I agree. I think you are stressing over this more than you need to. And your oldest is only 8. Enjoy the time with dad. Let him pitch in with one or two things if he wants. If not, whatever! You don't have to direct everything for your kids to be learning- crafts and science encyclopedias and imaginative play and time with dad are all GREAT for 5, 7, and 8 year olds. Pick the things that are most urgent in your mind to accomplish and do that stuff in the afternoon. If the not so urgent stuff didn't get done all the time because you prioritized time with dad and interest led stuff, so what? It's ok! :) But then I'm a relaxed homeschooler who thinks the field trips, the family time, the extra curriculars, the interest led stuff, the reading for fun and all of that is just as worthwhile as any curriculum I throw at them and we just kind of roll with it each day and see what life brings us and accomplish what we can accomplish and embrace the opportunities that come up along the way and enjoy learning in all different ways, and somehow it just works for us! P.S. My husband sleeps late which makes mornings a bit easier but he doesn't leave for work until almost 1 PM. And we do a lot of outings and field trips. So we've learned to just do school when we have time to do school- you'll figure it out, no need to feel a horrible guilt over it, this is the beauty of the flexibility of homeschooling!

None. I'd never spend that kind of money on photographs. We can have tons of perfectly nice candids and memories from our own camera basically for free. :D If I was going to blow that kind of money on capturing memories I'd rather it be on a shared experience, like traveling somewhere together!

Delaney, On South Beach Diet they suggest no fruit for the first two weeks. I did that. Then again my husband just decided to cut out grains and ate fruit right from the beginning and did fine with that. So, up to you!

Sometimes you just HAVE to prioritize yourself, and don't feel guilty about it, either. Remember that you're teaching your daughters how to be wives and mothers and how to find THEIR healthy balance (which doesn't include being walked all over and ignored by everyone else all the time) and your sons how to be husbands and fathers (which includes knowing how to put the wife/mom first sometimes, not neglecting the things she needs...right? :) It's perfectly okay to say to your kids, nicely of course, "Listen, you can manage a few more weeks without a haircut. Do you know when I last had one? Me either. This paycheck's for MY haircut. Do you really need an eleventh pair of shoes? Do you know when was the last time I bought myself a real pair of shoes, aside from slippers? Me either. I need to get myself a pair this time." And then just do it. It's okay. Really. The world won't come grinding to a halt. They'll live. Take care of you sometimes. :) Why are you never the priority of anyone else? You've never given them any indication you wanted to be, should be, need to be, deserve to be, etc. You have to take control and show them that sometimes you want to be, should be, need to be, deserve to be, etc. I think you also have to speak up if YOU need help, rather than being the one to give help, due to your chronic pain issues, lack of sleep, or whatever. But I wouldn't get upset by them asking about things...kids get excited about things, they ask. You just have to tell them how you feel (repeatedly, probably) as necessary, and only do what YOU can handle, and ask them for help as YOU need, too. I think it sounds like the main issue is you speaking/standing up for yourself with your family and you aren't used to doing that! :grouphug:

Well, for me, I gave up pretty much all grains. If it has flour in it, I basically stopped eating it. I've lost 57 lbs this way and by default it means I no longer eat cakes, cookies, and stuff like that. So that's already cut down my sugars drastically. If I want something sweet for a bedtime snack/dessert I will usually have either a piece of whole fruit, a homemade healthy smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, ice) sometimes my fruit will be plain or sometimes it will be something like an apple with peanut butter, or "ants on a log" (banana with peanut butter and a few raisins). Every now and then I'll have a sugar free jello or a sugar free ice pop but I don't do it that often because I do try to avoid artificial sweeteners most of the time. And once in a blue moon I'll just eat a few semi-sweet chocolate chips and a bit of milk, just because. I do find that once you stop eating junk food "desserts" and start doing fruit type snacks instead, you do get used to that, and that IS enough to satisfy a craving for something sweet.

Yep, this stuff:

Some of these are funny, though in the case of Sno White Tanning I imagine they meant it's where you go when you ARE "Sno White" and want to tan instead.

Really? 3? I'm very surprised they said that! That just screams "We want to make more money!" to me. I mean sure they dressed it up bright and colorful and appealing to even young preschoolers and toddlers. But in the end they are still teaching kids how to read and most 3 and 4 year olds are not yet developmentally ready to read! And the program does seem to move pretty quickly through introducing new things (though they say you're supposed to repeat lessons like 3 times each for that reason, I guess). While I guess young kids might like "playing" with it, and can do things in the playhouse areas and such, for more focused reading lessons and a real goal of teaching a kid to read, I would think most kids would do better between 5 and 6, although some 4 y/o's may be ready to learn to read anyway and would do well with it! Again, just follow his cues. If he enjoys the playhouse for now, let him just do that, there are probably things he can learn from there. As far as the actual reading lessons, I'd wait six months and give it another try. If it goes better, great! If it doesn't, wait another six months and try again! I think 5-6 is more realistic for a lot of kids (and especially if you've got a wiggly boy)!

So, we're studying Buddhism and Hinduism at the moment for SOTW. Yesterday, we were reading from My Friends' Beliefs, A Young Reader's Guide To World Religions, covering the sections on those two religions. We read a line that said: "There is a story of a follower of Buddha walking on water, as Jesus reportedly did at a later time." To which my 11 y/o daughter commented, "I thought that was Criss Angel who walked on water." :lol:

Yesterday my daughter and I were reading Prince Siddhartha (the story of Buddha). There was a story where a man was really angry at Buddha and was ranting and yelling at him. Buddha asked him, if you buy a gift for someone and they don't accept it, who does the gift belong to? The man said, to me, I bought it. Buddha went on to explain if he didn't accept the man's anger or let it bother him, it only belonged to and hurt the man, no-one else. Your son doesn't need to accept "mean ugly faces"- he can ignore them, find them silly, think of the Buddha story, decide to have a conversation with her at a later time in a non-confrontational way if he wants to ask her why she always makes faces, whatever he wants. Whatever. Let the girl keep her mean ugly face and be a mean ugly person if she wants to be, but, really, a face isn't hurting your son and doesn't require a parent interceding on his behalf.

I do sit with my 6 y/o while he does the lessons. I tell him when he's allowed to go play games and such. Your son's pretty young. He just might not be interested enough/ready to actually learn to read. If he's not interested in the actual lessons, or having too hard a time with them, I wouldn't force it at almost four. I'd let him do his thing and try again in six months, or next year, or whatever.

My son at 4 and even JUST before turning 5 had no interest in sitting and "doing school" and knew a lot but not all of his letters, wasn't ready to be taught to read, etc. I didn't do K with him until this year, just before he turned 6 (which is when he would have technically been going to K anyway because of a November b-day), and it's going MUCH better this year. He's more ready now. Is it possible your son has some sort of learning disability? I guess. Is it also possible he's just a four year old boy who is developmentally ready to move around and play, and not to sit and learn letters and such? Sure. Wait a year and he might pick them all up with surprising speed. Do you think he'll get much one on one instruction and patient help in the classroom, anyway? Doubt it! And as for the type of socialization you can expect him to get in a Kindergarten classroom, well, I don't know about YOUR district, but when MY daughter went to Kindergarten, she lost some or all of her lousy fifteen minutes of recess a day on almost a daily basis as a punishment for talking too much in the classroom. They were expected to sit still and quiet the vast majority of the day and weren't allowed to talk. They couldn't even talk at lunch- they had "silent lunches" so they could hurry up and eat, so they could hurry up and get to that very short recess (that is, if they hadn't already lost it for talking in the classroom), so they could hurry up and get back to their classrooms to do more deskwork...they had to prepare for the standardized testing that would be coming in a few short years, after all! Of course, I suppose by the time she got home at the end of a very long day, at almost 4 PM, that should be time enough for a 5 year old to play and socialize with friends, after school...oh, but wait, she had homework. Even at 5. :P

If I had a kid who was literally being kept awake at night with thoughts that their life wasn't worth living AND it wasn't the first time comments like those had come up AND there was a history of depression in the family, there is no way I would sweep that under the rug with pep talks. I'd take her to her doctor to be evaluated for a possible anti-depressant, because it's better to be safe than sorry. The last thing you need is your child trying to kill herself and you saying "if only I had...." I think onceuponatime had some good tips, but for me they'd be in conjunction with the visit to the doctor, not instead of.

:grouphug: I'm sorry. I hope something even better comes along for you!

That's awesome! Congrats on the microwave! My scale said 190.4 this AM- SO close to the 180's, just half a pound more! I hope it's by tomorrow, but going out to dinner tonight for my husband's birthday, so, I don't know. :P

:iagree: (and yes, I use and love it, and if you look at those threads you'll know exactly why lol).

I had an ectopic last summer and was given methotrexate (sp?) for it. I don't know anything about the specific drug you are asking about. But I wanted to say I am very sorry for your loss. :grouphug:

You know, it's not the worst thing in the world to just have the gallbladder removed. Just saying. I did. :P I'd rather have the gall bladder removed and then be able to go about my life eating a reasonable diet consisting of a healthy/normal amount of healthy fats! I don't see how a fat-free life is all that healthy or pleasant. What does your husband think? And even before I had my gall bladder removed, I don't recall them telling me to eat fat free? :confused: They told me don't eat fried stuff, or very spicy stuff, but they weren't like "don't eat fat at all." Still, of course I'm not telling you not to listen to your doctor lol. You can use things like I Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray on things for him and add regular butter to things for you guys. You can do a small separate pan of something or other with fat free cooking spray for his portion of things and cook with olive oil, coconut oil, or butter for you guys. Hold the mayo on his stuff but not yours. You guys can eat extra nuts and peanut butter and so on. It's kind of the same as when a parent decides to go on some sort of diet for weight loss or whatever but still wants to feed the kids non-diet foods, it seems a little awkward at first but you figure it out and fall into a routine that works for everyone and it becomes no big deal...good luck with it!

Definitely overstepped their boundaries. If anything, they should have called the mother and said, "These are some things that some students/teens do if they get depressed, I know your family is going through a rough situation, please watch out for the following signs and let us know over at the school if there is anything you feel we need to be concerned about. We will let you know if we see anything of concern here at school." Then they could let the daughter know they were there for her if she wanted to talk to them about anything she wasn't comfortable talking to her parents about at home, even asked the teachers to let the counselor know if they noticed any worrisome behavior in class, and that would be that. But I think they went too far with the things they did.

Honestly, I don't even KNOW if we're allowed to participate in public school sports- my daughter is busy enough with other things (book club, judo, Girl Scouts, guitar lessons, homeschool bowling league, etc), and my son, who is only 6, plays teeball and soccer through the community rather than through the school district. Perhaps you can either check into community sports, rather than public school sports, talk to the YMCA about availability of sports or them helping you get something started, hook up with local homeschool groups about whether there is anything available for homeschoolers, and if not, if they'd be interested in putting something together, and see if you can make something happen between the community, the Y, the homeschoolers, etc. If all else fails, see if you can lobby to change the rules regarding playing for the public school. You might have to work or fight a little for this!

:grouphug: This post made me tear up. I could just imagine how I would feel if I couldn't find my child, the panic, the awful directions in which my mind would go. So glad everything turned out okay. And that your husband knew just what to do afterward lol.

Yeah, well, I'd have to go for both. I'd have to pick a guy I think would do a good job AND who I didn't think was a real jerk. Just a personal feeling. I kinda like to have my cake and eat it, too! :D And I'm sorry, but there's no way I'd be voting for the guy who told me I was a self-aggrandizing, society-phobic, selfish, arrogant to the point of lunacy parent whose child was a "geek" who would never be properly socialized, and that I could never do as good a job educating my child as a public school teacher could, and who if I got defensive about it told me he was "delighted" by my defensiveness, and that my decision to homeschool pissed him off, and so on and so forth. And I am not religious at all and I'm offended for people who are that he publicly stated that "God hates homeschooling." Yeah, no, not voting for that guy. Just not. I do get what you're saying. Just for ME, I wouldn't personally vote for someone like that.

:lol::lol: LOL! Now that's funny, too!

What about a mountain lion/cougar? (mountain = rock for the Solid Rock part, feline/cat = curiosity for the "satisfying curiosity" part). (According to National Geographic, "They are solitary and shy animals, seldom seen by humans" which also sounds sort of humorous for a homeschool mascot haha).

Shrug. Maybe not. But it wasn't like he was a young kid those three short years ago. He was a grown man who acted like a playground bully saying some pretty rude things about an entire community of people and very obviously having fun doing it, just because he didn't personally agree with their choices and methods. Now he decides he wants to go into politics and if all those insults and taunts come back to haunt him, I don't feel sorry for him at ALL.