Maybe the Muppets Statler and Waldorf, although the kind of go back and forth between poking fun at each other and at the show.

I haven't tried one personally, but the Baby K'tan looks like it would fit your criteria. It looks like it holds the baby similarly to a Moby wrap, but it would be easier to put on in a seated position. There's a "breeze" version that is made of mesh and should be a little less hot in the summer.

Hmmm - I think my 8yo is less of a perfectionist (or used to the adults in the house being busy) - she might ask me how to spell those words if she was making a card for someone, but she'd happily write "yeer", "eve", and "beech" on a note for me or for a school assignment, knowing that we'll go over the spelling together for most of her school work. I don't have a great idea of where she "should be" for 8 years old / 3rd grade, but she's made progress in the past year. I'm seeing that she retains a lot of the rules we've covered in spelling but has problems when there are multiple ways to spell a sound and she doesn't know a rule to decide which one to use.

I've never dusted walls, but we do wash them before painting or when my parents are planning to visit.

Tofudabeast!

Yes. I feel like I'm pretty busy with the day-to-day stuff of running our household and adding in "extras" is rough. I feel like I'm terrible at buying gifts and that everyone is always disappointed with what I get for them but would be even more disappointed with me if I didn't make the effort to get them something. I'm overwhelmed by the mountain of gifts from grandparents, and I selfishly miss getting to buy presents for my kids. I hate having to plan special meals to suit a vegan as well as someone who doesn't eat any beans, spices, or tofu. It's dark and wet out, and I'd just like to hibernate.

Lands' End says clothing sizes 4-7 are "Little Kid" and 7-16 are "Big Kid". That seems about right. I think of my 8yo as being a "big kid" now, and I'm glad she has another 5 years before she's a teenager. :-)

If everyone is home and available to do cleanup at the same time, I'd try delegating a bit of housework to everyone at once. For example, "DS1, please clear and wipe down the table, DS2, please take out the trash and recycling. DH, could you please unload and reload the dishwasher? I'm going to strip the beds and start a load of laundry."

Soft "g", long "i". Fun-gye.

I haven't played chicken golf, but for juggling, the bigger ones work better. http://www.orientaltrading.com/api/search?Ntt=realistic+chicken

Tempeh w/ mushroom gravy here.

My first thought was... "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

It wouldn't work for me - I'm up with one of my younger children most nights, and then my husband gets up in the morning and gets the kids breakfast while I get a little more sleep. I need it. Also, I'll pass out if I am up for more than half an hour or so without food, so I'd need to eat first. I second the idea of doing a workout video at home with the kids around. Mine think it's great fun!

There are professionally made cloth diapers for youth and adults, so you wouldn't have to make something yourself. Here's one place that's been making them for a while: http://www.snap-ez.com/Shopping.html#Trainers Without the stuffer, they might work well over top of a disposable diaper.

Our ped suggested it for one of our kids, who was 1yo at the time. We gave about 1/4 of the adult dosage for several days.

The ones I haven't seen listed are soy milk, seitan, and chocolate syrup.

Some books about animals that we loved: The Thirteen Moons series by Jean Craighead George The Scientists in the Field series (http://www.sciencemeetsadventure.com/books/) Anything by Steve Jenkins If prehistoric animals are of special interest, may I suggest: Prehistoric Park (movies) Encyclopedia Prehistorica (pop-up books) We used RSO Life as our main science curriculum.

I haven't BTDT, but my inclination would be to meet him where is for practicing reading aloud. I like the suggestions of using tracking aids. I would also try to go ahead with the lit study by using audiobooks, so that he can work with the ideas in more sophisticated books.

It's not microbiology - that's the study of microbes (especially bacteria). I'd probably call it molecular biology. (My undergrad degree is in Molecular Biology, and my graduate degree is in Microbiology.)

What helps me is having an idea of how much space I want to devote for each sort of thing. So I have, say, a shelf for cookbooks, and it holds my favorite cookbooks. If I'm given more cookbooks, I'll look through them and make a few recipes to figure out if I like them better than the ones already on my shelf. If so, one of the ones I don't use so much anymore will get passed on to the Free Bookstore. I know that shelf holds plenty of great recipes for my family, and I can always look recipes up on the internet if I don't have a recipe for something I want to try making. Likewise, I have a drawer for shirts. If it's starting to get stuffed full, I'll take them all out, and start putting back just my favorites until the drawer is full, but not overstuffed. I know that drawer contains enough shirts for more than a week without doing laundry,

Oh - we had trouble with writing out problems from the textbook (Singapore Primary Mathematics) last year. I'd write them in pen and make a "worksheet" for her. And I gradually switched to writing just some of the problems, and indicating with numbers where she should write the remaining problems. We switched to MM this year and like the all-in-one format.

We had quite a few days like that in our first year of homeschool - maybe 1x per week for a while. It's gradually gotten better though, and those kind of days are more like 1x per month now. I feel like the tantrums and pushback was what happened when I pushed a bit on my daughter to do something that was hard for her. I think she's matured some and had some experiences of becoming able to do something difficult through practice, but she still sometimes has rough days. If this is the first month of your first year of homeschooling, I'd keep on with it for a while and be sure to talk up practice, persistence, and hard work - things that were really hard at the beginning of the year will get to be easier. Interestingly, my 5yos are in their first year of homeschool now, and they haven't had the tantrums/ meltdowns. And yes, I think your revised schedule looks better - with little kids it seems best not to take long breaks and keep on with reading and math over the summer. So just a little bit everyday should be good.

That is a great description of my oldest daughter's last year of B&M school and how I came to be homeschooling her. My thought at the time was, "I'm already homeschooling her for reading and math, why not make it official?" (At that point, I had moved from supporting the teacher's methods at home to using different curricula because I felt it was time to try another method.)

I was assigned the Fellowship of the Rings as summer reading material for my 9th grade honors English class (ages ago).

My thought is that she may be decoding the first syllable and then using some guessing to get the rest of the word based on context. I figure one good thing about that sort of guessing is that it indicates that she understands what she is reading well enough to fill in the words she can't quite decode. I see my daughter (age 7.75) do this a fair bit with multisyllable words, although sometimes she makes mistakes and then needs to go back and decode them. She will usually realize that something about the sentence she just read didn't quite make sense and go back and try again with a little more sounding out. I do a bit of that too. :-)