This actually happened to me. My parents divorced when I was about three or so, because he was a violently abusive man. When I was five my mother remarried, and they went through the legal hassle of having birth father terminate his rights so my new dad could adopt me and my sis. I grew up with no memories of birth father, just the stories of the horrors he had done, and how awful his family treated my mom when she left. My adoptive father passed away when I was seventeen. When I was about eighteen, on Mother's Day of all things, my birth grandmother and aunt showed up on our doorstep. It was horrible and awkward. My mother didn't want to ever see these people again, and it was a nasty shock when they showed up like that, but she also didn't want to deny me the right to meet them and get to know them, so she invited them in. (My sister was away at the time.) It's taken years to become okay with this, and there's still not much relationship going on. It's pretty clear that birth father doesn't really want much contact, but that birth grandmother does. We've got it down to about a phone call or email a couple times a year, which I can handle. I've since met my birth father in person, and he's definitely mellowed, but I can see the temper still simmering there and it's hard to get past how he treated my mother, and how he could've treated us if we'd stayed. And I have two half-sisters (by different mothers) that I can't form a relationship with, as much as we'd all like to, because of distance and circumstances. I don't know that I'm really contributing to the discussion, just responding on what it looks like to be the one who gets the surprise on your doorstep. And I still am not sure how they found us, except they had some relative who worked for a phone company and managed to do some tracking for them. Which to me is an abuse of information, right there. We'd moved enough times that they should NOT have been able to locate us, or they should've been able to do it a lot sooner (since birth father had the adoption paperwork at some point, after all). They just showed up with this sob story "we've been looking for you for so many years." What it looks like from their side, I can't even begin to imagine.

I think kids need to be more attached to their parents and family than to peers and other adults, especially at these young ages. :) I think your dh may find it works the other way around, actually. My kids are attached to me, sure, but because they're with me all day, it's DADDY they want to play with all the time. :D I will ditto the It Will Get Better and the Start Slowly suggestions from the previous posters. If your son is first or second grade (mine is 7 and going into second), that sounds like you've got an awful lot of summer work. I know mine's not yet ready for written narratives (motor skills and spelling skills) but could probably do it by dictation. He's a bright and somewhat advanced kid, but it doesn't keep him from being a kid and needing the wiggle time and time to let motor skills catch up. May not be the case with your son, especially with his prior school experience, but just wanted to share in case that ended up being one of your frustrations.

Seven Day is a stand-alone, except I think they might briefly touch on the end of Half Magic? Still, it's fine. The Half-Magic books are best in sequence, and the Magic or Not books need to be in order too. Hilarious stuff. Knight's Castle is what got me to read Ivanhoe.

Our church didn't even do that craft. We do five days in four, so I guess they just skipped that one. Can you just photocopy the image and color/glue on cardstock?

Not sure about the Bird Test ... birds can ingest substances that people can't. If you want to do an animal-eats-fruit test, it needs to be something more physical similar to people ... a mammal preferably. Got any annoying neighbor's pets? (Just joking there.)

I've only watched about three episodes overall, I think the Hawaii ones where they renewed their vows. So this whole thing looks doubly sad after that. I wonder if it would be a supportive thing to direct positive fan mail to THEM rather than TLC? Saying, we won't watch your show because we don't like what it's doing to your family, but that we really hope things can work out for you, that your family and marriage be okay. I mean, TLC could care less what happens to the family as long as they get ratings out of it, I bet. But just maybe, an outpouring of loving and honest concern might make a difference to them as a couple. I dunno. It's just a thought. I'm not one to bother folks with fan mail, usually. But they sure look like they could use a few kind and loving, prayerful, words right now.

It may depend on the cause too. I was told there were three types ... one that needs antibiotics, one that's caused by a virus, and one that's allergy or irritation-induced (like some speck got in the eye). I had no idea, but that's what our nurse said. Couldn't hurt to call and ask. Around our house, it tends to be an allergy thing though, so we wash carefully (being extra careful not to contaminate the other eye and all that), and dose up on Benadryl. If it goes more than a day or so, we do call, but usually we can see improvement sooner. My niece, on the other hand, gets styes like there's no tomorrow. I'm not sure what they end up having to do.

I've seen it as "I before E except after C, or when pronounced like an A, as in neighbor and weigh." The whole rhyme makes a lot more phonics sense than just the short version usually taught.

Good question. The law I'm familiar with mentioned songbirds specifically, and I don't know of too many non-migratory species. I was pretty sure it was a federal type law (since it was back in my pre-baby animal nut days and it was a Yahoo search collection of sites where I got the info). But I could be wrong. I only mentioned it so people don't accidentally get in 'trouble' for helping birds. Me, I'm all for going ahead and trying anyway, as long as you get realllllly good advice or already know what you're doing. :) The last one we had was a dying baby mockingbird (didn't last the night, it was sick and I don't think even a rehabber could've helped, but I couldn't find one anyway). That was a good five years ago or more though. I admit to not being totally current here.

FWIW, it's technically illegal to keep wild birds, orphaned or not. That's why they so often advise you to find a local wildlife rehabber. You have to be certified to do that work. But that's just FYI. I'd probably try to help the bird too. :) We don't have enough rehabbers around here (I haven't yet had time for the training or anything myself) and I'm a sucker for baby birds. Don't find many though. Lots of luck! Baby critters are so cute.

I would think, with Calvert, that the mere act of buying constitutes agreement ... kind of like installing software and you always have to click those Agree buttons for long-winded stuff no one ever reads. Just my unprofressional two cents. Is this agreement mentioned in their catalog or on their website? If so, they may not feel the need to reiterate when selling on the phone. Though it would be nice if they did.

I think some of it must come from the parents (for the HS kids at least). I know my son, who is 7, already has the ambition to be a very good daddy and frets that he won't find the right wife and get to have kids. He has no particular girlfriend in mind, thankfully, and I do remind him there's PLENTY of time for that later, but it is so sweet to see how seriously he takes this. Because he's home with me and sees parenting as an actual Job, it's his ambition right now to get a good job as a Daddy so his wife can stay home and be Mommy. I'm taking the whole thing as a compliment (and trying to reassure him as much as possible ... fretting runs in the family). So in, say, 15 years or so, there's going to be a REALLY SWEET young man looking for a wife. Heads up, moms of girls! :D

Our police station always tells us they'd rather we call when it's not an emergency than wait till it is. :) Go ahead and call the non-emergency number and ask. At the very least, maybe they've had similar complaints and can tell you it's Google Earth or whoever. If not, they can best advise you what you should do.

Here's another spin to throw in ... For those who buy (consumable) books and let the eldest write on paper so the next child can use the original, etc ... By the time several kids have used that particular consumable, there's a pretty good chance that version is OOP anyway, and has been updated by its publisher. Not sure if that affects anyone's answer, but I thought I'd toss it out there. Personally, I'm for buying nonconsumables whenever possible (total bookaholic here), and then getting fresh consumable workbooks for each child as needed. Aside from the copyright matters (which are important to me), I just don't want the hassle of keeping up with all those extra papers. :) But ... one kit we use is mostly reusable, with the exception of a handful of consumable student sheets. I am photocopying those so that each of my children can use them, since we're doing the experiments together anyway. I have no intention of reselling those pages when we're done with them ... but I don't want to have to pay for those pages twice, either, when the entire rest of the expensive kit is intended to be reused. Hmm. Am I cheating them of profit? It's certainly not my intent. :/ (Buying duplicates of the student sheets, for this particular curriculum, is not an option. Otherwise I probably would. It's an all or nothing package. But it is designed to be used with multiple kids at a time, if the parent so desires. Except for those pesky student pages.)

I don't think you were excessively angsty. :) There aren't THAT many places that you can ramble like that and actually have people understand what you're getting at. So go for it. (Says one weird mind to another, LOL.) I fret sometimes about 'the label' too, though it's gotten better as my kids have gotten older. They are what they are. I homeschool to spare them the tedium of my school experience. (I did have a lot of fun in many school situations ... but the classwork ... so anyway, here we are...). I assume they're gifted because dh and I were, and so was my sis, and I can see signs of it up and down my extremely crazy family tree, and our kids are very much like us. We'll test later if we find a need for it. (I made dh a deal. We get to do standardized testing for third grade ... two more years for us ... and if the scores come back high, he promised to let me have them officially IQ tested so I can get it out of my system.) I think part of it is a validation of my own 'label'. I don't feel all that smart, but I sure think differently from most of my acquaintances, and I'm an obsessive and fast reader, and things like that. Sometimes, in fact, I feel downright stupid. So I think if my kids, who are much like me, end up being tested and labelled gifted, it will help *me* feel better ... if they deserve the label, then I must've deserved it too. Very backwards thinking, but hey, that's how my brain works. I think giftedness basically boils down to thinking sideways from the rest of the world, and being that much more aware of the sixty million things you don't know. And actually wanting to learn. (Except cars. Car engines and the stock market ... I can never make myself learn about those... the knowledge just slides right off my gray cells and into the ether.)

Along the lines of what SWB posted earlier ... I went to hear a (noted but will remain nameless) homeschool speaker a few years back, talking about projects she did with her kids. They made some very cute clip-art timeline type books, and then started selling them as a small business venture. She was understandably proud of their effort. I questioned the ethics of using clip art from other sources without permission or even acknowledgement, and she jumped on me for being so picky about a simple kids' project ... "Who would be so mean to pick on a business venture by a kid anyway?". My thought was, And just when do you plan to TEACH them about copyright violations and ethics, if not now when they're earning money from it? It soured me enough that I won't buy this woman's products because I feel I can't trust that she's not violated someone else's efforts. (And that's why I leave her nameless ... because I could be completely misconstruing her intentions and I do not want to be slandering anyone. I merely bring up the situation as another copyright ethics for consideration.)

You might've gone to school with my sister ... was it the math school in Mobile that you got to attend? I know our gifted programs in our city (early 80s) were IQ-based. Not sure what the middle school used (we moved, but I was just assumed to already be in it), and our high school was useless ... hardly any AP at all. My sis got to go to the math and science school in Mobile in the early/mid 90s. At least it was less mind-numbing there, though it sounds like they got up to a lot of mischief. LOL. My kids aren't tested or anything, but as dh and I were both in the gifted programs and our kids are alarmingly like us, I'm assuming they are gifted. I am very glad that homeschool allows us to move at whatever pace is appropriate (as best I can guess it, anyway. Sigh.).

I could imagine not knowing. When I first got pregnant, I was also in the beginnings of a serious anxiety disorder, and I was throwing up non-stop every day. (Gee, sound familiar?) Plus I had my cycle for almost all nine months. If I hadn't been actually checking monthly due to the meds I was on, I could easily have been four or five months along before even beginning to guess. And even then, the kicking felt an awful lot like the intestinal distress I was having. I will say, nine months would be a lot harder to not realize ... but if you've already got a lot of stress going on, and a history of health issues, I can totally believe it happens to *some* people.

Probably? Every school has different requirements for what it takes to get into advanced or gifted classes, so it would depend on what rules your school used at the time. I remember being baffled about it in school too, when I was sure some of my best friends were as smart as I was supposed to be ... didn't we make the same grades, and have fun doing the same creative things? But I was in the classes, and they weren't. Go figure. But if you were qualified enough to be placed in a totally separate school because of it ... schools don't usually make accomodations like that unless they have to. So you probably really earned the 'gifted' label. :) ETA: For what it's worth, the gifted folks I know don't usually consider themselves all that smart either. I think it just makes us more aware of how many things there are to know, that we don't know. :)

Oh, I love those pics! I've got a whole room dedicated to books (bless my husband!) but not floor to ceiling shelving like that. It's a dream of mine. We also own several thousand books (I lost count after about four thousand) and it's just a necessity. Why have that many? I'm a re-reader. And a very fast reader. Given uninterrupted time (I can hear the parental laughter now, LOL), I could go through several books a day. Libraries aren't feasible. Plus they keep getting rid of all the good stuff (let's not even talk about how many library discards are on my shelves!). I collect OOP, used, wonderful stuff that won't be around in very many years (especially due to that stupid CPSIA law). We do use the library regularly for supplements, and I do try to keep the non-fiction up to date, though some of the best ones are the old ones. We've even got this fantastic kids' encyclopedia/anthology from the 1930s. We do discard things regularly. But there really are that many good books worth keeping around. FWIW, my dh gave me a 'library' of my own on the condition that I try to keep the books from stealthily taking over the rest of the house. LOL. I try ... but the books just keep coming ... :)

My son was diagnosed with asthma pretty young, after several bouts of croup and ER visits, and at least one hospital stay. My daughter had RSV as a small child, but mildly, and I was told she would have Reactive Airway Disorder and likely asthma. She's been fine except for the usual number of sniffles and colds. My son's triggers tend to be cold viruses from other people, though we think allergies may factor in. (I live in north AL, and everyone here suffers seasonal allergies ... the pollen is a killer, among other things.) However, at 7.5, his doctor is now weaning him off meds because he's been doing so much better. He was on daily Singulair, and we had a nebulizer for bad times (used mostly when he'd get a virus and couldn't stop coughing), and an inhaler for emergencies (never used). We're still keeping everything on hand, but so far so good (only been a few weeks though). I'd say the BIGGEST factor is a doctor who listens to what YOU say, and gives you good information. My niece saw another doctor in the same practice (only ones around) and she has severe asthma. Unfortunately, no one recognized it as severe asthma. She would be in the hospital multiple times a year. One time the idiot interns were ready to report my sister for child neglect, saying it wasn't possible that this child could be getting this sick if she were following all the medication directions properly. It was a pretty awful time. They later moved, and with that came a new doctor ... who immediately realized how severe my niece's asthma issues really are, and changed her meds all around. I think it's been over a year since she's had a hospital stay now, though there've been a few emergency doctor visits. She's very active in stuff like soccer (has been for years) and they manage her health very well. Preventive inhaler use before sports is one thing I know they do. So ... trusting your mommy instinct when you think your child might be getting sick, and having a doc who will listen ... those are critical.

This is wild. And here I've been worried because my oldest went on a milk strike when we weaned him off the bottle and hasn't voluntarily had a glass of milk since. I grew up drinking gallons of the stuff, till I got pg and nauseated and can't drink it much anymore. Guess I'll stop fretting and assume a kid that looks healthy probably is. Sigh.

Pros: It's definitely cheap. :) Do get the teacher guide as it has some additional info sometimes that can be good (we rarely use it ourselves, but there IS a lot in it). It also tells you which 1/2 book pages review the concept if you need more work. (In other words, if you fly through book 1, you skip book 1 1/2. If you need review of some of it, then you do parts of 1 1/2. And so on through the series.) It does go through about third grade reading. We try to do a workbook a semester, and after ETC 3 we alternate in the Beyond the Code readers. But then we started them pretty early, so I still project us finishing up the whole series in third grade. In the regular workbooks we do about 1 page a day unless it's really easy. We've not yet had to use the 1/2 books. Cons: Hmm. Some people find book 4 and syllabication to be a bit hard and delay it till later. We pushed through, but I can see why some people skip. Can't really think of many cons. If it doesn't work, at least it was cheap. The teacher guides cover two levels (1-2, 3-4, and so on), and that includes the half books. The Beyond books are for reading comprehension and have no guide that I can find. The stories are totally silly and my son enjoys changing up the work a bit. Like the PP, we also supplement with whatever easy readers we happen to have on hand. Rocket Readers were one of my son's favorites.

May not matter at this point in the thread, but somewhere earlier someone questioned Dorothy Sayers' religious background? To the best of my knowledge, she was Anglican. Christian, anyway, and a staunch one. I love her essays. And her mystery novels. :) (And man, do you have to be educated to read some of her novels today! Obscure quotes, characters lapsing into French or Latin at the drop of a hat, and stuff like that. But they are good reads anyway.) :)

Ours now offers a choice, so I am pushing to make sure we get mostly the composite fillings. I had no idea about the old amalgam ones cracking, though ... that would go a long way to explaining why my teeth are getting more sensitive as I get older! (Along with other issues.) I know our pediatric dentist routinely uses some sedation on younger kids; just makes it easier for them. Our family dentist won't do fillings under a certain age and sent us there for fillings till just recently. (My poor oldest has terrible teeth.) I was also told by both that they can only do one side of the mouth at a time, something to do with swallowing reflexes and stuff. They don't want to numb both sides and let someone choke by accident, I think? Made sense, anyway.