Zoos always make me sad. But, we still go once a year when the kiddos get their free passes from the library's summer reading program. And they love it. I've got one who loves, loves, loves animals. Seriously, she just spent all weekend with the grandparents, who have eight - yes, eight! - puppies, and she loved every minute of it - spent half an hour giggling straight as puppies climbed in her lap, bit her toes, and pulled her hair. She loves seeing the animals at the zoo, and I have to practically drag her away from one habitat to go see another one. She is young enough though, that I don't think she realizes how small their spaces are compared to what they would have in the wild. But on the other hand, most zoo animals have been born in captivity, and there is no danger of poachers or predators.

I was going to suggest a cat! But our (overweight) cat pushes out the window screens to get to the birds. People wonder why we have baby gates in our windows. They're cheaper than continually re-screening...

I wear one pair of shoes all winter long: Haflingers. They cost a little over $100. But one pair lasts me about three years. And that is literally the ONLY shoes I wear when it's too cold for sandals. I tend to buy my next pair at the end of the season, so often on clearance, and combine it with a "spring sale" that knocks off another significant chunk. Those shoes are worth it to me. My middle child destroys clothes, and she has sensory issues with many (most) clothing items. I tend to buy her second-hand clothing simply because I know the chances of passing it on to her little sister are slim. Why pay full price when she will destroy the outfit in less than two months? She also does better with second-hand clothes because they're worn-in and softer.

I just realized that, although we do not eat in bedrooms, I do use our bedroom as extra pantry storage. I have a 25-pound bag of oats under my dresser. On top of our wardrobe, we have boxes of pasta, cans of tomatoes, olives, and beans. I keep extras of my husband's snacks up there too. So, technically, a mouse could have a heyday in our room even though we don't eat in it. But we've never had a rodent/insect problem upstairs (the trap door in our bathroom leading to the Pit of Despair is a whole other story though...ugh). We did have friends over with a rather sassy ten-year-old who ate Oreos on my son's bed...after she had been told twice that we don't allow food upstairs. Oh, I was livid when I discovered all the crumbs!

I don't allow eating in the living room either (it's the only television we have) - except for very, very special occasions. and then the requirement is NOT ON THE FURNITURE! Since we hardly watch television, it's not been an issue. I got home from the grocery store once and all three kiddos ran up to me and said, "Daddy let us watch a movie! And he let us eat in the living room!" At my shocked expression, they hurried to explain, "He made us eat on the floor. With plates even!"

I just cannot eat in bed. Mother's Day is the only exception, and I force myself to smile through it. But, ugh. No food in bed. My husband, however, has no problem with it, especially when he works from home and wants to hide from children. What do you do with DISHES in the bedroom? I already have to patrol for rogue clothing that never makes it to the laundry room, and borrowed books that are most likely overdue at the library. Realistically, no one would bother to bring dirty dishes out of the bedrooms. And I don't want to add another item to my daily hunting expeditions.

We have several LLBean backpacks that have held up very well. My husband has a Swiss backpack (think Swiss army knife brand) that has had a ton of abuse and is doing great.

Floors, by Patrick Carman. There are three total - my son has devoured them more than once. Quirky, unexpected surprises, funny.

I know nothing of the Pure Wave massager. But my husband has found a TENS machine quite helpful. You do have to replace the sticky pads every so often (some brands are much better than others, and last much longer). It has been well worth the $40 we've spent on it.

I always thought envelope was spelled "enthelope", so that's how I said it. My husband realized this shortly into our marriage, and went on a campaign to correct my pronunciation. It took eight years, but I now say "envelope" correctly. When my son was learning to read, he spoke with a Bostonian accent. It wasn't that he *couldn't* say his R's...he just didn't. I remember him sounding out a word: "ssssst...arrrrr...t. Oh, staht." It was quite cute, but again, my husband worked on correcting him. There was a lot of pirate talk going on for months. Now, my husband misses those little pronunciations! ETA: I did learn how to spell envelope in upper elementary school. But the pronunciation was already in my head the wrong way!

We avoided all screens until age two. Then, they occasionally got a couple of youtube videos (Laurie Berkner, etc). Currently, they routinely get about 60-90 minutes on Sunday afternoon when they all play Super Mario Brothers, as well as a few short videos for school (under 10 minutes each, maybe twice a week). The grandparents always have the television on. Combine the unlimited screentime and the constant supply of junk food, and we always have a rough week after we visit the grandparents - we call it Detox Week. I've noticed major changes in behavior and ability to keep themselves entertained when screentime has been increased, so I try to keep it very minimal for my children. Television tends to suck *me* in. My husband watches a lot of Netflix on his computer (which the children can't see unless they're in the computer room), and it's often not even shows I like watching. But if I go in to ask him something, I get sucked in. If I struggle with that, how can I ask my children to self regulate any better? I recently got a smart phone (against my will, but I had no say in the matter), and I purposely have not installed much on it, and make a point of not using it as much as possible. I hate to see parents ignore their children because they're addicted to their phones...

I've found that with FLL3, I can summarize much of the scripting, and after the first of several similar exercises, I don't need to walk my son through it every.single.time - I'm right there if he needs me, but I'm unloading the dishwasher or starting the crock pot or putting in a load of laundry. We've modified it so that it works for us, and my son does actually like grammar. Granted, doing entire lessons in overly fake British accents, or speaking like pirates the whole time also adds an element of fun to some of FLL...

We're in a 100+ year old house, and so is my mom. First, are you SURE it's mice? We've heard "mousy" sounds coming from walls/ceilings and it's actually been bats - yes, they really DO sound like mice scampering sometimes! My mom has had both bats and mice. When my sister just couldn't stand the noises from the walls any longer, my mom hired someone who was experienced in working with older houses. In my mom's case, the mice found a way into the walls from the outside, but not into the house from the walls. He put down some kind of poison that also dried out their little rodent bodies fairly quickly, so there was no noticeable smell. Now, if they ever have to open up the walls, there will be several bodies, but that might be for the next people who live in that house! If the issue is bats, I'd take care of it quickly - you don't want to go through post-exposure rabies vaccines (ask me how I know...)

I grew up in a poor, unstable home environment. However, education was valued; and my mom was involved - she read to us nightly, she made sure our homework was done, she scrimped and saved so that we each played a musical instrument for several years. Getting strait A's was expected, as was going to college. All four of us have bachelor's degrees, and two have/almost have master's degrees. None of us have served prison time, are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or have debt collectors harassing us. We're all contributing members of society. Considering how awful our growing up years were, all four of us siblings are doing well - especially when we hear about friends who weren't on free lunches and had much more stable homes; they're the ones busted from making meth; having four children, all with different fathers; or still living at home because they just don't know what they want to do with their lives and can't seem to support themselves. Lower income families can't provide as many opportunities as wealthier families. But that doesn't mean that education can't be valued. When education is a priority, children can do very well, even with very little to work with.

Oh, I have spent many an evening in the computer room due to RPG nights (we call them MDG nights -Manly Dice Games - because my husband wasn't on board with my saying, "You and your friends enjoy your pretending games!") You might see about getting a Steam account - their games are often on sale. My husband often buys packages of indie games called Humble Bundles that are reasonably priced. You'd have to research what isn't violent. And Kongregate.com has tons of free flash games, many of them not violent in the least (running a burger stand, escape the room games, etc).

What about a potted plant? You could do a cactus, a Venus fly trap (caution: they're a little fickle to keep alive), or a little kit to plant his own. My kiddos got these and loved them:http://www.rainbowresource.com/searchspring.php?q=Eco+plant+pal

Does it have to be computer games? If you have a Wii, DS, etc, you might like Harvest Moon. There is no violence, there are many different versions and storylines. The only thing, if you are pretty conserative religiously, is that there are usually some form of harvest goddess, with festivals (not all festivals are for the goddess though). It's a small aspect of the game, but is there. I tend to be old school and like HM Back To Nature (a PS1 game played on our computer with a free emulator). My husband prefers HM Grand Bazaar and Happiness Island.

I was struggling with AAS for awhile, not consistently getting it done. It always seemed intimidating, opening to a new lesson, since I realky do take it as open-and-go. Once I realized I was sort of dreading spelling, I took a different approach. I figured we would just review for awhile, to establish the routine. We do spelling four times per week. On Mon/Wed we go through yellow cards; on Tues/Thurs we go through red. Blue are done daily; and for green, we review one "digit" daily (1, 11, 21, one day; next day 2, 12, 22, 32, etc). Once the review routine was established, we ventured into moving forward with new lessons. All new teaching is done in one day. The new green cards are reviewed daily for the rest of the lesson. After the day of new teaching, we take however many days it takes to go through everything else. The additional words are divided up, so my children write about 10 per day (on a hand-held dry erase board - it made it easier to fix mistakes). Since there are 12 dictation sentences, that gets divided into two days, with review done each day. At the moment, my third grader is finishing one lesson per week, and my first grader is moving a little more slowly. But both of them are doing very well and retaining almost everything. Once we move on from a lesson, they hardly ever spell those words wrong. Another thing that has helped is coming up with crazy stories that work the phrases or sentences in. My daughter, especially, giggles throughout her spelling lesson because of the wacky stories that she gets to write part of. Laughing during spelling is definitely a win!

A spline reticulator. We have had to re-screen so many windows, and it is quite cheap to do it yourself.

All three hospitals where my children were/could have been born had rates of about 40%, and all three are small town hospitals who do not take high risk births (in fact, I have a friend who was rushed by ambulance to the children's hospital an hour away because she was *one day* before 37 weeks, and they "were not prepared to deal with a premature baby"). My son was born at one of these hospitals, and we were very, very close to being a c-section - fortunately, we had a very good, patient on-call doctor who was willing to work with us. We moved out of state, and the next two were homebirths, but because I had dealt with our local hospitals on several occasions, I actually had it written into our emergency birth plan that I refused to be under the care of a certain doctor at one of these hospitals. His c-section rate (and care in general) is truly that bad; I have no idea how he still has a medical license. My mother-in-law is a nurse, and she was terrified of us homebirthing. I was more scared of going to the hospital!

My son has enjoyed Big Brainz/Timez Attack (on the computer) - it has addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. He likes that it's a "real" computer game (but my husband is a gamer, so that may play a part).

We received a string of very agressive phone calls from the CDC, wanting our children's vaccination records as part of a "survey", chosen by "random phone number selection". We had gotten a notice in the mail, and then all the phone calls started, with the callers almost yelling at us when we declined to participte. After the eighth call, I was going to make up some children (Jim Bob, Billy Bob, Bobby Bob, and Suzy Bob) just to get them to leave us alone. Scary how persistent some can be!

When I got a Pixma, it had really good reviews. I've had quite a few problems with it - my husband figured out that it was the wireless card having a hard time connecting to the printer. It still seems to glitch out on longer jobs, but is doing better with a different wireless card. We've had ours over four years, which apparently is supposed to be good for a printer.

My mom lives locally, and I am often over there, bringing her meals or groceries, etc. I often drop things off when she isn't home, and I have a key. I do knock, but then just go on in anyways - or walk in saying, "knock knock!" I usually do that even if I'm unlocking the door, simply so I don't surprise her if she's home. My inlaws are out in the country, with a mile-long driveway and five dogs. There is no surprising them, and since we're several hours away, we don't show up unplanned either. And by the time my husband and I get the suitcase/bags out of the van, our children have stampeded up the steps, flung open the door, and mobbed their grandparents. Knocking is definitely not part of their routine.

Canned food tastes so different than the fesh/frozen that I'm used to. I think it's mostly a texture thing though. Since my children are okay with fresh veggies but won't even eat freash cooked vegetabless, I think I'd have mutiny on my hands if I tried canned veggies. I do use canned tomato products (sauce, paste, etc), and canned beans (pinto, black, refried -NOT green beans). Oh! And black olives and artichokes. I do keep a few cans of fruit on hand, to use in a pinch, but that's probably once a year at most.