This is long overdue from the time that I mentioned how I’d greatly simplified my online activities through two separate applications: Scribefire and RSS feeds. This post is about how to post to multiple blogs simultaneously with the free Firefox add-on, Scribefire.

First, you’ll need to actually download Firefox to use as a browser. If you haven’t already done so, you can get it by clicking here.

One of the main reasons Firefox is so neat is because it has a bunch of add-ons that increase its functionality and let you customize your Internet experience.

One of those add-ons is ScribeFire. ScribeFire is a free download that allows you to pre-enter all your blogs’ logins and passwords, whether they be on MySpace, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, InsaneJournal or many other blog variations. On LJ-based platforms, it also allows you to pre-add communities of which you are a member. Then, all you have to do to start blogging is to hit the F8 button on your keyboard, type out your post, select the blog to which you want to post, and click on the “Publish” button.

I’ll break down into simple steps here how you can do this to post the same posts to multiple cross-platform blogs. For example, this post is going on my MySpace, InsaneJournal, Wordpress blog and LiveJournal. Please let me know if this was helpful or if I missed anything. Since I no longer have to log in to all my different social networking and blogging sites to update anything, nor do I have to cut and paste anything, it has radically streamlined how much I update.

1. Download and install Firefox.
2. Download and install the ScribeFire add-on for Firefox (it’s free and automatic).
3. Restart Firefox.
4. Hit F8, or go to TOOLS > SCRIBEFIRE.
5. In the right-hand window pane, click on the ADD button.
6. Type in the URL of your blog. Scribefire will automatically detect its platform (wordpress, Myspace, etc.)
7. Enter your username and password – it only stores this information locally, i.e., on your hard drive, so it’s totally private.
8. Repeat steps 5 through 7 for each blog you want to add.
9. Type your blog post.
10. Select the blog you want to publish to by clicking on the radio button corresponding to it on the right hand panel.
11. If you’re posting to a platform like MySpace or Wordpress that allows you to categorize your posts, you can further do so by first clicking the CATEGORIES button at the top of the right-hand panel.
12. Click on the “Publish to [Name of your Blog]‘ button on the bottom of the main panel, below your post.
13. To publish the same content to another blog, simply click on the KEEP CONTENT button that appears after your publishing has been successful. This will bring up the same blog post.
14. You can then make any tweaks you may need to, and repeat steps 10-12 until you’re done posting to all your blogs.

Scribefire has a lot of neat features, such as allowing you to edit past posts (by selecting the blog, then clicking the ENTRIES tab in the right hand panel); or sharing your posts on Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, etc, previews, as well as all the formatting of your usual posts. You basically never have to log in again to post anything.

A few notes about privacy settings:

If you are using a platform in which you friends-lock all your posts so that only designated users can see your posts for privacy reasons, you must have this feature automatically enabled via the individual platform to work with ScribeFire, which doesn’t yet allow for choosing individual privacy levels. LiveJournal, InsaneJournal and all other LJ-based platforms allow you to automatically set minimum security to “friends only” for all your posts; anything you post through ScribeFire will then be friends-locked. MySpace and WordPress have their own settings and every server/ set up is different. If you want help with yours, ask me and I’ll try to tell you how to do it, but otherwise you can just check the FAQ.

One last note about JournalFen:

I know many of you use JournalFen as an alternative or as your main blogging venue, but unfortunately their API and server settings are very out-of-date. The creators of ScribeFire have been trying to accommodate JournalFen for months and have even attempted to contact the admins of JournalFen to this purpose, to no response. So, sadly, ScribeFire does not yet work with JF.

Let me know if this was helpful to you, or if you have any questions or need any help setting it up. My next post will be all about how to set up RSS feeds with a similar application, so that you can read every blog, journal and newsfeed all in one place in Firefox, too. Happy blogging!

This is something we’re trying new for this year.

Dilemma #1: I’ve always been curious about lapbooking, but it looked like too much work for me and I was concerned about Shorty and his severe fine motor delays in his earlier years.

Dilemma #2: I’ve been looking for a Bible study/ Character-building curriculum that was fun, child-intuitive, and didn’t look like a curriculum. I strongly dislike treating this as an academic subject, as I think it’s just the foundation of imparting one’s values to one’s child and not just another school thing to do. I’ve so far eschewed any and all Bible curriculae I’ve ever seen, since it all has the same teacher/student format, with workbooks and quizzes and a bunch of other stuff I don’t want. The only alternative I could ever find was the whole “family devotional” format, even in WinterPromise’s book suggestions, which consisted of me spending even more time reading to the kiddo. I love to read to him, don’t get me wrong, but we do a LOT of reading, and he tunes me out after a certain point. I wanted something more interactive. Having failed to find anything, we just… haven’t done Bible study or character development in the last year or two, except whatever we get out of Sunday school.

Dilemma #3: I love the format and presentation of our handwriting curriculum, A Reason for Handwriting, and have been looking for a way to expand that in a fun, child-friendly way into a full-fledged memory verse, Bible study and character-building curriculum. I like the way it has the child practice a family of letters each week, plus a word or two every day, until it comes time to copy the whole enchilada, a Bible verse. I wish it used the KJV since the language is so beautiful, but It has little discussion topics and a weekly verse to memorize, but little else in the way of character study or any instructions on how to memorize the verse (I’m sure the teacher’s manual has some ideas, but it’s very expensive, so in my limited budget, I’ve never bothered to buy it to find out).

Solution: Enter HomeschoolShare.com, a free unit study and lapbook resource site designed by homeschooling moms that have decided to generously share their lapbooking materials for free.  They are very much geared toward Five in a Row users – a literature curriculum about which I’ve always been curious and which in fact I’m considering giving a shot in January, since they have three semesters’ worth of units for Shorty’s age range that happen to coincide perfectly with WinterPromise’s American Story 1 and 2.

Anyway, HomeschoolShare has a wonderful Character Development section for lapbooking. (If you don’t know what lapbooking is, click here.)  They have ten pre-made lapbooks for kindness, diligence, stewardship, forgiveness, cheerfulness, attentiveness, compassion/mercy, thankfulness and dependability, then they have a blank template for any character trait you choose.  I don’t want to burn out on these, so I’ve decided to do 18 this year, one every other week on the verse of the week.

We started a lapbook on obedience in relation to Shorty’s verse for the week (Phil 2:13) on Monday, our first day of fifth grade, and it has been a HUGE hit. We are only on day two, and Shorty has most of the verse memorized already – something he’s never done before. The A Reason for Handwriting workbook has the child write out the verse at the end of the week in his best cursive on one of their pre-printed sheets, which the child is supposed to glue onto construction paper and then give it to someone as a gift. However, we’ve been doing this curriculum for 3 years and have pretty much run out of people to give them to. LOL  So his best cursive is going to go on the back of the lapbook!

So far, the lapbook is coming out SO cute.  I intend to post pictures of the finished product on Friday.  My plan right now is to do one lapbook per week, alternating character study and Bible verse pages with literature lapbooks. However, if Shorty wants to, we’ll do one per week of the character study. We’ve just had so much fun putting it together, and on such meager supplies – I had some old manila folders lying around, for example, but I bet the lapbooks look even cuter with colored ones and scrapbooking adhesives to decorate.

Shorty has also asked me to do another lapbook on Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the book we just got done reading for Animals and their Worlds (easily our favorite book from the program so far).  Fortunately, they have a lapbook page for that, too!  I am wondering now if this may be a better option than book reports for literature this year. I’ve already Googled for a Pedro’s Journal lapbook, and found a great one on Christopher Columbus that we’ll do when he gets done reading that. Oh, and they even have one for the summer olympics!   The wheels have been turning in my head…

Anyway, that’s our Bible curriculum. Lapbooking character traits and memory verses based on the order in which they are presented in A Reason for Handwriting. It seems simple and I can’t see us doing this for years and years, so I’ll probably have to come up with something else next year, but for now, this is working for us.

Crystal Kupper, a writer for Focus on the Family, interviewed me on a feature their magazine did about single parents who homeschool, and this is the end result.

How exciting.

I love to cook, but I often just don’t have the time or energy to cook three full meals a day for three people every single day. So I eat out a lot, but I try to avoid fast foods like the plague. I prefer instead to eat at real restaurants, even if they’re cheapie ones like Denny’s, Boston Market or IHOP. At least you’re getting real, unfried, ungreasy food. We like our local Denny’s because it’s in a very posh neighborhood and quite a bit nicer than any other Denny’s I’ve ever seen, and kids eat free twice a week there, so it turns out to be a pretty good deal. But that can still be expensive, and anyway, I get bored easily and like to eat at different restaurants once in a while.

I’m lucky that I live in an area with a lot of really great restaurants, many of them ethnic cuisine, which I love. But I’m often on an extremely tight budget, which means that I don’t really get to go to the really nice, upscale ones, because it’s a rare day that I have $100 or more to spend on a single restaurant visit. And by “rare,” I mean “non-existent.”

Enter Restaurant.com. I am totally in love with this web site. They sell gift certificates you can print out from your computer to a bunch of different restaurants in your area at about a 60% discount. That means that for $10, you get $25 worth of gift certificate. A lot of those restaurants have a minimum (usually $35) and it won’t cover alcohol and other things and you have to go on certain days, but what that means is that a $50 meal can run you just $20, which is a pretty good gift for yourself or for someone else.

I LOVE to give gift certificates as presents, so I anticipate abusing this when Christmastime rolls around.

But I actually save even more money when I use this site, because these days, before I buy ANYTHING online that has a checkout process with a field for a discount code, I usually Google “______[web site name] discount code” or “_________ coupon” first. It sounds shady, but it’s not – there is nothing wrong with sharing coupons with other people, publicly or otherwise, unless the web site’s TOS forbids it (I always check first). And it turns out that with just about any major web site out there – eBay, Borders, Orbitz, Sephora, Expedia, Amazon, whatever – there are sites like RetailMeNot and MomsView which will keep track of current, usable discount codes for you.

I have TracFone as my cell service provider for me, my great-grandma and Shorty, and I ALWAYS Google “TracFone codes” before buying more airtime. I got free double minutes with a free code once, so now I usually end up paying about $20/month for 300 minutes a month, sometimes more.

Usually even when I do obscure searches, something turns up, like how I just got an indefinite subscription to the Sunday Miami Herald for $2/month with a code I Googled.

But this post is about Restaurant.com, because I wanted to take my grandma and the Shorty out someplace nice after church on Sunday. So just now, I found a 50% off Restaurant.com coupon code via Google (that would be coupon code GOODBUY, which expires Saturday, announced on Good Morning, America last week), so I got three $25 gift certificates for $5 a pop. Meaning… I just bought a $75 meal at a local four-star Cuban restaurant for what it costs 2 people to eat at McDonald’s.

Yes, I’m pretty pleased with myself right now.

I’ve been giving some thought today to temperament and autism and reductivism. About how we – and I include myself in this – tend to think “that is an autistic person” rather than “that is an individual who, among other things, is affected by autism.” Is autism a defining characteristic for a person that overrides all other expressive personality factors? It can be, of course, especially on the more severe end of the spectrum, with folks who don’t speak at all, but even then…

I can’t help but rebel against that idea because I spend most of my day, every day, with a child who has autism. An outgoing, cheerful, confident, chatty individual, who is funny, enjoys word plays, loves bright colors, loves to draw and make up stories (very literal stories, mind, but still), does not want his best friends to know he still sleeps with a stuffy, will eat anything as long as it has cheese, loves to make people laugh… and has autism.

Until I had Shorty, I had no idea it was possible to be an extrovert with autism. I understand now that just because a person’s temperament hard-wires him to enjoy seeking out social contact with people, it does not necessarily guarantee that person will have a parallel level of social intuition. If any of you have seen the film or play Amadeus, I’m reminded of Solieri, who loved music and was filled with a deep longing to be the world’s greatest musician, but possessed meager amounts of innate musical talent. It’s kind of like that.

Shorty is friendly, smiley and chatty, and I think maybe because he has not been subjected to the ridicule and ostracizing that other children with autism sometimes face in school, he has a very high self-esteem, so he is fairly fearless about talking to people, even if he doesn’t often know the “right” things to say. I think other children just intuit that he’s basically a good guy; this, in turn, means that he makes friends with highly intuitive, tolerant kids, which is a silver lining. I think that his personality ingratiates him to a lot of people, despite his odd jokes, his unusual speech, his pacing, and the fact that he prefers to speak to the spot on the floor directly to your right, rather than your face. He has a lot of friends – some with learning exceptionalities, some without. I think everyone is used to his little quirks and they see past it. Or maybe we’ve been very blessed in running into a lot of people who just don’t care about differences like that. Either way, we’re both happy.

I used to attend a church whose pastor had six children. The youngest was a really lovely, funny, fashion-conscious 13-year-old young lady with a deep love of singing and a beautiful, sweet, clear, child’s soprano. She also had Down Syndrome. Between service and Bible study, we used to sit together at the meet and greet, and chat about this or that over coffee cake and juice. We had a mutual fondness for cute shoes and big hair, y’all know how I roll. She mentioned once that someone had been mean to her “because she was different.” I asked her if it bothered her or made her sad. “Nah,” she shrugged. “I figure, everyone’s different somehow.”

I think about this a lot, and how her Down Syndrome became invisible to me the more I got to know her as a person. The reality is, it seems simple, but it’s true: EVERYONE has SOMETHING. We all have things with which we struggle, yet so few of us are clinically defined by those struggles. That doesn’t seem fair to me. I really wonder how many individuals in this world have never been allowed to realize their full potential because it’s been discovered early on that they fit a definitive label, and the vast majority of people, even the well-meaning, even the people who love them… stop there.

I don’t know if I’m convinced anymore that autism is even a disability, or just an uncommon point on the spectrum of the human condition. So many of the symptoms of autism no longer seem like handicaps to me. They are just… descriptions of some of my child’s behavior, sometimes. I’ve found that clinical labels are only useful within a clinical context, such as obtaining medical help or therapy. Beyond that, if Shorty cannot easily intuit idioms… so I cannot easily intuit scientific axioms. Shorty has no patience for chit-chat; I have no patience for talking on the phone. Am I disabled? Shorty thinks in pictures instead of abstract concepts; why is this pathological? Because it’s unusual?

Shorty is stubborn decisive about his preferences and has a hard time explaining them sometimes. He doesn’t like surprises and prefers to be able to anticipate change whenever possible. People are not always sensitive to this preference. When he was little, it would lead to massive meltdowns, but over the years, he’s learned words and other ways of expression, such as drawing or self-relaxation, and doesn’t have meltdowns anymore. He has also started coming to grips that the world cannot be controlled and be predictable all the time. It’s hard for him, because he prefers to make informed, careful decisions rather than think on his feet (is that autism, or is that just how he is?) but he is getting there. We learned – are still learning – to talk to each other. Maybe it’s the “neurotypical” folks who need to learn there is more than one way to connect with other human beings. Maybe that’s what we can all learn from individuals with learning exceptionalities.

I’ve had to retrain myself to think about individuals with physical and mental differences as “individuals” first. Shorty has autism, but that is one slice of the whole pie. I make myself make the disability invisible because then the rest of the person is allowed to shine through, and that’s at least as important. No one likes to be pigeonholed, you know?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Shorty and I have had a VERY busy month. I have gotten a nearly full-time work-from-home job as an advocacy coordinator for a company called OnPoint Advocacy, which I like a lot. I can’t say too much about the position, as they value confidentiality highly, but I can say that it is a job that pays very well and on time, utilizes both my college degree and a wide variety of my skillset, is quite interesting, and has an excellent support structure for its employees.

With my new job I am working around 30- 35 hours per week right now just on this job, plus a couple of random writing gigs (plus working on finishing my 2 books)… which has made it so that I have had to
severely crack down on time management. As such, I’ve had to re-evaluate and re-prioritize a lot of things in our life right now and for the coming school year, which officially starts after Labor Day weekend for us. I’ve made some significant lifestyle changes as a result.

• PRACTICAL LIFE SKILLS: Shorty will continue with Cub Scouts, which meets twice a month. This is Shorty’s last year as a Cub Scout! He’s actually very close to achieving Boy Scout status. Very exciting.
• BUT WHAT ABOUT SOCIALIZATION?!?!?! We’re keeping our weekly park play date, of course! That’s our social lifeline to other homeschoolers and all our best friends go there. It’s fun!
• PHYSICAL EDUCATION: We’re keeping the judo classes, but may consider cutting it down to twice a week instead of three times per week. I hesitate to limit this for Shorty because he’s really improved SO much both developmentally and emotionally, and the judo master is just incredible with special kids. However, if we only did it twice a week, it would give us two free days a week on
  the weeks we didn’t have Cub Scouts. So we’ll see.
• BYE-BYE, ENRICHMENT: No more homeschool co-op.  I was going to teach a class or two there, but it’s 20+ minutes away and now that Shorty’s best friend isn’t going anymore and they’re not
  offering any classes he’s interested in (they don’t have much for his age group), it’s kind of pointless for us anyway. However, if you homeschool in the Miami area and are looking for a good secular homeschool co-op, I can’t recommend it enough.
• FIELD TRIPS: I am considering joining PATH for the occasional field trip, just to change up our scenery once a month or so. We didn’t go on many of those last year just because we had too much on our plate, but I wouldn’t mind going to more this year!
• HANDIWORK: We are probably keeping the monthly Home Depot Kid’s Workshop because it is so fantastic and doesn’t take up that much of our time. Not only does it help Shorty with practical life skills, safety information and fine and large motor development it’s on a Saturday and next to a mall, and I do so love to be a mallrat on a lazy Saturday.

We’ve made some curriculum changes as well, just because I have to be completely honest with myself and admit that I do not have 5-7 hours per day to homeschool Shorty directly. I have, at most, 2 or 3 hours. He is 10.5 anyway, and needs to start being a bit more independent in his school work. But the curriculum I used last year is ALL extremely teacher-intensive, and I have had to take a hard look at that, and how I can work simultaneously on my desktop while he works on the laptop.

• FOREIGN LANGUAGE: Shorty will either be taking Elementary French I from Switched-on Schoolhouse or some other language from K12. Both these courses are self-teaching, self-paced, and entirely computer-based.
• LANGUAGE ARTS AND MATH: I have tentatively decided that we will no longer be using Rod and Staff for language arts and math. They are WONDERFUL, thorough programs, but they are also incredibly teacher-intensive. Each daily lesson was taking at minimum 45 minutes to an hour per subject. Instead, we will continue our MadLibs, copywork, CaughtYa’s! and literature/ creative writing, along with math games and and math flash cards for rote memorization, but we will primarily be using Time4Learning for language arts and math. I’ve looked over their third grade syllabus (Shorty’s grade level with math) and it looks extremely comprehensive. (Please note: if you decide to sign up with Time4Learning, please put in my email address, 1parenths at earthlink dot net, as the referrer - I get a free month!)
  
• PLACEMENT: Right now, I’m having him just take the quiz for each unit in math. Any quiz on which he gets 90% or above, we don’t do the lessons and just go on to the next ones. If he gets 89% or lower on the quiz, we do all the lessons since it’s something he needs work on. This way, he doesn’t have to start from scratch with Grade 3 or go over anything he already knows. Hopefully over time he can catch up to grade level.
• SELF-PACING: He’s allowed to work on it as much as he wants, and since the site gives him the incentive of 10 minutes of playtime (on an area with a ton of kid-friendly web site links) for every 20 minutes of schoolwork he does, he actually spends quite a lot of time on the site.
• OVERALL: I like Time4Learning a lot. At only $20 per month, it’s inexpensive in the short-term. The presentation is really fun and child-friendly. I was concerned it wouldn’t be as good as R&S, and while it doesn’t seem as thorough, it does seem very comprehensive in its scope. It also allows me to carefully monitor his progress on the work, and have him repeat any lessons he didn’t master. This way, I can hopefully avoid the problem of a lack of mastery while he makes visible, consistent progress.
• RECORD KEEPING: Time4Learning generates detailed reports for me, so between that and WinterPromise’s Instructor Guides, and the foreign language program’s transcripts, I will have much more detailed record-keeping in the coming year than I did this year (jotting notes down in my notebook… when I remembered…)
• EXTRAS: Time4Learning also has a history and science curriculum, which Shorty does as he sees fit just as a supplement or for fun, but the bulk of our work there will be WinterPromise.
• HANDWRITING: We will continue with A Reason For Handwriting, but lately I’ve started having him copy over the lyrics to American folk songs and other things related to our study of history instead, and we may get into copywork of Shakespearean quotations this year as well.  We may just use the Handwriting Without Tears cursive program my friend gave me last year – we used it for manuscript/printing and Shorty loved it.
• HISTORY: We’ll be finishing up Winter Promise’s American Crossing 1 for history, then moving directly into Part 2.  I think it is a terrific, hands-on, child-friendly history curriculum; Shorty doesn’t even consider it schoolwork because it’s so much fun. We haven’t done as much of the activities as I would have liked to do so far, just because I was always concerned we wouldn’t have time to “squeeze in all the subjects”, but now that he’ll be doing 3 of the subjects almost independently, it’ll free up my time to really dig in to history. Apparently, I am not alone in this experience with Time4Learning.
• SCIENCE: We are almost done with Winter Promise’s Animals and their World theme – we’ll be done by the end of September – and after that, we’ll be doing their World Around Me theme with some extras to beef up our study. It’s intended for K-2nd, but Shorty won’t care because the texts are so cute and fun, and some of their materials are recommended for up to 6th grade, so I’m sure it’ll be relatively age-appropriate. Also, I am adding science encyclopedia readings, definitions and a light science textbook to beef it up. Who says everything has to be hard, anyway? As long as he’s learning new and interesting things, I’m good. The World Around Me theme teaches a child the basics of scientific inquiry, and I think he’ll get a lot out of it.
• BIBLE STUDIES: Daily devotional reading, Sunday school, maybe we’ll sing some hymns here and there as music studies… that’s it, really. I was considering joining Bible Study Fellowship International because a lot of my friends go and really love it, but the closest one is nearly half an hour away and my car, bless it, would never weather that trek on a weekly basis.
• ELECTIVES: We’ll be doing one semester of Rod and Staff’s Gr 4/5 Health, and one semester of Rod and Staff’s Gr 4/5 Music. We’ll also continue our art appreciation and Shakespearean studies once a week. My grandma has agreed to continue working on his fine motor skills and drawing, since she is the artist of the family. I would love to start him back up on guitar lessons, but both of us have a pretty full plate as it is, so we’ll see.

I anticipate changing this 23972352 times or so, but for now, that’s our forecast for the year. Phew!