Handshakes were standard when I was a kid, then a new pastor came in and wanted to hug everyone as they exited the sanctuary. He went in for my dad and dad jumped back, shocked. Hugging was the standard at the church I attended when I was a young adult, and I got used to it, but it was a small church without anyone who was weird about it or creepy. At my current church, they offer buttons at the door indicating your personal space preference. It started after covid, but I think it's a great idea at any time.

For those who want a pristine derriere AND want to be environmentally conscious, there is an option....

I Speak Latin by Drew Campbell is another example of this type of program.

Last year I led biology labs at my co-op. We only did two dissections, and kids could opt out or construct a paper dissection model. This book is an excellent resource for lab ideas, and we used it for more than half of our labs. Our schedule: 1. Lab safety, measurement, using a microscope 2. Detecting carbohydrates and fats in foods 3. Detecting proteins in foods 4. pH-serial dilutions, effects of buffers, finding pH of household items 5. Mounting specimens for observation under a microscope 6. Staining specimens--simple stains and gram staining 7. Plant pigment chromatography using prepared extractions from summer and autumn leaves 8. Cell cycle, observing onion root cells in various stages of mitosis 9. Extracting DNA from strawberries 10. Building a monster using coin-flips to select alleles for each trait, and determining phenotype based on dominance. 11. Forensics activity--matching DNA to determine the criminal 12. Classification, using dichotomous keys to identify insects 13. Observing and identifying protists 14. Dissecting flowers 15. Constructing an insect dissection model 16. Constructing a frog dissection model (optional: dissecting a grasshopper and a frog) 17. Succession activity, looking at a local example of succession after a natural disaster 18. Outdoor activity: looking at plant diversity in the small city lot next to the co-op site. Some planned labs were unable to be completed due to snow days and illness, and some were changed due to time constraints. We didn't look at fungi, complete an activity on competition and natural selection, or go deeper into ecology. Such is life. 🙂

I like the Hemp Yeah protein powders. Just hemp protein. It's a bit grittier than something like whey protein, but the flavor is neutral.

Pierce county is more affordable than King. Everyone likes to complain about Tacoma, but I like it. I lived in what some considered a “rough” neighborhood for about ten years and it was fine. We outgrew our house and moved out of the city, and I wish now that we’d stayed in town.

My spring bulbs seem late this year. Early crocus have bloomed, late crocus are just getting started.

I recently saw the sauce for palak paneer described as spinach gravy, so I could get on board with marinara being called tomato gravy.

I've been using the Historical Novels info site to find books for my kiddos. It looks like it's similar to the History Book by Book site that Night Elf posted above. It divides each list into books for teens and books for preteens which I found helpful.

Not OP, but I think this is for a few reasons. I think the biggest is that evolution in particular has become the "big issue" in the science vs. religion debate that somehow became so prominent in evangelical culture. It's become the buzzword that encompasses not only what biologists understand as evolution, but all of the background science that provides evidence of an old earth and a changing universe. Another is that biological evolution in particular is seen as assigning humans the status of just another animal, not a special being with an intimate connection to a creator god. Finally, I suspect that our usual sequence of science courses for high school has a lot to do with it. Most students last study earth science or geology in elementary or middle school, before the age when students are really digging into the meat of the subject. But biology is the "easy" lab science that everyone takes, and since evolution is foundational, everyone encounters it at some point.

I’ve joked with some friends that with as many vaccines as I’ve had in my life, my body is 37.5% nanobots.

I had mine on Tuesday. I felt a little tired on Wednesday, and the glands in my armpit on the side I got the shot have been a bit swollen. My 15 y/o had it at the same time. It was his first booster and he had a reaction similar to my reaction to my first booster—fever, chills, feeling crummy for a day. 12 y/o had it too and complained that the shot hurt and his arm hurt for a day, but otherwise no SEs. We’ve all had Pfizer for all our doses and haven’t had covid as far as we know. 15 y/o and I didn’t even feel the shot, but we’re good at relaxing before a shot. 12 y/o gets nervous and tenses up.

Our first day is also our first day of co-op, so my kids are sure to have a good day regardless of me. Unless I somehow embarrass my teens, but it’s not like I haven’t been practicing my interpretive dance—it’s looking pretty good.

My kids who are eligible age-wise and I are getting the bivalent shot tonight. Our outside-the-house activities started last week so I’ve felt like I’m watching a horse race between “getting covid” and “bivalent vaccine.”

His conversation with his tailor about pants was pretty funny.

We slept outside the other night after staying up to watch the Perseids, and one of my kids wants to do it again. Northern lights would be a nice bonus!

My grandpa had a pierced ear when he was in the Navy in WW2. It was pulled out in a fistfight, so he had a little scar on his earlobe. It never seemed to cause him any trouble when he worked in the petroleum industry in the 50s-70s.

I don't know the source of your quote, but it reminded me a bit of Julie Bogart's quip about classical homeschooling in the fall, Charlotte Mason in the winter, and unschooling in the spring.

When we lived in rentals and had to prevent our cat from scratching molding we used the SoftPaws caps. Cameron was a medium-cooperative cat, so the caps worked reasonably well. They would have been impossible to apply to the grouchy cat I grew up with, and would be super easy with our current, chill, cats, but the current cats aren't super destructive and we don't care about light scratching.

I'll be using it with my 9th grader this year. Instead of using the fill-in-the-blank pages I'll have him do some Writing Revolution-style exercises, and he'll do longer writing assignments associated with the unit studies. For history we're going to do a deep dive on the early middle ages in the British Isles, including a series of lectures and living history instruction at a local medieval living history museum, and a few Great Courses series--Wondrium actually has a great selection of relevant courses.

Especially if the monologue centers on their special interest.

What a tough situation. Does she have accommodations at the college? The school should have therapists available, but I would understand her reluctance to use the service if they've been difficult before. Is she passing her classes? It might be worth talking to the current profs to see about taking incompletes in her classes to finish up at home, if possible. I don't have any ideas for the long term though. I had two friends in college who had similar paths, and both ended up on academic probation and then unenrolled. They both took a few years to figure out how to navigate life, and then returned to school with much better results.

I'm planning for my rising 9th grader, and was surprised by the order of topics in Miller-Levine. Unit one was what I expected: scientific method, basic chemistry, etc., but then unit 2 jumps to ecology? Now I'm old and haven't taken an intro to bio class in 25 or so years, but I had thought we'd do a general order of basic chemistry for life science, cells, genetics, evolution, basic organismal bio, and ecology at the end. I haven't looked at a lot of lesson plans or current high school biology textbooks, but now I'm wondering if starting with ecology is an idiosyncrasy of the Miller-Levine book, or if it's a more general trend of how biology is taught now. I hadn't planned on using the teacher's guide, but now I'm curious if it explains the choice of topic sequence. If you used Miller-Levine, did you follow the sequence in the book, or the traditional sequence? Is there a pedagogical reason for ecology before cell biology?

Not a doctor or an expert of any kind, but could you work with your therapist on maintaining healthy habits and accepting that your body will do what it does? What would it mean to let go of that kind of strict control?

Try this for MEP. Google tries to direct me to the primary page but this should lead to the main program page. https://www.cimt.org.uk/projects/mep/index.htm