That's my issue. Gack! Google already know way too much about me for my liking.

If you're in your normal weight range I'd be less concerned then if you're over-weight. If you're obese or morbidly obese I'd raise the alarm more quickly.

I like cemeteries too. I've always thought that some anthropologist should produce a picture book about the grieving process of people around the world or maybe cemeteries of the world. I'd love to look at either of those. It fascinates me how people's religious views factor into their grief rituals.

I'm going slightly crazy trying to find a potty that is actually appropriate for toddlers and am considering my options for a new one. I think that I've gone through 5 now. Either they work for girls and not boys or for boys and not girls or they are too tall and work for neither gender or the pee runs under the seat and onto the floor or there is a foam seat that gets saturated. Can you tell this has been a long road? Anyways, I need a potty that is easy to clean and easy for young, short toddlers to use without peeing on the floor. Suggestions? Edited to add: We use an outdoor composting toilet so I really need a stand-alone potty rather than a toilet seat.

That's an interesting idea. The fruit fly culture made me laugh though. You should see my kitchen at the moment. We're living in a fog of fruit flies. I've got two traps set up on the counter. I suppose we could start by studying those!

I can share my sympathy with you. My 5yo is very similar. My 3yo is easier to keep entertained. Actually, even the 2yo's are easier. He's getting better though. Active chore are the only suggestion that I have. He feels involved in the family and it gets some of his stink out in a productive way.

Thank you!

I'd like to extend our nature study to insects and spiders but I'm not sure how to start. Have any of you done this? I like Fabre's books for some reading material. Can you suggest other authors? I'd love to go beyond bees and ants. Suggestions? Edited to add: I should really do a search first. I just found this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/585541-in-case-anyone-else-wants-to-do-entomology/?hl=%2Binsects&do=findComment&comment=6806818 . I'm still interested in other suggestions, especially ones for younger children. Any ages would be good though.

I was this teenager but I was in public school. In retrospect I think that some of my problems stem from being an aspie but I didn't know that at the time. I think that sometimes homeschoolers struggle to make friends with public school kids because they are unaccustomed to the social norms of public school life. One thing that helped me was volunteering as a candy striper at the hospital. I met a few friends that way who were social outcasts themselves. I really would have thrived well with social groups that included adults or was mostly adults.

I thought that some of you might appreciate this article about "math disability." I suspect that they're talking about dyscalcula but were trying to keep the language simple.

All of what Hunter said was great advise. I really put my second in for audio dramatization. I also wanted to point out that she meant 1836 in this sentence.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. More to think about is always a good thing. We've done some food sensitivity trial (dairy and gluten) but didn't see a difference. We've tried magnesium. She does have some minor day time dribbling issues and quite occasionally she fully wets herself during the day. She'll wet 3 times a night sometimes irregardless of fluid consumption. The ultrasound that we had done suggested that her bladder was on the smallish size but that everything else seemed normal. They scanned her before and after voiding to see if she was incompletely voiding and to measure the volume. I'll have to look more into the at home sleep study stuff but given the day time issues I suspect it's anatomical or hormonal. I'll get back to you after I have a chance to talk to my dh. If I remember correctly though he said that the drug that he had a problem with had very occasional incidences of childrens' bladders exploding! DD is pretty good sport about it all. She wears cloth diapers to minimize mess and for comfort. She's just growing concerned that she will always be like this.

Interesting input everyone. She is neurotypical. She is adopted from my sister so we only know half of her genetics. Unfortunately, since we live in hicksville northern British Columbia, the nearest location for a sleep study or pediatric urologist is almost certainly 16 hours away too. We can do it but it will be a significant sacrifice. I wonder though if a regular urologist might be willing to see her at this point. There is probably one 6 hours away. We've used the Malem Ultimate alarm. I think that I might try having her use it again and I'll stay near enough to wake her up. We also used a load rooster alarm to wake her throughout the night coupled with an app that asks her a math question before she can turn off the alarm. The math questions was there to make sure she was awake enough to not just turn it off and go back to sleep. This had some success but I can't tell you the number of times she was near tears trying to figure out 0*5+4 or something similar.

The alarms thread got me wondering if any of you with heavy sleepers have also had troubles with bedwetting up into the teen years. My poor girl is going 14 and is still regularly wetting - probably 50% of the time. We've tried bedwetting alarms but she sleeps through them or else just shuts them off. Dh doesn't want to use meds (he's an MD and he says they're too dangerous for what they accomplish). We've ultrasounded her for abnormalities. We tried enemas and laxatives because constipation, even non-symptomatic constipation, is associated with enuresis. The closest pediatric urologist is 16 hours away but we'll probably try to go that route at some point. Please tell me she's not too old to see this resolve on it's own. Any other ideas?

13 is such a satisfying number to me. It's prime and in Fibonacci’s sequence. 13 is soooo unloved.

I've recently tried your suggested method with my two middle schoolers with great success. We decided to wing chemistry this year. I've been using "living" books to engage them on the topic and have been trying to emphasize certain facts through the process. I started with "Red Madness: How a Medical Mystery Changed What We Eat" (a history of pellagra) to get them engaged on the topic. Next, they read Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacs. We watched some youtube videos to show them the experiments described in Uncle Tungsten and now I'm reading aloud Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry by Bernard Jaffe. We mixed sulphuric acid (special drain cleaner) and sugar together for a great demonstration. My boy went from thinking that chemistry was boring to loving it. He has set himself up the humblest lab you can imagine and has been lighting every flammable substance he can find and mixing them together with abandon and then lighting them :o (obviously we're watching this carefully)! He says things almost daily like, "imagine if I found another element" or "maybe I could discover a new antibiotic." It's so nice to see his excitement. His sister isn't quite so excited but she's retaining what I've been teaching and that's headway for her. She normally takes things in one ear and out the other when it comes to science material.

We enjoy map jigsaw puzzles.

I tried to skip formal grammar but came to regret it. My older children are using R&S 4 right now to catch up. I found that my boy in particular needed systematic instruction because he's just not natural with language. I now can use the basic knowledge that he's aquired to help him see why a sentence is a run-on sentence and why a comma is needed. There are other errors in his writing that I've been able to help him understand. The actual diagramming is just a visual means of reaching this goal but I suppose that any grammar program would probably do the trick. The diagramming appeals to me because it shows the children that grammar is orderly. It's like math; there's only one right answer and there is always an answer. Teaching grammar without diagramming would kind-of be like doing math verbally or without the equals sign. It's possible but just less concrete feeling.

My dd doesn't mind it. She gets a little antsy if there is too much new stuff. My ds is the one who figures that he know everything and can't stand doing calculations. He wants geometry and any other math stuff that he can easily grasp without any hard work.

Of course upper class woman have affairs but they also have all sorts of activities that they can plug their children into that would allow them the time needed to have an affair in a more "appropriate" way. People know that that sort of thing is going to get CPS called on them and unless they're really disfunctional they're going to try to avoid it if they have any possible way to do so. When you have the means to cover your butt you're going to. My point was just that the upper class mom is probably not going to do that when she has an affair because she has the means not to. The picture painted makes people jump to the conclusion that it is a lower class person. Obviously I don't have statistics and I tried to explain that I was making assumptions. I suppose that I wasn't clear though. Lets be realistic here though. Lower class mom who want an affair do not have the means to cover their tracks like upper class moms do which makes it more likely to me that if someone is leaving their kids in the car to spend an hour with a lover it's more likely to be a lower class mom. Upper and lower class people are just as likely to be losers but the upper class person has more means to appear as though they are not.

I don't have a recipe but black bean soup with corn is delicious.

I was thinking about this thread today and I got to wondering if part of the reason that people inflate the risk of the situation with the lover is that they picture in their minds the children being left in a sketchy neighbourhood where as in the other situations they imagine better neighbourhoods. Clearly not all neighbourhoods are equal and a mother that is willing to leave her children in the car for an hour to spend it with her lover is statistically speaking more likely to be leaving her children in a scuzzy neighbourhood. In my minds eye there would be teenager loitering around trying to hawk stolen goods and prostitutes on the closest corner. I could be wrong here about the likelihood that the neighbourhoods in the situations would differ but I suspect others would hold that assumption as well.

We just finished this as read-aloud. The patriotism gets really old quickly. My children kept laughing at how all the heros have stunning, dazzling or bright eyes. I also didn't care for how some of the atrocities against the native people were so glibbly passed over. It struck me as being picturesque romanticized American history. It just doesn't give children enough credit to able to evaluate history critically. Disclaimer: I'm Canadian so I probably approach US history a little differently than other would.

I was enjoying this old thread again. I haven't had a good laugh like that for awhile. Maybe some who missed it would like a good laugh or have some to add. :)

I once had someone call the police on me because I had left my children in a van while I was in the store. I have two older children that were old enough to baby sit when the incident happened and I was parked right next to the front door of the store. All in all I was only about 20 feet from my children. If there had been trouble one of the older ones could have come and got me while the other stayed with the littles. I do this frequently. The great part of this story though was that on that particular day we actually had an adult friend sitting in the back of the van with my children. The when the police arrived I was already back in the vehicle waiting for my dh and just calmly explained that the adult had been there all along. I was ticked though. I really don't like how our society doesn't allow for children to be left in the car ever. There really are times when this is perfectly safe. For example, a 10yo and a 5yo sitting in the car while the mother pops into the bank to use the atm at rural location where she can see the vehicle is SOOOO different then a mother leaving a 6 month old in the car while she grocery shops in downtown LA. People just have no sense.