I am very much pro-gun ownership and am reflexively against gun control (I can be convinced sometimes, but my default position is "no"). I have not read the entire bill, but I'm pretty sure I could get behind the idea of it, as presented in the linked article. I would not so much be in favor of a national registry. I am one of the former government employees whose information was almost certainly compromised, and my former job was in collecting (and safeguarding while in my possession) sensitive personal information. Yeah, I don't trust the government with that. I also am not convinced that such a registry would be needed if the health privacy laws were relaxed enough for families to be filled in on the pertinent details. Families would know whether the individual owned a gun and most would at least attempt to take proper steps to remove the gun from an unsafe individual. The vast majority of gun-owning relatives would keep their own guns away from the individual if they were told by medical personnel that the individual posed a threat to self or society. I only became aware of this proposed law by reading the article linked in this thread, so my opinions are still very much in the formative phase.

I don't think you're overreacting at all. There are certain topics that are best introduced by parents when they think their kids are ready to hear about them, not by some unthinking director who just blathers on with no brain-mouth filter. I think my daughter would be very confused and upset at the idea of someone hurting himself on purpose ... and I have one young relative who is curious about everything and may be tempted to try it once just to see what it's like or if he's "brave" enough to do it! For very different reasons, I would not want either of them exposed to that idea just yet. I would frame it, not as "these topics are inappropriate for young kids," but as "we should let parents decide when and how to introduce these topics to their young kids." I think you have a good idea as to how to begin the conversation, figuring out what age group she's most used to and then pointing out that things are very different with these younger ones.

This spam has been showing up on the Sonlight forums, too, ever since they went free. It was pages and pages at first, and then nothing for a few days, and then pages again. They finally stopped accepting new registrations during non-business hours, presumably in an attempt to catch and ban these spammers early. I wish they hadn't found the WTM boards. Hopefully the moderators will be able to block them and prevent the spammers from re-registering.

We've only had it for a month, but we bought the Replogle Atlantis 12-in tabletop globe: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000945KW?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00 (sorry, I don't know how to put a link on my iPad, but copy and paste should work ...) We love it. It has political markings, textured terrain (you can feel the mountains), and realistic coloring. It seems very sturdy. My daughter loves finding different places on it. I think we're going to enjoy this for years.

My husband and I attended an international, interdenominational church for three years during one of our overseas assignments. It was common for people to take long vacations to their home country over the summer. When our (male) pastor was away for two months, we had a series of guest speakers. They were not announced ahead of time. One of the guest speakers was a woman, one who was on staff as the children's pastor. We do not believe that it is appropriate to have a female preacher in a position of spiritual authority over men. However, we did agree with--and love--our church's policy of agreement on the essentials and liberty in the non-essentials, and we do not believe it is sinful for a man to listen to a woman's opinion on spiritual matters, even if that opinion is being delivered from the pulpit. We stayed for her sermon. If it had become a regular event, we would probably have left that church, but we tolerated it as the exception to the norm. So, yes, it is very possible for people who do not believe in female leadership in church to find themselves unexpectedly listening to a female preacher.

I feel like a horrible mom even saying this, but ... weekends are "Daddy time" for my daughter. Either we do things as a family, or she does things with Daddy while I decompress. I'm very introverted and I'm exhausted after a whole week of no alone time. It isn't that way ALL weekend necessarily, but it is for a significant chunk of it.

I think the real issue is that you do have an agreement with your parents, filed or not. If they don't want to own the house, then it's disadvantaging them to try to back out. You should treat this like a legal contract that you want out of and go to the other party to negotiate if and how that will be possible. It may well hurt your parents' feelings or otherwise cause stress on your relationship with them, which are factors for you to consider as you decide whether it's worth it to you to try to back out of the deal to which you agreed.

I am a complementarian who is not comfortable with female leadership within the church, and I believe this situation was handled inappropriately by your church leadership. I can understand the elders and pastor coming back with a statement that they've investigated the issue and believe that male-only leadership is appropriate for your church's situation even though they don't believe that's a universal principle--they could be deferring to the sensibilities of those leaders or laypersons within the church who are uncomfortable with female leadership.They could be thinking that those who are in favor of female leadership can find that unofficially, whereas those who are not in favor can't escape it if they have official female leaders. (Your call whether or not that's acceptable to you; I'm merely offering a possibility of where their thinking is on this issue.) It's the rest of the response that is not ok. It was not ok for the response to include a statement that theological issues should not be brought up as motions in congregational meetings. Stating that in the response to your motion clearly makes it a statement that your motion was inappropriate, and by the rules of your congregation and denomination (at least the way you've presented them), that isn't the case. They chastised you for making a motion in a congregational meeting. That's much more authoritarian than I'd be comfortable with, and I'm fairly comfortable with strong authority. The sermons from Proverbs--were they a stand-alone series or things that came up as part of an ongoing series? If your pastor is going through Proverbs anyway, and they came up, it's unfortunate timing and you're being oversensitive. If they're a stand alone series that hasn't been planned before this happened, or if they otherwise came out of order, and there's no external stimulus for causing them (like Mother's and Father's Day would have been, for example), then you're not being oversensitive. It is possible that the pastor wasn't thinking of you in particular but that the sermons came about just because the topic was on his mind, but pastors should be wise enough to think about appearances as well--pastors should not give the appearance of targeting a particular church member from the pulpit, or if they really feel that they need to, they should acknowledge it and explain why. They instead should follow the biblical instructions for church discipline (first go to the person alone, then with someone else, then publicly in front of the church if other options haven't brought about repentance). The recommendation to watch War Room--has he recommended any of the prior Kendricks movies? If he recommended the others, this this is par for the course and probably not directed at you. If he did not, then again, even if he's not consciously directing it at you, it may well have been inspired by you and he should be aware enough to avoid the appearance of targeting a church member even if he's not consciously and deliberately targeting you. It certainly appears as if you're being targeted. It may or may not be something of which the pastor or the elders are aware or doing on purpose. If you're friends with the pastor, I'd talk to him directly. Lay out the series of events and tell him that it meets the standard of "would appear to an uninvolved, reasonable observer" that these events are targeting you and that it's making you feel unwelcome in the church. See what he says. His response would heavily influence my decision about whether to leave the church or stay. I'd also be uncomfortable with the hypocrisy that these events represent. If your church's official statement of beliefs/policy/whatever you call it is tolerance on the peripherals, and the role of women is considered a peripheral, then your pastor, with the collusion of the elders, is going against your church's official beliefs. That's very much not ok and is something that should be brought up with the pastor.

This is how all of my Foreign Service moves are. However, I don't sit around and relax. I supervise, actively, to ensure they're packing things well. I'm positive I missed something on the last one, with our things that are being delivered tomorrow, because I caught it on the second day of the move ... but they'd packed all our breakables on the first day. I'm dreading tomorrow because I believe that some irreplaceable items will arrive broken beyond repair. Don't relax. Watch the packers and speak up if they're not packing something well.

Asking your daughter to put her life on hold for a year--or to sacrifice her senior year in high school in order to look after her kid sister--would be a pretty big deal, unless it's something she has indicated she wants to do anyway. Would I ever do it? Maybe. If it were a dire situation, a family emergency, and that were the absolute only solution I saw, I'd consider it. To ask because it would "help make my youngest's homeschooling schedule much smoother" or "be convenient for the family" ... no way. That's way too big of an ask for convenience or a smoother schedule. I agree that you should start looking at ways to manage on less money or at ways to earn money in a way that allows a parent to be home with your daughter: sell or refinance the house, get a part time job that you can work from home or while your wife is home. If her income is less than yours and she'd be a good fit as a homeschool teacher, start looking at having her quit her job while you bite the bullet and keep doing a job you hate for the sake of your family, at least until you can find something else. But I wouldn't ask my almost-adult daughter to sacrifice a year of her life unless it was my last chance of saving my family from a catastrophe. Just as importantly, I wouldn't quit my job without a realistic plan in place to replace that income or to live without it. Financial stress is the number one marriage killer in the United States from what I understand, and that kind of stress would not help your youngest's education. Even if you have to keep working and find some non-academic daycare solution (maybe with a stay-at-home parent of littles), you can homeschool at her age around a work schedule. Not without sacrifice and creativity, but you can do it if it comes to it. Edited to say: It looks like you were posting at the same time I was. I didn't mean to beat a dead horse :)

Check with your local hospital system. In a smaller city I used to live in, there were counselors attached to the hospital system who used a sliding pay scale. They were pastoral counselors, but they worked with clients of all and no faith, and they didn't insert Christianity into the sessions unless the patient was a Christian who wanted them to.

Not liking your kids' medical difficulties, but it is good that you're already aware of how "average" doesn't mean "everyone." When I was studying psychology, that was one of the concepts that our professors harped on constantly, and it took most of us a while to really understand what they were saying. Studies never prove how any given person not in the study will react to any given situation--they can only tell you what's likely to happen most often if you put a lot of people in a given situation. Luckily, though, for home educating your kids, you don't need a nice big study that would be worthy of peer review. We're all about the case studies around here ;)

I don't believe most of us consult any peer reviewed research. Peer reviewed research is WONDERFUL for determining what happens on average--if you give this medicine to a large group of people with that disease, X percentage of them are likely to get better; if you use this teaching method for this or that subject, X percentage of students are likely to do well. The problem is that as homeschoolers, we aren't interested in what happens on average. The one person who is perfectly average doesn't exist. Averages tell you what works well overall in groups. We're not interested in groups. We're interested in what works well with a specific individual--our child. Peer reviewed research can't tell you that. By all means, if you want to look at educational research, go for it. Like Ellie, I'm not sure that peer reviewed research into homeschool curricula exists, but there's certainly plenty of books about educational philosophies and methods. How you teach your children, and which curriculum you use (or whether you create your own), will depend on your goals, your strengths, your weaknesses, your personality, your child's strengths, your child's weaknesses, your child's personality ... all sorts of individual factors. Even if there is peer reviewed research on curricula, peer reviewed research has not been conducted on your specific child as a student or on you as a teacher--and that's what really matters. Good luck as you get started!

We used Sonlight for preschool and preK. Now in kindergarten, we're using a combo ... We decided to get started on history, so we're using TOG year 1 for history and Bible, with some geography since my daughter loves to look at the globe. Sometimes if I'm not certain about TOG's history books, I look at the supplemental reading in the SOTW activity guide and use one of them instead. For literature, I look at TOG's suggestions but they're often too advanced. I'm using some literature from TOG, a lot from Sonlight's Core A, and a few from other age appropriate booklists. We're only three weeks in, but it's going well so far. We do have SOTW, and I read the first chapter to my daughter since TOG didn't cover how we do history or archaeology. She liked it and understood it, but prefers the smaller, topic specific books. I'll use SOTW as a supplement whenever I feel like we need it this year, possibly reading it to her over next summer if she wants. It's much more work for me than for me daughter, even though it sounds like we're doing a lot. It's definitely a mash up of different complementary curricula, though!

We spend a good bit on Amazon, so we usually get the gift card. It's perfectly legit and easy.

I'm so very sorry.

I think I would mention it to the youth pastor and try to brainstorm ideas for fixing the problem. Your girls are the ones who are hurting right now from this problem, but cliques in the youth group aren't really good for any of the kids. Of course it would be important to approach the youth leader with a cooperative attitude ("this is an issue that you may not have noticed, but I'd really like it if we could work together to fix it") rather than just complaining. It could help if you had potential solutions to offer. Maybe he could deliberately break the cliques up for long-term or recurring group work. Maybe he could have a social "event" (during regular meeting time) where the rules are that you can't speak to anyone who attends your school. Maybe it would help if he just stood up and said, "Hey, gang, I've noticed that you all tend to hang out only--or almost only--with others from your own school. That creates cliques in this group, and that prevents the Christian unity that we want here. This year, we're going to make a focused effort to break up those cliques and get you all socializing with ALL of each other. Let's take some time right now to brainstorm together how we're going to accomplish that." Maybe your girls could invite some of the other youth over for a small gathering at your house ... no more than one from each school ... rinse and repeat as desired to help them form better inter-school bonds. (I wouldn't be surprised, though, if you've tried something similar to this, since you said that the others are happy to hang out with your girls when others from their own schools aren't around.) If you girls think they'd be more comfortable in the adult ladies' group, I would not prevent them from trying it. However, if the youth pastor is receptive and seems willing to be pro-active to fix the problem without making it clear that you or your girls prompted it, then I'd encourage them to stay in the youth group for a few more months and see if things improve. Edited to Add: If the youth pastor addressed the issue head on, it would be the perfect illustration if he started it out, while everyone was seated wherever they wanted to be seated, saying something along the lines of: "Let's take a poll. Everyone from X School, raise your hand." (They'll all be seated together.) "Now everyone from Y School ... now from Z School ... You see how almost all of you are sitting in groups with others from your own school? I've noticed you all tend to hang out ..." and then continue with what I wrote above.

Figure out what sizes the older daughter was in when the weather was cold. Then buy warm weather clothes in those sizes.

Ugh. I probably would have done the fake email addresses too, but I would have kept them to reuse next year or whenever I needed to put an email on a form and didn't want to ;) I would have been tempted, if my norm was to "buy out" participation in fundraisers, to take what I was willing to donate and divide it not-quite-evenly among several of the fake email addresses, if it were possible to donate without using a credit card.

I'm sorry :( It takes a while to adjust to any new routine, and it can be a long and painful process. I hope you're able to figure out something that works for your whole family--including you!--soon.

fuzzy socks, assuming it gets cold where she is Starbucks gift card--perfect if she drinks coffee, but can be used for tea or hot cocoa otherwise a re-usable water bottle that seals well for throwing in the backpack and taking to class a travel coffee mug if her personality is such that that would be more useful than the water bottle :001_cool: good pens--not necessarily the crazy expensive ones, but the ones that are $5 for 2 instead of $1 for 20, IYKWIM if you can get one, a gift card to the school bookstore or on-campus "good" (i.e., not covered by meal plan) eating options sweet treats if she likes them whatever convenience food she likes that she can make in the microwave or hall kitchen (if her dorm has them)--a box of mac'n'cheese, for example a gift card to Wal-Mart or Target or iTunes Of course I just looked over your original post again and saw that you used the word "elders." I always associate that word with LDS, though in my experience it's mostly referred to the missionaries, who are unmarried and childless. In any case, if you're LDS, scratch the Starbucks and coffee mug ;) (or include them and make it clear it's for hot chocolate or herbal tea, if your/her conscience allows that).

{{{{{{hugs}}}}}}

:grouphug: I'm sorry. It can be surprising sometimes how much an objectively distant loss can affect us. Honor your friend by doing something nice in her memory--a donation to a charity she would have supported, an act of kindness, plant a tree, a note to her family. Honor her also by appreciating life, and even if you don't much feel like it, by celebrating yours today in a way that suits your personality. It feels odd to wish you a happy birthday under the circumstances, but I do hope you have a good day with at least pockets of happiness, and that you feel loved and celebrated.

I'm so sorry. I know it's so much easier to say "Don't blame yourself" than to do it, but given the information you had at the time, you really did make the best choice you knew to make. It isn't your fault.

It can be a wildly different experience depending on where you go and which organization sends you. Some organizations provide a lot of support; others provide almost none. In your shoes, I'd want to talk to someone in the company who's been there done that or who is in a position to know--and be honest about--the support that is or is not provided by the company. I like to find blogs written by expats living in the location to which I'm moving when possible--it isn't always easy or even possible to find those blogs, but sometimes they're out there. Do a search for "blog expat City Country," and you'll at least find the biggest expat websites, whether they have blogs from your location or not. Laws, enforced laws, customs ... they all vary wildly from country to country, but you should be able to find out at least the letter of the law via Google.