Not in my NY! :tongue_smilie: They all sound the same to me. I can't imagine another way to pronounce them, unless we're rhyming them with Murray?

This is what I'm seeing. I have to spell my name all the time, which is incredibly irritating since I have such a common name that used to be spelled only one way! How many ways can you spell Jessica?! I have to spell Nikolai's name for people less often than I have to spell my own!!! They can figure out how to spell a Russian name, but not a common American one? I definitely blame it on the creative spelling name craze.

I highly recommend natural fiber fitted diapers with wool covers. Synthetic fibers hold onto smells. We used FuzziBunz, BumGenius, and other dipes with PUL covers for a long time and dealt with all sorts of stench, until my SIL turned me onto wool and fitteds. Having some Bummis covers on hand for the leaky-poop newborn stage is a good idea, though. I also want to pass on a warning to be very careful if you visit the DiaperSwappers website. It is notorious for viruses!

I have the CD and it is in color.

Firecracker Grilled Alaska Salmon

Any of the following: watercolor paints watercolor paper watercolor pencils (You draw a picture, then use a wet brush to blend it into a watercolor painting. We love them.) paint brushes canvas or hardboard panels acrylic paints paint palette sketch pad Bare Books Stockmar block crayons erasable colored pencils drawing pencils of different hardnesses Prang brush pens

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mishchief of one kind and another, his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said, "I'll EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

Banana bread with chocolate chips? Shortbread cookies?

My grandmother has a very rare autoimmune disease. She was days away from death when her doctor finally tranferred her to Cleveland Clinic, where a doctor quickly diagnosed her and saved her life. The doctors and other staff have always been wonderful. So wonderful that when my father needed a liver transplant last year he transferred from the hospital he was planning to have the transplant at to Cleveland Clinic. We had another wonderful experience. Although I have no experience with their pediatric staff, I have only good things to say about Cleveland Clinic in general!

You're welcome! I'm glad other people will be able to enjoy them. We've received a lot of joy from the bird cards I linked to.

We have really enjoyed the cards for The Burgess Bird Book for Children that I downloaded from That Resource Site, so I decided to go ahead and make some for the animal book. Please let me know if I made any mistakes so I can fix them. Cards for The Burgess Animal Book for Children

I make a lot of things from scratch, but marinara is usually not one of them. If we ate more of it that would probably change, but we only eat it about once per month or less. It's one of our too-tired-for-anything-else kind of meals, and making sauce from scratch would defeat the purpose! Are we unusual in that pasta with marinara is a rare meal for us? I would say that I make spaghetti w/ marinara or vodka sauce about six times per year. I make lasagna about four times per year, usually with homemade sauce. I divide the recipe in half, using 8x8 pans so one can go in the freezer, which means it's really only two batches of lasagna made per year. I rarely (like four times in our 10 years of marriage) make ziti or another dish that uses marinara. We use pizza sauce more often, and that is homemade and home-canned. It's basically marinara, I suppose, but seasoned differently. We have a pasta attachment for our Kitchenaid now, so we may start making our own pasta, which would call for homemade sauce! I'm curious how often everyone uses marinara?

If by "sleep in" you mean 7 or 7:30 instead of 6:30, then maybe. It's more likely that they'll be up at the normal time and grouchy all day.

Thank you. I wish I had the money to buy them, even used, but until the holidays are over I'm outta luck! We'll start the bedtime story with morning retelling and drawing. Thanks! I saw that they are on sale right now. Unfortnately, I'm all out of money. I'll just have to pay the higher price, or find used copies once I have some funds. Or convince my parents to buy it for me for Christmas! :tongue_smilie: Somehow they never want to do things like that, insisting that the gift should be something for me. I try to tell them that things that make homeschooling easier or more enjoyable ARE for me, but they don't see it that way. Thank you for the run down on what it's like at this age.

I've discovered that while we love the idea of a classical education, it's not entirely what we want for our children at this stage. So we've started adding some Waldorf elements to our day, and things are so much more fun and exciting! But I'm exhausted trying to come up with ideas on my own. I've been interested in Oak Meadow for a while, but my husband told me last night that he thinks I should just go ahead and buy it as soon as we have the money. Yay! However, with the holidays upon us, it will probably be February before I have the funds to purchase it. I want to start doing as much as I can right now to ease the transition. Can anyone help me with the following questions? What does a week with Oak Meadow look like for a first grader? What can I do now to start the transition? Thanks!

I've started giving out homemade bookmarks with images relating to the party theme on them. The kids love them! I love them because I feel like I filled the expectation of a favor but still didn't sent home a bunch of junk.

This looks fun!

Today has been wonderful because we spent the morning at a pottery class making pinch pots and seeing a demonstration of how to throw a bowl. We spent 2 wonderful hours there. And we get to go back in a few weeks to glaze them! Today has been wonderful because I think Nik finally understands how to read a clock beyond telling the hour. Today has been wonderful because the boys spent the afternoon playing outside and I had plenty of quiet time to read a book. Today has been wonderful because we pulled an apple pie that my MIL made for us out of the freezer and baked it to have for dessert. Today has been wonderful because Calvin and Hobbes are highly entertaining and induce lots of giggling. Giggling is so nice to hear!

You're welcome! Since you'll have to create your own labels I would go ahead and create the cards themselves. Thirty dollars seems rather expensive for something you're going to have to create extra bits for it to work for you. I'm broke and cheap, though! :lol Maybe it's worth $30 to you.

Here are a few more: Metamorphosis Cards Apple Life Cycle Cards Oak Tree Life Cycle Cards Sea Horse Life Cycle (pdf file...page 8) Curiosity had me looking for a set of mammal cards. I found this pdf file which includes a section, on page 13, on the life cycle of the bison. You would have to make them into your own cards, though. I'm not finding much else about mammal life cycles.

Frog Life Cycle Sequencing Cards (pdf file) Frog, Butterfly, Dragonfly Sequencing Cards (pdf file) Ant Life Cycle Cards Butterfly Life Cycle Cards Ladybug Life Cycle Cards I don't know of any free ones for a mammal, but I would love to have some!

:iagree: It's also a huge hit in our house.

We watched Peter and the Wolf today. We've enjoyed The Life of Mammals and The Life of Birds. They like Liberty's Kids, too. I find most of the history documetaries to be a little much for my young boys, which is a shame because Nik is really into history!

This is what I'm experiencing right now. We were using Math Mammoth a few days per week with a couple of other programs the rest of the week. Nik would groan when I told him it was time for math, even though he was enjoying MM much more than he did MEP, which we tried out first. He often "couldn't do it", even though he really could. But on days when we used Noble Knights of Knowledge/Waldorf math he flew through the problems and had fun doing it. Starting yesterday we're using only the NKoK/Waldorf math. We spent well over twice as much time as usual on math because he was having so much FUN! And when we were all done, he asked to play Zeus on the Loose, a math game! I'm looking over MM before we start school, so I know what we would be covering, and I just apply those type of problems in a different manner. It's working like a charm!

It sounds like a smashing success! Supportive family is the best! This is such a lovely idea, and I'm totally stealing it! :D