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.

My son is exactly the same as yours. Loves mayo on any kind of potatoes and is apparently mocked by his friends at college for this.

We just joined a biggish church after being in a small church for 20+ years. Two of the things I liked were that they seem to do a good job of building community and of being involved in the local community. In the summer they have one service (usually two) and then have a breakfast afterward for anyone who wants to come. I'm looking forward to that to meet more people. I think they also try and make things easy for people, they have a lot of options for different small groups that meet at different times and some are in person and some online. The youth group seems fairly active and they do things like have a youth choir that literally requires no commitment, you show up if you can to practice and then you are welcome to sing whenever. They have kids in it that are obviously very gifted and practice more but the emphasis is more on inclusivity and flexibility rather than performance. They are very active in various service in the community and it seems that the people who are most involved in the church are also involved in the service. For example, they open up the church for a week in the winter to a program that houses people who are homeless. They provide three meals a day and a place to sleep. It's a program that other churches also do so the idea is that people can go from place to place. They are going to house a local food pantry in their building as it is being forced out of it's current location and they monthly provide food to the local school food pantries. They recently hosted a prom for kids and young adults with disabilities and their families. The entire building was given over to it...a formal meal for families, a separate location for the guests with Chick Fil A and cake, bunches of different game stations, dancing, a red carpet photo opportunity, etc. They give out free popcorn/hot dogs/drinks at the town Halloween parade, etc. There was a big town Memorial Day festival and they only held one church service so that the parking lot could be used for people going to the festival. I was recently on a non-profit call with various non-profits in the town (I was representing something separate from the church) and was really happy to realize that there were four people that I knew of on the call from the church, which to me showed that they encourage people to be involved in the community or maybe attract people who are involved, which is similar as far as feel. They also have a lot of support groups. There is a Divorce Care group and a group for people who are caregivers for someone suffering from mental illness, etc. There is a program called Stephen Ministry that matches you confidentially with someone who is a trained lay minister and is for people just going through any kind of difficult life event. I know several people who have used it (they told me, it is confidential) and they all said it was really well done and helpful.

So very very sorry. No words are adequate.

I had to rethink my own presumptions last summer when my son really wanted to do a mixed gender sleepover with friends. I was kind of wary and he pointed out that the assumptions are usually that there is going to be something sexual going on between girls-boys but that if any of them are/were anything other than straight that wouldn't be the issue. His best friend is a girl and he also found it really sad that there was a different standard for them than for a girl-girl friendship. I thought about it and told him he was right. (He also pointed out that if the purpose was to have sex they could just go do that somewhere and not ask to have a sleepover. Which was also true). We decided we were ok with it but only if all the other parents were. In the end they did have a small sleepover, it was at someone else's house and the Mom was more wary of the idea than me. My oldest went to college this year and his group of friends had many "sleepovers", starting from the very first week. And yes, I'm not naive and I know college student "sleepovers" can be very different. But the ones he's told us about sound exactly like what Farrar describe, they watch several movies and eat junk food and hang out in one person's room until they all fall asleep. Then he usually makes them all breakfast.