During the day he tally only nurses before and after nap. He's a great eater and drinker who has never taken a bottle and now strongly prefers open mouth cups. I just wish he'd magically decide that my milk tasted weird and self wean, but it looks like I'm just going to have to choose a week to be miserable and night wean. Probably next week since its a calm week. The question in my mind is whether to day wean at the same time our let him keep the nap nursing. My first night weaned easily early on and fully weaned pretty easily, too. My second wouldn't night wean until I weaned completely, and it was stressful for everyone.

I'm currently pregnant with number 4, due in December (yay) and still nursing number three, who will be two in September. I know this is ultimately up to me and a highly personal decision, but does anyone have btdt advice about weaning during pregnancy? Medically, I'm good to go, by I know I don't want to tandem nurse a toddler and a baby. I did that with my first two who were seventeen months apart, and I would not be able to do that and have enough energy to care for four kids. My toddler is showing no inclination to self-wean, but I don't think he'll be too upset for terribly long. Unfortunately he still wakes to nurse, which is rough on me and my husband. Medically, he's good to go whenever. He's healthy, strong, and huge with a great appetite. Given that, what would you suggest? Go ahead and wean now (this is about the age when I weaned the other two)? Wait till age two (which has been what I'm sorta-kinda aiming for)? Focus on night weaning first and then day wean later? Ultimately I know this is a small decision, but I like to talk things through and this is one area where dh does not want to try to give an opinion.

My husband and I were talking about this last night. Our pediatrician was amazed several years ago when our then three year old pushed a chair to be near the bed/table thing so she could watch her 21 month old brother get his exam. I was unsure whether I should tell her that her brother would have done the exact same thing to see her. Our current toddler also constantly does things like this. He'll get a stick to try to get a ball he can't reach. He'll get a bowl and container of raisins if he's hungry. I was asking my husband if this is normal or if it is just our normal. He reminded me that a lot of parents forbid their kids from "messing with stuff" and punish them for making messes. It's frustrating how chaotic our house gets sometimes (cleaning up incidental messes is hard to teach), but we think it is worth it to have kids who are becoming capable, thinking, people. (We'd be no good for an interview, though, since our oldest is 6. We haven't had a chance to find out if our methods will be successful long-term.)

Pertussis is a pretty big deal. I don't know that I'd require it for anyone seeing my baby, but I would encourage the vaccine for anyone who is going to be spending any significant time around young babies. And if I knew someone didn't have it, I wouldn't let them hold the baby if they had any kind of cough, even if they told me it was allergies or whatever.

I also live in the Atlanta area, but my kids are a bit younger. One thing I'd suggest is looking into places he could volunteer in a couple of years. I volunteered several years at the Fernbank Museum as a teenager, and it was great because I could study up on the exhibits and then have really interesting discussions with patrons and employees. Some of my friends volunteered at the High Museum and had a fantastic experience. The zoo is another possibility and even has opportunities for families to volunteer together until kids are old enough for the teen volunteer program. I think there are lots of opportunities for classes and clubs. Fernbank Science Center at least used to have some awesome classes that were open to homeschoolers. A homeschooled friend of mine did one that was sponsored by NASA, I think, and still talked about it years afterwards. A lot of stuff seems to open up in the teenage years. There's a math circle at Emory for middle and high school, for example. Right now, with a rising first grader and younger siblings, we are just doing academics on our own and joining with others for social opportunities. We take lots of field trips, and my daughter will do the monthly Homeschool Academy at the zoo in the fall. I look out for interesting events in the area, like the Archaeology Day that took place in Stone Mountain (not at the park) about a month ago. We take any chance we can get to meet professionals in a variety of fields who are passionate about sharing their work. I want my kids growing up knowing real people who do all sorts of things so that they can imagine themselves doing those things as well and see what sparks their interest.

If it were just a boy name that would be fine, truly. It's using a really common boy name that is already the name of the child's uncle and great uncle, but saying the kids is named for two fictional characters (one of whom is a very minor character in that world). The whole thing is weird to me. Particularly as the great-uncle has joked about leaving his money to kids named after him (but he also jokes about "you're outta the will" whenever we tease him, and it's all clearly joking) and I worry that my brother, who is extremely literal, has actually been believing this the whole time. If they have deep reasoning they don't want to share, that's fine, but I feel like the kid might have been named due to a misunderstanding. And my brother may have believed we were being written in and out of a will all the time.

We got dd's last week. It included state and national percentile. She's forgotten about the scores, so I'll wait until the test is close to give it to her as her score to beat. She shouldn't have a problem beating it! As a kindergartener she was a little in over her head. I'm just very proud she tried each problem and didn't shut down over the ones she couldn't do.

Not all the time, for sure! I love them and I'm glad I get to spend so much time with them, I just wish it was a bit less time, sometimes, or that I could carve out some time for myself in a reliably regular manner. The older ones will give me "alone time" if I ask (for a bit anyway), but my toddler thinks that when I leave the room I must be playing hide and seek. He bursts in with "here you are" just as I was about to fall asleep or right in the middle of the chapter I was reading. It's adorable, I know, but not something I always enjoy in the moment. I'll remember these days fondly, but I'm looking forward to a little more independence as well.

One of my nieces (older brother's child) has a top ten girl's first name and then a boy name as her middle name. Not a name that could go either way, a very common boy's name, like Jason. It is a family name, but the one with the name hasn't had kids yet, so there's no urgency to making sure this name occurs in every generation. When asked if she was named for her uncle, the answer was no, she was named for two figures from popular culture. It's just weird.

I get annoyed by people's tendency to self-diagnose their kids with whichever label is currently in vogue in their circle of friends. Like when I was a kid in the nineties, ADHD was becoming more well known. The obvious benefit to this was that many children were able to get the support they needed to succeed in school and life. The downside, though, was that the label got thrown around a lot. I remember my mom being annoyed on the playground with other parents who defended things like chasing and hitting smaller kids with sticks as "oh, he's got ADD." Now there are many labels, and it's great that so many kids can have their needs better addressed, but it also means that parents have more labels to misuse as weapons or shields. When I see a three year old kicking up a fuss like a typical cranky three year old told it's time to go home, I don't want mom to tell me and the other moms how the child has SPD and giftedness and so has trouble with transitions. That may very well be true, but it's not helpful for the situation. Just shrug and say "we're working on it" if you feel a need. Save labels for more professional or educational situations. We don't want people growing even more skeptical of labels due to overuse, making it harder for kids to get the help they need.

Are you saying: Some people use the words "school" and "education" a synonyms, so for those people the phrase "school at home" would just be a synonym for "home schooling" or "home education," while other people use "school" to mean the specific set of methods traditionally used by brick-and-mortar institutions and so have a negative emotional reaction to the term "school at home" if they believe such methods are inappropriate for learning in the home?

Mine looks great. Thanks for doing this!

Math: Beast Academy 3 and MEP 3 (hoping that doing both will take the whole year or even longer) Handwriting: ZB cursive, then copywork/dictation Reading: She's a strong reader. I think I'll let her choose but keep some sort of reading log/reading journal. I'm mulling this over. We'll probably keep going with First Language Lessons as part of our read aloud time in the morning. Her little brother enjoys being able to join in. Mystery Science and classes at the zoo, light geography, Logic Countdown, Muzzy French, church choir. Probably should figure out to do some art. Most likely a lot of swimming at the y.

Our school (that I attended) started German with some intensity in fourth grade, with reasonable rigour in sixth, then eighth grade counted for high school credit. I think my transcript called eighth "advanced German 1" and ninth "Advanced German 2." Tenth was German Civ, eleventh AP German, Twelfth German 5 (I'm not sure where the five came from except it was our fifth high school credit.) Colleges accepted and understood it for me and my classmates.

I think it may be helpful to think of those kinds of questions as logic puzzles/brain teasers that require a knowledge of math to solve rather than a test of the math knowledge. If your child gets bogged down but you think they would like it, you could separate the skills. Make a list of the math concepts she'd need for that competition and work some on those and also find some brain teasers that don't take math, or take a really low level of math, and get her used to them.

I live in the south, too, and I'd suspect dementia or mental illness. There's one woman I know who does weird, boundary crossing things like this and uses the "southern lady"excuse, so I was glad you included that this woman is black because otherwise I would have suspected my friend's mom, who certainly has a slew of untreated mental issues going on. The woman I know would do things like go up to families visiting my parent's church, tell them she was the official church grandma, and try to get them to give her their children. Visitors tended to just not return after scary interactions like that. It's hard to deal with people like that when you want to be kind and understanding and also not have them ever, ever near your kids or anyone else's.

Agree with others about Magnatiles having the most ability to grow with the child.

When planning a wedding, I think a lot of people stay with the bridal magazine, celebrity level pictures in their heads and then try to do that, only cheaper. If you have good friends who can donate a lot of goods, time, and labor that can be doable, but for most of us it just isn't. I recommend instead starting with a blank paper, bride and groom together listing the things most important to them, in order. For my husband and me, the list was something like 1. We walk away legally married to each other. 2. In a church with a minister. 3. Family in attendance. 4. Close friends in attendance. 5. Chance to socialize afterwards. 6. Pictures taken. 7. Food for everyone. Actually, having his brother's and my best friends in the wedding party was probably 5 for us, but that's the general idea. Keep going show the list, figuring out how important things like basic flowers, fancy flowers, basic music, live music, etc are. Then write down costs next to each item. Strike off anything that suddenly doesn't seem so important when looking at its price tag. Then, see how far down the list you can go while staying in budget. You may end up with a wedding that looks really different than typical, but it will have the things the couple value.

That seems good to me, too. Just let me know if I should pm you my email address or what for more info on paying.

I'm not sure how to classify my kids. I guess they are careful climbers? They are always giving other parents heart attacks, climbing to the top of playground equipment and furniture, but never jumping from more than about their own height and we've (so far) not had any injuries beyond minor scrapes and bruises. I have friends whose kids get into much, much more, some of whom get injured and some of whom don't, as well as friends whose kids don't climb but some how get concussions from falling of the bench they were sitting on. All I know is, kids are weird mixtures of nature, nurture, and something in the air.

I probably would have told my child "you were telling a really good story, but it wasn't reading the words on the page," and then distracted her by asking about Ms Frizzle. If I were in the position of the other mom, I would not have called you out! I would have whispered to my kid that he was right, she wasn't reading, but she was playing pretend and it's not nice to try to stop someone else's game of pretend. If I was chatting with you, I might mention how hard many have found it to stop the guessing habit once it has started and how frustrating it is to find a way that teaches reading well while still being fun (then proselytized for ProgressivePhonics.com because I think it does a great job being the middle way).

I went back and watched it again just to see if I could be offended, but nope. Nothing even slightly offensive is heard or seen. It's on par with the fairly common scene in modern movies where there are girls talking in the bathroom, one enters a stall while the others are doing their makeup, and they all chat, then one emerges from the stall. You know what happened, but it's neither mentioned nor surprising. I do agree it would have been better to cast younger actors for Amy and Beth, but Amy especially. Since she looks older, her silliness comes across as worse than if she were both acting and looking immature.

Is it still possible to get in on this? I'd be in for two, if it's still open.

I didn't see any urination either. I enjoyed it. Some film versions of classic stories like this get very cloying very fast, playing up the high emotion, or else are wooden, slavishly devoted to the text, but this one was true to my memory of the book without feeling like I was watching a very expensive book report. I never liked Amy much but always liked seeing that she grew up and improved (as did Jo, which have me hope for myself as a teen). I liked how this version gave ample time to their more grown-up years.

This reminds me of when I was sent by the ped to the children's hospital when my daughter was sick and needed an x ray to diagnose pneumonia. There were signs everywhere saying not to come in if you were sick. It made me feel horrible, but the whole reason we were there was that she was sick.