This is her viewpoint.

I feel your pain! It can be such a terribly tiring process. This is the lesser known stress that plagues people with a chronic illness. It's not just about the piling up of medical expenses. It's also about the massive amounts of errors that occur and have to be dealt with. It's stressful and exhausting at a time when you're already stressed and exhausted because of the chronic illness! Hang in there!

This! We need to quit attaching strings to housing. This article was eye opening. http://www.businessinsider.com/this-state-may-be-the-first-to-end-homelessness-for-good-2015-2 I know the article talks about homelessness, but the same applies, in my opinion, to people living in poverty.

Love the Billy bookshelves! Seriously, we have like 20 of them throughout our house. If you can afford it, I would buy the deeper shelves. They can hold more. I second the build your own desk. We have had our desk tops and legs for 10 years, and they still work great. We've put them together to make a big table, and now they are side by side to make two desks. We took off one front leg of each table and used a plastic 5 drawer cart as the front legs. Each kid has 5 drawers to use.

My information was compromised, and so was my husband's. Our credit was already frozen.

The con is that you have to thaw your credit each time you need to have a credit check. This costs money in most states. It's a hassle, but worth it to most people who don't plan on getting loans or lines of credit often.

I agree. This makes me very angry. It should be free to do this for everyone at all three credit agencies, especially now with all of these breaches. It should be an easier process to both freeze and thaw our credit, too. I'm calling our rep and senators to let them know. It's about time we the consumers had more power to control our information since it's obvious that no one else is going to.

Just so you know, SOTW 4 does not have coloring pages. You can purchase them separately, though.

If you already know you're not opening up lines of credit anytime soon, then I would say freeze. I know others have their reasons for not doing it, but for the average person who doesn't foresee opening up lines of credit frequently, it's the option I'd suggest (I'd actually suggest it for everyone and lobby Congress to make it free to freeze and thaw, but that's another issue). I mentioned in another thread that some businesses only check one reporting agency when checking credit. You can often ask, as we have, which they use and only thaw that one when applying for a loan or credit card. We did this for a car loan at a credit union and for refinancing our home. Both only checked one credit agency. We also did a temporary thaw. This meant we didn't have to go back and freeze again. Just fyi, according to experian, both my and my husband's information was part of the breech. We feel so at ease knowing our credit is frozen.

Here is the link from Clark Howard about how to do it. http://clark.com/personal-finance-credit We have hard ours frozen for 10 years. We have had to thaw it at different times for loans, but that's pretty easy to do. We always choose a temporary thaw so that we didn't have to pay to freeze them again. Also, some banks only use one credit bureau, so we have asked in the past which one they use and only thawed that one. We have no regrets about freezing our credit. Sure, it's a hassle to thaw it when we need to have our credit checked, but it's a million times better than having your identity stolen! And once your credit is frozen, you have nothing to worry about when these breaches happen. Even if your credit card number is stolen, that's a fairly easy mess to sort out.

This! Freezing your credit is the easiest thing to do, and it's the only way to protect yourself from identity theft. And now in many states you can freeze your children's credit.

Me too! I still get anxious when I get a bill from a provider because, in our case, most of the time there is an error that I have to push to get corrected. It has been unreal!

I have had to do this at least 5 times. Don't be surprised if you have to go back and forth between the doctor and the insurance company a few times. Be polite, yet firm, and advocate for yourself. I got so frustrated at one time that I called the CFO of the hospital. You better believe I got results after that! The VP of the revenue cycle knows me by my first name. Edited to add that in all the cases, it was the provider that had to resubmit the claims with a different code. Our insurance couldn't change a thing until that was done.

It sounds like our boys are in the same spot academically, although my son doesn't hate writing. He doesn't love it either. We are just finishing the 3rd section of Treasured Conversations, and I am quite pleased. My son has done well, and we've both appreciated the structure. I plan on continuing the model of this after we're done. For example, I'll take a nonfiction passage from or science or history and come up with a topic. Then we'll work together to take notes, make an outline, and write a one paragraph report. After months of this practice, we can eventually stretch it out to more paragraphs, like a report on rattlesnakes with 3 paragraphs. One about what they eat, one about where they live, and one about their bodies. Then in 6th, I plan to move to WWS. I think it's fairly easy to apply the structure of Treasured Conversations to other reading that you're doing, and it sounds like it might work for your son, too. Just my thoughts...

We have done SOTW from the beginning, and it has always gotten done. The best part is, my kids love history, and we didn't really do much except read (I'll admit I love history, so my enthusiasm has rubbed off). We're almost to the end of Modern Times. We read a chapter a week along with the coloring page and the map. We find the countries on the globe, and I often read aloud other picture books during the week that go with the chapter. We don't do many of the activities in the guide. This year we added a timeline on the wall and some narrations (the kids are 8 and 11). Like I said, it's mostly just reading, but it has been terrific! My kids get annoyed if I even try to skip history on Mondays and Wednesdays. As an aside, this has been our geography curriculum as well. We just label the map and look at the globe. I'm amazed at what my kids know just from doing that for almost 4 years.

I like this take on it. I'm planning on using it more as a loose outline for our history. Then I'll pick and choose and add to it as needed.

I absolutely love our Chromebook. You can't load any software because it is web based, but that's what makes it great. It turns on and is all ready to use within seconds. There are several different models at varying prices.

My son had this as a side effect of long term medication use. Rinsing with biotene at least three times daily worked very well.

Thank you so much for all of your advice! I'm pleased to say that we have success! She did have one accident this morning, but it was my fault for not seeing the signs. I think I was mostly stressed by the pacing, but now that she's been with us a week and is learning our routine, she is feeling less anxious and therefore not pacing much at all. Thank you again for the words of advice!

Please tell me I will be successful soon! I'm going crazy! Long story short, we ended up adopting a two year old lab rescue. They originally thought she was 6, so I thought potty training would be easier with a more mature dog. Alas, here I am trying to train what is actually a puppy. Any advice? We are crate training. We are taking her out to the same spot on a leash 6 times a day on a schedule. She is doing much better after 6 days, but it's the pacing around the house that makes me so nervous! We play with her outside and inside for about an hour after she's gone to the bathroom . Then she goes back in the crate. Should I try something different? She really is a great dog, but I'm so nervous she's going to have an accident that I'm a wreck. Help!

Hi there. Do you have a link to the Google database of newspapers?

I don't think they're worth the cost. We have Alexa and Google home, but they were both gifts. We use them for music and as timers, but we wouldn't have purchased them.

I agree. We love this program! We purchased the e-book through Amazon for $9.99. You really can't beat that price for a curriculum.

Here's another idea. We volunteer with a local group that provides household items for newly arrived refugee families. The children in the families often arrive with nothing, so you all could pack backpacks full of things for them.

Here's another idea I saw recently for a project where kids make hygiene kits for kids. https://projectcure.org/programs/kits-kids Here's the information from the website: Our Kits for Kids provide personal hygiene and basic "medicine cabinet" items that are scarce in the developing world. If a child gets hurt, families might have to travel a long distance by bicycle, bus or even on foot to receive care at the nearest hospital or medical clinic. Working with pediatricians and nurses, Project C.U.R.E. developed Kits for Kids to give parents in developing countries the supplies they need to provide basic care at home. A bar of soap encourages handwashing, too. Kits for Kids is a great service learning project or family activity!