Jump to content

Menu

Beach Mom

Members
  • Posts

    870
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Beach Mom

  1. In my experience by using 3 bins you are foced to break the giant job into smaller jobs that allow you to get through it without your tongue bleeding from holding in the commentary. :glare: We NEVER do the whole room at once. We do it in chunks over a weekend with lots of breaks between sections and a glass of wine for Mom at the end of the day.
  2. When I work with my 13yo to declutter her room the method that works best for us, and causes the least amount of issues between us, is to set a guideline (and we vary it depending on how bad the area) that for every item you keep you have to get rid of one (or 2 or 3 depending on what we are doing). I make it a no judgement time when she can pull everything from under her bed, corners of her closet, and other hiding places with no commentary from me. This method puts the choices in her control, takes the emotion out of it for me and leads to getting the job done. I put three bins in her room one for keep, one for discard and one for things that belong elsewhere in the house. She sorts to the three bins and then I help her organize the keep so that everything has a specific home and nothing has a home on the floor, under the bed or on the bottom of the closet. We go through the discard and divide into trash and donate, and put the bin of things that belong elsewhere away. She still doesn't love cleaning or being organized, but with this method we have found a livable compromise. We have successfully used this method for closet cleaning, books, craft supplies. We now just go through the process twice a year at the beginning of spring and fall and it has gotten much easier.
  3. Likely it did. We were told by our allergist, and it has been our experience that exposure to his allergans can cause both his eczema and asthma to flare up. We were cautioned to make sure that what may initially appear to be an asthma attack is not in fact an allergic reaction. :grouphug:
  4. I like to take 1, preferably my youngest. That DS has a great process for managing the coupons and the scanner while I manage the list and read the labels (due to his allergies). We have a great process and lots of fun. I hate grocery shopping without him because it takes me so much longer.
  5. Both of my boys (now 10 and 11) had this issue when they were 8 and 9. It drove.me.crazy. It was as if their handwriting couldn't keep up with their thoughts. We used WWE 1-4 so they knew how to hold the thoughts, it just wasn't in their nature to slow down enough to print nicely in all subjects. If I made them slow down they had lovely handwriting, but most of the time not so much. I noticed last year that suddenly my oldest had lovely printing all of the time. This year my 10 year old is starting to have nice handwriting about 1/2 the time and it seems better as the weeks go by. I have concluded it was a maturity and dexterity issue that required time to cure.
  6. Anger is normal and will likely come and go over time. My DS has had a peanut allergy for 9 of his 10 years and there are still grocery shopping trips where I end up angry and sad. Grocery shopping is no longer the mindless task it used to be. I know you have the added stress of being in a foreign country but know that even in the US the labeling requirements are not ideal. Manufacturers are required to list peanuts as an ingredient, but the FDA does not require cross contamination labeling - that is voluntary. "The FDA does not legally require manufacturers to report if a food may have become contaminated with an allergen due to production on shared equipment. Some manufacturers include a warning like, "May contain wheat and soy" or "Manufactured on equipment that may have also processed peanuts." Unfortunately, the FDA requires no standardization of the language as of 2010, though it is currently working on the issue." This makes chasing the "mystery reactions" so difficult. Some manufacturers are good, some stink. Labels change all the time so a product you may buy for months and is safe, suddenly the next month will have a warning label. Different items from the same company are made in different plants so some may be safe some may not. Hershey is a classic example of this. The mini bars carry a cross contamination label, while the full size milk chocolate bars do not. FAAN recommends you read every label 3 times. When you buy it, when you put it away and when you use it. Even after doing this for years an item occasionally slips into my cart that is not safe. It is usually something I have bought many times and just didn't look at as closely as I should have. Be very careful of soaps and lotions especially if you are staying away from tree nuts. Almond oil is a common ingredient in many of these. As for Sunbutter, it is a staple at our house, but watch the brand you buy. The "Sunbutter" brand is nut free, but some of the sunflower butter brands have cross contamination labels. Seth Ellis Choclatier makes Sun butter cups, which is a decent imitation of a Reeses peanut butter cup. The website Peanut Free Planet has lots of other products that are safe. It is a journey. As you have read from others over the years even with diligence there can be reactions. My DS had a bad reaction that turned out to be some cross contaminated ranch dressing. Don't be afraid to call a manufacturer if you aren't sure. Most are helpful. :grouphug: for you as you adjust to a new way of shopping, cooking and eating out. I sometimes long for the days we could go any where without "do you have the epi-pen?" and sit down at any restaurant without worries. It does get easier though as you form new habits to deal with the allergies and there is some promising research being done at Duke and Hopkins, among other places, about desensitizing kids to these allergans.
  7. We use the placement guide (and have for several years as we have continued to build our timeline). The record of time is lovely but was too pricey for each of my kids to have one, and they each wanted their own timeline. I didn't want a wall timeline as I had no real place to put it. I just used the placement guide spacing to create timeline pages in Publisher. We print and 3 hole punch them to create homemade timeline notebooks. This is our 4th year and the kids have learned a bunch from this work.
  8. :iagree:Their skippers are a great substitute for M&Ms in cookies. My only caution is make sure your kids understand that while they look like M&Ms it doesn't mean actual M&Ms are safe. Another great site is www.peanutfreeplanet.com They have nut free candy corn, trail mix and candy bars like Mars and Kit Kat that are also nut free. This site is a great help at Halloween time at our house.
  9. :iagree:My boys haven't been alive for a winning O's season. They are soooo excited! (But I have to admit these late night games are killing me!) Am I a bad mother for waking my son up at midnight to tell him we beat the Yankees?! Even half asleep he was high fiving and cheering.
  10. :iagree:I use this feature all the time as life and school collide. It is one of the things I really like about HST+ is how easy it is to move things around.
  11. My family loves this Chicken, Mushroom and Wild Rice soup http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/chicken-mushroom-rice-soup-50400000110812/ other favorites - potato leek, chicken taco soup and Pioneer Woman's Tuscan Bean Soup with Shrimp.
  12. A daily run (or other vigorous exercise) and a complex Vit B (recommended by a dr) make a huge difference in my daughter's mood swings. Now that she is a little older she has learned to recognize the swings and manage them a little better by proactively going outside or talking a walk to reset her mood. :grouphug:, the pre and early teens can be hard on Mom.
  13. Praying for you and your family. It is such a hard situation to walk through, and my experience was sister drama can make it so much more difficult. :grouphug: Someone told me when I was going through such a situation with my own father that sometimes God gives you "just enough light for the step you are on." She said that sometimes you can't even see if you are going up or down stairs, but rest assured He will light each step of the way. Don't try to look ahead, but do the best you can with each step of each day. In the end you will be thankful for every moment you hold your father's hand and every moment you are able to support your Mom. It is a stressful, heart breaking time. Hang on to your faith, walk away and walk outside for a moment when you need to, and know that you are lifted up in prayer.
  14. We have bunk bed sheets that are sewn on one side so they are easier for making the bed. The boys are required to straighten the sheet and the comforter, it takes less than 5 minutes.
  15. Both of our Yorkies are bell trained. One benefit I found is it is much harder for the kids to ignore a bell than a pacing dog. We now have a chart by hour so when the bell rings, someone checks and there is no arguing about who has to walk the dogs.
  16. We switched to AG after R&S 7. By the time we finished 7 I honestly felt she had learned all the grammar she needed. She found AG quite easy and we used it more to ensure she didn't forget what she learned than to learn anything new. I think R&S 6 was the book that really made AG easier for her. Because of working through 6 she was very familiar with appositives, clauses and other more complex grammar topics. In my opinion the biggest leap in R&S is from book 5 to book 6. The labeling is a little different in that AG focuses more on the type of word and the job of the word. For example in a sentence boy might be the noun and the job of that noun is direct object. She didn't love AG, but it did the job we needed it to do.
  17. I have to finish history and literature. I still have 8 days until schools starts so I am not behind yet! I find our year goes so much better if I have everything input into HST+ before we start. Then I just add it to our schedule every 2 weeks and adjust as needed.
  18. I have 3 and couldn't convince myself to spend $120 for timeline books. I bought the History through the Ages CD, printed the figures on sticker paper, and made the timeline pages on cardstock using Publisher. I used a fancy font and figured out the spacing of dates using the Suggested Placement Guide. This will be our 4th year with this method and they all enjoy this part of our history work.
  19. When we first started homeschooling I wasn't sure where to place one of my boys in Saxon, even after the placement testing. He was on the bubble between two levels. A Veritas consultant suggested we start the year by taking a chapter test each day from the lower level. When we got to one where he scored less than 80% that was the chapter we should start in. I already had both levels so this didn't increase my expense. We ended up starting about 60% thorough a book and it was a perfect solution. He wasn't bored with material he already knew, but wasn't pushed into a level he wasn't quite ready for. When we finished we started the next book.
  20. Here is a great free resource. Click on Old or New Testament, under Support Resources are coloring pages, word searches (easy and hard) and other worksheets for each Bible story. Those coloring pages have kept my boys occupied during many a sermon. (There are also devotionals and teacher's guides for each lesson if you need those.) Hope it helps you. http://children.cccm.com/
  21. I ordered from both places last Wednesday. I received the CBD order on Monday and the Rainbow order on Thursday. I thought that was great for this time of year.
  22. DD will be 13 and 10 months when she begins 9th at the end of August. She started K in the middle of Maryland changing the kindergarten entrance ages so she was only 4 when she started. Now they require you to be 5 by 9/1 the year you start K.
  23. This recipe is one of my favorites for company. It is a pasta, arugula, steak salad. Easy but fancy. Add a nice loaf of bread and some lemon bars for a tasty low fuss meal. I cook the steak the day before, slice it and just warm it in a pan the day I'm serving it. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/penne-with-beef-and-arugula-recipe/index.html
  24. I used it with my DD this year. We did one lesson or test per day. We didn't use the DVD lecture, because she preferred I teach her, but other than that followed the path you described. I was nervous whether she really retained it, but felt much better when she tested out of geometry at the private high school we hope to send her to with a 94%.
  25. :grouphug: Here too, you and your family are in my prayers.
×
×
  • Create New...