Was and still am a pediatrician. Although I now work very part-time.

I'd be really interested in reading it too! It sounds wonderful. I think I remember that on another thread you recommene The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down to someone which is one of my all time favorite books.

Ok, I have nothing really to add to this thread...except that the subject line caught my eye. You're all welcome to use me for computer science...but I doubt I'll be much help. :lol: Hopefully, someone else will find this as amusing as I do. Maybe this is a sign I should go do something more productive with my afternoon. :D

I'm a pediatrician, but can't speak for all of my profession. Obviously..I'm pro-homeschooling. :) I do think most of my partners and the people I work with view it as an odd choice. But then so do many people I meet not in the medical world.

I'm a pediatrician. The recommended vaccines for adolescents: TdaP- Tetanus booster has always been recommended to be given every 5-10 years. Pertussis was added back as a booster at this age due to the rising incidence of pertussis in adolescents and adults. Yes, vaccines do "fail". And we are constantly learning in medicine and changing our practice based on what we learn. Varivax-Now recommended that everyone get a booster of varicella. This can be given as early as 5 yrs old (with the other boosters they receive then for DTaP, IPV and MMR) or anytime after that. Meningococcal-The current vaccine is called Menactra and is "new" but we've been vaccinating for this for quite awhile, just with a different vaccine (Medimmune). Meningococcal vaccination is required by almost all colleges. Risk of meningitis starts increasing in college age due to close conditions of dorms, etc. Recently, it has been recognized that the rate of disease in adolescents is 1:100,000 which is fairly high for a fatal disease. The high schools in my area are almost as crowded as colleges, so this makes sense. The vaccine is offered after age 11, personally I usually recommend it for kids going into high school. Gardisil-HPV vaccine. Is required in some states for school ...I know in my state of Virginia it will be required soon for school (which I disagree with by the way) but is pretty easy to opt out of (parents just have to sign something saying they know about and are refusing it). Hepatitis A- Another newish (past few years) recommendation. The shot has been around a long time (20+ years) but used to be given primarily for travel. Is now recommended for everyone over the age of 1 yr old. Is a series of two shots. The schools here don't require this one, not sure about other places. Hepatitis A can be a fairly benign disease but we are seeing more of it in this country. Ok, now I have to get up on my soapbox. ;) Vaccines are really not about money. The drug companies don't make much money off of vaccines and vaccine research...in fact one of the big problems we have had lately is that when one company decides to stop manufacturing a vaccine there have been frequent shortages of the vaccine as other companies are slow to step in and take it on. Drug companies make a LOT of money and I am not at all a defender of them...but the money is coming from the high blood pressure meds and the allergy meds and the reflux meds and the cholesterol meds and the psychiatric meds....Not much is from the vaccines. Sure, when there is a new one like Gardisil they are going to market it strongly as they do want to make money off of it, but it's not the main source of their riches. And, as I've said before...doctors really really really don't make money off of vaccines. We don't. We usually are losing money on them or just breaking even as we often get paid less by the insurance companies than we are charged by the drug companies. Not a "poor little doctor" plea..but we're not making our money this way. And the well-child visits are really not just about the shots. In my practice I still see all the non-vaccinating people just as often as the ones that do vaccinate. I think it's just as important to follow their height, weight, development, etc. We diagnose unsuspected conditions all the time at well checks. For us it's not a scheme to "talk up" vaccines and somehow generate more income. Believe it or not, we actually like kids and want to be part of keeping them healthy. We actually make the most money on sick visits...so ideally for us financially we'd do no well checks and just see ear infections all day long. Lucrative, perhaps...but incredibly boring. :D Ok, now I'll jump off my soapbox. :001_smile: Vaccinate or not...the decision is, of course, yours as a parent. Hope the info above helps some.

Celiac, cystic fibrosis, food allergies and reflux are all good ideas. I would also agree with the poster who mentioned testing for Metabolic Disorders. The funny smell is the concerning thing there. A lot of metabolic disorders give a funny smell (a bunch give a smell of "sweaty socks") and moms are often the ones to notice it more than anyone else. Fairly easy to test for, it's just bloodwork and a urine test.

We've been using FIAR for about the past 3 months. I think it can be fairly pick up and go, as the manual has lesson suggestions (it actually has more than you need, the idea is you choose 5 you want from the ones given for each book). You could use just the book and the manual for teaching most of the time. It's designed so that's all you need. You can also do more with it with not a lot of planning. I spend probably a few hours each week thinking about what topics I want to cover in the book and then looking up books at the library that go along with our FIAR book. Then I think a few other crafts or field trips or activities we can do to go along with the book/theme. But, I'm doing this for K for my 4 yr old and so I'm probably, ok make that definitely, spending more time than I need. It's all still new for me so the planning is fun and we're not really doing much else, school-wise. I could do it with much less planning. You can absolutely do it for a few weeks and then stop. The books aren't in any kind of order and each can stand alone. I'm finding it fun to group them together into mini-units (we're about to start an ocean unit) but that isn't at all necessary or really the way the manuals are written. You could also check out Homeschool Share. http://www.homeschoolshare.com. If you don't already have the manuals for FIAR, you might not want to buy them just for the summer. There are LOTS of FIAR-like free units on Homeschool Share.

My second one who had bad reflux was like this. He would only sleep on me..in the sling or the Baby Bjorn. I basically wore him for the first 6-8 months. Around 8 months he would start to nap a little IF I lay down with him and fed him to sleep. He started taking real naps around 12 mo and now does 2-3 hrs a day at 18 months. So...no great advice except to hang in there...it might get better. :)

:iagree:

I see this statement a lot in discussions on science. It's OK for the experiements not to work. Having the experiement "work" is NOT the point of science. The point is thinking...hypothesizing about what will happen, thinking out how to do the experiement, performing the experiment, seeing what happens and if the results aren't what's expected or what they "should" be...then discussing why it didn't work. I was a Chemistry and Biology major and half our experiments in college didn't "work". That was part of the learning process. Sciene is all about saying....Hmmmm, I wonder________(why this works, what will happen if I do this, how this happened, what if I try it differently). I think all kids are born scientists to some degree...that's what all the "why" questions are. I know this doesn't really help much with your questions about how to fit science into your schedule but as I only have 2 little ones and am not there yet, I don't feel qualified to give advice on that point. Others here have been there, I haven't. I did just want to comment on the experiment comment as I see that all the time in different settings. Hope that helps at little...maybe it takes some of the pressure off? :001_smile: Blessings-

You can only see 5 at one time. (The most recent 5.)The others are still there in that they are counted but you don't see the comments anymore.

We picnic a lot in the spring and summer and fall. Typically for us it would be laughing cow cheese, yogurt, hard boiled eggs, whatever fruit we have in the fridge and maybe something as a "special treat" (cookies or chips). I also get juice boxes or boxed milk and save it only for picnics. Sometimes we'll go on a more planned family picnic and it would be similar but maybe have sandwiches made ahead of time (usually peanut butter and apple). Often when we go on a picnic we are meeting friends, and in all honesty I've found it doesn't matter what we take because my kids will want whatever the other Moms packed. But then their kids want what I packed so it all works out....:)

You may want to ask the question again with a different header...the way I read the subject line was that you were asking for an opinion ON SWB, not from her. :)

I don't know, I thought your story was pretty funny. :D My guys are young so we're still in the "sticking the fingers under the door and wiggling them" phase....

Me too! This is my all-time favorite parenting book. It's not so much a "how-to" as a vision for the kind of parent I want to be. Not exactly a parenting book, but I also really enjoyed The Myth of the Perfect Mother by Carla Barnhill. http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Perfect-Mother-Rethinking-Spirituality/dp/080106466X. It's not for everyone but I found it really thought provoking as a Christian woman and mother.

I just bought some at Giant. They were $.99 each and then each grocery trip they deduct $.03 per bag. I also noticed that you need less bags than with the plastic bags.

You can whale watch in Virginia Beach in the winter. Here is one site, I'm sure there are others. Looks like Whales are Dec-March...Dolphins are April-October. http://www.virginia.org/site/description.asp?AttrID=35184 You can go whale-watching places in New England in the summer. I've been from Boston and on a trip to Canada.

I think the second plan looks great.

My ds had a Henry and Mudge birthday party last year. It wasn't a Henry and Mudge theme. He wanted to have the a party exactly like Henry's party in one of the books....I think it's "The Greatest Day of All". It was very fun. I love those books and pretty much anything by Cynthia Rylant.

I don't know where you live, but we've had some great vacations at state parks in Virginia and Maryland. You mentioned camping, and you can camp at any of the parks. Some have "camper cabins" which have no bathroom but access to an indoor bathhouse and no kitchen. Some have full-service cabins. We use the park at Lake Anna for our annual women's retreat at church and it is very nice...linens, towels, full kitchen, cabins with huge porches and fireplaces. You just have to look around the site to see what each park offers. Here is the Virginia site: http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state_parks/. Maryland site: http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/ In Virginia I grew up going to Hungry Mother State Park every year. It's in the mountains and has a lake with a beach, boating, swimming, horse-back riding, hiking, etc. We do our church women's retreat at Lake Anna every year which is very nice. In Maryland I've been to Sandy Point State Park (Southern Maryland on their map) and I know people who love Deep Creek Lake Park. We also go to Sandbridge, Virginia with my parents every year. It's a great vacation. And I've been to the Outer Banks, NC several times and loved it. One last suggestion...Caanan Valley Resort in West Virginia was a very fun family vacation. http://www.canaanresort.com/. A lot of the ski resorts are open in the summer and we had a very inexpensive vacation there. I think Wintergreen in Virginia has similar offerings, and I'm sure there are others.

I'm a bit hesitant to chime in...it's so well thought out and comprehensive. Also the level of detail and graphics are amazing. But to me it seems a bit disconnected. For example, it would make more sense to me to study animal classification all together over a year. So that the differences between the classes are more easily seen. One of the things I disliked about science in elementary school was that our text would have a chapter on weather and then a chapter on plants and then a chapter on fish and they seemed random. I didn't really get the connections between them. (In all honesty, I'm not sure if I would have said that as a kid but looking back I think that's why I found it boring.) I always knew I wanted to be a doctor and that I liked science but I didn't really LOVE science until I got to high school and delved deeper into Biology, then Chemistry, then Physics. BUT..that's just me. I could easily see how your plan would work really well for someone with different interests or a different learning style or just who is different. You know your kids and what works best for them. As someone who hasn't been around all that long, I have gotten a lot out of your posts and links.

5'2"

The ENT's have this device they give the kids that is supposed to help them clear the fluid. Can she blow her nose? The device works similar to frequent nose blowing.

Oops...Dawn gave you the correct name for the Water Park in Va Beach. I had said Great Waves which is actually up here in Nova. Sorry about that.

I'm in Northern Virginia and we go every year to Sandbridge which is a smaller beach just south of Va Beach. September is a GREAT time of year to go (except for the remote risk of hurricanes...it's not as common there as other places but can occasionally mean bad weather). It's still very warm, the water is warm enough for swimming but it's not unbearably hot like it can be earlier in the summer. We typically spend most of our time in Sandbridge so I don't know VA Beach super well but the boardwalk is nice. We usually go in and ride bikes along the boardwalk once (it's very wide and flat) and play mini-golf at one of the many places. The Virginia Aquarium is nice...it's not huge so depending on what you have close to you or what you've been to before it may be more or less worth it. They have a biggish shark tank, a ray tank (where you can pet the rays) and a lot of info/exhibits on local Chespeake area fish and wildlife. Last year there was a cool exhibit on penguins but I'm not sure if that was permanent or not. They have an Imax theater that has good shows but again, if you have this close to home it isn't anything that different from other places. There is a water park right next to the Aqaurium called Great Waves. It is a very fun water park and also has mini-golf, a batting cage and go-karts all in the same complex. As for a day trip to DC...I could go on forever! Feel free to pm me or e-mail me if you want more info or have questions about DC or travel in the area, etc. We don't do a lot of other "sights" as to me the beach is all about relaxing, reading and soaking up the sun.