I say go for it. You said you still have some undergrad work to do, so start taking a class each semester. By the time your littlest one is school age you will have your undergrad degree and can then think about moving on to med school if you still want to. If you do nothing, you'll still be dreaming about it in four years but no closer to making it a reality.

I'm 34 and I still have trouble with past and til! It drives me crazy when my husband will say "quarter til 9" because I have to mentally convert that to 8:45. I wouldn't worry about it though, I'm sure your dc will pick up on it sooner or later. :)

We have a rental property that we were thinking about selling. I called a realtor and he said that we should wait until the lease was closer to being up for renewal because we weren't charging enough rent. We bought the house for $140,000 in 2004, it's now worth about $125,000, and we are charging $1200/month rent. The realtor said that a landlord with lots of rental properties would want $1200 (12%) for every $100,000 in property value, so he suggested we wait until we could bump the rent up. HTH.

Sticky situation, for sure. I'm pretty much inclined to go with the my house, my rules way of thinking. You can't control what the whole world does, but you can control what goes on in your home in front of your children. Surely your sister will understand, and if she doesn't and chooses not to visit you because of this, then really, she needs to grow up, and that's her problem, not yours.

Perhaps you could find a used literature textbook from a PS?

Letter of the Week is free and is great for, well, learning letters. They also have some science and social studies stuff there too, I believe. Five in a Row is relatively inexpensive, especially if you can get the books from the library. And if you're wanting to teach printing, I highly, highly, highly recommend Handwriting Without Tears. Some people don't like how "basic" the letters look, but it's so simple and gentle that even the youngest kids can learn to print neatly, which IMO is more important than printing beautifully.

When she was 4 and decided she wanted to learn to read, my grandma taught her with the old Dick & Jane books, just like she taught me 30 years ago. Whenever she finished a book, she would get a treat, like going out for ice cream or picking a small ($5) toy from Walmart. Now we've moved past rewards and she's expected to learn/read because she's a child and that's her job, just like daddy's an adult and his job is to go to work. When she was struggling with her spelling tests in PS last year, we did agree that if she got a 9/10 or 10/10 for 5 weeks in a row she would get some Littlest Pet Shop toy that she'd been wanting. It worked...she got the toy...but she didn't learn to spell, she just memorized the words for the test.

That was RUDE! I would have spoken to the manager. The waitress needs to mind her own business. I had a similar experience at Staples last week. There is a woman (probably in her 50s) that works there. We go to Staples a lot and always try to go through her line because she's really friendly and has always been nice to us. Well, last week she of course mentioned school and my DD said, "I don't go to school. I'm homeschooled." This woman then went off on a tangent about how she can't believe how many people homeschool now days and how public school was good enough for her generation but moms of my generation (I'm in my 30s) seem to think it's not good enough for their kids. I didn't know what to say, so I just mumbled about how it had nothing to do with the education, but that I didn't want my daughter to be exposed to values and beliefs that weren't in line with our families. Woah, that was a BIG mistake! I found out more about this woman's personal beliefs and preferences than I needed to know. It was SO uncomfortable and now I don't want to go to Staples at all!

That's exactly why I'm so reluctant to plan things out very specifically. I just can't gauge how quickly she'll fly through some things or how long she'll drag out others. So, my new method is to create six-week goals. At the end of six weeks I'll evaluate our progress and set goals for the upcoming six week period. But the biggest thing is to remind myself that they're simply goals. If we don't make the goal in spelling, we won't stress out about it as long as we're actually putting in the time each day. But if we're flying through math and get done with six weeks worth of work in four weeks, we'll keep right on going. I'm also planning a 1-2 week break after every six weeks, with the idea that we'll school year round. The break will be used for travel, resting, doing fun things, holidays, and catching up if we're falling seriously behind where I think we should be in an area.

Our old church (a Christian Church) would baptize anyone who wanted to be. Our new church (a generic nondenominational church) has specific requirements. Personally, I prefer our old church's approach. I don't think baptism should be denied to anyone who expresses a desire. And I agree with the PP, now might be a great time to start seeking out a church home. (Not judging, I know how things happen sometimes.)

Well, at first I thought it was all wrong, but then after hearing your kids ages I think it's completely appropriate, although I would have probably given the 8 year old something, like maybe $20, but since he is a man, he probably didn't even think about how sensitive an 8 year old might be. Older kids have bigger wants/needs than young children and as the younger ones get older they'll probably receive more expensive gifts too. When I buy birthday/Christmas gifts for my nieces & nephews the older ones always get more expensive gifts. It's much easier to find a $25 gift for an 8 year old than it is a 16 year old.

My daughter had computer class 1-2 times a week last week when she went to PS for 1st grade. (All the "specials" rotated weekly so some weeks they got it once and some twice.) From what I gathered, they just played games and got yelled at by the teacher who taught the class. My daughter thought it was a waste of time, but then, she complained daily that the whole PS experience was a waste of time. :)

Thanks everyone. I'll check out your suggestions. I'm just happy to know that there are other kids who have struggled like this. I tend to start obsessing about certain things when it seems like she is way behind.

My daughter can't spell to save her life. She wrote a "paragraph" to describe a photo the other day and this is how it went: "Won day ter wus a snow man. Won day it meltid away. The and." I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. (I kept a straight face to her, though.) Obviously we need to do some work. When she was in PS last year she struggled with the spelling tests the teacher sent home. She finally got to the point that she was able to memorize the list but it didn't cross over into anything else. If she needed to write the same word that was on her spelling test somewhere else, she would misspell it. She is reading very well (at the end of 1st grade the PS teacher said she was reading at about a halfway through 2nd grade level) and if I give her a list of some misspelled words along with one that is correctly spelled (eg BOK BUK BOOK), she almost always can pick out the correct spelling, but if I asked her to spell book she would get it wrong. So, what I'm asking is, is this totally abnormal or is it all part of the process? I know we need to do something to work on spelling, but I think giving her a spelling test every week would be a waste of time and energy as she can't seem to retain it. Any suggestions for a spelling curriculum that might help her catch up?

I did FIAR with my daughter when she was 4 & 5 and she loved it. She never got bored with the same story over and over, even when I did. We still have all the FIAR books that I purchased and she is getting to the age where she can read them herself and does. Recently I heard here explaining what a gondola is to her stuffed animals while reading Papa Piccolo to them.