We have a junk garage. If I cleaned it out I could actually park there, and not get wet bringing in groceries. It’s obviously nkt that important to me, since I haven’t done it yet.

That’s much better than what I read it as. :o I thought someone’s 10 y/o boy was goofing off on the forums. :)

We like to do our major science units during the summer, too. One year we used the Nomad Press Geology of the Pacific Northwest book and took some field trips to major geological sites (like my avatar!). The kids thought that was great.

We have a big visual schedule on our schoolroom wall. It has been helpful to us for each kid to see exactly what they are supposed to be doing, in relation to each other family member--Okay, P is doing spelling, mom is doing spelling with him, N and C are doing puzzles. It takes up the whole wall, but it is worth it. It also takes the blame when someone doesn't want to do something--well, that's what the schedule says. Somehow there is a disconnect there--they don't put together that mom set up the schedule. :lol: We also do the 4-day schedule thing, kind of. We call it unschool Friday. We're kind of scheduled in the morning--we do our read-aloud, our Brave Writer freewrite, and some fun oral Latin stuff. Then we play a game that hits reading (Quiddler Jr, nonsense word concentration from The Phonics Page, Happy Hats), a game that hits math (Prime Climb, Dragonwood, anything with scoring, really), my oldest might read something to the youngers. In the afternoon, depending on weather, we like to hit a local park, or watch nature shows, maybe do a Mystery Science lesson, or do something artsy. If the week has been chaos, we will catch up on loose ends. We try to keep it light and fun. :) SaveSave

Happy birthday! :party:

We’ve started to sing “He did the math—-he did the monster math†when we pull out Beast Academy. :)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I feel so morbid when I do. lol

I was not allowed to make my purchase at Target once because my signature didn't match the signature on my card. This was about 15 years ago, when you still signed the paper receipt. I probably could have had the manager called and made a scene, but I was on my lunch break and in a hurry, so I just huffed "WHATEVER" and stormed out. :laugh:

There is all manner of crud going around right now. One of my kids has had two vomiting bugs in the last month. I'm kind of scared to leave the house at this point. :scared:

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The characters are genuinely awful, the humour is lowbrow and horrible, but after a bad day it always makes me feel more functional and normal. :D

We enjoyed Florence Foster Jenkins. Dd4 walked in and asked if it was a movie about mommy. :D

I removed a giant shrub in the yard today and thought it was great fun. So I’ll join you in boring club. :)

My kids like to tease me about it. "Don't you know our names yet? You gave them to us!"

I know families who believe that sending kids to public school equals walking in the counsel of the wicked, which goes against Psalm 1. I don't think it's terribly common in our heathen little corner of the country, but I could see it being more commonplace is other regions. eta: On the other hand, I know left-wingers who just as vehemently believe that public education is evil because it trains children to be consumeristic cogs in the corporate machinery of the world. I guess hating on public schools is an equal-opportunity pastime. SaveSave SaveSave

The news this morning is almost unbelievable. The only thing I can think of is that with it being the inaugural run, there were some VIPs in the locomotive, distracting the engineer. (Or the conductor? I get those guys mixed up.) They have to have been doing trial runs and become familiar with the route before this--I can't imagine that the speed limit change was a surprise.

We’ve been listening to the news all day. What a tragedy. :( Traffic will be a mess for the next few days. There really aren’t many options to get through that area, with the sound on one side and the base and a big mountain on the other. I heard a rumor that there was going to be a route opened through JBLM but I don’t know if that happened. In response to the pp who asked why there are highways and railroads going through wetlands: due to the geography of the area in question, there would be no way to have a north-south highway corridor on the western side of the state without crossing the many rivers/creeks that flow down from the cascade mountains. The derailment took place near a nature preserve which is located at the delta of one of the major rivers in the area.

Huh. I had a pair of NYDJ and they had holes where my thighs rub within 6 months. I was sorely disappointed--those jeans are expensive!

This is such a cute idea! I use up stocking space by including convenience breakfast items that we usually don't have--individual bottles of juice, the mini boxes of cereal, applesauce in a squeeze tube, etc. Then the kids eat on the family room floor while they play with their other stocking do-dads and wait for the lazy parents to finally get up. :)

Thinking of you today. Gentle hugs.

Make springerle. They keep for weeks.

I think it boils down to a false sense of control. If I'm driving then I can prevent an accident, whereas if the pilot is in control he'll crash. If I have a gun, then my lightning-fast reflexes and cool head will prevail when the bad guy shows up and I'll take him down before he can cause any harm.

I don't know, counting the sticker as a yellow butterfly kind of seems like a reach. It wasn't a real yellow butterfly. If you had chosen an uncommon object, do you think that there would have been a sticker of that object on the bin? Yellow butterflies are so common that I think you could have seen one almost anywhere you went. You just noticed it because you were looking for it.

That sounds typical to me.

Sorry, I keep coming back to this thread because things keep popping into my mind. The writer of the first article focuses on EF issues. She has been diagnosed with autism, so assuming that it's a good diagnosis, she has the core autism issues. But the EF issues are what bother her the most, what she sees the most, so it's what she writes about. Some of the other things--theory of mind stuff, context, etc. are areas where you don't know what you don't know. An example from my life--I just realized, in the past year, that people act differently at work than they act at home. That people can be genuine while acting different ways. They aren't being phony, just acting appropriately for the context. It kind of blew my mind. :laugh: This one little thing changed the way I thought about so many things, and was so weird to realize for me, a non-autistic person, so I can't even imagine what kind of insights people who discover they have autism are encountering every day. The writer is probably at the beginning of that journey.

I would not give my mother red roses--in my mind, red roses are a gift from a lover. Fortunately, her favorite are a nice bright peach color. :)