Sharon H in IL
-
Posts
1,164 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by Sharon H in IL
-
-
I had a dream I was using a pressure canner. It was kind of a nightmare, since that horrible high-pitched jiggling sound brings back memories of canning season in summer kitchens so humid and hot that I wished I could voluntarily pass out.
Oh, and mom had us pick our green beans way past the optimal point for taste. They were huge and furry and stringy. [shudder]
Jelly-making, now that was a different matter altogether. :D
I'm no help; I realize I'm babbling.
-
I can't think of a slang that really bothers me.
Sweeeet. :D
You know it's badly overused when teenagers *and* kindergarteners use it.
-
How long to you keep reading before calling it a day? My boys have frequently complained that they didn't like a book I picked, and couldn't we please read something else, this one's so boooorrring.
Then they get into the story, and ask if I'm going to read in the evening. I'll give it a week of reading a chapter a night (assuming *I* like the book) before I'll call it off. If none of us likes it, well, heh heh . . . who's to know that we didn't finish it.
Thumbs-down titles that turned into thumbs-up:
- Around the World in Eighty Days
- The Mysterious Benedict Society (thank you, WTM board!)
- Indian in the Cupboard
- The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen
There were some titles that never really caught the interest of any of us, but I think that's a normal variation in people:
- Caddie Woodlawn
- The All-Of-A-Kind Family
- Henry and the Paper Route
-
Aw, come on, you didn't like Nicolas Cage with long air and a bad accent?
It had the misfortune of combining two elements that make a movie detestable: 1) it was a bad movie, and 2) I was so desperate for a break from nonstop motherhood I would have been happy to see almost anything, and it took my short-lived break and WASTED it.
:willy_nilly:
-
Oh that's easy: Con Air with Nicholas Cage. It was the first time since my new baby was born that we could go see a movie, and *nothing* was showing anywhere. We chose Con Air basically because we didn't know anything about it.
Mistake. Bad, very bad mistake.
We still talk about how truly awful that movie was.
-
Not sure what you mean, Stephanie.
Are you upset that you're not doing more? Or happy to be busy with work you enjoy, just noticing that no one's giving you the same pat on the back that other moms get?
Personally, I find my work as a SAHM is fulfilling, because I have a balance between physical and mental work, staying home and getting out and about. Well, usually balanced. It's the nature of life to be constantly in flux, and that includes long stretches where things are out of balance.
At a New Years' Eve party a couple of years ago, I was speaking with the hostess, who had welcomed several grandchildren into the family by that time, and she was reminicising about life. She said something that tugged at my heart. "Sometimes I wish that this [gesturing around her lovely new home] was all a dream, and I could wake up and be back with my children all little again."
We need to realize that the grass isn't always greener, and our jobs are important. C.S. Lewis said all other jobs in the world exist in order that this one job [of mothering] can exist.
-
I'm still looking into what a "victory garden" is....
It's a term coined during WWII, when normal supplies of food were disrupted. Patriotic citizens were encouraged to grow their own vegetables in their yards, dubbed 'victory gardens.' This way more of the crops could be diverted to war use.
-
But, dh has been obsessed with the next great depression for years and it makes him irrationally happy to prepare for it. a series of unfortunate events could change all that. He secretly hopes ;)
LOL over here, Margaret. My Dad has always been *exactly* like this. He loves to plan for catastrophes, and gets all happy and excited talking about it. He was practically set up with a bunker and self-sufficiency supplies for Y2K and was terribly let down by the lack of chaos.;)
-
I made jam in the last two weeks and it was fun and very yummy to eat but.....I had to buy $10 of jars and that really made me think twice. :
My mother always poured her jelly into any kind of glass jar, usually leftovers from other groceries, then topped her jelly with wax. I don't know what the rules are about jelly vs. jams and other spreads. Might be worth a little investigation.
Ask all your friends and spread the word among neighbors that you are in the market for canning supplies. You might be pleasantly surprised at what turns up for free. Check freecycle, too.
-
Is this the one you're looking for?
I bookmarked it because so often people have asked for guidelines when they are looking to simplify.
-
It would never occur to me to check to see if 50 pages of a large book might be missing. I mean, c'mon.
And hearts doodled on the margins near comments about the church? Odd. Just very odd.
Still, I'm sorry for your loss. A good book is a terrible thing to mutilate.
-
Hello, I homeschool the boys, while my DH works as a psychiatrist. His first career was using his degree in engineering physics working on missile systems for defense contractors in California. He decided he'd prefer to use his time and talents healing the world rather than bombing it. ;)
And boy am I glad he did, or we'd never have met! (He was starting medical school and I was finishing undergrad at the same university.) I've always had a weakness for medical men. :D
-
I would love to do this, but the mosquitoes would eat me alive this time of year.
I've also wondered what line-dryers do during pollen season? Doesn't the pollen get all over the clothes?
I suppose it would send one back to the dryer if it were enough of a problem. Around my house, we're just not very sensitive so the clothes can go up most of the year.
Actually, there is one thing that will send me to the dryer besides frozen fingers: when the neighbors have their lawn sprayed with chemicals! Scary.
-
Linguistic Development throught Poetry Memorization by Andrew Pudewa. I heard him speak at a conference and was sold! My dc are 7.5 and 5 and we've gone through the first four poems already. They love it! Check it out...
We love it too. The curriculum says to have the children read/recite the poems every day. I thought to myself that this was excessive, and would probably make my boys despise the poems, so we only read them on Fridays. Bad idea. The boys whined and moaned enough to convince me that perhaps Mr. Pudewa might know more about this process than I did, and so we'd try it his way.
Yup. Every poem, every day. That was our ticket. Excellent choices of poems, easy for the boys to quickly go through their memorized pieces by themselves, and my younger auditory learner learned most of his older brother's poems in addition to his own. So there! Does Mr. Pudewa come to this board so he can rep me? :D
-
Yeah, that doesn't sound fun to listen to. Shalom22 has good advice.
-
Astrid, you look charming!
What a good cause you all were out to support. Blessings.
-
My boys retain stuff a lot better when they're busy with their hands while listening. Play dough, Legos, coloring a page of something related to the reading, or tracing.
When my oldest was younger, he wouldn't do conventional narrations. He just wouldn't tell me things, because he knew I already knew it. Why say something useless? He just refused.
Then someone on the old board shared how her son did Lego dioramas of some aspect of the read-aloud. Eureka! DS would listen intently, then begin building a scene out of his Legos that illustrated something in the story. He explained it to me aloud, I took a digital picture of his creation, and sometimes printed out a paper copy of the photo to add to his school notebook.
Maybe your children would enjoy painting a picture or building a scene from other materials. Ears + Hands = Brain!
-
I'm voting 'too easy on the older child' because he was a challenging baby and even more so as a toddler. I didn't transition well to the toddler stage where needs and wants diverge, and he looked to me for all his entertainment and social needs, and he was (and is) an extremely social, interactive child.
He was exhausting, and it took a long time (or at least it seemed an awfully long time) to figure out how and when to let him scream (and then get bored with that find his own project to do) and when to GOYB.
And I was married to the father but single parenting, if you know what I'm talking about. DH and I have both learned and grown; we'd do things a lot differently in some respects but the fundamentals would remain the same.
BTW, both boys have settled into lovely children, whose company I enjoy.
-
Go to Andrew Pudewa's website and buy his lecture on "Teaching Boys and Other Children Who Would Rather Build Forts All Day."
His lecture is -- hands down -- the best information on teaching boys I've ever heard.
Some ideas I gleaned from Pudewa:
*All of these are generalizations, and necessarily limited*
- boys need movement to keep their lower brains busy so their higher brains can learn
- boys don't mind small noises (pencil tapping, foot bumping walls, creaky hinges) of the sort that drive girls and women nuts and prevent us from concentrating
- boys prefer a cooler temperature for classrooms
- boys hear a smaller range of sound than girls do
- boys concentrate more deeply on one thing at a time
- boys tolerate and even enjoy a much louder, tougher teacher approach than girls do. A girl might be in tears at a loud teacher's correction, whereas a boy might finally "get" the correction when softer, calmer approaches did nothing.
- boys thrive on competition
- male bullies are physically powerful, but socially maladroit. (Female bullies are social powerhouses -- see "Queen Bees and Wanabes")
-
Couple of ideas.
Teeth grinding can be from 1) depression issues & leads down the path toward the ugliness of TMJ or 2) a habit that's a genetic gift from our ancestors. My son inherited my occasional teeth grinding, unrelated to depression. I'm going to ask his dentist's advice. It doesn't seem to be frequent or intense.
It's important to get it treated in adulthood, because it really can wear down your enamel, and your body doesn't make any more to replace it. I broke a crown twice thanks to this expensive habit.
You can buy a dental guard at the drugstore if it's not a big problem, or your dentist can make a custom guard that fits your mouth perfectly for more money and better protection.
DH reports that my teeth grinding has stopped, after wearing my custom guard for a year or so. He says it must have re-trained my body. Who knows? My crown has lasted this time!
-
I'm thinking along the same lines as Mrs. Mungo. A little aversion training might be in order. Not necessarily involving nudity, but not necessarily omitting it.
-
That's making some lemonade, girl. WTG!
And I agree, learning a new skill is a tremendous boost. I once read an article about a young couple that learned how to do a lot of complicated repair & construction skills out of frugal necessity, but were quite rightly proud of themselves and what they had learned. The woman's memorable quip was "It's wonderful what you can manage to do, if you can read and have a brain."
-
I hope the vinegar works for you. My laundry is still crunchy; might be our extra-hard water. I use the vinegar as a rinse aid to get all the detergent out, otherwise DH's skin breaks out in hives.
We too, don't really mind the crunch factor.:D
-
I see-saw between sitting in a stupor channel surfing and reading "The Great Tradition" -- a book about classical education. I'm on Clement of Alexandria now.
Aaauugghh! I'm trying to simplify, and I've lost LCC!
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Here's what you do.
Go to your head librarian, and tell her how wonderful this book is, and how you really, really really want the library to get the 2nd edition of LCC.
Tell her you'll bake them some chocolate chip cookies. I have it on good authority that librarians love chocolate chip cookies. :001_smile:
Then your library will have the 2nd edition, you'll get to pore over it, and the 1st edition will mysteriously appear as you re-organize your shelves at your leisure.