I think it's important to separate the ideas of population-level concerns and individual concerns. If the OP is under a lot of stress, I would not advise digging deep into research on possibilities post-covid. Focus on recovering. While there's plenty of research on post-covid issues, you're not personally going to encounter all 100 plus symptoms. On a population level, it is a huge concern, which is why those in power need to make the big decisions, from improving air quality to funding new generation vaccines and so forth. On an individual level, the main thing you can do is wear a mask around other people, especially indoors, and do your best to help other people.

I was one of those kids who taught themselves to read before school, so I don't ever remember not reading. My eldest daughter was the same, was reading fluently before turning 4. My son needed consistent lessons from me in order to read fluently by 6, but he has a pretty wacky memory, doesn't remember many events from his early years, so I doubt he'd remember not being able to read. Interestingly enough his language scores are off the charts and he's a more adventurous reader than my daughter, who tends to stick to the series she likes.

I had this conversation about an hour ago with a local woman I know. Not about homeschooling, but just about how the woman so often has to sacrifice her career because men won't step up. The only people I know who have balanced kids and a successful career have been those whose husbands work part-time, and who have extended family (usually her mum) who can child-mind, do appointments etc. It takes the equivalent of a full time person to do those things, whether it is literally one person, or several people doing bits.

I always forget about Melbourne Cup Day. Coming from an anti-gambling family I didn't know much about it - then when I sent my kids to preschool, they actually had a Melbourne Cup themed day - I was absolutely floored. Could not believe they'd promote an event that's basically animal cruelty plus gambling. Shows just how much it's embedded into society! You'll have to keep me up to date, I've finally closed my Twitter account, combination of Elon Musk thing and just getting information overwhelm (doomscrolling). Family invited us to dinner inside RSL club next week - I will decline. They already know I'm super covid cautious so won't be offended.

Just had a segment on the ABC about the new wave in Australia; cases up by 25% in Victoria (one of the most populated states). Said that if you had 4 vaccines, your chance of dying was 1/30th of those who had none, which is huge (this is Australian data). They actually said 'wear N95 masks', not just 'wear a mask' which was good. I haven't followed the data in Australia for a while because I can't really interpret it, things have changed so much. I assumed a new wave would start as we headed towards Christmas.

Yes, it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Playgrounds were shut in Victoria after transmission there (during lockdown, the only possible place in the chain of transmission). While I agree that it wasn't a good idea, I think it's an exaggeration to say it's impossible, just far less likely, to catch Covid outdoors. Actually, my daughter caught a bad cold (not covid, after several tests), after we visited a large playground in the city. Lots of other kids scrambling over equipment, so it didn't surprise me, although I was annoyed.

Do you have outdoor time? You could hammer into the earth. There's also Styrofoam but it's pretty bad environmentally. You could do thick cardboard boxes, though, and you could also use plastic knives as saws on them. Hand-drills are good rather than screwdrivers (not electric, the old fashioned kind). You could definitely hand-drill into soft wood.

wow, I hadn't heard that. I read the book and couldn't understand why it was such a bestseller. It was predictable, I saw the ending a mile off, and it felt a bit 'paint by numbers' (moving from one trope to the next). I wouldn't see the film. If anyone wants a really good movie, I really enjoyed David Copperfield on Netflix. Keep in mind it doesn't follow the book 100%, it actually reminded me a bit of the way they did Little Women (the most recent one). Dickens fits in with the evil authors theme too!

I think I'm at the point where yes, I mask to prevent illness, but I also mask to support other people who might want to mask but feel social pressure about it. I know at least one woman my age who *wants* to mask, intellectually, but simply can't bring herself to do it. She's now had covid twice. I feel like you never know who you might be helping when you mask in public.

I don't know if you can get Anh Do books outside Australia, but they're crazy popular for that age group. They are simply written but have exciting plots. The easier ones are the Weir Do series and Ninja Kid. The other series Wolf Girl, Sky Dragon, E-Boy and Rise of the Mythix have more text, but still are written in a simple style and have pictures throughout the books. If you can get your hands on the Boy vs Beast series, this is an Australian series written specifically for reluctant boy readers. Very simple language, repetitive, but super exciting. My boy basically learned to read on this series. The other series by the same author (Mac Park - actually 2 people), D-Bot squad, is about dinosaur robots. Also simple and super exciting. A final Australian series that is very popular and uses simple language and lots of pictures is the 13 storey treehouse series (next one is 26 storey, and so on). All humour and silliness.

I'm looking forward to spending Christmas at the beach, imagining lovely weather and a relaxed day, skipping several family events to do so. I get really peopled out by lots of events on at this time, so getting away should be good. I have to plan the work Christmas party, and I'm thinking I'll put it in November so we can get it over with early, also before the next Covid wave really takes off. There's a local place where we can eat outdoors. Also looking forward to various TV things that we can watch as a family, such as Marvel specials and the Enola Holmes movie.

So sorry, it's hard. DH's mother never let anyone know what the doctors said, was always positive, but it became fairly clear to us what was going on due to increased hospital visits. She had two stints in the ICU before she died. It didn't make any difference to anyone whether they knew in advance or not, so I wouldn't worry about letting people know. It becomes obvious with increased sickness as time goes on.

Good point, there are no major holidays between Easter and Christmas here really. There are public holidays like the June long weekend, but often that's people going camping or whatever, not usually meeting with family groups or having parties like Christmas. It probably isn't the same as your winter mixed with Thanksgiving, religious holidays, New Year etc. So even though it will be summer here, we are expecting a big wave over Christmas (as we did last year), because everyone meets up and has end of year parties, family events and so on. I'd expect your January to still have lots of different sicknesses. NB, RSV was particularly bad here, and not just for babies. Lots of people got very, very ill, someone's mum I know ended up in ICU with RSV. If you can mask up and avoid big events, you'll reduce the risk of covid, flu, RSV. Oh, a bad gastro one went around during our winter too. My poor dear friends who caught Covid in early Feb got the lot - their immunity seemed to have been wiped and they caught everything (also kids are at school and not masking).

Yes, and boarding is a big issue too. I've seen the images of people with carbon dioxide monitors on planes before the plane takes off. Crazy high. My friend just returned from an international flight (20 plus hours). She wore a Flo mask, ordered a special meal so she was eating at a separate time to others, and did not catch Covid. She did end up with marks on her face from hours of masking, but it was worth it.

I've got such mixed feelings about this. Firstly, the NSW govt had a reading program over the last few years for k-2. It was terrible, whole language based stuff. They've kicked it out and started again, but it cost millions in training and of course those teachers now are 'trained' to get kids to guess. I also recall a similar whole NSW grammar program, based on one person's Master's thesis, which taught random invented grammar. Again, kicked out after a few years, but the cost! There are some really good Australian reading programs out there already - Fitzroy, Ants in the Apple. There are some good Indigenous programs being developed for particular areas of Australia, I remember some good ones from 20 years ago, really relevant for regional areas, less relevant for the city. I think education on existing programs would be better than the government throwing more money at the current big educational publishers. There used to be a curriculum advisor for each region; hiring that person again, to let people know about programs and work with them, would be better value for money. I agree Singapore maths would be brilliant, though.

Yeah, that's what scares me.

I am still hopeful there will be a scientific breakthrough which will lead to a sterilising vaccine. I mean, whoever invents that will make a lot of money, so you'd think that would be motivation enough. And my goal is to reduce the number of times I get sick, overall, by wearing a mask. This year I haven't had flu, covid, gastro or even a bad cold virus. I have had a mild cold virus once. Usually I would've caught at least one bad cold virus from the kids, so homeschooling and wearing a mask has saved me about two weeks of misery, so far.

I am beginning to hear "I've dodged it so far, so . . ." with the idea that they can drop precautions because they must be immune or something. My one friend irl who is super cautious has started to relax a bit which is a little sad. I think that now there are no further boosters on offer and no plans from the government, there seems like there's no hope on the horizon, so it's hard to hang on. I did read that any tourist who goes to Singapore can pay for any vaccine, including Novavax, that they want. I'm kind of tempted to get my kids some sort of booster, and myself a Novavax dose. (I mean, I don't think I'd fly to Singapore just for that. But as it's the main stopover airport, if I happened to be there, then I'd be tempted).

I used to teach a program called "Teaching Reading to Teach Talking". It was for preschoolers with speech issues and intellectual disabilities. It was based on research which found that the words the kids learned to read were the words they began to say. We saw great improvements in the kids. Unfortunately I don't think anyone is running anything similar these days in my part of the world. A lot of the knowledge has been lost.

I've got his birthday to get through and then Xmas. I have a t-shirt and a book and will get him something to eat/snack (eg favourite lollies or nuts). That will do for birthday. I will probably do something similar for Xmas - a book, shirt or shorts, and snacks. I got literally zero for my birthday so I don't feel too invested in perfect gifting. For the kids, I have already got a couple of stocking stuffers (dice game, rubix cube), and books. Might find some cool t-shirts, and apart from that they want to download a computer game apiece. They will get other gifts from relatives. We do secret santa with relatives, so I will have one or two other things to buy, once that is sorted.

I just bought The Writing Revolution, which I quite like. It gives really clear instructions to the parent/teacher on teaching the sentence, then the paragraph, and taking notes, and so on.

So I was reading a thread on twitter where a lot of teachers (from the USA) were really panicking over what they were seeing in the classroom. Huge absences meaning kids have missed out on core information, and inability to do homework or focus in class. The interesting thing is that in Australia, after we had very extended lockdowns but before Covid hit, they did a national standardised test and scores actually went up. They have not yet published the results for this year, after Covid has wreaked havoc across Australia, and it will be very interesting to see what happens. If, as I suspect, it is uncontrolled Covid (meaning sickness and the chaos of missing teachers, blended classes, and unpredictability) rather than lockdowns which lead to terrible results, will anyone admit it? Probably not.

I actually think the idea of renting a place near the sister's for a 'vacation' or whatever would be a good one. I mean, something to bring up and see what they think. You'd just have to be careful the rented place didn't end up getting full of stuff too. In our situation, repeated falls made it clear she needed to be in aged care; fortunately, she was happy with that as she was lonely, and she enjoyed her time there until she died last year from cancer. She did still end up filling the aged care unit with lots of things (and we still have a shed-full of stuff we're slowly going through).

I've been reading this one through the year too, and highly recommend it. While I might not agree with everything, it's a thought-provoking, positive read, with a quote from the original Stoics heading up the discussion for the day. It's led to good chats with my kids, too. The over-arching idea which is you might not be able to change much, but you can change your own perspective on something, is a good one. I liked one of the most recent discussions, which was saying - you can't make yourself a taller person or a younger person or whatever, but you can work on being a truthful person, and that's a worthwhile thing.

I'll leave it there, although as a special educator with 20 years experience in the field, I find that occasionally I am able to offer suggestions which can assist families in seeking out help (which is what I thought the OP was looking for). I wouldn't have a clue if the child has autism, but it's something I suggest parents look into when seeking help for a child who demonstrates cognitive inflexibility.