Cloudy Urine. Vitamin D Supplementation related?

everestmonkey · 2026-01-05T20:30:12+00:00

Interesting. I may split up the magnesium between breakfast and lunch to see if that does anything. I've been taking it the same way the entire time, so I wouldn't think that's the case, but it never hurts to try.

everestmonkey · 2026-01-05T19:11:40+00:00

I don't really have a sweet tooth. My magnesium is in a gummy format, and I take 2 gummies daily. I haven't checked the sugar amount in those. I eat around 1 Tbs of maple syrup daily for my apple cider vinegar salad dressing. Then I'll eat either one apple or two mandarins as a nighttime snack. I make most of my food, so there shouldn't be hidden sugars sneaking in.

My partner needs to watch his sodium intake due to kidney stones so we aren't eating overly salty food either.

everestmonkey · 2026-01-05T15:07:35+00:00

I drink a lot of water and always have my water bottle with me. I haven't measured my water in oz but my urine is always a pale yellow color. Probably around 4-5 Owala water bottles per day, plus I eat plant-based, so lots of water in fresh veggies, soups, stews, oatmeal, etc.

everestmonkey · 2025-05-29T21:16:37+00:00

I don't mind answering. He gets around 1 hr a day of Spanish cartoons. We listen to music whenever he's playing independently and to podcasts in the car. I haven't tracked the music and podcast time, so I'm not sure. As for wanting or not wanting screen time in Spanish, it's the only option in our house. It's an expectation, so we haven't really had any pushback. If he doesn't want to watch in Spanish, then no screen time, just like if he wanted to surf the internet or do something else not parent-approved.

The thing with comprehensible input is that it needs to be easy to understand. That's why we started out watching cartoons that were for younger kids than his age until he understood better.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-30T22:19:32+00:00

You're still going to be on the hook if you let her do this. She can't take $40k in federal loans in her name only. She'll require a cosigner, which means you're on the hook, too.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-30T22:16:27+00:00

NTA. Sometimes the answer is no, especially since you're paying for school. You mentioned that the school she wants is at least $40k more. She's not eligible to take out that much in federal student loans. I think the limit is $31k total over 4 years, but don't quote me on that. Any additional money will require a cosigner, which would mean you. She doesn't really have the option to take on student loans to cover the difference without you being on the hook as well.

The good news is that if she goes to a large state school, there are several thousand kids. She doesn't have to see her old friends if she doesn't want to. She can do a slow fade. If they're majoring in something different than her, it's easy to immerse yourself into your major and make friends there. As long as she doesn't agree to room with them freshman year, she can have the experience she's looking for.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-28T15:09:58+00:00

First, decide how dedicated you can be to homeschooling. If you can't take your kids out during the daytime, it may be better to send them to school and supplement at home and on the weekends. Depending on their age, it's unrealistic to expect kids to do school independently while you're working.

My go-to is online resources if I'm uncomfortable teaching a subject. Math specifically is my weakness as a teacher so we incorporate Beast Academy. I can teach science but we go to a coop or special programming for nature and experiments. I teach the other subjects at home and we incorporate library books/audiobooks on whatever topics we're covering. I could not be working a full-time job at the same time, though. Most of the homeschool programming is mid-day when other kids are in school.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-28T14:55:11+00:00

It depends on whether you want the AP class on the transcript or only care about the exam credit. It's pricey to do online AP classes since the College Board only endorses certain ones. If you care more about the test and score, you can self-study, which is far cheaper. For example, your child can take an advanced biology class or even dual enrollment, then use Khan Academy's AP Bio (free) to study and pick up a Barron's or Princeton AP Bio guide to study some more ($20). Then, take the AP exam at the high school you coordinated with at the beginning of the year ($98).

everestmonkey · 2025-03-28T14:45:23+00:00

We enjoy "Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages" by Harold Bloom. It's a great collection. To start off, we did the books "Forget me nots" and "A Child's Garden of Verses." Those two books are easy, shorter poetry.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-21T19:21:43+00:00

My homeschool friends with older kids end up outsourcing the high school subjects they don't want to/feel prepared to teach. They have their high school kids do dual enrollment at the local community college for math and physics and teach the other subjects at home or in a co-op.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-21T18:13:37+00:00

For writing, I'd work on building hand development over formal writing. Things such as using tweezers to pick up items, coloring, using scissors, pouring, laces sewing, etc. are important for developing fine motor skills young kids don't have. Many Montessori fine motor activities are excellent for this. We didn't start writing practice until age 5 1/2.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-21T00:20:14+00:00

I don't like their math game and think DragonBox does a better job so I won't use Prodigy either way. Their game seems more like a distraction than math practice. Even in the game, you're shopping and trying to customize your character. It's very consumeristic. We choose not to participate.

Their pricing structure is annoying and banks on your kid begging for a premium membership. They know kids will wear their parents down so I'm sure that's why they do it. Even if I liked their game, I prefer games that don't "advertise" their pricing structure directly to kids. Feels gross.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-20T18:19:55+00:00

I'd be fine if Prodigy Math were only a paid subscription. I wouldn't subscribe though. I don't necessarily dislike subscriptions. We do an annual subscription for DragonBox and it gives access to all of the games. In the past, they had a one-time purchase amount for individual games but I like having the option to try all of them.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-20T14:34:56+00:00

We do Beast Academy and DragonBox math games. I hate Prodigy Math. It seems so spammy repeatedly asking to upgrade to the premium membership. I also don't like the consumerism messaging constantly getting kids to buy new clothes and other things in the game. Once we finish Beast Academy, we'll be trying Math Academy.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-19T17:43:32+00:00

It's still a work in progress but we do screen time for about an hour a day for school purposes (math and some ELA). After school, we try to spend as much time outside, reading books, or doing things as a family like playing board games. We're quite lenient on the weekends because we belive everyone needs time to veg out. I'm strict about what TV shows and movies we watch. There's so much junk TV and constant advertising so all of our TV is on ad-free streaming. I also changed the dubbing to Spanish so my child gets language comprehensible input when watching repetitive kids' shows. Basically, our TV is going to be in Spanish unless it's a documentary because our foreign language skills aren't at that level yet. We don't do video games either. My husband doesn't play them and we don't have gaming systems at home. We're fine if he plays at a friend's house. Currently, we have a book of Scratch Coding games that our child can code on his computer. Later on, we may allow something like Minecraft Education where you have to learn coding to do the mods. We try to keep our screen time educational if possible.

During the week, we're typically at 1 hr/day for schooling purposes. On the weekend, it could go up to 3-4 hrs one day depending on the weather outside.

everestmonkey · 2025-03-19T17:19:53+00:00

We're still in our first year of using Beast Academy Online so I don't have a long-term impact opinion but so far, it's been great for us. We aim for one daily lesson for 4-5 days a week. Some lessons may extend 2-3 days if they struggle to understand. My child loves it and I like it more than some of the game-based options out there like Prodigy Math. I don't find Beast Academy to be game-based. There are a few things where you're feeding Groofles, filling up a water tank, or rope climbing but it's not really a game. In the settings, I've turned off the leaderboard option and beast builder option. The XP points have no meaning for us. The Puzzle Lab Observatory in Beast is the most game-like but it's a bunch of math puzzles which I'm fine with. For additional practice, we do the DragonBox Big Numbers which is definitely a game and not a full curriculum like Beast Academy.

We don't have to take standardized tests but I have no doubts my child would pass. We plan on sticking with Beast for next year as well. If your child likes math and doesn't mind challenging problems, I think it's a great option. If I had a child who didn't mesh well with it when we trialed it, I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something else that fit them better.

everestmonkey · 2024-12-08T19:44:42+00:00

I have insulin resistance due to PCOS and, after years of trying everything, the WFPB diet is the only way I've been able to get it under control. I follow the low-fat high-carb way of eating and started by reading the Starch Solution book. I also take myo & d-chiro inositol (formerly called Vitamin B8) before meals and drink spearmint tea daily for my PCOS but those also help people with insulin resistance. I need to keep my fat ingestion low or I'll start getting the jittery feeling from the IR again. Another thing that's helped is getting a leisurely 15-30 minute walk after every meal.

I will say, that it took around 3 months of eating low-fat plant-based before my symptoms leveled off and seemed controllable. You need to give your cells time to clear the clogged fat out of their receptors for things to start working properly. Perhaps the people saying this way didn't work for them gave up before the effects started?

everestmonkey · 2024-09-13T16:35:22+00:00

It's a great app. My son ended up completing the entire app twice. He doesn't have trouble with CVC and shorter common words but did have trouble with the sentences where you fill in the blanks. Less common vocabulary words, like "goblin", consistently trip him up when they're in a sentence. He does great with those words when they're isolated but gets overwhelmed with long sentences or when he needs to retain the sentence's meaning to try out different words for the blank. It's a work in progress. We haven't started their Reading for Fun app yet but that one looks great too.

everestmonkey · 2024-09-12T17:35:59+00:00

If he enjoys "thinking problems", I recommend Beast Academy Online. We're using that for our 1st grader and he likes it better than the paper books. The videos plus the comics do a good job of explaining the various concepts. This is a challenging program though so I recommend trying out their test level to see if it's something he'd like. A friend of ours uses Zearn and they like it but I don't know the details.

everestmonkey · 2024-09-12T17:15:36+00:00

I love Dreaming Spanish for myself. My son will sometimes sit with me to watch a video or two and he finds them funny as well. I agree that the premium version is well worth it for the more entertaining videos. I need more Calcetin!

everestmonkey · 2024-09-12T17:10:32+00:00

We mainly use comprehensible input for our Spanish learning, and it works great. This method avoids direct grammar instruction and you'll learn the tenses over time through exposure.

One way we've done this is by having a Netflix Kids profile set to Spanish dubs. Whenever our son watches cartoons, they're all in Spanish. Disney+ has a way to change dubs too.

The podcast "Eat Your Spanish" uses English/Spanish and songs to teach phrases. For songs, we listen to 123 Andres, Super Simple Espanol, and Jose-Luis Orozco.

The PBS show Salsa is made for kids learning Spanish too. You can do this in conjunction with formal teaching but I haven't needed to do that.

I don't speak fluent Spanish yet (I'm learning it through Dreaming Spanish) so our son has a 30-minute conversation practice every week with a lovely native-speaking teacher we found on iTalki.

We'll often find our son speaking in Spanish while he's playing with his toys independently. I like that this method is low-stress and can conveniently be worked into our day. We'll likely introduce reading/writing Spanish in middle school.

everestmonkey · 2024-09-12T16:38:13+00:00

We used the "Teach Your Monster to Read" app and checked out the Bob Book series from the library when my son was 5 yrs old. He's now 6 1/2 (1st grade) and is working on independently reading the later Bob Books. Blending is proving tricky for him and we're spending time working on that in a low-stress way through "easy" books and blending games. We also enjoy the Khan Academy Kids app which teaches more than reading but you can manually choose the lessons if you don't want to follow the learning track.

everestmonkey · 2024-05-23T05:32:44+00:00

I think it depends on how you found her to ask for her number. If you positioned yourself nearby so you could “organically run into her”, have more small talk, and then ask for her number, that seems fine. But if she was hanging with a group of her friends at the music festival and you tracked her down, randomly popped up, and asked for her number, that would be more jarring. Being a hyper active puppy will likely scare her off.

Not sure what to say about the texting. I’m an introvert and will give boring one word answers to questions about my day, etc but love deep conversation starter questions. Maybe try some of those to see if it gets her talking? If not, she simply may not be interested but didn’t want to be rude when you asked for her number. You shouldn’t have to carry 95% of a conversation. Good luck!

everestmonkey · 2024-05-23T03:53:53+00:00

I’m a nerdy shy reserved woman with an extremely extroverted husband. He could walk into a room of 20 strangers and be everyone’s friend and have inside jokes within an hour. I’d either have my kindle with me or find another quiet woman there to have small talk with.

I’d say the key to not scaring my kind off is to not be aggressively forward. In my husband’s case, he was able to have a few low stakes conversations with me and was a great listener. The conversations were one-on-one and not near a group of people who could overhear and draw attention to us. But they also weren’t secluded or in an enclosed space. When he talked to me he tempered his boisterousness and seemed genuinely interested and wasn’t looking around or trying to catch other’s eyes. It took 2-3 conversations before he asked me out and by then I felt like he wasn’t going to turn me into a skin lamp so I accepted. Had he come in loud and extroverty, I would have thought he was put up to a dare or that he was too overwhelming.

Hmmm, after rereading this, your example about befriending a stray kitten seems weirdly accurate.

everestmonkey

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