He turned 10 over the summer. ETA: Thanks for the reminder - I fixed all the ages in my signature now.

Spencer has now written many, many musical compositions, but today, for the first time, he got the opportunity to perform one of them in public for an audience. A world premier! Here he is playing his piece, Funeral March (one movement from one of his piano sonatas): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NiXv4CXEK92wjxHjtih2hd4IHPFABpY5/view?usp=sharing

Most of my kids have found math to be pretty easy (even as I accelerated them according to their abilities), so I added in Problem Solving as a subject so they got daily practice working on problems that took effort and perseverance. At that age we used Balance Benders, Logic Safari, and Tin Man Press Enrichment Packets.

My big boys should have five full days of school this week - hallelujah!! The weather is even supposed to warm up; 35 degrees is going to feel mighty good after a couple weeks of single and low double digits. The fire clean up company will probably be starting work on Tuesday or Wednesday, and will be working for 3 or 4 days. Most of that work should be while the big boys are at school. Hopefully by next weekend Spencer will be moved back into his room.

The way you are describing homeschooling is so radically different than we do it, that, for us, your question wouldn't even make much sense. We rarely use curricula that are divided into designated "weeks", so we don't move faster or deeper than any arbitrary standard. We study material that is appropriately challenging for the student, for lengths of time that are developmentally appropriate for them, until they master the content and are ready to move on. Yes, at our house this looks like fifth graders studying algebra, but only for a typical fifth grade amount of math time. When my kids are ready to study history more deeply, we add in primary sources and opposing viewpoints and more of the whys and hows of history, but none of that means we have to study any particular book or event I don't think they are ready for. It means we study the things I want us to cover and the things they are interested in and the things that come up in daily life, and that we don't worry one iota about whether a curriculum says they are the right things to be learning about in any given week.

I think our homeowners insurance will be dealing with some of this. They are taking the blanket, the burned mattress, and all the other burned bedding.

So, two weeks before Christmas I finally faced the fact that I had to send Peter to public school for the second semester. The first semester (of 9th grade) he was a calculus superstar, and totally aced a dual enrollment astronomy class (at the community college that required absolutely no reading or writing of any kind), but other than that he accomplished very little. He wasn't doing school or chores or hygiene - something had to change, but I hate it with every fiber of my being. In the two weeks between then and Christmas: - I spoke daily to the school trying to get Peter's registration sorted out before winter break started - Our furnace unexpectedly died leaving us without heat for several days and dealing with a new furnace installation - The furnace installation went astray and they had to come back three times to fix the plumbing and humidifier that they broke - My new car got a flat tire - And my good friend got sick, went into hospice, and died. After winter break: - A blizzard hit causing lots of snow days right when we all should have been getting back into our normal routine - The disrupted routine caused Elliot to go off the rails leading to lots of violence and destruction - Elliot hurt DH to the point he now is in physical therapy for his shoulder - Spencer's new electric blanket from Christmas caught fire in the middle of the night and burned through his mattress - And we are now dealing with home owners insurance and the disaster clean up company being here most of next week trying to clean and salvage things. I need off this roller coaster. I don't have any more reserves to draw on.

I'll respond primarily about the 9th grader - you won't know what the school can offer until you actually meet with them. My 9th grader just started public school at the start of the second semester. They are not accepting homeschool credits, but are placing him in appropriate classes and having him test out of the first semesters so that he will earn the full credits. I am pleasantly surprised by his schedule: Advanced English 9, AP Calculus, World History, Spanish 3, Forensic Science and Game Design. When we sat down with the school, they talked us through the options and gave DS lots of choices.

1. I would count a chunk of the Miller-Levine toward the high school credit. Cell organelles haven't changed in the last two years. 2. Any chance he could crank through a couple experiments over the summer? My son took a one week BioTech camp at our local science center over the summer, and I'm counting those hours toward his bio labs because it was all hands-on. I also had him play around with some virtual dissections (he does not want to do any real dissections). Then during the school year we just aimed for one moderately in-depth lab where he produced a lab report...and we paused all other bio activities for two weeks while he was doing that lab and writing it up. 3. Are there any particular aspects of biology that you think your son would enjoy? My son is anti-biology, so I filled in most of his bio time with Great Courses (now Wondrium) lectures on bio topics that he found interesting...or at least as interesting as possible. Since your son went through a survey course just a couple years ago, I would be fine letting the rest of his bio be interest-led. There are some great lecture courses that delve deeper into various aspects of biology: Biology and Human Behavior, Major Transitions in Evolution, An Introduction to Infectious Diseases, Earth at the Crossroads: Understanding the Ecology of a Changing Planet, etc. And almost all of them include a Guidebook with discussion questions for each lecture.

My husband will probably be retiring shortly after our youngest graduates from college. Our dream is to sell our house, buy a fifth wheel, and travel the country. Our favorite kind of vacations, both before and after kids, are semi-rustic camping on the outskirts of a large city. We like to stay for 2-3 weeks at least so we can see and do a lot of things in the city without it feeling like a sprint or a marathon. We typically park and ride at the outermost transit stop and take the train into the city. One day we might spend most of an afternoon at a museum, the next take advantage of nice weather to bike or hike near where we are camping, and the next go back into the city to see a show. We also hope to be more available to our kids as they live their adult lives. My parents typically came to stay with me for 4 or 5 days after I had a baby or had surgery, but I would prefer to be able to stay near my kids to help out for weeks or months without being an imposition. I imagine being able to spend a couple hours at their house as often as they wanted, supporting them however is helpful, and then getting out of their hair. I could see taking older children on outings or bringing them for a sleepover with us to give their parents a break.

Early '90s, rural midwest. Breakfast - Cereal, mostly Frosted Miniwheats or Honey Nut Cheerios. Always 2% milk. Lunch - Either packed or at school. Packed would be PBJ on white bread, chips, apple sauce and a few cookies. School lunch always seemed to be pizza - taco pizza, tortilla pizza, breakfast pizza, regular pizza, etc. - they might have served fruits and vegetables, but I didn't eat them. Snack - Cookies Dinner - Chicken nuggets, tater tots, and the ubiquitous frozen vegetable mix: peas, corn, carrots and lima beans...plus always a glass of milk. Bedtime snack - ice cream

I grew up in a fairly rural area...I could walk 10 minutes to a very small playground, or 30 minutes to our very small library, but any real shopping or activities were a 30-45 minute drive away. I was on the bus for an hour each way, so I didn't have much time on week days to get bored, but weekends and vacations were pretty empty. There was a movie theater in town, but we didn't have money for those types of activities. We had an acre of land, so I could play outside, but there wasn't really anything to do out there - the roads around my house were gravel, very hilly, with no sidewalks and very fast traffic, so it wasn't safe to ride bikes anywhere. There weren't other kids around; I only had one much younger brother. We didn't have dirt bikes or snowmobiles or anything. Once I was old enough, I could (was forced to) cut the lawn with the tractor, but that wasn't exactly a boredom buster. My mom didn't let us participate in any sports or clubs that ever met during family/chore/homework time (evenings and weekends), so other than a brief stint in girl scouts, I was never in organized activities. I was bored a lot, but it didn't take long for me to start using that time for academics. The library was right next to the post office (where we had to pick up mail from our post office box), so I could check out new books every other day or so all summer. I think my parents also felt guilty that they could not support my academic strengths, and that our rural school wasn't doing much either, so they were always willing to buy me math workbooks from the grocery store. I could spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to add negative numbers and then checking myself with the answers in the back. My mom had a big roll of newsprint, and she would let me write and solve h.u.g.e long division problems, like 20 digits divided by 3 digits. That could fill up a summer afternoon. Once I was older, I spent a lot of time solving math problems from old competitions...even though there was no way I could actually compete. Unfortunately, the further ahead I got academically, the more time I spent bored at school. I also turned a lot of time spare time toward making money. My parents were always vehemently against paying kids for any chores, so that was never an option. But by ten I was getting paid by a couple neighbors to act as a mother's helper, by twelve I was babysitting, by 14 I had my first off the books "real" job, and by my sixteenth birthday I had bought myself a car and gotten a real on the books job that I had to drive to. That is also the age I started leaving school after lunch every day to take dual enrollment classes, so I was a lot less bored by then.

I wanted to offer support for another point of view. Three of my kids have been homeschooled from the beginning (now 2nd, 5th and 9th grades), and some of their best friends are homeschooled only children who get plenty of opportunities for socialization. You might find that once you are part of the homeschool community in your area, that there are lots of activities that aren't on your radar yet...and if not, you might start making one-on-one connections with other homeschool families. My oldest son has been friends with a boy (homeschooled, only child) for the last 7 years (ages 7 - 14). They have done a couple organized clubs together (Comic book drawing, Dungeons and Dragons), but almost all of their hanging out has been just play dates we set up. Back when they were little we would all play at the park or go swimming at the local pool. When they got older they had afternoon play dates at each other's houses. Now that they are teenagers, they have a very strong friend group of four boys and two girls (all homeschooled, half only children). They play D&D, hang out at the mall, do clubs, camps and activities together, go to the arcade or pinball, etc. My youngest two kids (an 8 year old girl and a 10 year old boy) have a very good friend who is a 9 year old girl who is a homeschooled only child. Her mom and I trade kids once a week, so I have her Monday mornings while her mom is taking a class (and I do science with all three kids, math with the girls, and the kids have plenty of free play time). Then her mom picks up both girls after a Friday morning art class, and she feeds them lunch, does baking and crafts with them, and lets them run around their pond getting muddy all Friday afternoon. I think socialization just looks different for only children vs. larger families...but also for rural vs. urban, and introverted vs. extroverted, and sorts of other factors. Families homeschooling only children have to look for most of their play opportunities outside the house, but in my experience, they have an easier time of it because they aren't having to also juggle a lot of kids' needs. When my oldest was 7, and met his friend, we had a much harder time fitting play dates into our schedule than they did, because we were still tied down by naps and toddlers and speech therapy appointments for the preschooler and all the things four kids need. Now that my youngest is that age, her only-child friend is footloose and fancy free most of the time, and able to attend all the field trips and events, while we are juggling music lessons and dual enrollment classes and physical therapy and the much higher academic loads of my middle and high schoolers. After a decade of homeschooling, I have seen a lot of different ways homeschool families are thriving.

For me, the buttons that control cell format are in the upper bar to the right of the zoom setting and to the left of the font. The ones that control number of decimal places look like .0 and .00 with tiny arrows above them. I think you just need to select the cells you want to change and press the .0 button which decreases the number of decimal digits by one.

Sure. At that point I would probably throw it into chicken soup with rice to rehydrate it and pep it up.

My brother is planning to get my kids the cooperative card game Ravine. I know nothing about it other than that my brother played it with a group if friends and deemed it acceptable for my kids.

This is the route we have taken with my kids. We started ADHD and anxiety meds for all of them somewhere between 5 and 6...right about the time they were transitioning from preschool classes and expectations and theories of mind, and they were starting to suffer academically, emotionally, behaviorally and socially from their delays and deficits and growing anxieties. With two of my kids (who ended up with ASD and ODD/DMDD diagnoses), that was not enough to stabilize them even at that age, so at 7 they were on Risperidone as well, because our psychiatrist feels strongly that early stabilization is crucial to get kids to a place from which they can grow and develop coping strategies. Unfortunately, with Elliot that has not worked, because even at 12, on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, he is not safe or stable. And that lack of stability means that my two younger kids now have PTSD diagnoses from the trauma of living in a house with Elliot's violence. Instability can have just as many long-term consequences and side effects as medications. And one of the huge downsides is that intensive therapy does nothing for Elliot, because he is not in a receptive place where he can (or wants to) adjust his thinking or behavior. But for Audrey, early medical intervention has made all the difference in the world. At 6-turning-7 she was suicidal, attempting to run away on a weekly basis, refusing all school work, kicking holes in walls, and throwing extended violent tantrums. On .5mg of Risperidone (plus large doses of Focalin and Fluoxetine), she is a happy, thriving just-turned-8-year-old. She is on a gymnastics team and in girl scouts, and is doing so well across the board. Of course we will reassess her meds and dosages over time just like we do for all the kids, but I am so glad to have her on a stable, functioning foundation right now. Unlike Elliot, therapy is now hugely beneficial for Audrey - every week I see her taking coping strategies and social strategies she has learned in therapy and applying them to her life. But this is only possible for her because her brain is regulated enough to allow her to implement new skills, and because she has been stable enough over time to build friendships and communities that she values and wants to maintain.

Ours is Marvin (The Paranoid Android) He is constantly catastrophizing.

My very geeky 14 year old is very much into D&D, Nerf guns, Puzzle Magazines, and puzzley games like this.

My Spanish reading is far better than my listening or speaking. I took five years of Spanish in high school and one semester in college. In all those years the emphasis was on conjugation charts, written translations, and reading. I think this was simply the most common model for teaching classrooms full of teenagers and adults new languages at the time - minimally qualified teachers, lots of reading and worksheets, easily administered fill-in-the-blank tests, and no need to police how much English students (or teachers) were using in class. I, obviously, wish that my spoken Spanish was much stronger, but I am glad for the ability to read Spanish. I have a very large Spanish vocabulary, and while I might miss some nuance, I can passably understand signs, instructions, newspaper articles, fiction at the level of Harry Potter, etc. My limited ability has been a huge boon in helping my kids reach much higher proficiency. Obviously I outsource all of their conversational tutoring, and started them on that journey at a much, much younger age than I began learning. But I have been able to expose them to vast amounts of Spanish by reading books to them. Obviously we could get the same effect with audiobooks, but they are often too fast for beginners to understand, or not on topics that interest my kids. Plus, with me reading, I can keep them engaged with questions...either those within my limited spoken proficiency or ones I formulate ahead of time. But, bottom line, learning to read a language first is not something I would advocate. I don't necessarily think it has any real advantages over learning to speak first. And at least with Spanish (I know this would be wildly different with other languages), my kids have not found learning to read it a difficult task once they were solid English readers and had several years of immersion/comprehensible input Spanish instruction under their belts.

On the other end of the spectrum, my 130 pound 12 year old takes 4mg of Abilify daily plus 3 mg of Risperidone.

We bought this one from Amazon. We bought the 6" thick version because DS was sleeping in a bunk bed at the time, and we wanted to make sure the guard rail extended far enough above the mattress. We were shocked by how comfortable it was for being so thin and so cheap. And that was almost 3 years ago, and it is still holding up great.

All my kids LOVE those things.

The biggest thing that has helped here is grouping as many chores as possible together into one lump on Sunday. The kids hate it, but they actually hate it less than having to remember and transition to chores every day. We used to try to spread their weekly chores throughout the week, and it ended up with me having to remind them and pester them all day every day. So now, each of my kids has one, consistent daily chore that they do immediately after breakfast. I am already there supervising them cleaning up breakfast dishes and brushing teeth, so I also make sure they do their chore, which should only take 5-10 minutes. But, then, 6 days of the week they do not have to think about chores for the rest of the day. On Sunday, after breakfast, they do their daily chores, and then immediately start in on all their weekly chores. It takes everyone about 60-90 minutes (or quite a bit longer if they want to tantrum about it), but by 9 or 9:30 they can be entirely done with their chores. I no longer have to remind them about chores because that is what everyone does after breakfast on Sunday. I still do have to supervise and get them moving again if they lose focus, but it is so much better to only have that job for one block each week instead of having to always have a part of my brain focused on who should be doing what.

If you are hoping to outsource, Lantern English has 8 week courses teaching research papers at both middle school and high school levels.