A full day here, too! clean out the fridge/bread cupboard tidy the house strip the beds go to the dump stop by the grocery store for lunch/snacks sweep double check the "last minute" part of the packing list (toiletries, meds, chargers, sunglasses) lower the heat pack the car FLY find the bus late "dinner" at the hotel (we have ample snacks for the plane. Dinner may just be something small) watch the water parade

That's one of those things that is lovely for portable cooking or extending your range during holidays. I think you should give it a go once or twice with two different types of dishes (wet and dry), and then put it aside once you have the hang of it. Or, gift it to someone who entertains often/does demonstration cooking. If we had the cabinet room something like that would get a lot of use here during larger breakfasts or complex birthday meals.

Maybe add in some turmeric?

I'd be concerned about the person willing to share all this information with me. You're getting it secondhand, and that's not always an honest situation.

I think it would depend on their current age range. If I was in your shoes, I'd probably bring a small gift that connected me to them - a book I enjoyed at their age, an age-appropriate version of a craft I do, a kit to make friendship bracelets with each other, a game we could play together. I want to try to build a deeper connection into the gift so they felt more like they knew me.

I did remember one: The Girl With The Silver Eyes. It's a short chapter book. It's not exactly horror (medical malpractice), but it is unsettling and the age is right. I think the protagonist is 13 or so. I ended up mulling that one over for a few years before moving on to Stephen King's Firestarter. Same sort of theme, different audience. Also, loved by my kids: Invasion of the Lawn Weenies/In The Land of the Lawn Weenies And Other Creepy Tales. They're fun, but definitely weird. If she's ready for anything longer, Caroline B Cooney's books are...something. The Face On The Milk Carton and sequels are unsettling with the what-if's. What if you were stolen? What if you had bonded with your new family? What if your old family wants you back? Her other books are just as good.

I find The Yellow Wallpaper and Jane Eyre to both be horrifying, but that may not be your style. Perhaps something local? Our Barnes & Noble sells anthologies of ghost stories for our state and region. They range from pretty detailed to light sketches. Nothing as deep as like, In Cold Blood by Capote, but enough to light the mind. I'm trying to remember what I read in high school, but I think a lot of that was thrill, not horror.

Homework done. I have a professor who is enamored with TikTok, and requests 90% of the homework to be short videos. I'm not amused. Aside from the fact that TikTok is not welcome in my house, I don't feel like astronomy is the right class for this. But at least the grading scale is either getting a "like" or not in the class website/dojo/whatever it is. I *think* I have an A? Who knows. I have 12 likes. Envelopes are not happening this trip. Not today. The back up plan is scavenger hunts. Dh and I tidied some, enjoyed the poor weather inside, and I'm about to cook dinner: pork meatballs and sesame noodles.

Spring has come in fiercely, with a lot of wind and rain. Today: finish my homework violin pack for vacation find the duffel. How it went missing, I don't know, but it's bright yellow. Mysteries abound, and will probably be solved with the help of children checking their rooms. finish the surprises tidy half the house (the rest is tomorrow)

I know nothing about the sourcing.We live in cold weather and I spend quite a bit of time in ice rinks, so merino wool is my friend. I don't have many pieces but I buy whenever I find base layers on sale.

The "got your nose!" ? 😂

I was local when this was happening. And you're right, but ultimately there would have been a much greater chance of conviction had there not been the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of the 4 officers that were caught on video. A lot of people came away with the feeling that this "evened the score". There was not a jury pool in the area that was not colored with the feelings that the L.A. police were a bunch of aggressive, racist idiots who tried to get away with murder. It didn't matter if OJ did it or not - what mattered was not letting the police have a win and contributing to their racial bias over the people they serve. It's one of those things that we absolutely cannot take out of historical context.

May his victims/families find closure. And may we all continue to research brain impairment due to TBIs and CTE, minimizing them in the future.

If you've already ruled out vision issues, I'd do these: Phonics/Reading - Elson Readers. They're old, but pretty quickly accelerate. If you wanted a structured format for them, there are optional teacher's guides (mostly the questions already in the books as well as some fun writing projects) and/or Reading & Spelling Through Literature, which includes a phonics/spelling lesson for each piece in the book and reinforces the rules. I would absolutely stay away from the alphabet leveled readers. They are trash. They're based on Lucy Calkin's work and include quite a bit of "balanced literacy" techniques that will undercut the phonics and spelling you are trying to teach. Find phonetically leveled readers instead. Grammar - laterally move into Grammarland to continue reinforcing concepts in a new way, or just play games together. Structured writing: I would not have high expectations here. We spent K/1st with simple narrations, daily short dictation, and learning to label things. It was absolutely sufficient and worked into the rest of the material we were doing. You might look at Beechick's The Three Rs for a way to teach skills in an order that works for your kid and lets you hang out at each point wherever necessary. I started a formal writing program with my kid in 2nd and even then, it was a lot of what we did in K/1st, but at a higher level.

Good morning! schoolwork run to the grocery store for dinner ingredients: tortellini, spinach, bread, lemon finish painting Disney boxes. I was going to spraypaint them the character colors, but at $10 a can that's an expensive trip! Craft paint and clear gloss is much cheaper begin putting things together. laundry take ds shopping for shorts, shoes, maybe a few plain shirts at the outlets dinner at home Family Fun time? We'll try!

I think you'll be fine if you do lower expectations. It'll be okay. Now, if you wanted to group them in certain subjects, you still could. I've done history at a co-op and history in a small home setting with kids of various abilities at the same time. Our group time was always more focused on things we could do together: narration, activity, literature, music, art. Individual time depended on the child's ability in that area: a higher level picture book or lower writing output, a task for fine motor skill work or a full body movement one. There are programs like Layers of Learning that will build in these sort of ranges for you, but the goal is almost always to group input ability and individualize output in content subjects (history, science, art history, music appreciation), and heavily individualize skill subjects (like math, reading/writing, instrument lessons) with a touch on group learning/cooperation at intervals.

I would group your K and 1st together as much as possible. I do think you should do SOTW, but given that both of the kids have done vol 1, and one has done 2, it might be a good idea to go through year 2 again with an emphasis on the projects. That way your 1st gets a different version, and your K catches up. If you wanted to approach the year from a different angle, I might suggest History Odyssey. That said, I am always a little wary about directing a family to book 4. It is a HUGE jump for kids and it is a LOT to process. The information is more dense than previous volumes. You should buy it, look through it, and then make a decision: 1. Continue using SOTW in a more friendly manner. I like the task cards at Creek Edge Press to help keep a kid organized without needing much from you and still use the volume 2. Use a different modern era program instead. 3. Take a year for American history Your oldest may need you to sit there and help keep them on task/discuss material, but they shouldn't need the intensity the younger ones do. You can rotate kids through math and language arts with you, and set up to do science together once or twice a week. The same with art and music. You might prefer to go have a looped schedule, where you do whatever you can in a day, put the task list aside, and then pick it back up again the next day at the same point. Give yourself time to figure out what would work best for you and when your kids work best in each subject.

Good morning! So far today, it's pretty basic: schoolwork violin work on Disney envelopes begin making the packing piles dinner: eggs, waffles, bacon round of activities with ds

I thought of another one, just because I started washing it all this morning: Appropriate sports gear. It makes me sick to think how much money our child is wearing at any given time, but as he's gotten older we've made sure that protective gear is rather high end, even if we do have to wait for sales on it. Skates that are molded on to his feet and regular fittings so there's much less worry of 'Bauer bumps'. Well made chest protector. Top of the line helmet that can be tailored to fit his head. A neck protector he will actually wear. Things that make the difference between a hit being bad or being, okay, we can deal with it.

Oh, man. I will say at ds's age, they tend to be skeptical little critters. It actually takes pinpointing exactly how they grew to make them believe that good came from the season. DS has medals and awards given to him that he promptly threw in a drawer to forget about, but his award for 'greatest improvement' at age 8 detailing how he started/finished, and his award this year, "playmaker", really got a place of honor. It told him something about himself that he needed to hear. DS14 will eat an entire bag of this by himself if I buy it.😋 It doesn't matter if it's the veggie one or the chicken one. It's one of the best in the frozen aisle that I've found out there.

This. Human Odyssey works pretty well, approaching the material in new ways. But they don't match up exactly. You have to do the work. If it were me, and keeping the kids together in a spine was a priority, I'd use SOTW I'd go through more of the WTM style and really push the extra parts done more independently with you right there: outline the chapter read a supplemental text: literature, poetry, or Story of Science add to the outline with the kingfisher (or other) history encyclopedia create a summary/paper based on the above weeklong project from Reading Like A Historian (free) analyzing primary sources OR a more fun investigation like History Detective / Mysteries In History The younger child would do a similar pace with: coloring page/hands on project/or map while reading the chapter picture books covering the literature/poetry/aspect of the reading oral narration of the chapter written summary/draw a picture add to the timeline

Hugs. DS had that year a while back. It is incredibly demoralizing to put yourself out there again and again during that kind of season. I feel for them.

Nice kitchen knives. I found a Wusthof on sale about 8 years ago from their higher end line. It was a game changer. We've added two more over the years in other sizes, choosing only what we would use most often. It's actually made cooking more enjoyable and satisfying. My other would be good pens. Dh and I each have ones we prefer and they're definitely not Bic. I like a nice medium gel pen and he prefers an thin, spidery ink. It makes it easy to tell whose is whose and not have them go running off.

1. Steak 2. Avocados 3. Izze sodas Of the 3, only avocados are bought with any regularity. Steak is once or twice a year, same with the Izzes. Avocados are my weakness when they go on sale here.

We were lucky enough to be visiting family during the 2017 eclipse. It was interesting, for about 5 minutes for the younger ones. This time around we're only getting about 90%, None of us care much about it. DS14 is choosing to do chores, half the family works in buildings with no windows and won't step outside. I've seen a few and am fine missing the slight shade this time. I did not want to travel at all, even though we could have only gone a few hours and gotten a spot.