Ugh. I'm sorry you're dealing with this, on top of everything else. I pray you get good news about Wyatt tonight. My advice: Start stockpiling every penny you can, in case you need to move. Prepare as if you do have to move, so that you can move on your own terms instead of suddenly "the house is sold and the new owner wants you out." I know it's hard. I'm sorry :(

I'm so sorry :grouphug: Any possibility of buying the house?

Wait, what? Does Julie of the Wolves have a rape scene? My sixth grade teacher gave every child in her class a book for Christmas, and that's the one she gave me. I read it, I loved it, I don't recall anything that disturbing in it ... But then, I was the extremely sheltered child who didn't even realize until adulthood that the song "I'm Keeping My Baby" (by Madonna?) was talking about an actual baby, meaning TeA before marriage, not just a defiant "I'm going to keep dating my boyfriend whom I call baby as an endearment" ... Maybe I should reread Julie and see what I missed!

Oh no! I'm so sorry your son was exposed to that without preparation. Like you, I don't advocate censorship, but I do want to be informed about potentially age inappropriate topics and events. Heck, even for myself, I once read a book (as an adult) that had an unexpected rape scene, and the images haunted me for weeks.

I'm so sorry :(

We intend to re-evaluate every year, so it could be any number of reasons--or any combination of small, insignificant on their own reasons--that would cause us to send our daughter to school. One of the things I intend to keep an eye on this year is the social opportunities for my daughter. Up until just a few months ago, she was very quiet and shy and never wanted to leave the house, and although we did go to weekly playgroups, she always clung to me and didn't interact with the other kids. Earlier this summer, everything changed--now she's desperate for other kids to play with (which has been hard with us being in transition this summer, spending time in the U.S. in between overseas posts). If I'm unable to satisfy her social needs in our first year at our new post, we'll consider school for her second year. Another concern I have, that we'll evaluate every year, feels kind of selfish to me. I'm a severe introvert, and I need lots of quiet time alone. That doesn't always fit well with having a homeschooled young child. I think that if I can make it work until she can read independently, I'll be ok--I can send her off to read for an hour or two while I have my own time alone. In the meantime, I make her have quiet play time in her room for an hour or two every day. That worked out ok for me when we were in a house ... right now in a 1BR hotel suite, it's not working so well, but once we get settled in our new home, I'm hoping we'll be able to figure out something that will work. I'm not too worried about it for these early years, but another reason we would send our daughter to school would be if her academic needs were best able to be met there. I'm not confident in my abilities to teach higher level math or science. My husband has said he'll help with that when the time comes, but with his work schedule, I have my doubts. If we discover that our daughter's educational needs aren't being met well at home, she'll go out to school. If I became ill and therefore unable to homeschool, we'd send our daughter to school. If I died, my husband would have to send her to school. If he died, I may be able to stay home with her and keep homeschooling, since we'd have life insurance money and I would move to the area where our extended family lives (a low cost of living area), but I'm not certain--I'd have to run the numbers. I'm not sure what other circumstances would cause us to send her out to school, but as I said, we re-evaluate every year, so I could see us deciding to give her a trial year if she wanted to, or deciding to send her to school for 2 or 3 years if we were at a post with an exceptional school. One school at a former post offered a program each year where kids participated in a week-long service project--some local projects were options, but some were amazing international experiences that we'd never have access to. I could see enrolling her in school for a year when she's older in order to gain access to that type of opportunity. (Heck, I can see me begging for the chance to chaperon such a trip ...)

Why do we homeschool? We're just getting started, but we're doing this because of our highly mobile lifestyle. My husband is a Foreign Service Officer, so we move to a new country every 2-3 years. Some posts have excellent international schools. Others have terrible ones. Usually when we move, it's over the summer, so it wouldn't disrupt the school year, but if we stay on schedule at our next post, we'll be leaving right at the start of the academic year, and if we go to another overseas post, we'll be required to take home leave in between, so we wouldn't arrive at our new post until well after the start of the school year. We have little to no control over our moving schedule, and limited control over where we end up. Homeschooling gives us freedom in the scheduling and in where we go--we don't have to research the schools before we decide whether or not we'd be willing to go to any given location. Although I still prefer to move over the summer, if we arrive a few months later or earlier, it's less of a big deal if we're homeschooling. We also can take our vacations whenever it works best for my husband's job and for the itineraries we want (we love to take advantage of long, relatively inexpensive re-positioning cruises, which typically happen only once or twice a year). Are the schools in our area not up to par? If they were up to par, would we homeschool anyway? We don't know yet. We'll arrive at our new post next week. No matter what the quality of the schools available there, we'll be homeschooling for the reasons above. I haven't even researched the quality of the schools at our next post. I have no idea what's available--but I have found a couple of other families that homeschool! :hurray: Do we intend to continue through a particular grade? Our plan right now is to continue as long as we're in this international lifestyle. That said, we'll evaluate our options each year and choose the one that best fits. I suspect that if we decide that homeschooling K didn't work out and we want to make a change in a year for 1st, we can do that at post, as many students in our new host country reportedly don't go to K at all. If we homeschool for 1st, we may or may not even have the option of putting our daughter in an international school for 2nd--homeschooling is generally illegal (except under certain circumstances) in our new host country, and it wouldn't surprise me if the international schools don't want to accept a formerly homeschooled student. We anticipate returning to the U.S. for a couple of years after our next post, so we think we'll be back in the U.S. for our daughter's 3rd grade year, so we could put her in public school then. We're hoping not to--we couldn't afford private school in the U.S. (we could only do it overseas because my husband's employer would pay for it since local public schools usually aren't an option), and we'd rather not put her in public school. But if it looks at that point like the best option for us, we'll take it. But I'm hoping it will work out well for us to homeschool all the way through. Has this changed over the years? We're just getting started, so we haven't had an "over the years" yet :)

My family of origin always called it chocolate parfait. I think my husband's family of origin called it chocolate delight. (I voted Other.)

I am a Christian, and I believe that homosexual sex is sinful. I am conservative by almost any measure of conservatism, both in terms of my religious beliefs and in terms of my political beliefs. However, I believe--as others have stated--that the government is not the morality police, and I have no problem whatsoever with the government granting recognition and rights to homosexual individuals who are engaged in a committed relationship. (I do wish it had been done legislatively rather than judicially, but that's beside the point.) Many conservatives would say that my acceptance of legal marriage for homosexual couples is not conservative, as the OP implied. However, I justify my political position on same-sex marriage in terms of limited government and religious freedom--conservative buzz words if I ever heard one. I've thought through my conservative principles, and they've led me to part ways in some areas with those who would be labeled spokesmen for conservatism. That doesn't make me liberal, however, no matter what those conservative spokesmen would say.

I believe that my religious beliefs should not dictate secular law in areas where there is no demonstrable harm to others. So to the extent that the government recognizes marriage, my religious beliefs alone should not prevent government from recognizing gay marriage.

Dairy if kind of a grey area in paleo, with some saying it's fine and some saying it isn't. I have a little milk in my coffee ... cream is a splurge sometimes :). I have come to prefer the taste of honey over real or substitute sugar in my coffee, though. Full disclosure, I'm not full paleo ... not even sort of paleo this summer though I'll get back into it within a couple of months.

I'm so sorry, and I pray that everything is resolved quickly and that Wyatt will be able to remain with you.

I start feeling comfortable more quickly but for a place to truly feel like home, it often takes a full year. Finding friends is key, as is getting familiar with where everything is.

I'd go with practical. Things that you would like to replace with newer or higher quality items, but that you can't really justify spending the money on (towels, sheets, etc). Or, if she prefers to spend more money, practical luxuries like a high end food processor, Le Creuset specialty pans, etc. Or gift cards to be put toward something large that you're saving up for.

I voted on your blog--option A. That's the only one where the text doesn't fade into the background and is easily read. I would strongly consider changing the color of the bag from green to red, though, and possibly putting a medical symbol on it, especially if there is ever any situation in which your son is away from you, or in which you could leave the bag in the car and send someone for it if it were needed, and the more easily recognized "medical emergency" color scheme could make a difference. Red as a color also just tends to jump out at people more quickly, so if you're looking for it, red would be seen sooner. There's a reason medical kits and fire extinguishers tend to be red. I agree that the green and the cow are cuter, but I think I'd go for practicality. Even if you went with red for visibility, you could put the cow and your planned text on the sides, with or without a medical symbol beside them.

I do feel sad for Anna, and for the kids, because you know they'll have this thrown in their faces at some point.

I am a rather extreme introvert. I can see positives to this rule, but for me, it would be torturous--as the parent or as the child. When I was a child and attended school all day, even though I didn't have to be interacting with others but just sitting in class most of the time, it was exhausting. I would come home, go to my room, turn on the radio, and just lie on my bed. I would stay that way until dinner. I needed it after having been forced to be around people all day. I don't think it would have been much different if I'd been home all day but forced to be in a room with the rest of the family. Even now, as an adult, as the parent of only one child, one of my biggest struggles is that my child always wants to be with me and I need time alone.

At least it sounds like it's only being pitched and is by no means a done deal. They're probably grasping at anything and everything they can to keep that TV money coming in, as the article seemed to indicate.

No, you don't need it just for science. We used the whole P4/5 core but didn't follow the IG for science. My daughter loved those books, so we just read them. We ended up way ahead of schedule in them. We didn't do any of the optional activities, though. We just enjoyed reading and discussing the books. The science books in P3/4 also were good, and would be appropriate for a 4 or 5yo, too, if you wanted more science books to enjoy.

Please tell her sooner rather than later. I experienced menarche very early, before I'd been educated about it. I literally thought I was dying. It was very traumatic. Don't allow your daughter to experience that.

I had posted this thread asking for advice about a travel jewelry organizer, but I found one, so never mind :)

In my experience with overseas movers (and with movers in the States, actually), it would be better if it takes a long time. That means they're paying attention and packing things carefully. When they go quickly, that's when you arrive at your destination to find that the boxes had empty space instead of paper at the top, so things moved around and broke inside the boxes, or that things were squished into spaces too small for them and became permanently misshapen, or that heavy ceramic trash cans were placed on top of irreplaceable made-just-for-you coffee mugs ... I'm still a little bitter about that one. It sounds like the things you're already doing are great for helping to speed the process along. However, when the movers actually come, I'd focus on slowing them down enough for you and your family to supervise the process well enough to ensure that things are packed correctly. Also note that a lot of that two day estimate may be for things that will happen after your belongings are already packed up. In some overseas locations, a full afternoon can be spent building the lift vans on site and then loading your boxes into them; in other locations, the lift vans are made before they're brought to your home--and it varies whether anyone is at your home packing boxes, or if all the movers are away from your home working on the lift vans. In some locations, they can't get the lift vans to your home at all, so they take the boxes away and that last day of work is completely away from your home and not in your presence at all. I've had moves where the time estimate was dead on accurate, but only half of that time was spent inside my house packing things into boxes. There's nothing you can do to hurry along that part of the process. One more tip, though: the movers may have been instructed to wrap everything in paper. If that's the case, they will wrap every last pen in a sheet of paper, adding both time and shipment weight. I usually use up an entire box of gallon size Ziploc bags putting small things like that together, so that they wrap 30 bags instead of 3000 pens, post it notepads, hair clips, combs, forks, random wires and cords, etc.

I was raised in a nominally Christian home--we attended church, but mostly because it was the cultural thing to do. Some very hurtful hypocrisy drove me away from the church for a while, and during that time my entire family stopped attending. All but one of us came back, individually, to different churches within the same denomination, and I think as we came back, it was for more than social, cultural reasons--we'd each come to a real faith and came to the church as an expression of faith. Most of my family shares a very similar belief system. My husband and I are in the process of changing. We're definitely Christians. We definitely believe the Bible and in salvation by grace through Jesus Christ. However, our time in interdenominational, international churches has opened our eyes to the way that our religious upbringing conflated patriotism and Christianity, and conflated political conservatism with Christianity, and promoted a rather self-focused form of "worship." Some of that is just coming up now, as we've spent the summer in the US and are seeing our familiar worship services through new eyes. I'm not sure in which denomination we'll eventually land. We're definitely Christian, and we're definitely politically conservative, but the two are no longer synonymous in our minds, and we prefer a worship style where we're actually worshiping God and seeking to join our lives to *His* story, not just acknowledging the awesome stuff He does in *our* lives. I'm not sure if I explained that last bit well, but it's the best I have for now.

I suggest a different style of Birkenstocks. I can't deal with anything between my toes, so I wear one of the styles that are just two straps. I particularly like the soft sole version--they're much more comfortable while being broken in than the hard sole version is.

The biggest problem extroverts seem to have with my introversion is that they don't want me to acknowledge it. On those rare occasions when I've felt the need to explain that I need to stay home or whatever because I've been socializing too much lately and I'm burned out and just need some alone time, they take my explanation as an apology and lecture me about how I need to accept who I am and not feel guilty. Um, hello, that's what I'm doing by telling you I need down time?