For a many children, Montessori is a fabulous fit! It's a 'hand in glove' situation where there's effortless learning disguised as discovery play. For curious children who can find the patterns in life and draw inferences and conclusions -- it's heaven on earth. My older son was such a child, and I only wish I had kept in in a Montessori program longer! (He started pre-kindergarten in a 'regular' school.) As it turns out, my older son, while very bright, is also dyslexic. And I really think that for him, a Montessori program would have detected his core reading weaknesses much earlier and fixed them at the proper 'core' level before he even started formal reading instruction. (He couldn't rhyme or tell how many syllables were in a word.) As it was, he speant two unhappy years in the 'slow reader' group before the school would even acknowledge a problem. Anyway -- I wish I'd kept him in Montessori through elementary school -- maybe even middle school. Can you imagine Montessori algebra or geometry? But for some other kids, Montessori isn't a good fit at all. A Montessori approach relies on the child to 'discover' the patterns, but my younger child couldn't do that at all. He has to have things explicitly explained to him, and he needs concrete rules to follow. Unfortunately, for him, it was all 'play' and not much learning. Of course, he's not a typical learner either (autistic spectrum). Fortunately, his Montessori school recognized that and was very proactive with me about finding a diagnosis and a better placement for him. And then there's the "all Montessori's aren't created equal" principal. We experienced two really good ones, and one that we weren't happy with. (Too rigid) But if your child is thriving in a Montessori school you're happy with, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I'd be in NO HURRY to change things.

Kaismom--I've had plenty of meltdowns in the past 18 months of this, but I've been fine lately. We almost did this when I was pregnant with our second, but I convinced DH to wait until after she was born to start. Briana--I feel for you living with someone else. We've been so fortunate enough to have a decently sized house to live in for the past 8 months so we didn't have to squeeze down too much. Yes, I think we're realistically about a month behind. I'd like to say less, but I'm tired of under estimating! I would have said 3 weeks until today when I found out that drywall would take about 8-10 working days. For some reason I thought it would only take a week. Beagles--I hadn't thought about the stress of living with the kids in a kitchenless house with construction still ongoing. Maybe we'd better plan for a 3-month apartment lease and stay there until the house is further along. Celine--Yeah, some stuff is a bummer. The progress feels good though. I can't wait to see your kitchen done! Hurry! Patriot--I'm sure I'll be happy with it too. I appreciate your help in my path to buying it.

This is timely. I just this weekend found out the possible reason for one of my friend's unusual name. He only had an initial for a first name, *H*. It was on his drivers license. I caused him grief when he had to fill out forms with his name because they would always hand the form back to him and bark "We need your full name filled in!" and he would have to produce his ID and they would get confused and insist he had a "real name". I had always assumed that his parents did not name him at the hospital and the hospital put in an initial because he had such a common last name and then the parents never got around to having a name put in on the certificate. I found at at his funeral that his middle name was "Rap". At first I thought it was a nickname he acquired because he did always break into 'rap' sometimes and it drove everybody nuts and sometimes people would tell him to 'knock it off', especially when he made the real LOUD popping sounds as part of it. It hurt the ears. But that was his real name. I never thought the word 'rap' was part of the American lexicon back in the sixties and wondered how that came to be his name way back then. This past weekend his name came up in conversation and someone told me he had been named after a famous Black Panther in the '60s. I looked it up and it looks like he probably was named after H Rap Brown. H Rap Brown is famous for his quote "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down". He is currently serving a life sentence for homicide. Not quite as bad as naming someone Adolph Hitler. Here is a link that might be useful: H Rap Brown

I sincerely thank you all for your kind words of support. It's so hard to look at her and know that she's going to die sooner than later and she hasn't a clue. I almost wish we didn't know. and found out late like we did with a rottweiler we had years ago. We're going to continue to spoil her. She's already spoiled rotten! I'm just giving her extra scratchies on her flank that she really likes. I let her sleep in our room last night, on the floor but that was not good for any of us, she paced a lot and growled at the cats who sleep on the bed. Tonight she'll have to stay in her bed in the family room. We don't know how much time she's got-once it's spread it's just a matter of months, but the tumor is relatively small right now, so it may be a year-we hope anyway! The weather is turning and it's warming up, so we might take the dogs to the beach. She's only been once, and she stuck with the Labs the whole time (she grew up with our two dear departed labs) so we'll take her and see how she does. It will be good for us anyway-we always liked taking our dogs to the beach. But mostly we're just going to let her do what she likes-which is lay at our feet with something she's stolen from the kitchen. Like a jar of pickles or, like right now, a package of crackers. She doesn't eat these things, she just guards them.