My nine year old just said she wants a boyfriend. No one in particular. Just to have one. :scared:

We use first edition, which has less manipulatives (and upfront cost), since I hope to switch to Beast once my kid is ready.

So sorry for your loss.

I will qualify: I have never had a toddler who slept through the night. Generally, at three, they are proficient enough at undressing to use the potty groggily during the night by themselves and I have taught them enough strategies to put themselves back to sleep. I still get up with my two year old 1-3 times a night. I still feel exhausted: at least as babies I don't spend all day cajoling them to clean up all the messes they make or to stop destroying everything.

I would say from 1-3, but really, personality plays a bigger role than age.

Another recommendation for All About Spelling.

My parents are in their early sixties and put my paternal grandfather in a nursing home when care for him becomes overwhelming. I don't see them as having that sort of attitude. I don't have eldercare plans for my parents, let alone myself. As the child who lives closest, I expect I will have the primary responsibility. I hope there will be better options if my parents can no longer care for themselves.

Wait, she bled through a tampon and pad in half an hour?! I would take her to urgent care.

Okay, I'm excited for that!

I had a little panic attack when you mentioned the binding, but looking back at it, all the affected area is towards the center and outside edge of the pages.

This is what I decided to do.

I don't know. I have a hard time imagining that a screen play will live up to all my Harry Potter dreams.

I just read the Washington Post's article about A Mother's Reckoning, by Sue Klebold and put the book on hold. Thoughts? Really, I just can't even imagine.

My two year old just peed on my brand new copy of WWE1: it only got about four pages damp: the cover pages and the the page for the first week of lessons. There isn't any way to salvage this, right?

As a kid, I really wanted to be on Legends of the Hidden Temple. Now the idea of being on TV makes me queasy.

I have some audible books on my kindle that I can't figure out how to get on my kids' freetime account. Does Freetime not support Audible? I love the idea of immersive reading and want my six year old to be able to follow along as he listens to the audiobook, but I don't want him to be able to buy anything off of Amazon. If I can't use Audible in Freetime, is there a way to have parental controls outside of a Freetime account?

We tried it when he was about halfway through OPGTR, and I placed him in Level Two. OPGTR and AAR don't line up very well. Plus, the fluency sheets were torture for my kid, and we tried AAR at that time because he struggled with fluency.

After getting burgundy glasses once, I learned my lesson about neutral colors for daily wear items. Go with black.

My kids like puzzles. I guess they got that from their dad. We don't really have anywhere safe from the toddler in this small house to work on a puzzle over the course of days.

Does anyone's kid here play electric violin? I'd especially love to hear from parents with kids in a Suzuki program. My six year old started an acoustic violin two years ago, and for a six year old, he's pretty serious about it. He keeps talking about wanting to play electric violin (like his idol, Lindsey Stirling). His teacher, who we both really like, isn't really a huge fan of that type of music. If you or your kid have played both, are they fairly comparable in terms of technique? How easy is it to switch between the two? Are electric violins good for beginning violinists? (He's still wrapping up Book 1.) Do they make quality,tiny electric violins? (He just moved up to a 1/8th size.) Is there any way I can rent one?

I have him reading readers, but he's mostly reading Star Wars readers we get from the library. Maybe I should do something systematic like that...

I had initially planned to start All About Spelling after OPGTR, but then thought maybe we needed more explicit reading instruction before we moved to spelling. (I didn't want to teach both at the same time.) If starting AAS helped with reading multi-syllable words for you, maybe we'll just stick with the initial plan.

I would love a Blaze, but I have a perfectly good Charge HR.

We're wrapping up OPGTR. We tried AAR, and while I wish we had started it, changing to it wasn't a good fit. The way that OPGTR teaches multi-syllable words hasn't worked well in his other reading. He can read the multi-syllable words in OPGTR because they introduce it broken up, but he has a very hard time breaking up words into their syllables in other reading. He's okay with two syllable words and words with common prefixes and suffixes. Has anyone else's kid needed more work on breaking up syllables after finishing OPGTR? What did you use?

I have not hat a hysterectomy, but my mother did. The resulting scar tissue ended up blocking her intestines, requiring more surgery to fix that.