I voted that we don't have one. We must be a strange (and very blessed) family because our sons have never thrown up (they are 7.5 YO) and my dh has never thrown up since I have known him (around 9 years). I threw up some when my gallbladder was falling apart and needed to be removed (before children) and then I got a stomach bug when our sons were babies and I threw up a couple of times one day with that. Other than that, we have not had any throwing up around our house, thankfully. I hear of other families going through this often and I often wonder why it never hits us. We have colds go through our house a couple of times a year but that's about it. Whatever the reason, I am oh so grateful:).

We haven't gotten to SOTW3 yet but we did use the reading selections for SOTW1 and are currently using the ones for SOTW2. I normally get all of the ones our library has available and we end up reading most of them.

I have a female 2YO that is indoor only and a male 15 YO that is indoor/outdoor, pretty much as he demands;). He was an indoor only cat for most of his life, until he was 13 YO. Then his same age half-sister died and I was heart broken so I found another one that looks just like her that was a kitten. She is now the 2 YO and she has always attacked my male cat and he now hates her and she will still go after him if I am not watching her closely. He has always wanted to go outside (his entire life), has tried to escape any chance he got over the years and has succeeded a number of times, which only made him try harder. We finally moved to a subdivision that is more rural, with one acre lots and a two acre area across the street from us that has a nice little pond. So I decided about a year ago to let him go outside. He has been so much happier since then that I know I made the right decision for him. He has disappeared twice and I put signs out for him. Both times he was locked in a neighbor's garage. Overall, he has done very well and it is clear that he is a much happier cat being able to go in and out as he pleases. And Yet, he has recently started urinating in the house at times. I think most of the time it happens during these cold nights, when we are sleeping and he decides it is time for him to go outside. I hear him in the early mornings, howling as he roams around the house wanting someone to let him out (the female cat is locked up in a separate room during the nights). During the summer it was not a problem because he could stay out all night if he wanted and he often did. He absolutely loves being outside when it is warm, hot or sometimes even on cold days, as long as the sun is shining brightly. I think I may have to start locking him up in the laundry room at night when it is cold outside. I hate to do it but I don't know what else to do. For those of you who have a cat door in your garage, do you ever have any issues with small wild animals such as squirrels, opossums or skunks coming in?

Ah, thank you so much!

I'm being lazy and I don't want to go look it up. Anyone know without looking it up when TWTM recommends teaching U.S. History?

I am in a similar situation. My husband is a family physician and is working full time at an urgent care an hour and a half from home, while also starting his own practice in our city. When he works at the urgent care, he works 2 or 3 days in a row and stays overnight there. Then he comes back home late that night but usually has to see one of his own patients at his practice in our town early the next morning, before our sons even get to see him. He is working very long days in both locations and has take-home work from his own practice, when he is in town. It has been very stressful and I often feel overwhelmed and exhausted. I have been doing what must be done and not much else. For housework, that means that things are usually picked up and we all still do our chores so the beds are made and the place usually looks fairly neat. However, the floors are not being mopped as often, the furniture is not dusted as often and the bathrooms are not cleaned as often. Additionally, the kids and I have been eating out much more than I prefer, which I know is not good but something has to give and, at the end of the day, I am usually exhausted. The boys may also get to watch an extra 30 minutes of a movie and/or spend an extra 15 minutes playing a video game, when dh is away for days at a time at the urgent care. We recently took a 2 week vacation, which was a wonderful thing and I think we all needed it so much. This schedule is wearing on all of us. After we returned and returned to our normal routine, dh and I both realized that we can't go on like this. He is planning to cut his hours at the urgent care in April and then cut them more in May, so that he will be at half of the hours he has been working. That should help our problem a lot. I really feel for you. It is not a healthy situation for anyone in the family. Are there any steps you can take to ease the load on yourself? If dh had not reduced his hours, I was planning to hire someone to come in at least once a month and to the heavy cleaning and I was going to start hiring a sitter for one half day a week to give me a break from the boys. Is there anyway you can do something like this to give yourself a break? ETA: One other thing we do is switch our days around so we can be off when dh happens to be off an in town. Sometimes he will have one or two weekdays off but has to work at the urgent care over the weekend. When that happens, we will switch school days, taking a weekday off and working on Saturday, for instance.

I normally order every book on the SOTW list that our library has. When I go pick them up, I sometimes put one or two back, if I can tell right away that it looks too in depth for my sons. The rest I bring home. I go through them and decide which ones I like the best for us, which ones I will read aloud and which I can assign as read-to-self and I make sure we read at least those. The rest are used as more of a "book basket". I keep them on the coffee table-ottoman in front of our couch, where we often sit or pass by. My sons will often pick a couple up and take them up to bed to read before falling asleep or sit down on the couch and read it sometime during the day. I have found that most of them end up being read, to some degree (some have multiple stories and are fairly long), over the two weeks we have them.

We pay cash for our cars. We buy used ones and try to find those that are relatively new with low mileage. dh is driving an older Honda Accord with over 200K miles on it right now. I am driving a 6YO Toyota Sienna with over 80K. We will likely keep driving these until they become unreliable.

I agree. I would have done the exact same thing.

Does the ped dentist tell you to go to the ortho because you need it or do you need to check with an ortho? I have one who might need one.

How expensive is it to rent a camper?

I have an old bridge that will likely have to be replaced at some point. The bad thing about a bridge is that they usually have to grind down the teeth that the bridge hooks on to, or at least they did back when I had my last one (that's been a while). Did they say anything about this? I think they ground down the one behind the space and the one in front of the space so perfectly good teeth are basically ruined. At this point I no longer have a choice and I have to have another bridge. The other thing is that, when you floss, you have to use this small piece of looped plastic (made for this purpose) to feed the floss under the bridge so you can floss between the fake tooth and the gum. If you had an implant, you could floss around that tooth just as you do with any other. Overall, I think an implant is the best way to go long term, although I have never compared the pricing.

That was me that started the other thread about my 7 YO son having OCD. I have been researching OCD and PANDAS a lot lately because of this. I was reading your thread and all of your daughter's symptoms and thinking it sounds very much like what I have been reading about. Make sure you find someone who specializes in treating OCD in children. After waiting 2 weeks, we finally went in today to see a child psychologist only to find out that she had never treated this before and thought we needed to find someone who had (we agreed). Anyway, we wasted a couple of weeks waiting for this appointment and now the next appointment we can get with the only other available child psychologist is at the end of March. Very frustrating. Thankfully we also have an appointment with a child psychiatrist in a couple of weeks so maybe we will learn something from that. I hope you find the help she needs. I'm sorry you are all going through this.

I have a 7YO ds who does this. He will go on and on and on about everything he is doing or thinking about, which is mostly related to Star Wars, Legos, which jewels he has earned in AWANA and sometimes Batman. Sometimes I tell him my ears are tired.

We didn't have a nursery at our wedding and lots of children were invited. I set up a children's table with lots of fun stuff for them to do, if they wanted, during the reception. It went over very well with children and parents alike.

With the exception of the one night when he was up during the night, he seems to be sleeping well. He looks good when he first wakes in the morning but I have noticed that by the afternoon he has dark circles under his eyes, which is normally a sign that he is getting a cold or something. It is so odd to see him with these dark circles under his eyes every afternoon and sometimes he looks so tired but I he seems to be sleeping well. I am wondering if the heightened anxiety and fear is causing him to be much more tired earlier in the day or something. It has to be exhausting for him, I would imagine. He spends a good deal of time in these behaviors.

Thanks so much for sharing this. I would definitely like to get this information from you for dh to see. I will pm you (if I can figure it out:).

This is so good to know. I will definitely tell dh about this and maybe he can contact an infectious disease doc and discuss it tomorrow. I think he knows at least one or two around here. Maybe we could get him in for testing sooner.

Those are good questions but I really can't think of anything new that we are using. To date, we have never seen him respond to anything with any kind of allergic reaction, although there could always be a first. I really can't think of anything new we are using though.

I had read about this and told my husband about it. He did a throat culture but it came back negative. I read that if the throat culture comes back negative they should do a blood culture because it does not always show up in the throat culture but they could still have it. dh did not do that but he decided to go ahead and put ds on the antibiotic for the strep just in case.

Thank you so much for your prayers. I am going to have my husband call the doctor back and see if there is any way ds can get in earlier. Thanks for the suggestion. This is very frustrating.

Thanks so much for this. It was very informative. There have been no new stresses. I thrive on routine so we normally have a weekly pattern we follow.

My 7YO son started displaying OCD tendencies about a week ago. He had gone through this a little bit about 2 or 2.5 years ago but not this severe. Back then, he was mostly just tapping on things/people and counting or needing to tap a certain number of times but that was about it. We were going to a family counselor at the time for anger issues that our other son was having and we asked her about the tapping. She said that at his age it probably was not anything to worry about but we might ask him to sit in a chair if he felt the need to tap and try to get him to do all of his tapping there. Somewhere along the way he just stopped and it has not been an issue since then....until last week. This time it is really bad. He is tapping and counting again but more often this time. He is also doing lots of other things multiple times and having to count them also, things such as looking in the trash at something over and over or walking back and forth over and over or any number of other things over and over again. He gets much worse as the day wears on and evenings/bedtime are his hardest times. He has to say goodnight and I love you a certain number of times and we have to respond the right way the same number of times. If we mess up, we have to start over. He also wants to keep all kinds of trash and can't stand to throw anything away or have us throw things away. My husband is a primary care doctor and is starting his own practice where we live, while also working at an urgent care an hour and a half from here. When he works there, he works 2 or 3 nights in a row and they put him up in a hotel. My husband was working out of town 4 nights ago and my son woke me up at 2:00am, very distraught. He was having to go look in the trash over and over and he was taking things out of the trash and hiding them in the playroom off the kitchen. I am not sure how long he had been doing this before he finally woke me up very upset that he couldn't stop. I had him get into bed with me and I talked to him for a quite a while and soothed him and he finally went back to sleep around 3:00. The next morning, I found disgusting food covered trash hidden under the couch, behind toy baskets, behind doors, all over the place. There were strawberry remains, empty cat food cans and yogurt containers and stuff like that. It was really gross. I cleaned it up and he helped and he was crying and felt bad about it but was upset that I was insisting that it all had to be thrown away. My husband has made an appointment with a child psychologist but they cannot see him until next Thursday. He also made an appointment with a psychiatrist but that is not until March. Today my son said to me "Mommy, I can NOT wait another whole week before seeing that doctor for this!" He is so unhappy about it and hates that he does it but cannot stop. I have tried to do things to help. I make sure that all trash is out of the house right after dinner. He usually cries when I am gathering it up to take it out because he doesn't want me to but then later he thanks me for getting it out of the house. I have been talking to him about this Mr. OCD guy and that he is not the boss of my son, that my son can be the boss that the Mr. OCD guy tells you lies, that you will feel better if you just to such-and-such one more time but then you don't feel better, and things like that. They may help a little but certainly not long term. I have read that when this comes on suddenly it is possible that it could be caused by a hidden strep infection. Apparently one can have strep with no fever, sore throat or other signs. This son has had a couple of minor colds recently also. My husband did a throat culture and it came back negative. I had read that if that happened, the doctor should test the blood because the strep infection could still be there and not show up in the throat culture. My husband didn't do that test, or maybe didn't know how or something but he went ahead and started our son on the antibiotic for strep just in case. I also read that it could be hereditary too and both of our sons are adopted from Russia so we don't have any family info to know about that. From everything I read, it sounds like it is more of a chemical thing in the brain. This is so stressful and I am at a loss for how to help him. I can't imagine going through who-knows-how-many-more weeks of this before we can get this under control. My son was so excited to go to AWANA last night because he had learned about 16 verses (I think this is driven by the OCD also). I was hesitant to let him go but I knew he would be devastated because he had looked forward to it all week and had been working on learning the verses. He kept touching the other kids and was very annoying to some of them, which I had worried about. They made fun of him but it didn't seem to bother him very much. He just kept talking about learning the next set of verses. I very gently told him that I thought he should not go back to AWANA until we get this issue under control. I don't want him to lose his friends or having everyone avoiding him and disliking him and thinking he is this weirdo kid. When he gets over this and is acting like himself again, I think it will bother him to think the kids saw him like that and now think badly of him. I discussed this with dh earlier today and we agreed that we should keep him home for a while, from AWANA and church in general. He also decided to go ahead and call in a script for him for prozac, since that is a common med that they give for this. He wasn't sure if the docs we will be taking him to will like that we put him on this or not but, since it takes a few weeks to start helping, we thought maybe it might be a good idea to get him started on it. I'm sorry this is so long. I know there are some psychologists on this forum and I thought I might be able to get some advice as to how I can best help him until he can be seen by the doctor next week. If you could keep our family in your prayers during this difficult time, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you! I can't believe how easy that was and that I could not figure it out. I have a new little laptop and I have never had this kind of mouse pad before so I didn't even know it would do that! The funny thing is that it only did it for this site and no others so I kept thinking it had to be a setting on the boards. I was so frustrated. Thanks so much!

Somehow I have managed twice to increase the size of the display of the forums in my browser. It no longer even fits inside the window and I have to scroll across to read a post. I have been on these forums for years (I was a long time lurker before joining) and I have never had this happen. I have searched again and again for a way to change it back and I have not been able to find anything. Does anyone know how this happens and how to fix it?