I came home from our "family living" unit in 5th grade (public school) and proudly told my dad that he didn't have to worry about me drinking alcohol, doing drugs, or having sex. Our teacher had been quite clear that people engaged in sex because they were weak in the face of peer pressure, and the results were pregnancy and disease. There was no mention of any positive aspect. I'm not surprised to hear that other people may have gotten similar negative ideas about sex early on and had to confront those ideas upon marriage.

If it's a sensory thing, gum between meals might be helpful. The xylitol stuff is supposed to be good for your teeth.

I've had my Kia Rondo for 5 years and only had 1 minor problem with it - one of the seatbelts that was holding a car seat got stuck and had to be replaced. I don't drive as much as some though. After 5 years, it has only 38,000 miles on it.

Some of the suggestions for forgetting chook duty sound completely reasonable for a kid who is forgetting to do a chore. But the OP sounded more like the daughter had lied about doing the job rather than simply forgotten it. I guess I'd be inclined to punish for that, and I'm interested in hearing how non-punishment parents would deal with the lying aspect.

My car has them, and I never intend to use them. The kids sometimes set them accidentally while climbing into the car, and then they're not able to open their own door when it's time to get out.

FLL you can start with level 3. If you'd like to do WWE, I'd work through the sample lessons and evaluations on the Peace Hill Press website to have a gentle start - I think that will give you 3-4 lessons from Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, and then you can decide on an appropriate level to buy for the rest of the school year. Classical Academic Press Fable and Michael Clay Thomas Island level are two well-liked programs that start at the 3rd-4th grade level. I think you could also start out with Bravewriter in the Partnership Writing stage and use some of the Arrow guides.

Most of IKEA's mattresses are packed rolled up, so you can easily get them in a car. Depending on the sizes of your kids, they might be able to sleep on smaller mattresses (mine have been fine with a crib mattress through age 3 or 4 and a "small bed" through age 7). Can you get a place with a washing machine? In my area, many rentals have washers & dryers. Would scooters or roller skates be a good bicycle alternative for your kids? Those take a lot less space. It's probably worth pricing out whether it would be worth upgrading one of your vehicles to something that could pull a trailer so that you could use a trailer for the move in both directions.

I wouldn't go (but my kids are all about 2 years younger than yours) because watching all 5 of them for a whole week would be too much for any of their grandparents. Perhaps your ILs are younger and/or in better health than my parents and my husband's parents.

I haven't done much extended rear-facing because it's logistically difficult in our vehicle. When DD7 was a baby, we didn't have a car and took transit most places. She screamed her head off in the car on the rare occasion we rented one and drove somewhere. I think I installed her carseat forward-facing on her first ride after her first birthday, which was when she was about 15 months old. DD5 and DS5 are twins. When they fit in small seats (like the Combi Cocorro), I could have both of them rear-facing, no problem. Once they got too big for those seats and required bigger seats, there wasn't room to install a big rf seat behind the driver's seat. It would've been possible to have one rf in the middle seat, but I opted to turn both of them ff at that point. They were about 20 months. DS2's carseat got turned around early this summer (a couple months after he turned 2). He was rf in his Radian and fit just fine, but the seat blocked the air vents in the car, so that all the kids were sweltering once the weather got warm. Our 10-month-old is still rear-facing in the Cocorro. I'm hoping to keep him in that seat up until 2 years (if he fits - he's tall!), and then have him RF in the Radian the following winter. If we still have the same vehicle, I'm going to need to turn him around to keep his seat from blocking the vents. In our vehicle, there are some tradeoffs with having kids extended rear facing. I assume others have similar issues that make extended rear facing impractical. Those huge RF seats just don't work well in small vehicles.

Salad made with iceberg lettuce and topped with "Pink Dressing" (a mix of ketchup and mayo). Fried eggplant - I like eggplant, but my parents would bread and fry it so that the eggplant ended up covered in burnt breadcrumbs and barely cooked inside, Scalloped potatoes from a box. I've tried making them from scratch and don't like them much better though - I'm not sure why because potatoes and dairy products are usually right up my alley.

I'd look into it for your daughter because of the heavy periods rather than the acne. Personally, I think birth control pills were terrible for me. I started different versions of the pill several times, and each time, I would have phases of weepy depression for the first few months, gradually getting mostly better as I stayed on the pill. What I didn't realize until I was off the pill was just how out of control they made my moods, even after the first few months. Once I was over the worst of the depression (the first few months), my emotions felt "real", and I had no idea they were affected by the hormones. When I stopped taking the pill in my late 20s, I started feeling calmer and more able to cope with setbacks. It was SO NICE to get off of the emotional rollercoaster. If I'd had any idea, I would've stopped MUCH sooner.

Thanks! I got The Elements for a future year. I loved the look of the sample.

I'd vote for option 2. I love AAS, but it moves pretty slowly. We're using it for spelling, but at the same time, we're zipping through OPGTR to finish up phonics. I like the idea that my daughter is learning words in three stages: (1) coming across them in books where she figures them out partly by sounding out and partly by context, (2) learning a rule and seeing other words that follow the same pattern in OPGTR, and (3) learning to spell the words. Since you've already got OPGTR, I'd be inclined to go ahead and use it. We started with the consonant blends and would go through 2-3 related lessons in a day for a while, slowing down when things started to get tricky towards the end of the book.

We tried them when our first child was born because we were afraid the cats might freak out and scratch the baby. One cat who would bite them off right away because he couldn't stand them. He's the cat who tends to scratch the furniture. :-/ They stayed on the other cat a long time, until we would hear them clicking around when she walked. The nails keep growing from behind and the Soft Paws just stay on the tips. The claws get too long and click on the floor when the cat walks. I think cats normally shed outer layers from their claws, and the Soft Paws seemed to be interfering with that for one of our cats.

I just keep getting robo-calls saying, "Hi, this is Diane, and I'm calling to see if you would like your carpets PROFESSIONALLY CLEANED? We're having a whole-house special right now..." I yell at the phone, "No, I don't have carpet!" and hang up. Diane is persistent though.

We're in the lowest percentage range because of: - a great income - a grain- and legume-based diet - cooking from scratch - gardening - my husband's company providing lunch for its employees - buying most of our staple foods in bulk

Of the moms I know, I have only heard of 1 first-time-mom induction that did not end in a C-section. It makes me wonder why induce at all instead of just going straight to a C-section if it becomes necessary. The long induction followed by a C-section sounds awful.

I have done 23andMe and am waiting on results from Ancestry DNA. My mom is estranged from her family (for good reasons), so I didn't know much about them and had been afraid to ask my mom much and dredge up a lot of bad memories for her. My most interesting 23andMe results were: (1) I'm 3.7% Neanderthal, which is in the 99th percentile for people of Northern European descent. (2) I was contacted by someone who is a 3rd cousin once removed. I knew that my mom's family was from the same part of the country as her family, but the only other thing I could tell her about that side was my mom's maiden name. She figured out how we were related and showed me the family tree for that branch. (3) I found out that fraternal twins run in that branch of the family. This was especially amusing for me because when I found out I was carrying twins and shared the news with my mom, her reaction was, "Well, twins don't run in my family!" :laugh:

The son's Y-DNA will tell you about the son's father (the son's father's father's father's... line). It cannot tell you anything about the son's mother (or the son's maternal grandfather) because the son got his Y chromosome from his father.

Not quite. The mitochondrial DNA is not from the X chromosome, but it does trace your maternal line. At conception, the egg cell is much bigger than the sperm cell and it contains all the machinery for growing and dividing to make new cells. Part of that "machinery" is mitochondria, which are little organelles that contain their own DNA, separate from your 23 pairs of chromosomes. Since mitochondria are generally passed down through the eggs and not the sperm, the mitochondrial DNA can be used to learn about the maternal line.

I keep the books I'm intending to use for school on the bookshelf in my daughters' room. Most of the picture books on on the bookshelf in the boys' room. The kids are welcome to read / look at whatever they'd like; I just wanted to be sure the school stuff is not in the room where the little guys take their naps. I don't want to risk waking a sleeping toddler to find the book we were going to use for art, history, or science that afternoon.

Curiosity Hacked (formerly called Hacker Scouts until the Boy Scouts came after them...) would be another option. Its focus is more art and technology. http://curiosityhacked.org/guild.html

Of our two cats, one pees and poops on carpet and one sharpens his claws on carpet. I'm glad we don't have carpet anymore. (The peeing cat still has issues though, so we crate her at night.)

I've been doing more than usual lately, and my house looks nicer than usual. :-) But there's no way I can keep it up once our school year starts in earnest - right now we're just keeping up math and reading skills.

I second the recommendation for the books by Mitsumasa Anno. We liked Anno's Math Games, Anno's Hat Tricks, Anno's Magic Seeds, and Anno's Counting Book.