in addition to the tag fee and in NC is paid to the DMV along with your registration renewal. In NC, we also have to pay personal property tax on boats, motors for boats, jet skis, motor homes, campers, RVs, unregistered vehicles and motorcycles, planes, hot air balloons, helicopters, mobile homes that don't count as real property, trailers (tagged and untagged), and blimps. https://www.mecknc.gov/AssessorsOffice/Pages/Individual-Personal-Property.aspx Looks like an antique tag wouldn't necessarily get one out of property taxes in NC https://www.dmv.com/nc/north-carolina/custom-vehicle-registration

It's not just those with large families--we only have one kid, but it's still making a virtue out of necessity since we've been a one mid-level income for the last 18 years, and are trying to help our daughter through college. It was a voluntary choice, but does have certain consequences. Frugality is the only thing that's made it at all possible.

We replaced my husband's 2005 Matrix this year at about 260K because, in addition to a/c that couldn't seem to be repaired, lots of bad body dings, and bits held on literally with zip ties, it started leaking exhaust into the passenger compartment. We bought a six year old Prius V, as he has a long commute daily. We now use this one for any trips out of town. My car is a 16 yo Camry with a bit over 230K. It's running (knock on wood!), though the headliner is falling down, the paint is failing, and only one speaker still works.

I've been seeing reports since at least Saturday from the local TV meteorologist I follow on FB here in NC and it's been showing up in my Google newsfeed. I don't have regular TV or cable, so can't really compare, but I am not surprised to see less media coverage here, since our main impact will be some heavy rain for a little bit, but I would expect more in Florida. I know I was actively constantly seeking out the latest updates on Florence because of potential personal impact, which would skew my perception of how much coverage was out there. I agree that I think that the speed it's developed could be a factor, since it was only updated to a hurricane yesterday. Keeping my fingers crossed for the schools that are closing in Florida. My UNC-Wilmington student just started back to class yesterday after a month out due to the evacuation from Hurricane Florence (her last class was Sept. 10), and there is still one part of housing that isn't usable so there are still a good number of students displaced.

We've been using wool balls for a few months and my husband (who does most of the laundry) feels it makes for a shorter drying time.

We did the same thing here in NC. These were Christmas cookies, and we had one bowl of sugar dyed green and one red, so that the cookies could be stamped with our choice of colored sugar using the glass, though you had to dampen the glass first so the sugar would stick.

We sent our daughter back with a Halloween countdown calendar from the Vermont Christmas Company via Amazon (had planned to mail, but she just went back after a month-long evacuation due to the hurricane). They have a lot of different types of Advent calendar options for Christmas--treasure box, greeting card, fabric, chocolate, stickers, etc. https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/70C98C15-748E-443B-8F3C-2B52E4AA06EC?ingress=2&visitId=003cb747-0a9f-4663-a371-bbcbca54038f&ref_=w_bl_hsx_s_ho_web_2603192011 She's a freshman, so I haven't done a Christmas one for school yet. I do have a box with a mini tree and tiny ornaments/lights I got in the after Christmas clearance last year that I'll be sending back with her after Thanksgiving. Inspired by Target's 12 Days of Socks calendar, last year at home I did a sock Advent "calendar". My daughter generally wears mismatched low cut socks, so I went to Old Navy and Forever 21 and bought 12 pairs of cute socks, separated them, and put them in a bag. She pulled one sock a day out. You could wrap the socks and put in a box or mix and match with other items. This year I'm looking forward to the Aldi cheese calendar ? but I'm not sure that is easily shipped. Two years ago we did a makeup Advent calendar from Nyx with mini lipsticks and eyeshadows. If that sort of thing might be of interest, search "beauty advent calendars 2018" and you'll find them in a variety of prices from various companies, some including skincare and other items. Some will be the full month, some 12 days. Ulta had some half price last year on Black Friday. Since she will be home in mid-December, you could include a "coupon" for some of her favorite holiday activities to be redeemed when she gets home (along with whatever treat). Comfort items for during exams would be a nice touch for the early days. Duncan Hines has a tasty line of single serve microwave mug cakes this year which only need water added. Each box has 4 packets, so you could mix and match flavors. We tried the Betty Crocker ones and a Dr. Oetker one, but liked DH the best. Haven't tried the Ghiradelli ones yet, but I'll bet they're really good. Does she like tea or cocoa? Packets of those would work well and be relatively easy to mail. Check the after-Halloween candy clearance. Not all of the candies/food have specifically Halloween packaging, and the individually wrapped small sizes are ideal for stockings and Advent calendars.

Marzipan. Hot dogs and sausages are technically in their own tubes. If you consider a tube to include anything in a cylinder, you are home free---most canned/jarred foods, Pringles, some candy, cookies, etc. ?