Every year for DS's birthday, I get some helium balloons from our grocery store. They have a nice selection and they usually last a long time. DS wanted to get DH some for his birthday almost 3 weeks ago and they're still all filled and are doing great. I got DS's balloons on Tuesday night, brought them home and they were noticeably deflated by yesterday morning (his bday) - they were still floating through and DS was happy. By last night after dinner, they had lost all of their floatiness and have shrunk considerably and are resting on the floor. Do you think it would be unreasonable if I brought them back with my receipt and asked for a refund? I bought 6 regular balloons and a mylar one and it was over $20. I'm pretty annoyed by this, and $21 is enough for me to be crabby about. I don't want new balloons because his birthday is done, but 24 hrs seems to be a very short life for balloons.

I clicked other - in our yard no because we've completely renovated our house and I still find the occasional nail/screw/pieces of wood in the grass. Other places that don't have leftover construction material in their yard, yes.

So cool!! Congratulations to your son. :-)

Yay!! Congratulations to your DS and his fiancee! :-)

Play catch - DS decided that "skip counting catch" was a game last summer. So we'd toss a ball back and forth counting by 1s, 2's, 3's, etc. As you catch the ball, you call out the next number in the series. We'd do each number up to around 100 (except 1's). Once he got those down, we switched to multiplication fact catch. We play for a few minutes a day most days still. It's helped a ton in solidifying his multiplication facts and it's fun, which is nice!

I'm not doing a very good job wording things today, sorry! I meant that I'm hoping that BA will help reinforce some of what he's done already and I'm assuming that the authors will have slightly different ways to approach the problems, so he'll be able to see wordings of problems, for example, that are worded differently then in MM. I'm glad to hear that reworking the problems in simpler numbers and working through them one step at a time is what other people do too. It seemed "right" to me, but I had this little worry in the back of my head that doing this now will maybe gloss over the fact that he struggled with the wording of the problems and some time down the road it would come back to bite me and I'd have to go back to MM 3B and remediate 2 years from now or something.

Thank you! I'm not worried about him at all OneStepAtATime - I'm thinking about my teaching. He's quite intuitive with math so far and this is the second time we've run into something he didn't understand immediately. The first was a "how many more" lesson back in MM 1 - he could subtract just fine, but got tripped up a bit on the wording. We solved that by using the tiles on our floor and I had him hop from tile to tile to get the concept. I just don't want to keep working through MM and then realize a year from now or something that I did him a disservice by helping him decode the word problems too much. Or do something to cause major math issues down the road. (I tend to overthink things) Abacus2 and Kateingr - thanks for confirming I'm on the right track. We'll keep on and if an occasional word problem tripping him up turns into more, I'll re-evaluate. I'm planning on doing Beast Academy over the summer with him for some fun math time, so I'm hoping that'll fill in any potential holes that exist. For the fall, I am debating between BA or MM - DS really likes MM so far, but he's also liked the bits we've done with BA so far. Thanks again!!

DS has been cruising along in MM and up until now, he hasn't had any trouble picking up concepts or memorizing math facts. I've noticed over the past few lessons, he's starting to struggle a bit in some areas. He's working through MM 3B right now and he can do the computational work just fine, understands place value, regrouping, etc. The wording on the problems is starting to be above his understanding maybe. We usually do math buddy style and I give him the review and mixed review pages to do on his own. I feel like there's been a jump in how advanced the wording of some of the problems are in 3B. He had no problem with: An adult airplane ticket costs $655, a child's ticket is $200 cheaper. Find the total cost of two adult and two children's tickets. He did this in his head in about 2 seconds and was able to explain how he got there and wrote it out for me. He had a hard time working out: The distance between town A and town B is 4200 km, from B to C is 3200 km, from C to A is 2200 km. How many more meters is a trip from A to B and back than a trip from C to B and back. I had to walk him through this one. Once I helped him figure out what to do, the actual adding was no problem. But, I don't want to over help if that makes sense. What I did was, change the town names to city names he recognized and made the distances smaller - 50km, 100km, etc. Once he saw that, he figured out how to do the problem and was able to do the original one on his own. I don't want to mess this teaching math thing up. I know he's going to have no problem with the estimating, measuring and weight chapters that are coming up. Same with the start of division and fractions. He's got his multiplication facts down pretty cold - we're still practicing those with our multiplication catch game, but I would say he's got them all down within a second or two and most are automatic. When do you decide to hang out and do some extra work on a concept vs. thinking, he's 6 and some of the wordings of the longer problems might be a bit over his head still? I'm not getting worried because he struggled with one question - it's been a bunch of the word problems in this book and the puzzle corners too. (please don't think I'm nuts!)

We love All About Spelling! You get the teacher's guide, tiles w/ magnets for the phonograms, cards (phonograms, key cards and word cards). All non consumable. We use a good sized white board to organize the tiles and dry erase markers for writing words and rules on the board.

Just seeing this now - hope the medicine is working and you got a clean bill of health today. :grouphug:

We just gave DS's swimming teacher a thank you note from DS and a gift card to a local coffee shop. She was leaving the gym and it was a "thank you and good bye" kind of gift. I coached gymnastics for over 7 years and got a few gifts from the team girls at Christmas, but that was it. I never got any kind of gift from any of the rec kids I coached - I saw them for 7 week sessions. I never expected a gift from anyone, but especially not from the kids who I only taught for a session or two. The gifts I loved the most were notes, to be honest. I still have most of them. :-) Every once in awhile, I'd get a thank you or a "I'm so excited I learned a new skill" type of note and they meant more than any gift card or trinket ever could.

What color is discolored? Has be been drinking enough liquids? Is it darker than normal? Personally, I'd call the Dr and speak with whoever is on call tonight given the sore spot on his abdomen. Good luck!!

Can you take the grates off? I just get right in there with a sponge, dish soap and warm water. I've also used clorox wipes on ours when I just want to do a quick wipe.

I didn't know that some people didn't tip! We typically leave $5/night for housekeeping and I put it under a "thank you!" note. In real life, I've never met anyone that didn't tip housekeeping.

My almost 7 yr old has been playing in the mud daily for the past week or so now that the snow is mostly melted. I can't vote because he still loves it. :-)

Do what she said. :-)

That would not bother me, no. I think I'd be offended if they replied with something like: "oh no, not you - I've been dreading the day you asked me for my number!" But not much else.

Awesome Gil! We've got some friends struggling with addiction and it's so hard. Congratulations!!!

Chrome has been weird for me today - I've had that happen with a few different websites. Ones that I needed to be secure for work. I switched to Safari and all was well. I just checked pinterest on Chrome and it's green, but I think something was going on w/ Chrome earlier today.

I had this too and it was horrible. I remember one time almost passing out in the grocery store when I was in my early 20's. Aleve helped a ton - my dosage at the time was 550 mg 2x a day and it was a game changer. The rice microwaveable heating pad helps a ton!

I'm a spreadsheet gal - I've read Dave Ramsey's book and found some good value in it and we were able to pay off almost all of our debt with his methods. Our problem with it ended up being the car issue - never having a car loan. We ended up buying lemon after lemon (that we had checked out by reputable mechanics - multiple ones) that we just dumped money into. Like thousands each time we had to go get an oil change. It was getting ridiculous. So now we have 2 reasonable car payments and don't worry about repairs. What I do: I made a spreadsheet with all of our fixed expenses in the first column. second column is due date - subsequent columns are months in the year (Jan-Dec) Under those, I made a nice big black line Under that - our variable expenses (groceries, gas, spending money,etc) I also add in, for lack of a better word, optional money: going out to eat, clothes, that kind of thing Under that is our savings goals each month and I break them out into: emergency fund, property taxes, longer term savings, christmas/gifts etc. Af the end of the month, I check Mint.com and fill in what we actually spent on groceries, gas, etc. to keep me on track and see if I need to adjust (either my spending or my goals) Our income varies a bit each month, so anything extra goes to paying off our last credit card. Each paycheck, the first thing I do is move money into the various savings accounts I have set up online. Our bills are all set to auto pay through our bank on paydays. In my head, I have our minimum checking account number set to $500 and anything that's left over that the day before payday goes to the credit card bill. Once that is paid off, that extra money will go to savings. Spreadsheet looks like this (I'll try to get the format right here) Bill Amount Due Date Jan Feb Etc. Mortgage $xx 1st 1/1/15 electric $xx 20th 1/20/15 ___________________________________________ groceries $xxx $xxxx spending $xx $xx __________________________________________ em fund $xxx $xxx Dr's $x $x

dp

This is a cake, not a cobbler, but it meets your other (buttery delicious) requirements: Blueberry Cake 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar (you'll take 1 tablespoon of sugar from this and mix with 1/4-1/2 teaspoon cinnamon to sprinkle on top of the cake before you bake it.) 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon(this one goes into the cake separate from the cinnamon on top of the cake.) 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 eggs separated 1 1/2 cups flour 1/3 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 1/2-2 cups blueberries(sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of flour as you measure them) Separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Add 1/4 cup sugar (from the 1 cup sugar) 1 tablespoon at a time and beat until stiff peaks form. Set aside. Cream the egg yolks with the butter and rest of the 3/4 cup of sugar(minus the 1 tablespoon). Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg together on to waxed paper. Sift one more time. Add the vanilla to the milk. Next and the flour mixture and the milk mixture(alternate the 2) to the creamed butter, egg yolks and sugar mixture. What this means is add a little of the flour mixture, beat, add a little milk mixture, beat, flour mixture, milk mixture and so forth till both are added in. I usually break it down to the additions of the flour and three of the milk. Fold blueberries into batter. Last fold in egg white mixture. Pour into 8 x 8 square pan. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of sugar/ 1/4-1/2 teaspoon cinnamon mixture. Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean. (I always end up baking it for around 50 minutes especially if you use more blueberries.)

you're not secretly my brother are you? Both of our parents do this and it makes me mental...I've learned to tune out. :-)

Do you have mutual friends with the people you were out to dinner with? Or do you live in a smallish town? I feel like I get suggestions from everyone in town and all of the friends of friends friends' lists. Although since I've installed AdBlock and Facebook Purity, I don't see anything except my main feed, recent activity and the groups and such on the left. It's awesome.