Homework is graded for completion, not accuracy for my kids. They are somehow given the answers...I think in practice they often go over some of the problems in class or the teacher posts the answers online and they can ask if they got them wrong and don't understand why. But they aren't checked individually or graded.

My son did a gap year. We had always planned for it, he was young for his grade so he still left for college at 18 with the gap year. We didn't say he had to do it but we'd talked about it a lot as a possibility and he'd saved money towards it. We had him apply everywhere during his senior year and defer. We preferred that so that he didn't have to spend the gap year worried about applications. We asked everywhere if they allowed deferments. Our experience was that everywhere said yes. There was a process and it technically wasn't guaranteed but the impression we got was that they almost always allow it. From the college's perspectives there isn't a huge downside. We also asked up front about financial aid. Everywhere said that scholarships would defer, but you have to redo FAFSA so any grants/loans aren't guaranteed. You have to redo FAFSA every year for college anyway, so that wasn't a surprise. We made sure to have it in writing from the college he ended up choosing that his scholarship deferred. And we found that as our financial situation didn't change, the rest of the package also didn't change. And yes, they all told us he couldn't take any classes for credit. He is also a college athlete, for Division III and all the coaches also said they were fine with deferment. He is a swimmer so there one suggestion was that he shouldn't take a year off of swimming but should continue to train. That might be different for people who are team sport athletes. We had thought he would do more travel internationally and perhaps some service trips. However, his gap year was 2021-2022 and things were still so unknown with Covid that there weren't the official programs available and we didn't want to spend money on non-refundable trips. So he ended up traveling domestically. He traveled to every state (except Hawaii and Alaska) and swam in each state, just to say he had done it. He did the trips in sections of about 2-3 weeks each. His brother went on three of the trips with him. We did one as a family. And he went on one with his aunt/uncle. We were not okay with him traveling alone as it was a lot of driving. In between, when he was home, he worked to make money for the trip. The trips ended up being all between September-February so that he could return and train for swimming more consistently in the spring. It was a great experience for him. The trips with his brother were especially bonding and I think they will never forget them. The main unexpected thing for us was that it's virtually impossible to stay in a hotel under the age of 18 and difficult under the age of 21. On the first trip he was 17 so that became an issue, but we were able to have him stay with people we knew and some friends of friends and do some camping to make it work. The other trips was a combo of hotels and friends. One other positive thing from the gap year was that he said he was felt he was more fresh for college than most of his friends. He said most people were a bit burnt-out both academically and as swimmers but he was really ready to get back to both.

My son is vegan and has typical teenage skin issues. He likes the Simple products, you can get them at CVS or Target.

I fairly quickly scanned the article so I definitely may have missed something. I'm not sure where the quote you gave that mentions "unvaccinated men" is from. As I understand it from reading the study, there weren't any truly unvaccinated people. It's a little hard to parse out but I think what they did as look at people who had received the vaccine who got admitted to the hospital with myocarditis and then compared those who had recently had the vaccine and tested negative to those who had the vaccine and had a positive test either before or after the vaccine. From their description of study population: We included all people ages 13 years or older who had received at least 1 dose of ChAdOx1 (AstraZeneca), BNT162b2 (Pfizer), and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccine and were admitted to hospital or died from myocarditis between December 1, 2020, and December 15, 2021. And later: Among people receiving at least 1 vaccine dose, 5 934 153 (13.9%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, including 2 958 026 (49.8%) before their first vaccination. So they had 42 million people they looked at who had gotten the vaccine and of those about 6 million also tested positive for Covid, 3 million was before their first vaccine. Not discounting that there is a risk of myocarditis with the vaccine, just that it's not really comparing the risk of myocarditis in those unvaccinated to those vaccinated. They didn't include the larger risk of myocarditis in everyone who had Covid, as far as I can tell. What it seems they did is consider a positive Covid test as a separate exposure from the vaccination. Looking at the AHA site, I couldn't specifically see anything else addressing this study but they do report more of the statistics I reported earlier, which is where I got some of mine...that there is a risk but it's higher with the infection than vaccine. And I think you could argue that this study showed that there was increased risk in people who had the vaccination AND got Covid over those who just got the vaccine. The difference could be that this study looked at data early on (vaccines given betwenn 2020 and 2021) and there is now more data (this study looked at 42 million people but there are now 12.7 billion doses given so a lot more potential data).

My daughter's favorite girly movies at that age: High School Musical (and all the sequels) Princess Bride (not really girly but one of her favorites) Enchanted The Parent Trap (she liked the newer version better) kind of a girl "power movie"- the Enola Holmes movies on Netflix are really good

It is a risk but it is rare and less of a risk than myocarditis from Covid. It's about 35 cases per million doses after Moderna and about 12 cases per million doses after Pfizer. Highest risk is after second (or later) vaccines and in young men 18-29. That is from the American College of Cardiology. Some sites give a higher risk usually because it changes when you look at specific risk groups, the highest I've seen is when you combine all cases in that high risk (males in the high risk age group) after any dose is up to 77 cases per million doses given of any vaccine. The risk of myocarditis after Covid itself in that same age group is about 450 cases per million cases of Covid. In general when you look at all age groups the risk of myocarditis from Covid is between 2-7x greater than myocarditis from the vaccine. In general, the myocarditis after the vaccine tends to be milder and more self-resolved than the myocarditis we've seen after Covid infection itself.

We used Outlier https://www.outlier.org/collections/course-catalog?type=courses. It's a college level course. I can't remember the details now but we chose to audit it which was cheaper and also meant we didn't have to worry about the grade and having to report it. I still graded it myself and he still got feedback from the instructors, we just didn't want to have to worry about keeping up exactly with the syllabus, which was challenging for a high schooler (he also was doing it as a 9th grader so I wanted it to be less intense).

I wear Lands End yoga pants. I like the cropped ones because I am short so they end up not that cropped. The only thing I don't like about them is they don't have pockets but otherwise I love them.

My great-grandmother was known for her "apricot nectar cake". I never really knew her but my Mom grew up going to her house every day after school and said she would always have it on the table. It uses a cake mix, but is very good. I'm guessing she probably got it off the back of the cake mix box. I can never find apricot nectar to make it so instead use mango nectar which I can usually find. Her birthday (the great-grandmother) was Christmas Eve so it's kind of a family tradition to make it on Christmas Eve. My grandmother was known for her Russian meatballs which are just stuffed cabbage. Her mother (different from the cake great-grandmother) was from somewhere in the Soviet Union (a whole other story but she never told anyone where she or her husband were actually from and my grandmother grew up in France). I think the stuffed cabbage was something her mother made and then somehow they just got called Russian meatballs. My grandmother would make them along with ham and turkey every holiday- and we have a pretty small family so it was a lot of food.

Yes to all of this. I did a tap dance class for a couple of years and I was by far the youngest at 50. I was a terrible tap dancer and it was the absolute most fun thing I've done in a long time. We performed in a recital which was both terrifying and amazing. I only stopped because the timing didn't work for our family but I plan on doing it again one day. And I replaced it with Pilates which I am equally bad at and is also fun. I have found one of the best most freeing things about getting older is to enjoy being a beginner again. I have nothing to prove and it really does not matter one iota if I'm good. I have a whole list of things I want to try being a beginner at when life gets less busy with kids and I retire.

I'm not sure what your question is. Were you looking for specific recommendations? What aren't you happy with as far as how things are going? The thing that stood out to me were that your daughter doesn't want to homeschool anymore. I think it's really hard to homeschool middle school and high school and that it would be even harder to do so with a kid who didn't want to be there. I don't know all the details of what's best for your kid or your family but I'd think about maybe why she isn't happy with homeschooling and use that as a starting point. Is not homeschooling an option? If it isn't, what changes can you make to meet her where she is? The social stuff is really important for kids and if she doesn't have some outlet that is meeting those needs, I'd make that a priority. It sounds like you've tried to do that with co-op and youth group but maybe those aren't good fits.

I don't think it's either tacky/insensitive for her to wear it or needy/insecure for him to ask her not to. I think if I was talking to the girl I'd say that wearing it is probably sending a message to the ex that she still has feelings for him or is potentially still interested in him. Whether or not that is the intended message, it sounds like he regrets breaking off with her and may be looking for messages whether or not they are there. So if it was my daughter I'd tell her, it's not really wrong to wear it but you might need to be prepared for the potential awkwardness if this guy sees it as a sign/message that you still are in to him. As far as the current boyfriend, I think these kind of things in relationships are binary that red flags/reasonable requests. In an ideal world, he'd probably not say anything even if it bothered him because he knows she loves the necklace and he trusts her. And in and ideal world she wouldn't wear it because she'd know it might bother him and now want to do that even if she has the right to wear it. If he just said something like "Oh, I don't love that" when he realized it's from her ex and then dropped it, I don't think that's a red flag. If he got angry or flipped out or kept harping on it, that's a red flag. ETA: I just thought of a similar story. My husband has a beautiful hand-knitted sweater that he inherited because a roommate had an ex-girlfriend who had made it for him. The roommates then ended up with the woman who became his wife and she wasn't comfortable with him wearing it. So the roommate gave it to my husband. I remember my husband said that at the time the roommate kind of thought it was silly that the sweater bothered his now wife but also that he knew it did so he was willing to give it away.

Good update! I was thinking about your original post this week. My always homeschooled daughter started public school this week, as a 9th grader. The first day she came home and said there was a group of girls in her PE class that "gave off mean girl vibes". She couldn't say exactly why and she said in fact they were very nice to her and complimented her outfit and talked to her a lot but she just got weird vibes from them. She felt the same way the other two days they had PE, although again the girls are nice to her. She is handling it by being casually friendly with them but she's choosing other people to try and sit with at lunch or get to know better. It was just interesting to me that she got that vibe right away. I did counsel her on listening to her gut but also not making snap judgements. I pointed out that maybe they are nervous about starting high school and it comes across in a way that seems mean. She agreed, which is why she's still being friendly with them but also being a little wary.

I think there there is "luck" in the sense of privilege that other people have talked about. Where you are born, your genetic makeup, etc is to a large extend luck. I think there are also those weird coincidences/occurrences that seem lucky in the moment. Like finding a valuable antique at a yard sale. I don't think there is some force guiding those, although I do believe in God. I also think that sometimes luck is how you view your circumstances. For example, in medicine, doctors often get labeled as "white clouds" or "black clouds". People who are black clouds are believed to be unlucky in the sense that it's always busier and crazy things happen. White clouds are supposed to be the people who seem to have the easy shifts when everything is calm. Someone did a study of medical residents and discovered that in general there was no difference in actual busyness or crazy things happening, it's just the way people perceived themselves. Black clouds tended to remember the busy crazy nights and say things were "always" like that and that they were unlucky. White clouds tended to see the easier nights as normal and think the busy nights were just an aberration from their usual good luck. I'm not at all saying that people who are in really terrible circumstances (abuse, poverty, trauma) just need to have a better attitude...I think there are people who are lucky and have things easier. I'm talking more about people who have things pretty good and then how they view the world.

Congrats! Can you share where he is going? Those are the two things my current junior is most interested in studying. If you don't want to share publicly, you could DM me if you are willing.

My oldest did Latin at Lukeion and it was fantastic for him. He did the AP Latin class and also really enjoyed it, he didn't seem to find that it was too test prep heavy. He had Amy Barr as a teacher, I know some people don't like her but he loved her and it was a great fit. He also took a few of their writing classes and the Shakespeare classes,, I think from Sue Fisher. He is a STEM person and hates writing and Luekion was a great fit for him, I think between the Latin essays and the writing classes it got him to the level of writing he needed for college. He also had to do one semester of Latin in college and found it very easy after Lukeion. He said most of what they had done he had already done or it was easy comparably. He had done Latin last his junior year of high school and then did a gap year, he did well on the AP exam but his college required a placement test for all languages instead of just giving credit based on the score (they require two semesters of language typically). Even though it had been over two years since he'd done Latin, he remembered enough to place out of one semester and then the one semester he did take was easy. I felt that was a testament to how well prepared he was from Lukeion. As far as the chat box...I don't think it was an issue at all with their classes. The teachers used the chat a lot for questions. And I would hear him having to read out loud or translate out loud. I think she gave them a set amount of time at the beginning of class when they first signed in to randomly chat...and sometimes she would ask a fun question to encourage that and then the expectation was that it was only being used for class.

This might be too late to be helpful, but it depends on the doctor. We can't legally prescribe ADHD meds with refills and the max we can give at once is a 90 day prescription. Some insurance will only allow 30 days even if we write for 90. We are allowed to send in three 30 day prescriptions with "do not fill until" dates on them (so dated for the date we write them but saying not to fill until one month and then two months later. So that's the limitations as far as meds. Different offices have different standards as far as how often they want someone seen. Typically I'll see someone 30 days after any medication change or starting a new med and then every 3-6 months after that depending on how stable they have been on the meds. We can't do televisits across state lines so if I have someone in state I'll usually am willing to do televisits but only if they also come in when they are home next. But we can't do that for people out of state. That also is state dependent, some places are allowed to do them across state lines. As much as it's a pain for people to get the refills, Adderall abuse is rampant, especially on college campuses so most doctors are fairly wary about prescribing without a fair amount of follow up. And as much as I sometimes feel like "I know this kid and don't think he will abuse the meds or (more commonly with ADHD kids since it doesn't typically make them high...sell them to someone else)," it's better that we just have a standard practice as far as what we require people to do rather than making judgements that might be unfair about who will abuse and who will not. I don't know if your son is seeing a pediatrician or family med/internist or psychiatrist. I've found with our patients aging out of our practice that many of them have trouble finding a family med or internist who will write the prescriptions and they have to see psychiatry even if they have been managed by us for many years.

I don't have a favorite. I agree with the people who said that there are times one kid needs you more or circumstances are such that you are closer to that child but I think that different than having a favorite or loving on more. I think it often changes who you feel closer to though. My oldest is very similar to me and we used to be closer due to both being big readers and sharing a lot of interests. We're still close but he's in college now and he's not a big talker so the relationship has definitely shifted. My second son was very hard to homeschool and that caused more conflict between us when he was younger. But he's also had a rough few years the past few years and that has meant we've grown closer in a lot of ways as we've had to have hard conversations and deal with some tough things. And now we've spent a lot more time one on one and have more new shared interests. And my daughter is my only daughter which has always meant that we have sort of a special relationship different from her brothers.

Do you have a Children's Hospital, non psychiatric, near you? That might be the best ER to go through and might be able to help facilitate admission somewhere appropriate. I don't know where you are but we have a Community Services Board and a Crisis Response Team, both can be called in an emergency and they do an assessment in house. They then help with admission. Is there anything similar there?

My kids also really loved the miniature rooms in the Art Institute. There is a series of books about them...The Sixty-Eight Rooms Adventure Series. Reading a few of those before and after made the rooms much more interesting. We also did a river taxi which they all loved and it's cheaper than an official tour. We took it to Chinatown for dinner, but you could go anywhere. Nighttime is especially magical.

Background: I had a full ride scholarship to college which was great but I knew from the time I was young that my parents couldn't afford college and that I'd have to get a scholarship. I didn't blame them but I also knew that it was due to some poor finacial decisions on their part. It was stressful and somewhat limited where I looked at schools. It probably didn't have to limit as much as it did but I didn't have good guidance and just assumed a lot of schools would be out of price range. Dh had $7000 in loans coming out of college and paid it off pretty quickly. (I had a lot of debt out of medical school but that's a somewhat different beast.) We have 529s which we've been funding since oldest was a baby. (And I do realize that we are lucky to be able to do that and not everyone can.) We also however have been really honest with them about what we can afford. For us that means we say we can pay X amount, they are responsible for about $5k and then they could take out loans but our recommendation is not to take out more than $5k a year, so $20 k max. When we looked at colleges with our oldest, the finances were part of the discussion and he definitely turned down some places due to finances. For freshman year, oldest had no debt. He got a scholarship to a small private liberal arts school and a small grant. The total cost is less than or equal to most of our state schools. The cost was the amount we had said we would pay, and he paid for things like travel, car insurance, books, and other extras from money he had saved from work. This year the cost went up a small amount. What we've told him is that instead of taking out a loan to make up the difference (about $4k) he can essentially "borrow" from us. We'll pay it now and then he'll owe us when he graduates instead of owing a bank and we won't charge interest. He will still cover all the same things he covered last year but knows that the more he saves now the quicker he can pay us back. We have other friends who have done similar things. One family has the kids pay half of wherever they go, but paid back to parents instead of to a bank. That's kind of a long answer.

I work outside the home but not full-time. This past year my daughter was the only one homeschooling. Her brother decided to go to public school at the last minute last August so we didn't have a lot of time to make other plans for her and she didn't want to start public school in 8th grade anyway. So she was home alone on the days I worked. I'm not sure I would have done anything different just due to circumstances being what they were but I don't feel like it was a good year for her due to being alone so much. I've homeschooled three teens while working. It worked best with my oldest who is kind of the ideal homeschooler. He's an introvert who likes people but doesn't need a lot of time with people. He had a few activities that he had some good friends but didn't need to see them every day and he's very self-motivated as far as schoolwork. It also helped that he had two younger siblings who were home and so they had some interaction. In addition, his 11th and 12th grade years were during the pandemic so everything was kind of weird everywhere which made his experience seem less weird, if that makes any sense. My second son in theory would be a great homeschooler. He's all about creativity and pursuing passions. He does not like to do things just to do them and gets bored really easily. He has ADHD and finds being in a classroom hard. However, he never had the same friends in the various activities we did other than his brother and his brother's friends so he was much much lonelier when home. And it turns out he really needs the structure of school outside the home (even though he also chafes against it). He would say he wants the free time, but it ended up being too much free time. Even though the inefficiency of school drives him a little crazy, in the end he needed to be with other people. My daughter has always been the one that I thought would want to go to school for social reasons. She actually has a great group of friends at dane and dances several hours a day so she does have another social outlet. But still being home alone was lonely for her. She is a good independent worker which in some ways backfired as she would get work done quickly and then just sit in her room all day. There was way more screen time than I wanted but I also felt like it was hard to tell her not to do it when I wasn't here and I knew she had gotten her work done, practiced piano, done some other projects and would exercise with dance. It wasn't a healthy situation and we did what we could to make it better and knew it was time-limited. I don't know if that exactly answers your question but it's a bit of our experience.

For my oldest who homeschooled through high school I didn't put PE on the transcript, even though it is a required class for graduation in our state. I also didn't put any fine arts credits but he did play piano and do some theater. I listed them as extracurriculars instead. I didn't feel like I could list as both and that was just the way we chose to do it. My second son homeschooled for 9th grade and then started 10th grade in public school. I had always heard from homeschoolers that the schools wouldn't accept credit and the county website made it clear that they might not. Our experience was that they accepted everything, even completely home designed classes. The one class he wanted to make sure he got credit for was 9th grade PE since he didn't want to have to take two years in high school. So I put a PE/Health credit on his transcript and in the course description just described things that we had done as part of home life "Student participated in a variety of sports and physical activities including swimming, running, biking, rock climbing, skateboarding and hiking. Student discussed sexual education, drug and alcohol education and nutrition especially as pertaining to a vegan diet." or something like that. I had no qualms about calling it a credit even though we hadn't counted hours or done anything formal. And they accepted it no problem. I would have done the same thing if for some reason my oldest had applied to a school that required PE/Health as a credit.

I only answered for my one kid who homeschooled all the way through high school. He did 5 AP classes and took an additional 2 AP tests. The goal was mostly because the classes were the best educational choice for him. We also felt like it was helpful on his application. I knew he was a good test taker so anticipated he would score high. We might have done more DE but it was during the pandemic and everything was online. The AP classes were also online but what we found (personally and from talking to people who took classes at the CC) was the the homeschooled AP classes online were higher quality as they had mostly figured out how to teach online. Some of the online classes at the CC during the pandemic were not great as the teachers hadn't figure out how to offer a good class online. He also was young for his grade so couldn't drive until senior year and it was easier to do classes at home with two other kids at home than to drive him to the CC. I mention that to say that often the choices people make might have more to do with the reality of logistics than which one is "better". We didn't do any CLEP. This may be unfair but the impression I got from the people I knew who really pushed CLEP was that it was really just a way to check off boxes and get through college faster. I wasn't convinced it was going to do that as we didn't know if colleges would give credit and we didn't really have the goal for him to finish in less than 4 years. Of note, his college does limit credits that you can use. You can only count AP credits from 11th or 12th grade and the total number is limited. And you have to take math and foreign language tests to place into the course that the AP tests might say you can take, you aren't just automatically given that credit even with the score. My second son started 10th grade at an IB school. He will take some IB classes but not the full diploma. He is also going to do a DE class for English in 11th and 12th grade. Those choices worked best for him. My daughter will start 9th grade there. I anticipate she will take a lot of IB classes and perhaps do the full diploma, she's more of a test taker and also more motivated by outside achievement.

We have a lot of Catan. As other people have said you only really have to have the base game. If you want to play with more than 4 people you need the base expansion. All the other variants add on to the base..you have to have the base to play. I think consistently our favorite is Cities and Knights. Some of the variants have multiple potential games you can plan within them (think slightly rule changes which makes the gameplay different). For example I think Traders and Barbarians has a bunch of different games within it, some we've never played.