Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any groups for kids that age. We homeschooled our daughter for our first year here, but then realized that she was coming out of her social shell and wanted friends--which we'd been unable to provide exactly because we couldn't find any English-language groups or classes for her to join, and the other English-speaking kids we knew were busy with school all day and often traveled or attended school-related events on the weekends. After a very lonely year, we put our daughter in school so she could spend time with other kids every day. We did make contact with other homeschoolers here, but their schedules were full enough that we weren't able to spend much time with them, either. We also made some friends through church, but again, the kids are just so busy ...

It sounds like, in your situation, the bathroom is a functionality issue and the kitchen is a form issue (with some functionality implications, in that you don't want to invite people over). I'd pick function over form every time--do the bathroom first. I've lived in a bunch of houses that I haven't gotten to choose, and there's always something I don't like, something a tad embarrassing, sometimes something bad enough that if I had the choice, I'd rip it out and fix it ASAP. People understand. If you feel the need to comment or apologize for your kitchen: "Welcome to our retro kitchen! We want to update it, but it works fine and there were some other things we wanted to renovate first. In the meantime, enjoy your flashback to the 70s!"

:hurray: :hurray: :hurray: :iagree: :hurray: :hurray: :hurray:

ELTL: English Lessons Through Literature AAR/AAS: All About Reading/All About Spelling OPGTR: Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading TOG: Tapestry of Grace ETC: Explode the Code RLTL: Reading Lessons Through Literature It takes a while, but eventually they all start to make sense!

OP, I'm glad you're getting some help. I wish I knew you in real life and was close enough ... You could talk to me about it.

I love my planner from Plum Paper Products (an Etsy shop). It's customizable in most respects: page layout, how many months, which month to start with, optional sections, labels of your choice (or no labels) on the weekly pages.

If I lived near you, I'd bring you meals. If I knew you in real life--enough to know your contact information and your preferences--I'd be thinking about some other way to help you, possibly by hiring a cleaning service or mother's helper who was local to you. What you went through is a real, big deal. Don't be afraid to ask for whatever form of help you need. A lack of physical injuries does not mean that you don't need time and space to heal. If you have a good church family, they will understand that.

I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Thank you for helping others--it can be hard to hold it together in the moment and help rather than following the biological imperative to seek safety for yourself first, but you will always be glad that you were able to do that. I think that none of us know you well enough to advise you about whether or not to send your daughter to school right now. From what you've described, it sounds like she'll be fine either way. It comes down to what you need. You seem to believe that you need time alone to work through what has happened. I believe that's what I would need in a similar situation ... but then I remember another event in my life, nowhere near as traumatic as what you've gone through, but still traumatic, and I *did* need time alone to process. But I also desperately needed to be responsible for my daughter (then an infant, and my husband wasn't able to be with us at that time). Her need of me is what kept me from shutting down and disengaging from the world completely. But I did still need a lot of time alone, and I was able to have that because I was staying with my mother, who cared for my daughter when I couldn't. School may serve a similar purpose for you--caring for your daughter when you can't, giving you time to work toward your own psychological healing. Because your kids will be home in the evenings, you won't be able to completely retreat from the world and shut down. It may give you the best possible combination right now. And you know they'll be home with you all summer, so your goal is to work toward being able to manage that. On the other hand, if your personality is such that long periods of time alone will not help you, but will drive you deeper into depression or anxiety, then you should keep her home. You, your spouse, and your therapist are the ones in the best position to decide what will help you most. Either way, it is not selfish to seek what you need to get through this crisis. Even if it turns out that you send your daughter to school and it wasn't ideal for her, it's far more important for her (and your other kids) to have a healthy mother than to avoid whatever negatives come from sending her to school near the end of the school year.

I know because I'm still on the SL forums, though not as active there as I am here (and I'm not all that active here). The catalog has been mailed, I believe; some may have already received theirs. I'm not sure if the online catalog is available yet or not. The new products will be available for order on 1 April. More general comments, not specifically in response to Slache: We used Sonlight for preschool (P3/4) and preK (P4/5). Even at those young ages, I tweaked. And I did not at all like the K LA that we added to P4/5. And I used it at the younger ages rather than the older, so I felt that the books were a little too advanced for my child, but--especially after reading TWTM--I didn't want to delay Core A (intro to world cultures) until 1st and not start history until 2nd, and I didn't want to do their cycle--world cultures, 1-2 years of world history, 1-2 years of American history, repeat. I didn't get the impression that their materials would help me discuss the books with my daughter as she got older, and I need help with that. And as conservative a Christian as I am, I still find a good bit of their marketing statements and some of their books (some missionary ones) to be too fundamentalist for me. I was uncertain about supporting them financially for those reasons. And then there was a big kerfluffle when they attached specific grades to the cores. I had started considering slowing down our progression through the cores, but I realized that if I did that, then I'd end up teaching my daughter with products that were labeled a grade or two below where I considered her to be, and if she picked up on that, or if my husband's employer--who pays for our homeschool expenses--picked up on that, it would be trouble. And then I realized that these kerfluffles tend to happen regularly with Sonlight, and I decided that I couldn't trust them enough to plan for more than a year or two in advance, and I'm a serious long term planner--I'm fine with changing the plan from year to year, but I want to be able to tweak a plan, not be forced to create a new one because my product supplier radically changed something. So I switched to Tapestry of Grace, and I really like it (so far, at least, one year in). I do look at the Sonlight website and book lists, and I've pulled several of their books to add to our studies, or to have available for fun literature. I'll get the catalog this year--I really want to see these book descriptions I've been hearing about for years. Removing LA from the core makes me more likely to go back to SL at some point, but even then, it isn't that likely, because my overall concerns about the company haven't changed and because I like TOG, and it's easy enough to pick up additional books from the SL list if I want to. I think bittersweet is a good word to describe how I feel about Sonlight. They were my entry into homeschooling. Having their "perfectly laid out" plans, and still feeling the need to tweak them, taught me a lot about how I use curriculum--specifically, that although I like something that has a plan, it needs to be not so planned that it messes everything up when I tweak it! They gave me the confidence to branch out into something that fits me better, but that I would have found overwhelming had I started with it. But I still also have a little bit of the ick factor at some aspects of the company--even though I know Christians who are less conservative than I am who love Sonlight, and I still want to love them. I just ... don't.

I'd go. Then again, I live in Athens, Greece, and honestly in a list containing the names Paris and Brussels, Athens kind of fits right in, if you know what I mean. So do some other cities that my husband has traveled to recently for work, and cities where friends live, and cities where we intend to visit over the course of the next couple of years. We won't let the terrorists stop us from living our lives, and since we can't predict where they'll strike next, it's not like we could travel at all (or even stay in the city where we live) and be certain we won't be there at the worst possible moment. So we take reasonable precautions, and we live our lives. Be very aware of your surroundings when you travel. Have a large amount of cash easily accessible, possibly even on your person (though be careful not to show that it's there, and consider using a purse/bag/camera bag with discreet security features, like those found in Safepac bags). Register your trip with STEP; it won't help in the early moments of a crisis, but it'll at least let the embassy know to find you and check that you're ok, and it means that they'll notify you of any security alerts that come up. Pay attention to travel warnings about specific places--I tend to ignore the ones that cover entire continents, as that's just too general to be useful. Take reasonable precautions, and enjoy your trip!

I've only been to the UK once. We spent 5 or 6 days in London and didn't get to see everything we wanted, because it's just such a wonderful place to visit and so much to see, but we thoroughly enjoyed everything we did see and do, especially the Tower of London and the Churchill War Rooms. I highly recommend the hop on hop off bus--the company we used included a river cruise that could get you to Greenwich, though we only took it from Big Ben to the Tower of London. I'm very familiar with the jet lag of transatlantic travel, though, and I guarantee you--you do NOT want to get there in the morning after a redeye flight and drive a long way in an unfamiliar car on unfamiliar roads on what will feel like the wrong side of the road. I know it's the trip of a lifetime, but you won't enjoy it if you spend the entire time exhausted. Build in some down time or you'll regret all the hours you spent pushing yourself to go, go, go, and not enjoying any of it because all you wanted to do at the time was rest but you kept pushing because you just had to get it all in. That was the way my father structured our childhood vacations, and I rarely enjoyed any of it except the evenings at the pool in the hotel. As an adult, my husband and I now are careful to structure our leisure trips as a combination of what we call expeditions (go, go, go, see it all!) and vacations (relax around the pool, sleep late, enjoy leisurely meals at nice restaurants). Trips that are all vacation are boring. Trips that are all expedition are exhausting--we may see it all, but we don't absorb any of it; we end up with cool pictures and few memories. You're planning a major expedition, and if you're anything like me, you'll regret not building in some vacation. For 10 days, I'd pick one home base, maybe 2, and do what I could do from there--mostly staying in the city where I was staying, with a day trip or two for something really special. That's what we did with London--most days in the city, with one day trip to Oxford and one half day trip to the Harry Potter studio.

Yes, this. You would "stand to your feet" for a dignitary, a bride walking down the aisle, or to show respect for the reading of God's Word in a very conservative church. You would "stand to your feet" if you were sitting and someone said something that you felt compelled, on principle, to stand up against: for example, something like, "After Bob heard Joe make the awfully racist comment, Bob slowly stood to his feet, looked Joe in the eye, and said ..." You would not "stand to your feet" because you needed to get up and go somewhere, for example. Edited to add: This was common usage where I grew up in the Southeast. I don't recall if I heard it in any of the many other places I've lived.

I skipped TOG Primer and went straight to TOG year 1 with my 5yo K daughter. We only did the history readings and some of the literature ones, and I did substitute a few history titles because the recommended ones were a bit advanced for her. Overall I've enjoyed TOG year 1. I'm very excited about year 2--I looked at all the history books in the list for it, and they look to be on her level and interesting. We'll probably hold off on the read aloud books until our next cycle again. We're also using LOE Foundations and I love it. It's a wonderfully logical and incremental approach to reading and handwriting that really works well. We're almost done with B and plan to continue to C in the summer, though I think we're at the point of dropping the pace to 1/2 lesson/day just because it takes a while.

OP: I'm so sorry. It's hard to lose friendships, no matter which one of you is moving. As for the rest, I'm with the expat crowd. I don't have a best friend anymore; I haven't since I moved away from my hometown my junior year in high school. I have people with whom I am friendly in whatever location I'm in at the time. I move every 2-3 years, and many of the people I meet also move that often. Those who don't move that often are not always willing to open their hearts to those of us whom they know will move on a schedule. It's self-preservation on their part, and it's totally understandable. It's hard all around and is one of the factors that has me occasionally re-evaluating whether or not this lifestyle is a good one for my family.

LOE Foundations teaches that there are two primary reasons for a final silent "e": (1) to make a vowel say its long sound and (2) because English words don't end in V, U, ... and some other letters that I forgot but my 5yo could tell you :p So, in the word "save," the final silent "e" serves both purposes. In the word "have," it doesn't make the "a" say its long sound, but it's still needed so that the word doesn't end in "v."

Americans in Cambodia are part of the rich, favored class. By and large, our skin is lighter and our wallets are heavier--and both are considered signs of being blessed in this life due to good behavior in previous ones. However, that knowledge of heavier-on-average wallets also means that we may be targeted more for crimes, for everything from pickpocketing to home invasions to violent assault-with-the-intent-to-rob. Everyone--white or not--is at risk for being pulled over by a police officer on trumped up charges and expected to bribe your way out of it, though white people may have been expected to pay more (I never drove myself but always used a tuk tuk, so I didn't encounter this myself). I definitely stood out like a sore thumb and felt like my stuff was in more danger because of it (pickpockets, snatch'n'runs, that type of thing) but never felt like I was physically more in danger because of it.

Medical care in Cambodia is indeed very poor. I've heard horror stories of being turned away from hospitals after accidents, because that particular hospital doesn't treat that particular kind of injury, of the hospital they were told to go to being closed, etc. Emergency or trauma care in Cambodia is severely lacking. Our medical evacuation point was Singapore--that's where the embassy would have sent us if we needed care that wasn't available in Cambodia. The more common destination for non-embassy expats was Bangkok. And of course if the injury/illness is acute and too severe for you to make it there ... well, you can guess the outcome. I shed many tears for a young Cambodian boy with an illness that was treatable, but not with the equipment available in Cambodia--by the time the NGO was able to raise the funds and get the visas for him to fly, he was too sick to fly; a hospital in Vietnam eventually agreed to accept him, but either they weren't well-equipped/staffed enough or it was too late. An expat with med evac insurance would have been able to get out sooner, but with some situations, even we wouldn't have been able to get to good care quickly enough. It's a risk, for sure, but one with which different people have different comfort levels. Even with all the resources of the American Embassy behind me, I seriously considered (but eventually rejected) seeking out training more thorough than your standard first aid training--they have training designed for use in the wilderness, where the idea is to be able to stabilize someone after a traumatic injury for hours, for a long hike out, or for a long time for emergency personnel to reach their remote location. I decided it wasn't necessary for us, because we spent our time in the major population areas and do have the best med evac insurance on the planet, but if we'd been there independently or had spent a lot of time in the provinces, you better believe I would have done it. I very much respected my friends' decisions to live there and to travel to remote areas without advanced first aid training.

I used to live in Cambodia, as the wife of a US diplomat. I had all sorts of luxuries that my non-embassy friends didn't have, and it was still a difficult adjustment (and it wasn't my first time living outside the U.S., either--though that may have contributed to why it was hard, due to some difficulties at the prior post). I'm not familiar with your history, so forgive me if you've already provided a lot of background information in other posts, but ... Where in Cambodia would you live? Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, and Battambang all are very different from each other, and the more rural areas are far different still. Did you visit the area where you'd live? How long were you there? Visiting, even for a relatively long term visit, is so very different from living there. Do you have contacts who already live there--friends or colleagues whom you visited before, perhaps? If so, I suggest asking them a lot of questions about the difficult parts of living there, the parts they may have glossed over or shielded you from when you visited. If you don't have friends there, I could ask mine if they'd be willing to talk with you--though they all live/lived (some have repatriated) in Phnom Penh. I'm not sure what salaries are like for expats in Cambodia, but I would expect that if you're hired locally, they'll be very low. You can live on not much money there, but only if you're willing to live in questionable housing and eat like the locals (good food, don't get me wrong, but I'd get tired of rice after a while.) Imported goods are available, but are expensive. Electricity costs a fortune; most of my friends only had air conditioning in one or two rooms. Power went out frequently. My friends drank the tap water and accepted the risks--and regular medications for parasites--but I was forbidden by the embassy from drinking it; we were provided with distillers in our homes. Crime rates are very, very high. On the flip side, you can hire household help for prices that will make you feel guilty for paying them too little, but that will make them do a spontaneous happy dance in your kitchen (as my housekeeper did, no joke, although I paid the "embassy premium," meaning I paid more for someone who'd passed a background check, spoke fluent English, and had experience with Western perceptions of good housekeeping--it's simple truth, not a disparagement, to say that standards are different, and some things we consider perfectly acceptable are taboo to them, and vice versa). My main piece of advice before moving to another country: research, research, research. Research everything that occurs to you to research, everything that's suggested to you to research, follow all the rabbit trails that come up in the course of the research. Read blogs from people who live there, talk to people who live there if you can, start studying the language before you arrive, if possible; Khmer isn't the most difficult language in the region, but it's hard enough. Look into employment opportunities before you arrive. Either research schools or figure out how much it would cost to ship homeschooling supplies, or figure out how you're going to get them there without shipping them. And that's not even accounting for the non-school difficulties your kids most likely will have in adjusting. There was a viral blog post a while back, called "I Am a Triangle." Read it, if you haven't already. Read The Culture Blend. If you'd be going as a missionary (or for social justice activism when not working), read A Life Overseas. Read everything you can get your hands on about being an expat, and more specifically, about being an expat in a country that is less developed than your home country. Moving overseas is a wholly different thing than moving within a country. Good luck with whatever you decide.

I know a woman named Ann Renee. It flows off the tongue easily. Anne Renee would work, too, but that has an awful lot of Es in close proximity to each other. I also like the suggestions above for Ann Elise (or Anne Elise ... or Annelise with no middle name?) Do you intend to use the middle name with the first as a double name, or will the child be called Ann/Anne alone? If she's called only by her first name, I prefer Anne because it's prettier and looks more complete somehow. I think no matter how it's spelled, people will either spell it however they think is normal (and be wrong 50% of the time), or they'll write "Ann," then look up and say "is there an E?" If she's called by first and middle names, then I think the choice of middle name matters more, and I would be more ok with spelling it "Ann."

I'm not committed to opposing single-sex competitions, but I wonder if they are counterproductive. Even as a teenager, when offered the opportunity to compete intellectually against only girls or against girls and boys, I was more interested in competing against both. I was insulted at the offer to limit my competition to girls only, because my logic told me that a wider pool of competitors was more likely to get good ones than any pool that was limited by irrelevant factors--not that the boys necessarily were smarter or better at the tast than the girls, but that most likely, _some_ of them were smarter or better at the task than _many_ of the girls, just as _some_ of the girls were smarter/better at the task than _many_ of the boys. I wanted to compete against the best, and limiting it to girls only meant that I was being prevented from finding out if I could win against all the boys. Then again, I didn't lack for confidence in my intelligence or intellectual abilities, either, and I routinely competed against and beat boys in academic competitions.

I'm also not a huge fan of the name--I don't like that things marketed to girls tend to focus on appearance. It's not a deal breaker for me, though. I'm hesitant about a girls-only STEM competition, in any case, as it seems to imply that the girls can't compete with the boys and need their own special competition in order to have a chance at winning. To have an event marketed as being for girls then be won by a boy really is counterproductive--better either to market it as getting "kids" interested in STEM or to leave it as girls-only. My biggest hangup about this competition, though, is that from the brief descriptions they gave of the winning and runner-up ideas, only two of them seemed to fit the criteria of the competition, assuming the instructions really were to design new technology specifically for the bedroom, as the news article suggested. The winner's idea could be used in a bedroom but makes more sense in a living/play/game room. The Fridge BUDI idea would make a much more useful kitchen gadget than bedroom gadget. The Bubble Board is clearly meant to be used in a bathroom (which is borderline, since an en suite bath could be considered part of the bedroom). The Smart Curtains and Sleep Monitor were the only ideas that were specific to the bedroom. I would think the panel would choose ideas that met the criteria of the competition. The winning idea definitely has merit, but it's not a bedroom item, so it should have been eliminated from consideration before it got to the voting stage.

I usually score as an INTJ, but the N and T hover very close to the line and cross over with disturbing frequency--I blame that for my extreme indecision, as I can never seem to decide whether to go with my gut or my brain, to prioritize relationship or logic ... it's hard being a J when you're ambivalent on two of the other factors! In any case, I could see myself in pretty much all of the IXXJ descriptions. ISTJ: I tend to be consistent; I handle details well; I can be rigid; I do lose sight of the big picture; I am most definitely a perfectionist; and although I did break out of school-in-a-box, it was not without a great deal of resistance ... though I guess you'd never know that since I did it before my daughter was 5 years old. ISFJ: I like to be useful; I despise conflict (although you'd be surprised how willing I am to go with it if it's really important); I care deeply; I am extremely loyal; I am plagued by self-doubt (even as I am totally convinced that no one else does it quite right either, and if it's going to be not-quite-right, it's going to be my version of it); even when I moved away from boxed curriculum, I stuck with relatively complete subject curricula. INFJ: I try to be a good mentor-guide for my daughter, so much so that burned out is just regular life for me; I am overwhelmed by the details until I can figure out the perfect organizational system, which usually involves a spreadsheet, and then I handle them just fine; I love planned curricula ... though I love them even more once I've tweaked them to fit our needs; I'm actually really bad at relationship-building, but I do have an intuitive sense of what my daughter needs that usually proves to be accurate; there is again that conflict avoidance, perfectionism, and burnout; and I do prefer a trusted curriculum that I can adapt, whether it's structured or loose to begin with. INTJ: I have zero tolerance for stupidity; I don't view myself as "unconventional," yet I somehow always end up doing my own thing anyway, which is rarely what everyone around me is doing; I LOVE creating a system and a plan for homeschooling, and I do follow through, but I'd actually prefer to hire a private tutor to do the follow through; I'm good at problem-solving; I seem pretty confident if you hear my intellectual assessment of my abilities--yet I never actually *feel* the confidence that my brain tells me I should feel; a goal is to foster independence in my child who seems to be resisting independence with everything she has in her; I cannot handle noise and hubbub; I totally obsess; I'm not good at showing affection; I notice emotional and physical cues when I'm paying attention but I'm often not paying attention. I do like scripted curriculum, but only if I can tweak the script. I research curriculum like mad and prefer to use curriculum that I can tell has been well-researched and is logical. We have very few outside commitments. STEM is very important, and if I had to choose that or the humanities, I'd choose STEM, but I really want it all.

I am a combination of introverted and highly sensitive. (There <ahem> may also be some anxiety in there, but that hasn't been explored and probably won't be, due to anxiety about how diagnosis could affect other important areas of my life.) As a child, I was always torn among my competing impulses ... be around the group because I was always anxious that I was missing out on friendships and fun stuff and I absolutely was sensitive to the feeling of rejection (even if I was the one rejecting the group), or be alone because I was just so overwhelmed and exhausted from being around people all day long. I can see an immature me trying to get the best of both worlds by insisting on being with perfectly quiet others (though after a full day at school, I was so peopled out that no one had to suggest that I go be alone in my room). There is a balance to be struck there, and it isn't always easy to find. It may be that the combination of preschool and gymnastics/co-op is simply too much for her--maybe one or the other would be fine, but both is just too much. For example, I can handle social interaction 2-3 times a week and still be functional for my family. If I have to do more than that, and back when I had to deal with people all the time at school or in a job, there is simply nothing left and I neglect my family because I simply cannot deal with another person until I've had hours of alone time. There may be activities that I love, but if I've already had my 2-3 social events that week, I'm done--I don't want to go to that activity that I love. (Yes, I realize how blessed I am to be able to stay home with my daughter--and send her to her room for quiet time for a couple hours a day--rather than having to go to work around people all day every day.) All that to say--explore the possibilities, definitely. But don't discount your initial assumption of extreme introversion.

Praying for you and the baby!

We save 15% of our income for retirement. We tithe 10%. We don't do debt. We have an emergency fund. Everything else, we budget--we cover the necessities (food, transportation, insurance) first, and we save for long term, non-retirement goals (our daughter's college, a house once we're done with our current highly mobile lifestyle). Whatever is left, we spend guilt-free. We enjoy Disney cruises--they're expensive, but we enjoy them guilt free because we know we've saved what we needed to save for our other goals, and we've saved what we've needed to pay for the cruise without debt. We're very blessed in that we're currently in a situation where we don't have to cover some large expenses that normally we'd have to cover (our housing is provided by my husband's employer, for example, so we pay "rent" to our house fund instead). Because of that, we're able to save substantially for retirement and other long term goals while also indulging our cruise habit. We know that in a few years, our situation will change, money will get a lot tighter, and we won't be going on so many vacations. We're prepared for that and enjoying these years of plenty.