This is a great thread. I'm a teacher (though I only do long-term sub jobs right now), and also GT certified and trained. I've also raised two children, one of whom passed all the GT tests as a kindergartner and is now in college. My other child passed a few of the GT tests as a third-grader, but honestly I don't see her as 'gifted.' Part of the problem is that this school district includes achievement tests in the battery of GT tests, which is completely inappropriate, but there it is. And she is an extremely hard-working kid. Anyway, I've always been hugely interested in GT education and absolutely LOVE working with these students. But I'd like to let you in on a couple of dirty little secrets.... The first secret is that there are many teachers, even GT-certified who don't LOVE teaching these kids. In fact, they often appear (to me) to be defensive and ready to shoot down these kids at every opportunity. I think it is difficult for a parent to truly realize this because they aren't in the classroom. But I have witnessed it over and over again.... It's heartbreaking, and I try to intercede when I can, but that isn't always possible. The second 'secret' is about teachers being expected to differentiate instruction for all the levels in the room. It's a joke. Not because the teacher doesn't try. It's just a ludicrous system. It is politically incorrect to group students by ability, and no longer allowed anywhere that I've found. So a typical classroom has students with IQs below 70 and students with IQs above 125, occasionally very far above. Imagine you are trying to teach 25 children something -let's say .... how to knit. Some of your students have been knitting for four years, and some could not tell you what a knitting needle looks like. While you are trying to figure out how to group them, four boys have grabbed needles and are trying to stab each other, two more have grabbed your balls of yarn and tossed them to each other, which has caused them to unravel of course. The girls are yelling at the boys to stop it. Some are crying because they really, really want to learn how to knit. So you finally bring order to the chaos, and figure you can divide them into three groups, which does not truly correlate to the levels in the room, but is the best you can do. You truly need the entire time with each one of the groups. But you only have 1/3 of the time with each of course. And what do you suppose the other two groups are doing while you are working with one? You have given them some books about knitting to keep them occupied, but they are old and have only black and white photos so that isn't terribly successful. So you start with the least experienced group because they need the most time. After you spend ten minutes with the first group, you will barely have begun your session with the second group before a few students from the first group come running over with problems. And then that happens again. So the second group's instruction takes twice as long as it should because of the interruptions. And since the third group's time was used for the second group, suddenly, there's the bell! Guess which group didn't get attended to AGAIN?!?!? You may remember that I was fairly strong-minded in the original post on this subject -and felt you needed to think about removing your daughter from a toxic environment. If she wants to be at this school and the good outweighs the bad, okay. But from the sounds of it, her educational needs are not being met. Which might be okay if you or she are supplementing them at home. The way I see it, there are two types of needs for these kids. The first set of needs is what she needs to get into a college where she will hopefully truly have her abilities matched to her environment. And the second set of needs is what she needs to feed her hungry brain. The first set of needs could be covered in one year rather than four for most of these kids. When the information is drawn out over four years, boredom and frustration set in, and many GT kids simply begin to tune out. Some lose all of their enthusiasm and interest in learning and begin to fail. And then they can't get into the colleges where they might truly flourish for the first time. As I used to tell my son, don't kid yourself -there are some extremely bright people who never made it to college. There is a whole group of gifted dropouts, mostly boys, who didn't get the first set of needs met. And Anele -it sounds to me as if your daughter IS gifted. The sheer fact that she is interested in reading what you describe is a give away. I hope I haven't offended any one here -I am passionate about the short shrift these very top students are getting in the K-12 system, all over the nation. It is a huge loss to them, and a huge loss to our country. It's mind-boggling to me that we put forth so much time, money and energy to the first-string on the football team, but not to the academic team. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now....

Your feelings are very normal, and you do not need to share knowledge of your intended wedding day with anyone. It might be a good day for you to spend doing something special that you and Jesse liked to do, or maybe be with his family or your family and friends who understand. Grief is long, slow, and painful. It just takes time, and there are no shortcuts unfortunately. Cry all you need to. To be fair to your new boyfriend, it will just trouble him if you have periods of unexplained sadness. It's not right to be "mysterious" about your grief because he will not understand what is going on with you. It is possible you are not ready to "move on" and need to take more time for yourself to recover from this terrible loss. When did Jesse pass away? 9-11-10--does that make sense? I was just wondering how long he has really been gone. Deepest condolences.

I am also a bit hesitant to buy things or sell things to strangers, although I did sell a futon on CL, but it was a nice lady and she was by herself, so I figured I could take her if I had to!! But, I'm more hesitant to sell a car through the paper than furniture. It really makes me nervous to have someone come and drive my car around - I don't want to really go with them, and I'm afraid they'll drive off with it or wreck it. My husband is not at home regularly in the evenings or on weekends, so we just trade in the car when we need a new one. I feel bad in a way because I know we could get more for it by selling it ourselves.

Talked to our realtor today. Apparently, their agent refused to eat the $375, so that cost got shifted off to the sellers. They did agree to pay it, but there hasn't been any communication from them since we refused their proposed closing date. Oh well. The other bummer is that we had our eye on another property and it got taken off the market yesterday as someone put in an offer for it. You win some, you lose some, I guess. About the assessment - to be fair to the sellers, they only found out about this at the beginning of January. Still, I think they could have mentioned something about it in the original listing. But pebbles, your assessment didn't go back down?? That scares me. Seems like so many of these condos have exorbitant fees, and you have to wonder sometimes - what is it really paying for? In the area we're looking to buy, we've seen condo fees as low as $145 and as high as $600, all of which basically paid for the same things - water, trash, insurance, etc. For the condo we made the offer on, there isn't a pool, common area, the building's in good shape, there aren't really any lawns to mow... Speaking of lawns, DH and I nearly laughed our @sses off at one listing we went to see - the condo fee of $315 didn't pay for any utilities, but said (and quite proudly too, I might add) "fee covers lawn care and maintenance." Well, we spent a good 5-10 minutes looking around the building for anything resembling a lawn. Finally after some time had passed, we noticed a little planter with a patch of green peeping out - it was so small you could have covered it with a small bath towel. airforceguy - thanks for the tip on suntrust. I looked on their website and they are actually offering the same rate we are getting with SDFCU but they are charging an additional 1% orig fee. Also, as you said, you need 20% down with them, which SDFCU doesn't require. We do love Falls Church though - we actually live near EFC metro now and love our neighborhood. Its just too pricey for us to actually afford anything here. Ah well, back to the drawing board. Thank goodness we have a vacation coming up in March to decompress from all this nonsense!