I wanted to buy a house on Chateaugay Rd, but my husband and teenager found the street name absolutely mortifying. We didn't get it because it needed too many repairs to pay full price and the owner wouldn't budge on the price. There was a large hole in the dining room ceiling that you could see the second floor through. Decades of dust was caked so thick, you could see the narrow walkways where the homeowner walked through the house. The master bath looked like a crime scene. That wasn't even the worst house we saw during that 8 months of house shopping... I always pause to think about long street names that have to be spelled out every time. One of my childhood homes was on Entree View Dr. Once you spelled out Entree, people would demand View be spelled as well, like they couldn't trust that would be a normal spelling. My current street name has to be spelled out, but it's only 4 letters, so I don't mind as much. I passed by Cut Thru Rd yesterday, and thought that would be a miserable place to live. My youngest desperately wants to live on Boring Rd. lol

I kept supplying graphic novels for pleasure reading, but also made sure there was a shelf full of interesting novels of various reading difficulties available. For school time, I would require regular books at the current reading level. To switch from picture books, I started with one page stories. If the kid could see all the print there was to read, it made it seem more doable. Once that was fine, we moved to 2-3 page stories, and then a chapter of Magic Tree House, etc. Eventually, the kid made the switch on their own with their pleasure reading. The biggest thing is to keep non-school reading fun, so they keep reading.

I am generally okay eating anything, as long as I don't try to eat peanuts, or pizza and ice cream on the same day. Antibiotics do seem to throw everything off for a bit. I've found that while my digestive tract is recovering from a round of antibiotics, I need to eat lower fat AND lower sugar for a couple weeks.

I've always ordered mine via setontesting.com Some of the tests do require the proctor to have a college degree. When I lived in Georgia, I used the ITBS (Iowa Test of Basic Skills). They revised the test for common core standards, so it's now called the Iowa Form E. In Tennessee, they refused to update their test list (I emailed so many people at the state education department, but to no avail), so I had to use the Stanford 10. Overall, I preferred the feedback from the Iowa test, but I got enough information from the Stanford 10 to get a sense of whether I was doing enough with the homeschooling, and which areas to focus on in the future. We also skipped schoolwork on testing days. The last couple weeks of school, I tend to skip/condense assignments because everyone is ready for summer, so our school year is still 180 days. I figure if the schools can count standardized testing days as school days, so can I. If anything, schools have fewer days of instruction because they waste a week or more on review for those standardized tests.

I had 3 wisdom teeth erupt in my teens, no problem. All of my teeth were textbook straight. Right after my first semester of grad school, the 4th one erupted and in the space of 3 weeks (the time it took to see the specialist and get a date for the surgery), one of my front teeth started turning. I now have a gap in my smile between my upper central and lateral incisor. If the wisdom tooth didn't cause it, that is a crazy coincidence. ETA: The tooth stopped moving after the wisdom teeth extraction.

Brunch: ham or eggs, assortment of fruit, Filipino Spanish bread (crescent rolls made from scratch, with a caramel filling) Dinner: cranberry chicken, butternut squash, multigrain bread with butter. I bought small dark chocolate bunnies for dessert, but if we crave a sweet, we may just substitute some rolls leftover from brunch, and save the bunnies for another day.

There are more replies from this year on this thread:

Between Kroger pickup and Market Wagon, I'm paying $400-500 per week for groceries for the four of us. We have so many allergies and dietary restrictions that it's crazy (to the point that when my medical insurance paid for a nutritionist, the nutritionist said she couldn't help me). Groceries have always been a big chunk of our budget. Chicken here is about $17 for 1.5lb, when it's available. Ground beef is still $6/lb. I'm paying $8.10 for a half gallon of milk, but it comes in a glass container so it tastes MUCH better than cardboard or plastic. It's extravagant, but it's like a taste of childhood.

When we built a frog pond at our old house, we used The Pond Digger's videos to learn how to do it. It helped me to know what not to do and why not to do it, in addition to learning the proper method. My parents also used his videos to build their own koi pond with waterfall feature.

We owned a 2,000 sq ft house, then rented a 1,200 sq ft townhouse (out of state move, and needed to get to know the area and find the right house for us), then bought a 4,000 sq ft house. We are a family of 4, but my youngest is now 12. I find that bigger houses are not that much more to clean. With bigger rooms, it's easier to move the vacuum around the furniture. There is one more bathroom, but my kids clean half the bathrooms for me now. Dust is less frequent of an issue with bigger rooms (i.e. still the same number of bodies shedding skin, but spread over more square footage). I find I do most chores less frequently, so even if they take a minute or two longer, I'm still not spending any more of my life cleaning. Also, the little kid clutter is only for a few more years. Around age 10, my kids started confining their mess to their bedroom. Schoolwork and projects were still in the common space, but toys didn't live in my living room anymore IYKWIM. One thing to keep in mind with such a big jump in house is that it will take more furniture to fill the space. For instance, I had never had a den separate from a living room before, so my living room currently only has one rocking chair in it. I have never regretted having the extra space. Smaller houses give me claustrophobia and I'm just stressed all the time. Being in a large, fairly empty house makes me feel so much more comfortable. This is also the first house I've lived in with 10 foot ceilings and that helps a lot, even more than vaulted ceilings. ETA: The 2000 sq ft house was built in the 1980s and the 4000 sq ft house was new construction, so our utilities actually decreased in cost. The only things that increased in cost were light bulbs (in the first two years we had to replace LED bulbs multiple times , until we bought a whole house surge protector) and HVAC filters (there are four to change every couple months).

Poetry Short story Screenplay Magazine article (let the kid choose an expertise from how they spend their free time) Write a review: book, movie, video game, etc. Compare/contrast essay of book vs movie Autobiography Resumé and cover letter (get ready for high school part-time job applications!) Let the kid pick one project per week. Find resources on your bookshelf or online to teach the skills.

Did he use multithreading to make it check several data points at a time? I know I'm asking a bunch of nosy questions that aren't your area of expertise, but I am trying to understand what kind of coding changes he made, to see if he'd be a good fit for some jobs I know are available. If he's not interested in a new job, there's no need to find out the answer. Regardless, congrats!

Did he rewrite the software to use a GPU to handle floating point computations?

The snow accentuates all the angles and makes Sid look like a warrior. We woke up to 5" of snow over on the east side of the state, and it's still falling. We'd had so many days over 70 degrees this last week that we had been talking about pulling out the summer clothes this weekend. At least we get one more day of cocoa and hot tea. 🙂

My junior has been taking Mythology this semester from an online public school. The class uses Edith Hamilton's book as the spine and therefore only covers Greco Roman mythology, with a couple weeks spent on Norse mythology. She's only halfway through the class, and my daughter is already designing a Mythology II class with her teacher to cover mythology from all the other cultures in the world (Egyptian, Irish, Native American, African, etc.). What books would y'all recommend to cover such a broad range? As an aside, this teacher is the most fantastic I've encountered in a public school setting. While there are tests (it is a public school), there are no worksheets. Assignments have plenty of choices, from making a comic strip about the myth to recording dramatic readings with costumes to taking notes while watching a movie about the myth. There are usually 5+ choices, plus an option to create your own assignment with approval. When they take notes on the text, she gives extra credit for kids who put snarky comments about the myths in parentheses. I can see why my daughter is willing to put in the extra work to get to take another class with this teacher.