I think this is what @Farrar is talking about. There are facts. There is commentary. They are not the same thing. At some point along the downward slopes of the charts, "reporting" becomes "blogging." Media literacy can help us, our students, and civil society pinpoint the moment that reporting ends and commenting begins. I had to giggle when I saw that Wonkette was defined on the earlier chart as a news site - obnoxious, profane, hysterical commenting it is indeed, but reporting? Absolutely not. Sites that represent themselves as news that are actually blogs are part of the problem, and when they are liked and followed via social media, are given a grotesque sheen of legitimacy. Just because it might have "news" in the title does not a news outlet make.

I'm very sorry, Terabith. Are there any mitigation strategies your older child could use that would allow you to feel a baseline of safety? My dd goes to classes in a KN95 under a cloth mask that's inserted with a medical mask, clear plastic safety glasses (non-prescription, just a barrier) and carefully strips to shower when she gets home, isolating each batch of clothes. Her fellow students are pretty darn cavalier, and she constantly sees them without masks inside the building but they are in a university setting and so not so easily "controlled" as high school. You dh being vaccinated, maybe he can do the shopping and "outside" errands for four months to further mitigate the risks? Could you hire someone to help dh's parents just from March to June or else just shop for them and "see" them over zoom? None of these are easy or good, just coping for those four months. Please know, I'm not minimizing your stress, I'm just trying to think about any techniques that would allow your oldest to continue school and your family to stay together and safe.

Holding your family in the light, Scarlett.

The pink fascinator with the pink cloak and DH in the pink bowler plus pink background nails and pink stilettos - crushing it. However, hubby will need spats: https://www.rubylane.com/item/274555-30-361/Edwardian-Deep-Red-Suede-Spats

Sending you peace for the loss of a beloved feline.

Oldest, summer birthday: grilled anything - salmon, burgers, veggies, and corn - plus chocolate raspberry ganache cake Next oldest, summer birthday: salad Nicoise, St. Andre cheese with crackers, lemon curd tart with fresh berries Third, winter birthday: nori rolls, slow-cooked pork or beef with mushroom gravy and homemade noodles, creme brulee Fourth, Thanksgiving birthday - anything that isn't turkey dinner! buche de noel for dessert

nm

Thank you for starting this thread. I pitched a few ideas to Dd this morning, so she knows I'm in the planning phase - for once she didn't roll her eyes and say "let's talk about it some other time" so there's that. AP English Lit with her delightful mentor. A live class of one with a remarkable teacher. Pre-calc with Mr. H at Mr D Math, she is an actual fan of this teacher. Either AP Bio or freshman bio at our local four year LAC. This is tricky, as this college has a brutal level of add/drop. They allow local students to register for credit through a special, super cheap process, but local students are last on the list to get into any class. If we wait to register her for a good online AP til she knows whether she can get into the college class, it will be too late. I have an email in to a professor there to ask about this class filling up, so TBD... Nope. She wrote to a number of profs who already knew they couldn't accept her even before add/drop. AP Bio next year if she still wants it. AP Environmental Science with PAH? Next year. APUSH at our local high school - the teacher is a friend but his students don't score very well. This would be more like a social outlet with mandatory outside sources to study for the exam. I'm not a fan of this idea, but she needs some social time. Also dependent on covid. Also a no. This has been the biggest question - she would rather do more social justice history and less learning to the test. I don't want her in the school even though they're masked, our exposure budget is maxed. This might be the last homeschool class I teach! Driver's Ed, PE, computer literacy. Finished both last year plus .5 of a health credit. PE every year. German 3 with Lingoda Physics at the LAC (prof accepted her) Dance at the LAC Something in spring at the LAC, probably econ I'm hoping that covid slows enough to let her spend time with her sister in Switzerland this summer and do a German intensive. Also no. Sister came home and they've played a ridiculous amount of colorku over tea in the mornings. TA for PAH Assistant handworks teacher Show choir, one-act play in the winter Possible extended internship from this summer wth a climate-focused non-profit

Just dropped in to read this thread with no prior knowledge. Mind blown over coffee, thanks.

Yes, Dd24 has this. I don't know much about it but we found out when she was small and couldn't learn the times table. For maybe two years I tried many different ways to teach her (including bribes!) to no avail. This was following my first kiddo who was a math geek and I was feeling pretty smug that I had this teach-math-thing down! I finally asked a friend from whom she took art lessons to try, and she figured out that it was synesthesia in one day. She let my daughter assign the "right" colors to the numbers in the times table and lo and behold, she learned it in a couple of weeks. I didn't do much to help her use it during her homeschooling years but when she got to college she took a class on executive function as a college student and she learned how to apply it more broadly. She's a musician in grad school now and uses it to learn and memorize difficult music - she lightly highlights the passages she's working on in the "right" color to cement the memory. She also used it to color-code and sort ideas while writing papers eg, main idea gets a green sticky note and all its supporting docs or notes get the same color. This was helpful but it was most helpful to music, maybe because it's so related to math. She is a music theory whiz and I think it has to do with this same trait. Sometime she'll get a piece of music that has someone else's notes in it and if they're in colored pen she has to white everything out or she gets disoriented. I don't know much about how it develops in kids, etc. and I confess I was a bit of a scoffer until I saw how it "worked" for her. You are doing just the right thing by trying to find out more now.

Zero boundaries, zero respect, zero consequences. Complete parenting fail, not your problem. Agree with katilac. Quit and spend the time of your one precious life with people who respect you.

Tree still up but getting very dry. I usually leave it up til Twelfth Night, so another few days will be fine. Dd24 gets a covid test today, she's flying back to Switzerland on Wednesday. She will quarantine for 10 days, then have her thesis defense a day later. Ds will drive her to the airport then continue back to college. Dd16 starts up school today, which feels just right. She taught herself to darn over the holiday, and is now pulling out beloved old sweaters and doing quite nice darning work. Older dd has been tatting a shawl for me, a piece of which I received as a teaser Christmas gift, and ds is needle felting. We all feel anxious about dd and ds leaving, telling each other it's going to be ok.

Q

I loved the slower pace for our family and spent ridiculous amounts of time outside and in my garden. My beloved two-years-older sister received a terminal cancer diagnosis last November, but had 13 metastatic tumors removed from her head and is still alive and living without pain now. DIL has had surgery to correct an issue that caused two miscarriages and they are actively trying to conceive again. I can see the air and water are cleaner in my area. When the fires were happening out west, it was very noticeable. The comet and "Christmas Star" were celestial high points which we spent hours marveling over. I can only write this with a lump in my throat for all who were not as lucky or privileged as me and my family.

I know I posted this before: In the evening we eat yummy foods, often fondue or little appetizers, then do predictions for the coming year but start by reading last year's sealed envelope of predictions. We give a point for each correct one, half a point if you've jumped in on someone else's and got it right. Accuracy is pretty low - out of hundreds of predictions total, the winner might have gotten six or seven correct. Maybe we're just dense. We have categories like politics, sports, kids we know getting into colleges, marriages, babies, new restaurants in town, etc. This year should be interesting - two of our "extra' kids have decided to quarantine and get tested to be able to come for the evening, but we'll be zooming in the other regulars. We had to make an actual matrix last year to cover all the possible outcomes of the primary season and election, which I think every one of us ultimately predicted wrongly. Olympics, sports, cultural events - all of last year's guesses will be skewed because of covid. The real question is whether any of us predicted the pandemic, in which case they will win. Instantly. Every year we have a few little secret guesses folded into the edges- for this year mine was my oldest and wife would be expecting....there's still time for an announcement! One of my kids and a close friend usually create a wacky ball drop at midnight that always ends with the friend playing Auld Lang Syne on bagpipes out in the yard and no, the neighbors haven't shot at us yet.

We used to be all about the one-room schoolhouse, multiple ages learning from each other, distanced learning was meh, not our thing. Now we're homeschooling high school, college, and grad school. Negotiating bandwidth is the new chore chart.

Me too, with veggies and potatoes from the garden. I'm stress eating pretty much everything that isn't nailed down, between phonebanking and manic house cleaning. After my first course of reese's cups, half a bagel with an egg, celery, salty almonds, fried celeriac, and spicy cheese, I've moved on to wasabi peas. They're perfect, because there's a slight dis-incentive to keep eating them as they get spicier the more you eat them. It snowed 4 inches here this morning, so tonight we'll have a bonfire, beef stew, Swiss chocolate that DD managed to grab on her way out of the country, and wine. Plus anything else that doesn't get eaten before dark.

Thank you, she arrived without too much worry and has been staying at our business in town. She can get a test next Monday.

Switzerland's cases are skyrocketing I've spent weeks talking her down off the ledge of stress as it's been unfolding I keep telling myself Must. Not. Hug. for 14 days and a negative test.

I can't find the "like" button in the new format, but consider all your posts liked!

Not a terrible miss: DD15 dropped Blue Tent Online Honors Chem after a week, no real problem, just wasn't a good fit. She'll do a self-paced chem and is continuing with phytoplankton monitoring at a local lab instead. Huge hit: AP Psych with Mrs. Gonzalez at PAH. DD LOVES this class!! Amazingly well-prepared teacher, fascinating presentation, great organization. She's constantly referring to concepts she's learning and how they apply to real life. She's super grateful for this class.

Thank you all very much from my self and my daughter!

I've been reading and lurking here as much as time permits but don't have much time to research or even look at the internet these days. My DD in Switzerland is beginning in-person classes again next week. We've sent her pretty cloth masks, some simple medical ones and a couple of N95s. I think I remember somewhere in the big Covid thread a bit of data that said three layers of cloth/paper/cloth as a mask were as effective (or close to) an N95. If anyone remembers that or has more info about this, I would be grateful for it and will send it to my DD. Thank you in advance.

Welp, DS got to campus on Tuesday, got tested, got to his room in a senior house with three other pre-med/biology majors, got a negative result today, aaand one of the three housemates got a positive. So that housemate is in the infirmary hotel, DS and the other two are quarantined at the house for two weeks, will start online classes on Monday and have food delivered from the dining hall. Positive housemate is completely asymptomatic and feels very badly about being the positive one. I sent DS with a plethora of immune boosters, enough to share with his other housemates. There's apparently 6 positives out of about 2000 kids on-campus, which isn't as bad as it could be. Sighing.