Thank you all for the commiseration, book and website recommendations, hugs and so on. I appreciate it. :) I did use the OPK test strips in March and April. Both times seemed to give me a positive around the same day so at least I do know when I ovulate, which seems to be around the 12th of the month. (Our first cycle of trying, in February, I had no idea). But I don't track my temp. Thank you both for not saying "Listen, jerk, we've been trying for a long time, three months is nothing, so don't complain okay?" :) (I do know three months is really not a long time. It just feels like it is to me. You know what I mean, I'm sure. And especially because I'm about to turn 38 and the clock is ticking so to speak). And yeah this is sort of a new experience for me, too. I was only 18 when I got pregnant with my oldest and it just happened, unplanned. I did TTC my now 10 y/o and got pregnant very quickly with what resulted in a "blighted ovum," tried again as soon as I got the go-ahead and again got pregnant very quickly with my now 10 y/o. Like probably within a month or two of trying each time. My 5 y/o son just happened, he was unexpected. And now here I am about to turn 38 and for once actually trying and I guess I had hoped it would happen right away. So much for that. But I know this is nothing compared to trying for a year, two years, three years... you guys will be in my thoughts and I hope that it happens for you, too. :grouphug:

Maybe you could buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Passive-Aggression-Spoiling-Relationships-Happiness/dp/1569243611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303635794&sr=1-1 or borrow it from your library, and next time you're going to be around her, bring it with you, hand it to her, and say: "I came across this book and I thought of you, I thought you might want to check it out." :D

I'm sorry. :grouphug: I've had a lot of issues with my mother, too; from as far back as I can remember- childhood to adulthood. They'd take a year and a day to go into here. Suffice it to say I just spent 5 months not talking to her at all and finally just laid everything on the line to her after a recent email she wrote me and told her that if we were to have any relationship at all, changes had to be made- we are tentatively starting over from here but if things go south again, I'm just done. Like permanently done. In the meanwhile, I am trying my best to be a very different kind of mother than the kind I had/have and have come to terms with the fact that she never was and never will be the kind of mother I have dreamt of having (nor will she ever be the kind of grandmother I've dreamt of my kids having). So I try to BE that kind of mother instead, so that my daughter will grow up able to BE that kind of mother to her kids and so on, and I'm grateful for the love and support I get from the other people in my life. And I try to give that to myself, too. Your choices are: 1) Write her a heartfelt letter or email laying it on the line- how you feel, what you need/would like from her, and see what happens. 2) Accept that you can't change a person who doesn't care to change and have whatever relationship you are able to have with her on those terms. 3) Severely limit your interactions with her and/or cut her out of your life (perhaps after making an attempt at number 1 first?) Either way, be kind to yourself. It's not you, it's her. You don't HAVE to have a toxic person in your life just because they are related to you, so if you decide the time has come to cut her off, don't feel guilty. And you don't need her. You don't. You have a husband, kids, friends who care about you... if she doesn't want to be one of those people, it's her problem and her loss and maybe it has something to do with the way SHE was raised... but if it was, the cycle ends with you. You will be a better mom than your mom was/is.

definitely rude and definitely old enough (unless she was so caught up in her book that she literally didn't hear her mother which wouldn't necessarily be surprising to a bookworm like me- are you sure she heard her)?

:iagree: This book (I only have SCFES so far) is not intended to teach grammar from scratch, it's just intended to teach a child to write stronger, more interesting sentences by imitating strong, interesting sentences. It operates under the concept that it's easier to write a good sentence than it is to write a good paragraph. It teaches them to look at a sentence at a time. And they might have to rearrange sentence parts to make one sentence, they might have to add sentence parts to make the sentence their own, they might have to write their own imitation, etc. I agree that it assumes some knowledge of various concepts, as it only VERY briefly touches on what they are and provides one or two examples and then plunges you right into doing the work. My 10 y/o and I started in January and were a bit sporadic for a while with using it, but we're now in a rhythm of doing one "practice" a day. She can usually do fine on her own at this point with all of the exercises except for the imitations. Those she still tends to need some hand-holding with, especially for the longer ones. These practices can take anywhere from 5-15 minutes depending on what it is.

This, and because it takes up less room in a signature line haha. I DO, however, mention my kids by first name from time to time in the discussion part of posts, and in my blog, so it really isn't a privacy issue for me, I don't tend to worry about sharing my kids' first names.

My daughter was around 3 or so. She loved to come up behind my husband or I and stick her head up under the backs of our teeshirts. We would reach round to pat her head going, "Hey! Where's Alexa? And what is this lump on my butt?" And she would crack up. It was funny until the day we were standing on a long check out line at the supermarket and Alexa, growing bored, asked loudly: Daddy, can we play the butt game?

I started to. I started my son on Oak Meadow Kindergarten last fall and selected things from Growing, Growing Strong to use for health. We didn't get very far into it, however, and 7 or 8 weeks into the school year I found that he was just not interested enough/focused enough/ready enough for any sort of Kindergarten curriculum, so I dropped everything and will be revisiting it all this coming fall.

Just got my, er... "friend." So our third month of trying didn't work either. I turn 38 in eight days. And then I guess I'm going into month 4 of trying for that one last little one, but I keep worrying that the longer it takes the more chance there could be of various problems and so on. Plus I don't want to wait. I just wish it would happen already. Waiting and being disappointed each month really stinks.

I called my grandparents Nanny and Poppy. My kids call some grandparents "Grandma/Grandpa" and one grandma they call "Bubbe" (which sounds like bubby) (Jewish grandma name).

See, from my perspective, even if K doesn't offer a lot of new information, it can be just kind of for fun before moving on to more formal or challenging stuff. And while I do think that there wouldn't be academic problems necessarily in second or third grade, I think it is POSSIBLE that when you get to later elementary and middle school that you might find that the types of assignments they have to do, particularly reading and writing, might be easier grasped, and have more gotten out of them in regard to understanding and so on, if they were that extra year older. Just some food for thought, you'll of course do whatever you think will work out best for your child and will make it work out in the end either way. :)

For which grades? Oak Meadow uses weesing songs and fingerplays in K, uses the recorder in the earlier years as a musical instrument and provides some recorder books (not sure which grade that starts at), although personally I've decided not to bother with that. We just do our own informal thing for music earlier on, and my daughter will start guitar lessons next year in 6th grade. For 4th and 5th we used a free site called makingmusicfun.net to learn more about various composers and orchestra instruments, we've got a bin full of simple musical instruments they can play with, we attend live performances here and there and so on. Art in K is a lot of nature type crafts. In 4th there was a built in art curriculum learning about laws of perspective and so on. In 5th and 6th there's no formal art instruction/curriculum but instead various "handicrafts" that tie into the English and Social Studies lessons (which are always integrated). We're going to be adding "Meet The Masters" next year for 6th grade. I think in 2nd or 3rd grade they start with a cookbook of some sort but I haven't had to use it as I've only used OM4, OM5 and part of OMK so far. ETA: You can get an overview here: http://www.oakmeadow.com/curriculum/kindergarten.php (That's Kindergarten but you'll see links on the left with all the grades, and as you click each one, it will give you an overview of the curriculum for that grade including what they do for the subjects you are interested in).

Yes, and yes. :) (Well mine's a counter height table that's a rectangle unless I "open" it, and then it becomes a big square). I love the way it looks.

Gosh, those pictures... I really feel so awful for him! And can't imagine how stressed you must be! If you continue to have a hard time finding a lawyer I wonder if you should contact your local news station and get your story out there and maybe that will help you get some help (as well as make other parents aware of the danger)!

It really wouldn't have been so bad if I had a bigger, more private property. But my yard is like 20X80 for crying out loud lol. We live in a county where "row homes" are common. My house is not attached to another house but it may as well be, there's only the width of a walkway between them. So any neighbor who happened to be looking out their window could easily see him. Anyway, a lot of these stories are really making me laugh! :D

:lol::lol::lol:

I vote Kindergarten. Definitely. For one, Kindergarten is FUN so why not experience it? For another, I agree that you may be glad for it when they get to later years... My daughter started out in public school with a b-day right ON the cutoff date and I started her instead of waiting that extra year. But I do think now it would have been better if I'd waited. She would have enjoyed that extra year of young childhood more if I'd waited, when we got to where we are now (4th, 5th, 6th grade) I think she'd have gotten a bit more out of our reading and writing assignments if she'd had that extra year to mature, and I still have to face the fact that down the road I might regret her "graduating early" if it's going to mean she wants to leave home and go away to college or something as the youngest kid there. She's starting 6th grade next year and I haven't made a final decision yet, but I have been toying with the idea of spreading 6th grade out over a two year period with her. My son will be starting Kindergarten this September and will then turn 6 in November.

I am a HUGE fan of Oak Meadow. My daughter was in public school from K through most of third grade. I didn't pull her out of school til toward the end of the third grade year, so we didn't use a curriculum to wrap up the school year, we just did our own thing. I heard about Oak Meadow during that time period, read about it, had a chance to see the Kindergarten curriculum in person and some of the second grade curriculum in person (friends were using it) and I fell in love. I was lucky enough to find an older, used version of Oak Meadow K-8 all from one seller and bought the lot. I then used Oak Meadow 4 with my daughter last year- and we both loved it. It's not dry or textbookish, it's creative, hands on and fun. We just wrapped up Week 29 of Oak Meadow 5 for this year, and are continuing to love it. I am looking forward to moving on to Oak Meadow 6 with her in the fall and (re)starting Oak Meadow Kindergarten with my 5 year old son at the same time. I don't know how old your kids are- Oak Meadow is MUCH less academic, more gentle, Waldorf-ish and so on in the earliest years. In later elementary (say 4th on) it really is more caught up to age level and becomes heavier and heavier on reading and writing, with interesting writing assignments to choose from and so on, but still manages to not become dry, textbookish, full of "busywork" and so on. I have lots of info on Oak Meadow on my blog if you want to take a look. You can start here: Oak Meadow Review http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/124071.html Oak Meadow Kindergarten Sample Week w/schedule and pics http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/125979.html Oak Meadow 4th Grade Sample Week w/schedule and pics http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/126472.html Oak Meadow 5th Grade Sample Week w/schedule and pics http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/126296.html

At the moment, we're keeping a week long log of the mileage on our family car. Every time someone uses it, my daughter has to write down why they used it and track the mileage. At the end of the week she has to total the mileage, figure out whether any of our trips could have been avoided by more careful planning or by walking instead, etc (we've been doing various types of pollution and "alternatives" such as housing, fuels, cleaning supplies and so on lately).

Yesterday my ten year old daughter was doing a Sentence Composing For Elementary School Lesson. She was on the section that pertained to compound verbs, and she was on the activity that had to do with expanding. I would show her the sentences in the book which read, for instance: "Mrs. Jones stopped, jerked...., put...., and continued...." and she had to fill in with sentence parts of her own. But I would also read her the original sentences from the back of the book just so she could know what the original sentence said before coming up with her own version. That particular one said: "Mrs. Jones stopped, jerked him around in front of her, put a half-nelson about his neck, and continued to drag him up the street." My daughter looked at me, said: "No lady in MY sentence is doing a half-nelson!" (which totally cracked me up) and proceeded to write: "Mrs. Jones stopped, jerked her car to the side of the road, put on her sunglasses, and continued driving."

But I mean they just have to water them one time? They don't have to come back and keep watering them, right?

So, you can't water your own flowers? Is this game going to irritate me?! LOL. (I used to love the TV show The Smurfs when I was a kid. And every time I got money, I would walk to this Hallmark type store and buy Smurf figurines. I had quite a collection of them and would often play with them in my dollhouse, in my brothers' Castle Greyskull, in the bath, outside in the yard, you name it. Imagine my dismay, horror and lifelong trauma the day I came home to find out that my mother had had a yard sale and my brothers had decided to take AND SELL my entire Smurf collection so they could make some money! My husband heard that story so often that in recent years he started buying me Smurf figurines online lol). So yeah when I saw the app, I downloaded it- just haven't had a chance to try to play it yet. P.S. Is it a one time thing that somebody has to water your flowers or is that supposed to be an ongoing thing?!

I have it downloaded but haven't checked it out yet. Why do you need a friend to do that??

Well, thank you all for sharing your stories and making me feel better (and some of those are truly hilarious) (and I've learned it could have been worse, he could have pooped outside haha). I'm all for letting a kid discretely pee outside somewhere if there is no alternative/no bathroom nearby, but when the bathroom is about 20 paces from where you're playing and a neighbor could look out and see you (and you're also peeing through the fence into their yard)... just, no! lol.

Mine's been easy (I'm not all that tech savy either) and was free for a long time until I decided to upgrade. It's in my signature line. :)