I am reading The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk this week on my own. Together, my daughter and I are reading The Long Winter (Little House on the Prairie series).

Last year for the first day of school we made a "Back To School" wreath to put on our front door and decorated it with cute little things- a little house, an apple, a "chalkboard" we made out of black construction paper which we wrote on with chalk and "framed" with a flat piece of corkboard, a little "book" we made out of folded cardstock and so on. I also took a piece of paper and put a picture on it of my son on his first day of school, his handprint (using fingerpaint), his height and weight, the date, and so on. When the day is over you can always go out for ice cream or something to celebrate. Oh, and we also started our "seasonal table" (only instead of a table we used a small glass aquarium with a lid to keep things contained- we went on a walk and found things that reminded us of fall and put them in our tank).

Thank you, everyone, for the nice comments. :) She did have a really nice time! And the nice thing was, her life skills class teacher took them to a local beauty school to get their hair done during the day... a good thing, because I'm HORRIBLE at doing hair! AND the school has a rack of dresses that have been traded or donated in and any girl who needs a dress can borrow one from there as long as they've bought their (only $5.00) prom ticket. So the staff at the school helped her pick that dress out and it's a borrowed dress. We didn't have to go spend a ridiculous amount of money to buy one that would only be worn once or anything like that. :) I love that they do that and thought the staff did a really nice job helping her select a dress that fit and looked nice on her! Yes lol...they are either fearless or blind, a few times they ran pretty much right up to our feet as we walked before they seemed to notice we were there and ran the other way. Sure. :)

:) I googled something like "Pennsylvania counties map" and looked under images to find that image and I printed it out. My husband glued it to a block of sanded wood, trimmed the edges so the whole thing would be in the shape of the map, and they sanded the edges, put a few coats of varnish on the whole thing to make it smoother and to protect the paper printout, and then used the band saw to cut out the individual pieces. I thought it came out really cute, too! I joked that he should make a few more and try to sell them but we didn't really think that would work, they aren't like professional manufacturer quality or anything and I'm sure there aren't huge crowds of people out there just looking for a homemade PA county map puzzle haha. But if you are serious about wanting one, I bet he'd make another one if you were willing to pay for shipping and a bit for materials. PM me and let me know. :)

She's 19 and she attends a special needs school/life skills class, where she will go until she's 21. Last night, they had their prom. I wanted to share a few pictures of her! http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/205317.html Just scroll down til you see the first two prom pics, and then there are three more toward the bottom of the page. :)

I saw gas stations range from $3.88 to $3.97 while driving around yesterday here in PA.

Well, we only have 8 games left in the season. Hopefully Coach can keep his sanity til the end lol. And at least Ben has still learned a lot. He knows all the positions and bases and so on. He's getting better at throwing. And he now knows that "hustle" means hurry up and get over here and that it is NOT the name of another child on his team. :D

If 12 years of school didn't teach me enough to provide an elementary education to my children, then it's a darn good thing I'm going with choice B for MY kids. ;)

Look at these teeball pics from last night's game (just scroll down a wee bit until you see the first teeball pic). I mean, really? lol. Are yours like this? http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/204863.html

We've always done Dunkin' Donuts gift cards so they can get coffee or whatever.

That falls under the realm of unethical psychological experiments in my opinion. Disgusting.

Yes, this is a really key point, too! I know that if I were trying to teach math myself and I was having a hard time getting something across (by reading and translating a textbook) in a way that my daughter could understand it, I'd get frustrated. As much with myself as her, but I know that it would show, and all that would probably do would be to make her confidence levels drop and have a negative effect on our relationship, and on our attitude about school being fun in general. Which is an attitude we DO like to try to have. SO not worth it. Using TT and allowing her to do math more independently with "someone else" teaching her so to speak avoids all of that and has worked out beautifully all year. And I get to focus my school time with her on the things she either needs more help with or that we really just enjoy doing together instead of spending it on something as potentially frustrating as math (and then having that frustration turn into some sort of bad mood that might carry over into other parts of our day)... no thanks! By the way... I am looking forward to seeing more updates in this thread from those of you who hadn't yet tested or gotten results when I originally posted this to see if more of you had the same experience with getting good results on standardized tests after using TT. :)

You're welcome. :) Astrid, not sure, but I grabbed a coupon for myself, too, and the coupon code number is the same on that one, so I think anybody who wants to can go to Hershey Park's website and use that code online to get that deal.

:grouphug: I really, really feel for you. You're kind of in a Catch-22. On the one hand, it's not necessarily feasible or reasonable (in most situations) to try to tell an 18 year old "adult" what they can and can't do. (Sure she's living under your roof and you can play that card but you have to balance if/when you should do that with whether it will just cause long term relationship problems between you, or her rushing to move out, etc). And on the other hand, this is definitely a HUGE issue/concern, that this guy could just randomly fall asleep while he's driving your daughter and their newborn baby around. How extremely nerve-wracking, I would be so worried every time they left the house. Unfortunately, I think that all you can do is tell your daughter something like, "You're an adult, and I know I can't tell you what to do. I also want us to keep having a good relationship, so I don't want to put barriers between us. So this will be the last I'm going to say on the subject and then I just hope that the two of you do the right thing. As a mom, you have to put YOUR baby first now. I know you would never be able to live with yourself if he got into an accident while he was driving this baby around, and you lost your child. So I REALLY hope that you will talk to him on your own and about getting checked for some sort of sleep disorder and/or use your good judgment as to if or when he should be driving you guys around. I would hate for something to happen to any of you. I'm only saying this because I care about you all, not because I want to control you." And then you probably just have to let it go and let them make their own decisions.

Saxon has SO many problems per lesson, it seems like overkill to me. I would drastically shorten the number of problems she is expected to do per lesson if you see that she gets/understands it. For TT my daughter does 22-24 problems per lesson, plus the 5 practice problems. So maybe you can trim Saxon down to a comparable number of problems for material your daughter understands and chalk the rest up as "busywork" and just skip it. By doing that, maybe you can get through more of the lessons sooner than you think. Of course, if she's having problems understanding the material, then you don't want to rush her through it. But if she gets it, don't let her get bogged down in busywork, just try to condense things somewhat.

I had already posted to this thread to say that as the wife of a tattoo artist/body piercer, I agreed that a place like that would be a good choice, as long as you go to a clean, reputable one. Wanted to post one more time though after seeing those pictures. My daughter has those "fixed bead" earrings too (also known as captive bead rings). Hers are purple niobium. She loves them. And yes, piercing needles are WAY "cleaner" and less traumatizing to the body than piercing guns are!

My 5 y/o, who rarely has an attention span for being read to, did pretty well with sitting through The Indian In The Cupboard (which is a series). Bonus: My 10 y/o daughter enjoyed the book, too! My 5 y/o also liked some of the Roald Dahl books.

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The homeschool thing is not just on one day, it's all month, but you have to buy the tickets by like the 16th. They have an order form online. But also FYI I happened to eat at Subway for lunch today and they had Hershey discount coupons there :D So I grabbed one for you. If you are going in June, you can save $12.00 off regular admission. It says you can go online at hersheypark.com and you can put in the coupon code online which seems to be 15632, and it's good for up to 8 admissions.

:lol:

Well, I'm not sure what it would be like if you just went on a typical day. We went specifically for an educational program where they had different stations set up with demonstrations and hands on activities and so on. Very pretty there, for sure! Not sure how much there would be to do on just a "typical" day. I do have a few pics up on my blog if you want to take a peek.

We were driving with the windows open yesterday on our way to an educational program at the Daniel Boone Homestead when the breeze carried a giant whiff of cow manure into our open car windows. My 5 y/o son was not at all pleased with the smell. I told him, "Well, if you were a farmer, and you lived and worked on a farm, you'd have to smell it all the time. But you'd probably be used to it and wouldn't notice it as much." He informed me, "If I was a farmer and I lived and worked on a farm, I would move out." :lol:

Awesome!! Thanks for sharing that! I'd love to see TT start getting a better rap than it has been so that the families who have the type of kids who would definitely benefit from it don't have to be afraid to use it. :)

Do you happen to be going this month? If so, they are having their "homeschool month" and tickets are WAY cheaper if you go on one of those days! However, they have to be paid for in advance, I think by like May 16th or something so you'd have to look into it right away. Other than that, not sure how you can go about getting discounted tickets (I know, they're expensive!)

Gee, I would hate for it to come across that way and I hope that to most people, it doesn't. I'm not sure if you realized, it isn't just one child pictured- it's two different children (and after this summer, it will be four different children). And the post is not about what the circumstances of any particular child, it's about the program in general. I only say a few lines about each child and what they enjoyed while they were here, nothing about "here's the story of this particular poor, deprived child" or anything like that. The pictures are to show what a positive experience it was overall in the hopes of encouraging others to give it a shot. And while I did post pictures and first names, I, of course, didn't use last names, or where they are from or anything like that. Host families and volunteers do also submit photos to the Fresh Air Fund for possible use on their site and so on, too, and sometimes they have news people show up at the bus areas and so on, so I'm assuming they covered the publicity permission portion of things, although, again, I didn't use last names or anything to at least somewhat protect their privacy. I do kind of know what you mean, I don't want to sound like I'm being defensive, either. I certainly don't want to offend or embarrass anyone, I just wanted to see if I could help get some more people interested in a great program.