Dh will be deploying soon. He'll have 3 months in a different city, able to come home lots of weekends. Then he'll be it of country for 9 months. Hopefully, he'll get a few weeks of block leave upon return to have some "vacation" time before returning to his regular job. He's national guard, and this is our first deployment as a family. We've been lucky. We're used to 3-6 week things several times a year, but this is, clearly, far longer. My kids will be newborn, 2, 5, and 6 when he goes overseas. I know many of you have done this sort of thing before, so please give me ideas for how to keep parent-child bonds strong. (No stuff yet about home coming. I know that will be its own thing later and I'm not ready to think on that yet.) My ideas so far are letting the kids leave him lots of video messages and have him respond as he is able. They love baking videos but aren't good talking on the phone for more than 30 seconds, even with video. Also, the oldest loves stories and drawing, so she and dh could work on stories together: one writing a part and the other illustrating, then switching. I don't have many great ideas for my 2 and 5 year old sons. Dh is in the middle of a 6 week thing right now, and my almost two year old was searching the house for him, checking his closet, and mad when he wasn't there. Maybe taking the Flat Stanley idea and sending dh with a laminated picture of the kids to pose with (though he likely won't go many places that are great for pictures, they can see where he lives), while we cart around a picture of dh to pose with. That just seems sad, though, and I'm crying thinking about it! Planning helps me cope, though, so I'm trying to enter planning mode.

Yeah, my husband is in the military and has been gone four months during the last year and will soon be deploying for a year. It is a bit hurtful to think he might be judged as having no relationship with his kids. People who work a lot can be very intentional with the time they do have. It's different, for sure, but not necessarily "no relationship."

I agree with what others have said about setting clear boundaries and asking for more money and like that you feel comfortable addressing the issue. My only suggestion is that on the step issue, if you feel you need to revisit it with your brother, be explicit about your reasoning that you will soon be watching the baby as well and need the three year old following established routines. From the dad's perspective, he just watched his son jump down the stairs competently (and probably has seen similar feats elsewhere), so it seems silly that you are worried the kid can't walk down the stairs. My two weeks short of two year old is fantastic on stairs and will reliably reach up for my hand if the stairs are unusually steep or wet. If someone told me I had to hold his hand, I'd comply if it was on their property, but there would be lots of eye rolling (inwardly). Also, the child seems littler to you than he does to his dad since he's the oldest in that family, but you have a teenager to compare him to. (I haven't seen your steps of course. They could be death traps and the dad could be crazy! You are with the kid a lot and so are probably a good judge of his abilities. I'm just taking the other position to maybe help you be better able to explain the problem to your brother.)

Yeah, there were a number of us like that in AP Calc, and we all did well, but it still makes me laugh to think of. I'm hoping she'll like Murderous Math. I got the set, and they are waiting for her, but she's resistant to reading books without lots of pictures. I could do them as read-alouds, but I think they are kind of that level of rudeness that I'm okay with, but she'll have more fun reading on her own without me having to be mildly disapproving. (I actually wrote this post a long while back, but I walked away without pressing "submit reply." I went back to it now, and found my comment had been saved!)

Oh yeah. I also asked (politely) what testing process their products went through to be sure they lived up to the promises being made about them. My sil has not invited me to another mlm spiel since then.

I say through a spiel one time and asked the lady how the company defines "natural." She responded with a non sequitur answer about how great natural products are. I don't buy anywhere near that much cleaning/personal care/supplements in a six months as they assured me I must spend every month. They also wanted my credit card info for just in case I decided to sign up later. Nope.

With my oldest we didn't do worksheets at all, just read off the screen. With this one, I only print the worksheets and still read off the screen. I know that doesn't work for everyone, though.

My two that have used it are both, in my opinion, gifted. Well, the older also took a test that said so, haha. I think this is a fantastic program that might be better known and respected if it weren't free, ifykwim. It's usually true that you get what you pay for, but this is one of those great free things that do exist. I hope it works well for you and your daughter. It isn't workbook based, though there are nice coordinating worksheets at some levels. We spend about ten to fifteen minutes on it doing a worksheet and then reading together. I know you have got to be very pressed for time in your house!

Have you looked at ProgressivePhonics.com? I'm using it with my second child, and even though he's a different learner than the first, both have done/are doing really well with it. Plus it's free.

Clearly I don't know, but it could be that he likes talking to you but fears judgement on his choices. He may have been testing to see how you would react to the idea of his paying for her.

An alternative explanation for the wallet forgetting story is that he is paying on purpose because he considers it a date, but he wants to explain it differently to his mother in order to maintain the "not dating" fiction.

With date rape/acquaintance rape being such a high percentage of assaults, encouraging young women to have escorts when running, walking back to their apartment at night might be putting them in more danger in some ways. I would emphasize the lesson "it's okay to be rude!" Just because a guy walked you back to your apartment doesn't mean you have to let him in to use the bathroom. Just because a guy you don't know offered to drive you somewhere or go running with you doesn't mean you have to agree. And if you agree against your better judgment, you don't have to show up. My friends and I had an agreement that if some guy was putting on pressure, whether due to being a creep or just socially awkward, we would just start assuming that invitations issued to one girl were actually invitations to the whole group. Want to go to a walk to the creepy bridge this evening? Why sure, we'd love to, all eight of us.

Generally I say little ones should get lots of chances. If my kid is acting up at the playground, we don't leave right away. First they get a warning, then have to come stick with me for a while before being allowed to go off again, then they have to stay close to me on a less-crowded section of the playground. But correction happens, and it would be a different story if it were dangerous behavior. At a pool, most misbehavior can turn dangerous quickly. I would contact someone over the life guard's head about this. I'd also be wondering who the family was related to to be able to get away with this behavior so long.

One part of it for me when I was trying to avoid attention was that I had trouble knowing when people were giving me a sincere compliment/making small talk and when they were seeing me up to tease me. Did "I really like that shirt, where did you get it?" mean what it seemed to mean, or were those other middle school girls going to laugh when I answered because they knew it came from Wal-Mart? I wish my mom had noticed my reasons instead of just being thankful that her daughter wasn't one of those silly girls who cared about clothes. I felt much more confident in my jeans and t shirt after I started wearing jeans that fit well and t shirts that reflected something I loved, and even more confident when I owned a few tips and pairs of shoes that could dress things up a tiny bit. Also, when middle school was over and done. By tenth grade at my school, students were much more confident of their social standing and so were more accepting.

To say something slightly different than the general consensus, I was also that girl. For a couple years I only wore blue shirts to avoid attracting any kind of attention to my clothes. At some point, I started to want to dress a little nicer but didn't want to seem immodest or vain, plus my mom had pretty bad taste in clothes herself. I was very thankful I had an aunt and a grandmother who would give me something fashionable but not flashy each year for Christmas. (Well, Grandma had a few spectacular misses!) I loved having a few things that fit my style but were nice. So my advice is, don't talk about it, but if you see things on sale you think fit her personality but are also in style, as long as you can afford it, buy them and drop them off in her room, mentioning they were a great deal. She may never wear them and you'll have to be ok with that, but having them there in case she wants them may help her confidence.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is except to shake my head about the asynchronicity of these kids. My six year old zooms ahead in math concepts but still largely counts on her fingers. We've been working ahead in MEP and Beast but also having her play various little apps and computer games to practice math facts in a more fun way, which is working but slowly. Yesterday she was playing one for the first time and it turned out to include negative integers as well as positive. It asked questions like 5-(-4) and (-1+7). She got all of those right immediately, barely thinking! All we ever did with negative numbers was explain what they are on a number line, but she is faster at arithmetic if negative numbers are involved than with all positive numbers! These kids... On a probably related note, I've been having her do BA2B along with beginning MEP 3, mostly to slow her down. She strongly prefers MEP, saying Beast is too hard. She does it really quickly, though, when pushed to it. I think it's too easy and she doesn't like thinking about things that are that easy. She wants everything to be either immediately obvious or else a real challenge.

Books that show immigrant children/"outsider" children having some difficulty but ultimately doing well and being accepted might be nice. In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson comes to mind, as does Molly's Pilgrim (which is a picture book).

If it helps to know, the high school I attended, which has a large gifted population, allowed some sophomores to take AP Chem in the years before I went there. They ended it just before I had a chance, largely because parents would advocate for their border-line child to get in the class and then complain that their child had a low grade in the class. It was too much of a pain to keep up standards and deal with parents. (To be fair, students had to maintain a 3.0 or get booted from the school, so GPA did matter.) Now they've gone back to allowing it, really even encouraging it, with more relaxed standards, so the pass rate isn't great. All that to say, there are schools that let students do AP for their first real exposure to chemistry, and many students, but certainly not most, do well.

I know this doesn't always work with 5 year olds, but in your situation I'd devote a little extra time in the next couple of months getting your little one reading as well as possible, then get him Jr editions/picture book versions of the stuff his brother is interested in our reading. Then I'd encourage him to sit nearby reading for part of the time big brother is working, doing mazes and such part of the time, and screen time part of the time.

Look into The Language of God by Francis Collins. I haven't read it, but he's a scientist who believes in evolution and is a Christian, and this book, I think, explains that. Very different from Dawkins!

Teach your Monster to Read is fun. Free for desktop and not too expensive as an app. Could you also teach him some solitare card games? For example, Pyramid generally is played matching the cards that make 13, but if you remove face cards, you can play with tens, which is more useful to memorize. Will he do mazes? Draw, perhaps on a white board or boogie board? Draw a little squiggle first, then challenge him to turn it into something he would see outside, or something funny, etc. Screens will probably be your friend, but you'll also want to break them up some, I'm sure.

I obviously don't know this woman, but I'd imagine that if she feels the number of kids she has is out of her control, having kids would be that much more stressful. I'm now pregnant with my fourth, and I'll have four ages 0-6 while my husband is deployed. I know it will be really hard, but I know it's going to only be for a season. He'll come home, the kids will grow, and we've decided to only have four, so we'll move out of the baby stage and into other stages with their own troubles. If I thought I was facing never-ending babies, it would be hard to suck it up and deal. I remember a woman a few years older than me whose family flirted with quiverful stuff sobbing when she found out she was pregnant with her third. She and her husband must have had some talk because there was a huge gap before the fourth and final child, and she has been much more relaxed and positive since. Having a sense of control makes so much more manageable.

Some kind of washable waterproof cover sounds best, like the nice ones to protect beds. Would you be able to sew something like that? Really, though, it sounds like the color doesn't matter. You either need something washable or just plan to get a new-to-you sofa every year or so. It wouldn't be any cleaner if it were black.

Check out ProgressivePhonics.com. it's free. Funny stories that aren't overwhelming. You read the words in black, she reads the ones in color. You could likely fly through the beginner level and then really start working at the intermediate level, but if you want to build confidence, you could start with the alphabeti books and go through the whole sequence. In the early books, the child gets to "read" a whole book while really only reading a few words, like at, cat, and hat. By mid-intermediate, most of the time they are reading half or more of the words, and by advanced they are taking over just about all of it. We never finished advanced because my oldest kid was ready to switch into real books, but now I'm in intermediate with the next, and it's interesting to see how it works with a different child.

If this was my family, I'd tell my daughter that aunt is figuring out about how top be a mom, that this is something all new moms have to do because you can't learn to be a mom until you start to do it. I'd tell her her aunt isn't ready for kids to touch or hold the baby, and we need to respect that, then it's brainstorm things she could do for baby that would be acceptable (draw a picture for the nursery, fetch blankets/diapers/glasses of water for aunt) and assure her cousins get more and more fun as they get older. Then I'd tell aunt that my daughter wouldn't ask to hold or touch the baby any more, but that she still really, really wants to. I'd ask her to please let the child know when it would be appropriate to hold or touch the baby, and until then, to please involve her however possible/comfortable for her (fetching, etc).