If I were ever going to get a dog, which I won't...I'm happy with my relatively low maintenance cat lol...I would totally want to adopt a retired greyhound. :D

Here's a thread I started a while back when my daughter had to take her first standardized test after her first year of using Teaching Textbooks. It shows how her math scores dramatically improved, and a bunch of other people said the same. So as far as I'm concerned, TT works great for us! http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259625&highlight=teaching+textbooks+standardized+test

Good points. Refusing to participate with her or allow your son to participate with her doesn't show her "chivalry," it shows her a total lack of respect as a teammate and/or opponent, denies her an equal opportunity and might prevent her from advancing.

30 days was a long time, because what are you going to do if it happens again in that 30 days? Add another month? You might end up getting him so mired down in months without screen time that he won't even care because he'll never see a way out. Maybe you should have made the punishment a week at a time. But what's done is done now and I think that you have to stick to what you said and make him miss the movie and see the punishment through because he has to know the seriousness of what he's done and that he can't put his hands on people like that and know that you meant what you said. Choking is scary! It sounds kind of like he needs some anger management techniques though and I'd look into ways of researching anger management techniques for children. And while I don't see a playful running up and yelling "ha" as something punishment worthy on your older son's behalf, I do agree that generally speaking he's got to know not to antagonize or push the buttons of your younger son on purpose. P.S. I do not agree with pushing the family movie back to another time. It would not be fair to make older son wait a month or more to watch something he's been so looking forward to on top of having been choked yet again because younger son couldn't control himself yet again.

I bet I'm the only one here who ever stood on a line for hours outside a bookstore (I think it was a Borders) in New York City for a book signing (Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers signing his book "Scar Tissue"), who then got bored with answering "book signing" when asked over and over again by passerby: "Hey, what are you guys standing on line for?" and so instead started saying: "American Idol Auditions!" which then caught on and resulted in people around me coming up with their own creative responses when THEY were asked...it got pretty amusing (despite one person saying something about a sperm bank). P.S. I was really only there to keep my sister-in-law company. She was the big Anthony Kiedis/Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. I bought a copy of the book and got it signed since, what the heck, I was there. I've still got it sitting on my book case. This was YEARS ago. Would you believe I've never even read it? Standing on line was the most fun part haha.

:iagree: I was thinking "Yes, until they were older," but then again, once they were old enough where the boys were so much bigger anyway, I highly doubt they'd be pitting them against girls. But when they're young? Little kids, kids who aren't yet teens? Sure, why not? My daughter's in martial arts and has to spar with boys, and every once in a while for fun they get to play "Judo Games" and have to try to do things like get down on their knees or hands and knees (no getting to their feet) and be the first to get their opponent off a mat...it's pretty darn close to wrestling when they play and there are times my daughter (she turned 11 in Oct) has been matched against a boy about her size prob a year younger than her and as far as I could tell, nobody was bothered by it. At 7 no way would it bother me.

Unwound by Neal Shusterman and The Hunger Games? Also maybe the short stories Stephen King wrote under Richard Bachman?

Both unfortunately because PA is ridiculously intrusive! :P we have to hire an evaluator each year, plus do standardized tests in grades 3, 5 and 8, plus submit portfolios with samples of work to the superintendent each year. Fun!

My husband's birthday is April 12th. Mine is May 1st. Right in between that, on April 24th, the Michael Jackson World Tour Cirque du Soleil is going to be about 2 1/2 hours away from us. Neither of us have ever been to a Cirque du Soleil show before. My mother agreed to watch the kids overnight (which happens maybe once a year) and we bought our tickets and booked a nice room in the area last night as our birthday presents to ourselves and each other. I'm excited because I pretty much never do anything special for my birthday and I always thought it would be awesome to see a Cirque du Soleil show. I will be 39 in May so I grew up when Michael Jackson was huge!

I always tip food delivery people $3.00 plus whatever the change is to make it an even amount that I'm handing them so that they don't have to give me coins back.So sometimes that means that I'm giving them closer to $4.00 than $3.00.

Tried another new healthy chicken recipe tonight that was a hit over here, just found it online tonight, tried it out, and everyone liked it. I put 6 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves in a big glass casserole dish. In a bowl I combined a small can of low-fat cream of mushroom soup, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a small diced onion, 1 1/2 cups of fresh mushrooms and some salt and pepper to taste, spread it all evenly over the chicken breasts, baked it in a 350 oven for almost an hour, and then served it over rice with some green beans on the side. If you've ever had the "Saturday chicken and rice" at Cracker Barrel, it tasted something like that. A chicken with mushroom gravy which thinned out a lot while it cooked giving it a nice gravy to spoon over everything with lots of juice for the chicken to cook in, keeping it nice and tender while it cooked... we really enjoyed it! So between that and the "salsa chicken" we also tried recently, I've got a couple of new chicken dishes to keep circulating myself, which is good, because I eat a lot of chicken and it helps keep it from getting too boring. I also sometimes do a "healthier" version of chicken scampi or shrimp scampi by using I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper and either chicken or shrimp and I'll add broccoli and mushrooms and try to have just a small amount of whole grain rice or whole wheat pasta with it. You can also do a healthy baked chicken parm instead of frying in oil and use a more low-fat cheese. Chicken or shrimp fajitas with whole-grain wraps, low-fat cheese and sour cream and lots of veggies sauteed in just a bit of healthy olive oil.... How's your quest for healthier chicken and fish recipes going, anyway? :D

Starting last spring and summer, our homeschool group started having some sporadic kickball games. But only one particular mom had an actual kickball and so we depended on her being around lol. I just decided I'd go on Amazon and buy a kickball, keep it in my trunk, and bring it with me when I wanted to organize a kickball game this spring/summer. Simple, right? Apparently not. I'm having a tough time! The Mikasa brands apparently have horrible reviews. A bunch of people saying the quality is horrible and that they fell apart amazing quickly. I found a yellow Voit kickball and then saw quite a few people saying it's "too hard" and that kids can get really hurt with it. I don't see anything else that specifically says "kickball", just "playground balls." Will they hold up? Do you have a kickball that you'd use for play with a mixed age group of kids from preschoolers through middle schoolers, where adults could join in if they wanted to? That won't "hurt" the kids, can stand up to a game, etc? What brand? What size? Thanks! :)

I've never really noticed this unless it was because people already had one gender and were having what they thought was their last baby and really wanted to round their family out with the other gender.

I'm usually not a big apple fan, but I found that I love Honeycrisp apples! I eat bananas, I recently got a bag of Sunkist oranges, the seedless ones, and they were good. The red seedless grapes are sometimes still good this time of year. The kids love when I buy canned/jarred peaches since they're obviously not in season fresh. Jarred applesauce or applesauce cups. Raisins. That's about it. I sure do miss summer and sweet nectarines, cantaloupe, strawberries, peaches, cherries.... I mean, you can still buy them but they're ridiculously expensive and don't taste very good. :P

Now, where is that like button?!

I do not believe in an "afterlife." I believe that all things must come to an end. Things die. Life ends. It's just the way it is for all living things. Can it be a little bit depressing if you spend too much time contemplating it? Sometimes, I guess. But the opposite is true, too, if you spend time contemplating living forever and ever and ever, that's a little bit depressing, too. You live, and you die. That's life. You enjoy it while you have it, you do good things with it, you appreciate it, you make a difference, create new generations, love your loved ones, and eventually, you die. Like someone else said, life is rewarding in and of itself in many ways for most people. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on it. That would be like sitting here refusing to enjoy a bowl of ice cream because I'm too busy sighing over the fact that it's going to be gone soon. I'd rather just eat and enjoy it! And whoever started bringing up what about the baby put in the microwave and so on and so forth...yeah. Bad things happen. We all know that. There are people, unfortunately, whose lives aren't rewarding at all. Who live lives of abuse, neglect, and misery. Sometimes they end up escaping it and sometimes they don't. That, too, is part of life, but that has nothing to do with an "afterlife" and if you ask me, that's just yet more proof there's no magic supreme all powerful being out there. Any such being who could stand by and let little babies get raped and microwaved and tortured and murdered and abused and neglected, sometimes for years, while we're supposed to go "Oh, it's okay, we still love you, magic supreme being, we know little baby will get his "reward" someday, after he's dead," is not exactly worthy of my worship. No thanks. I'll go about celebrating my life here on earth with my loved ones, doing good as I see it, making a difference in tangible ways that I can, and when I die, I'm confident I will just die and that will be that. I would like to be cremated (after donating any organs if that is a possibility) and then I will be gone. If I "live on," it will be in the memories and hearts of those who loved and knew me, and when they're gone, it will be in the traits and genes they continued to pass down and perhaps, for a while, stories they told, things I left behind. I think it is interesting you ask the question aren't we afraid/depressed about there being nothing after life on earth... while a lot of people just accept it and come to terms with it, a lot of people can't and that's probably why there is such a strong need to believe in a Heaven and afterlife and a God even though every time I really think about it I'm just kind of amazed that such a belief could really be so widespread among adults, it seems so fantastical after all (to me). But the belief is so ingrained and the alternative so bleak to so many and the "but what if?" fear so strong that I think for a lot of people it's too scary to not believe. If there are those of you that believe that my beliefs will have some vindictive supreme invisible being putting me in "hell" for all eternity in some fantasy afterlife despite being a good person and doing good things unlike the murderer rapist abusers in question (who supposedly might end up in some happily ever paradise if he honestly says he's sorry and decides he believes in "God"), well, okay, but I just don't believe in that and don't see what makes such a being so worthy of my undying devotion, either.

The best article I've ever read on explaining death to children is this one: http://www.buddhanet.net/r_talkcn.htm

Get the No Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers by Elizabeth Pantley. Please don't do CIO, especially with an adopted baby you've only had for several months, and especially for hours on end. :( I know it's exhausting (believe me, I know, my son was a horrible sleeper from the day he was born and at 15 months he was still waking up multiple times per night. I actually got a cake that said "Ben Slept Through The Night!" the first time it ever happened and threw an impromptu pizza party), but it doesn't last forever.

The cutoff age varies per district and the child varies in regard to readiness. Not necessarily academic readiness, either! I tried to start my son in Kindergarten a couple of months before he turned 5 (with a Waldorf-inspired, not particularly academic Kindergarten) and it was a disaster. If interested, you can check out my blog post/article entitled "A Kindergarten Dropout" lol: http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/190076.html We ended up totally "dropping" all formal attempts at Kindergarten and delaying it a year until this year, right before he turned 6 (which was when he would have started school officially due to his birthday and our district's cutoff date anyway), and it's been MUCH more successful and a more pleasant experience overall for both of us. I have no regrets about waiting. It was what he needed, and I needed to respect that. Sometimes, you just have to follow your child's cues.

At this point, you definitely don't need to feel like you should be doing more, it sounds like you're doing plenty, it sounds great! Maybe when you really need to add more science, history, etc, you can do more of a block scheduling thing, or maybe the kids will be old enough that they can do some stuff independently in the mornings, or maybe you'll just have to sacrifice some things because like others have said, you really can't fit it "ALL" in (nor should you have to, you know that quote about how education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail?) :) Really, I think it all has a way of working out in the end, and that an interested, curious mind in a nurturing environment really does learn tons, in lots of ways other than books and worksheets, even if we sometimes can't help worrying that it's never "enough."

haha, no, I mean if a mom had an 18 or 21 year old with her, does that qualify as a second "adult."

Good for you. But I hope that you cc it to the principal and the school superintendent.

Oh, okay, that was going to be my next question! (And what constitutes adult? 18? 21?)

Jean, that was nice of you to go above and beyond bringing meds over and doing all that cleaning (and teaching FIL how to use the dishwasher lol)! Hope your MIL feels better soon!

Aw, love this!