Ella Enchanted. Did they even READ the book? The Westing Game, believe it or not, is a very cheesy movie under a different name, and it's horribly done. They left out half the characters and half the clues. One obscure one that's not too bad ... Betty Ren Wright, who mostly writes children's ghost stories (her earlier ones are less creepy than her more current ones) wrote The Dollhouse Murders. The movie actually isn't too bad, though they made it creepy enough that it scared me AND the kid I was sitting when we watched it (we'd both read and loved the book). I have never seen a movie that was better than the book, except perhaps The Princess Bride, only because I did what it said and read the last chapter that you're not supposed to read. LOL. And the movie is just a hoot and so quotable. Don't even get me started on the new Narnia movies. The first one ... I could bite my tongue, they added some nice touches but left out some important stuff. The second one ... Peter just would never have behaved like that. It was ALL wrong from beginning to end. They had a few nice touches here and there (I loved the mostly empty council chamber, a set-up for the next movie), but overall ... let's just say I own every version of the Narnia movies ever made, and the new LWW in both extended and regular form ... but I just cannot bring myself to pay actual money for Prince Caspian. I just found a copy of Nim's Island, I'm about three pages into it, and I can already see that the book is better than the movie. The quirks of the book came across as bizarre and surreal on screen, and it just felt wrong when we watched it. I used to hate the Phantom Tollbooth movie but it's grown on me. The book is way better though. Disney ... let's not go there either. They don't understand the dignity of a proper ending that isn't perky. (Little Mermaid, for example.)

Noeo worked well for us this year. It comes with some experiment kits, and others are suggested in the readings. The stuff you need is usually easily found around the house (like an empty soda bottle) or at the grocery store. If you use it, I suggest joining their yahoo group in case some of the experiments don't come out right (as can happen with any program) ... usually someone there can help figure out what went wrong or point to an alternative way to do the same thing. (Like our petri dishes ... the agar never did set properly...) Noeo is a collection of 'real' books rather than texts, some experiment kits, and an instructor's guide that tells you what to read or do when. You're supposed to do a lab page or narration each day for a notebook, but I think most of us do less than that. :) My kids enjoyed most of the readings and most of the experiments, both my first grader and my 4yo. We did Bio I this year. Not familiar with the other science programs out there, but we did like this one. The only problem might be doing for two ... you have to make sure sometimes to double up on your supplies. (Like during the human body unit, you get to make a t-shirt with velcro-on organs for each section of the study ... so for two kids, you'd want to buy some extra colored felt and more dots, if you can't trace two on the sheet of felt they give you. Easy fix though.)

My plan, if my kid hits a wall or goes faster than *I* am comfortable with, LOL, is to expand outward. Do the fun stuff. Raymond Blum is the king of math (and other) puzzle books ... start with some of his stuff. Try Vicki Cobb's "Bet You Can't" and "Bet You Can" for some science and math variety in thinking. Do logic puzzles, and then do lateral thinking puzzles. There are all sorts of ways to broaden the horizons of math till a child is ready to get past any wall they might hit. My experience with math is that I could do the work all the way up through college Linear Algebra (thankfully the last course I had to take) but that I didn't 'get' most of it. It's possible to make A's and be totally clueless, apparently. LOL. This baffles my dh, who lives and breathes math the way I speed-read my way through libraries. We're an interesting marriage. Ted seems to be taking after dh, so far, so at some point dh is gonna have to be the primary math teacher. I can pass it, but I doubt I can teach some of the higher stuff. I know my limits! There's a cute series, which appears to still be in print, called "___ the Easy Way." Most of the series are dry boring books, but the Algebra, Trig, and Calculus books are story oriented ... a fantasy kingdom explores math as they find problems they can't solve using the methods they already know. I found the Trig one very helpful in high school, and part of the Calc one too. I need to get the Algebra one for just in case. :) Though that wasn't a struggle for me.

Hey, Cam Jansen isn't twaddle! LOL. I STILL buy every new title I can. (Children's mysteries are one of my favorite genres, though most of my faves are OOP.) I think balance is the key. I read a lot of 'easy' stuff (some twaddle, some just good but easy) which REALLY increased my reading speed and fluency, I think. Slowed me down a bit when we hit 'hard' books in high school and college, but I still had a big advantage because of being a natural speed reader. One key to really digging deep in books is the ability to re-read them ... which college and high school schedules don't usually allow for. How can you analyze literature if you don't have time to read it more than once? So practice on the easy stuff actually does help. But the quality books need to be in that mix too. FWIW, nobody ever censored my reading. I tended toward clean cut stuff anyway, and old stuff, so that probably helped me. Older twaddle still has a higher vocabulary level than newer twaddle. :)

The World of Goo on the PC is a weirrrrrrd game. My kids (and dh) got addicted to it. Now they want to buy it every time they see it on the Wii channel. They don't believe Dad that it's the same game. LOL. Anyway, we've never had trouble ordering games there. Yet, anyway.

I do have to agree that it means less ... it used to be that an 8th grade education was plenty and high school was special, then high school became normal and college something special. Now a bachelor's is the norm and if you want to stand out in a field you almost have to go for the master's. I think master's and PhD work probably still is rigorous as it used to be ... but more and more folks are going for it because a bachelor's degree just isn't 'enough' in some careers anymore. And a lot of kids spend plenty of that college time in remedial work because of high school ... which will start to cheapen the bachelor's even more... Sigh.

We never used the TG except when the question doesn't make sense, so I hadn't noticed any errors yet. :/ I will say, in Horizons 2 that we did this year, I was annoyed when they got 'less' and 'fewer' mixed up all the time in word problems. Drove me bonkers. LOL. I just crossed out the wrong words and wrote in the correct ones. If my kid were older we'd have had an impromptu English lesson out of it.

I think the first two stand alone just fine, and yes there's an adult scene in the third one. I like the middle one best so it's been awhile since I read the first or third, but I think the first is clean, and I know the second one is. You're right about Mercedes Lackey. Why is it so hard to find really good, exciting, well-written, CLEAN novels?

Someone mentioned Tamora Pierce ... she's a good fantasy writer. BUT she includes adult scenes in her books .... the cleanest series is the set of quartets in her fantasy country Tortall, and there's still plenty of sex. The Circle of Magic books were cleaner, due to the ages of the characters ... but then the second quartet included some rather gruesome mysteries, and the finale stand-alone made me so mad I returned it to the store for a refund and got rid of all the others. (One character made a lifestyle choice I strongly disagreed with, and it seemed completely out of the blue for the series. Plus it was just a badly written book.) So ... keep that in mind with her books. She's talented and makes great fantasy worlds, but her characters have some fairly physical relationships at times.

Oh, how could I forget Robin McKinley? She can WRITE! Spindle's End is my current favorite, though I love The Hero and the Crown too. I read the first Percy Jackson book and was surprised to enjoy it. Looks like a potentially fun series.

We received one as a gift. The chocolate came out a little funny following their recipe ... I would definitely recommend, whatever you get, try it out first! So you can tweak the recipe to your taste. We were all adults with kids underfoot, so it got a little messy, but it was fun. Just the recipe seemed a tad off.

I'm no expert on Latin, but it's my understanding that ecclesiastical (church) Latin was somewhat different from classical Latin as it was actually used way back when. So maybe that's the difference.

The Pern books definitely have some adult scenes, so you may want to hold off on those. Ditto many of Orson Scott Card's. Patricia Wrede is GREAT. So is Diana Wynne Jones (though she has a couple of adult titles which I think are okay, been a while since I read them, most of hers are YA or juvenile and pretty clean). Jane Yolen, though she can be hit or miss ... I read some great juvenile ones and then some creepy YA ones. She's a good writer though. Lloyd Alexander is good. Susan Fletcher is good. Susan Cooper is pretty good, Light vs. Dark, though not Christian (and I thought the end a bit depressing, but oh well). Hmm, most of those are fantasy. I'll have to think of who does juvenile/YA science fiction. Some of Isaac Asimov's stuff is okay, though some of his novels also include adult scenes, which I found annoying. Old obscure stuff can be fun, like the old Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series. If they like short stories, Bruce Coville has a collection of anthologies. The quality of the stories varies, of course, by author, but overall they weren't (mostly) objectionable. Some of them were great. He's got both fantasy and sci-fi anthologies, as well as a couple horror (juvenile scary, but they scared me, LOL). He is a good writer himself, for the elementary and mid-grade age set. He picks some classic stories and some contemporary ones. Redwall by Brian Jacques, and its sequels, are pretty popular. All I can think of off the top of my head. The rest coming to mind are more adult ones.

Good luck! Can you get the current pastor to mail you a copy of the Sunday bulletin so you can at least see how they format things? That would sure help you out. I've had pastors never visit. Sometimes it bugs me, sometimes not. I speak to our current pastor fairly regularly in church, so I don't feel slighted that we haven't had a home visit. And I work with his wife in my daughter's Sunday School class. As a Methodist myself, I wish you luck on moving day. Hugs! I don't know how you all coordinate this and show up all ready to go on Sunday, I really don't. An after-church potluck to welcome you would be a nice move on the part of the congregation. This is a two-way street ... they are supposed to welcome you, you aren't supposed to have to do all the work. This is their church, and you are being brought in. They should be enveloping you with love and welcome and lots of dinner invitations. :)

No help, just hugs. I had this done to me in middle school, against my will I might add, and it was miserable to have this enormous blood blister on my finger for everyone to stare at. And, fwiw, I still have scarring in that location. (I will say, it seems to have scared my body into not producing any more major warts, which were always popping up in childhood!) It seems like it took a while, and then it got bumped or something and started bleeding on its own, and we just treated it and it went away. I don't recall a time frame though (and that was, what, twenty years ago probably). Hugs to her! (And I wish I'd gotten out of PE for it!)

Cool price! Even if it's not exactly what you need, it'll be a fabulous supplement and you can't beat that rate! I know when they first dropped the price I bought several for all my friends. LOL. I hope you like it when it comes!

If you can find a copy of ROAR!, it's a great family guide to all the books, with some vocab and questions and devotionals and activities ... varies by book and chapter. It was on clearance at CBD for a while, and the website no longer exists, but of all the newer Narnia guides, it is the BEST out there. Before that Kathryn Lindskog's book was best. (These aren't necessarily teaching guides, more for family discussion and study. So I don't know how they compare to Logos and VP. But if you can still find Roar for $5 or so on clearance, it is WELL worth getting. And I am a nut about collecting Narnia books, so I've seen a lot.)

The Secret Seven has both British and American versions, for what that's worth. It does change the stories a bit. I'm trying to collect both versions in their complete sets. :) Famous Five is okay ... fun light reading, but yes a few dated attitudes. Haven't read the others yet but hope to some day. I didn't like the one I read of the "Adventure" series.

I learned some good parenting techniques from them. :) I loved Mama's solution to the housecleaning laziness. Can't wait to see the new doll, either way. I love the AG books .. the old ones ... the newer ones are not quite so appealing but still enjoyable.

We did an agar/yeast experiment set with another brand kit and had all sorts of trouble. It never did set, I finally chilled it in the fridge like jello. LOL. I did google some information on agar for future reference, and the warnings about disposing of those lovely home-grown bacteria were enough to scare me off of trying it in the future! But if we do, I'm going to order pre-agar'd petri dishes from some place. And yeah, fresh yeast helps. :) Nice to know it wasn't only this other company's product that had problems, because I had other issues with them too and was about to give up. But sounds like this may not have been their fault. Anyway, google for info before doing the experiment with the agar, and it'll help pin down the specifics for you.

Wow, how'd you find out so fast? I only just got an email from AG that there was going to even be a new doll. The books ought to be interesting. But they'll be competing with the All-Of-A-Kind Family series ... Jewish family, NYC, same era. Those are great books.

I used to get grounded from reading as a punishment. LOL. But other than that, no limits ... we were reasonably active in life so it was okay. Some people just get very deep into books when they read, and don't hear what's going on around them ... that's normal. Sounds like what your son does? It's not being obsessed with the book, just being well focused on it. My dh is like that with the computer ... I have to get his attention to speak with him when he's programming or gaming, and he knows he has to get my attention if I have a book in front of me. Just the way we are.

It's a pain to get adult names removed from minor's stuff once the minor reaches adulthood. We were given gifts of stock by a grandparent when we were children, and even into my adulthood the bank would occasionally insist that my mother and I both sign the dividend checks, even though it was deposit only and both our names were on my account. It was wacky. And to remove a person from a bank account, that person has to sign off on it ... you can't just remove a name from an account. I learned this when I got married and my mom and I switched my account from joint with her (for emergencies) to joint with my husband. So if the stepparent is on the account, then technically he has as much legal access to that money as the child does. And if the child doesn't know the money is there, the child can't really do much to protect it. Seems ripe for scamming to me. :( This is probably the sort of situation that a lawyer's advice would be needed on ... and the child probably does need to be informed the money is there. Is it possible the family could get a lawyer to send the child a nice legal letter with the information, so that one family member doesn't end up as the sole bad guy? Make it look like part of the will ... informed when turns of age. :) And then guide the child into moving it to a separate account, preferably with financial counseling.

We just used Bio I with my first grader and enjoyed it very much. I don't know about the upper levels though. There's a Noeo yahoo group that might be able to help you out on that.

Okay, so I'm a newbie ... what's Climbing Parnassus about? Why would I want to read it? And what's the Homer one about? always looking for good additions to my reading list ... right now my challenge list is Orthodoxy by Chesterton and he's making my head spin...