Subway can make decisions anyway they want abotu who to let enter their contests. I can also make my decisions, likewise. I submitted a complaint to Subway and told them that although I have frequently ate at their establishments (more frequently than other fast foods but not overly frequently), I would have to reconsider changing my ways. No, I do not think that anyone should be discriminating against my children for being homeschooled and if they do, I will consider my future purchases or business in that light. We would have no problems not winning the athletic equipment or giving it to a local school or community center. They can make a disclaimer that the equipment only go to an institution but the individual prizes should go to the students.

Lowering taxes particularly corporate taxes helps the economy. For examples, look at Ireland, Estonia, and the US. Yes, we are not having as robust an economy right now as in the last six years. We should increase energy production, stop madating ethanol and reduce government spending. Yes, I do have a degree in economics from one of the foremost universities.

I read all the discussion on The Excellent Wife and so I know that many of you read Christian advice or devotional material. I have never seen what I need at this time. I need books to help with mental illness in young adults as a parent. I am not talking about cure books or driving out demon possession or anything like that. My oldest got medically withdrawn from third year in college because he was suffering from major depression. That happened in March and he was hospitalized for a few days then. He came home and we had two visits from the police at night because he was making suicide threats online to friends throughout the world and one or another would call it in to the local police. The second time, he was taken to the local mental hospital where he stayed slightly more than two weeks. He has been out for over two weeks and the medications haven't helped much. The psychiatrist is considering hospitalizing him again. Meanwhile I am trying to homeschool two others, one of whom has continous headache.

I would definitely call them and ask them their plans. If not me, then my husband. I would not buy or plan for that many people (actually, I don't like having even one more person here unannounced unless I am making the invitation) without knowing they would be here. But then, I would never have that many people at my house unless I had a really big house and extra buildings and knew there would be many of them doind lots of the work. I am amazed by how some of you do this kind of thing.

We school year round. We take time off for vacations, Christmas week, a have light weeks some of the time. We always take time off for moves and that can be a few months, depending where we are moving. My girls' homeschool academy and co-op classes run from August to April next year so they will be full-time then. Right now, they are both slightly less than full-time. I am trying to catch up my older daughter back to regular schedule so she can graduate in May or June of 2010 or 2011. ( I think it will be 2011 but she wants to try to graduate early).

I think their only a few ones I regret but mostly for bad writing- Flowers in the Attic is one. That was poorly written and nasty too. There were other ones I read that I have no idea about the author's names or the titles but just were totally unenlighting, not enjoyable, and badly written too. Total wastes of time. The school assigned book I totally hated was "The Old Man and the Sea" . What a boring book! I still haven'read anymore Hemmingway to this day because of that book. Books like Helter Skelter and others got me interested in crimes. I later went into criminal justice field.

I go for a store bought high quality food that does not bring about problems. My dog now has to eat a true lamb and rice food ( many lamb and rice products include wheat and/or corn which are allergans for him). Before that problem and with previous dogs, I would use something like Iams or Eukanaba. I am currently using a more select formula of Purina for my senior cats that works very well. I decided by looking at serving sizes. Some popular cheap brands would have my dog eating three times that amount I feed him with better quality foods. I figure three times the food, three times the waste and no thanks.

With my first, I followed TWTM schedule and simply gave a government credit for the time spent on Government readings, discussions, and also campaign work. I also gave a geography credit by adding in the ABEKA map book to the other work we were already doing. I also separeted US History as a separate credit. This time, my daughter will have 1/2 credit in Ancient History, 1/2 credit in Geography, 1/2 credit in economics, 1/2 credit in government, 1 credit in US History and 1 credit in world history after ancient times. At least that is my plan with some of having been done already.

I voted for her and will try to remember to vote every day. I thought it was the best.

I decided to have my daughter who is a very auditory learner and has major spelling problems plus has a very hard time with memorizing learn Spanish. She just finished the class for Spanish I at our homeschool academy and got an A. It was a 90% A but it was an A. This was with her suffering from non-stop headache since late November. I chose Spanish because it has one of the best spelling systems. So far, she hasn't had almost any problems with spelling in Spanish. She made flash cards and reviewed over and over again. She had previously tried learning French when we lived in Wallonia, the French speaking part of Belgium and while she did learn her numbers and colors and such, she couldn;t spell any better in French than in English. I didn't push early language learning with her because of her memory issues. Her memory is improving as she gets older. (She is 14 now and finishing up ninth grade at home.)

I got it because it would be easier to use for me. I love it because it uses less water, does more laundry and is quieter.

When my parent's named me, I had the same first and first middle name as my mother. They called me by a nickname which I didn't like. I ended up having banking problems because of the fact that my mom and I had the same name. When we moved to another area, I changed my name. I kept the same first name but changed the spelling and changed my middle name to Christina which is what I use. My mom was okay with it. Both my husband and I wanted only traditional types of names for our children and that is what they all have. Not traditional English names but traditional first names nonetheless. =

All of us here have different circumstances. We can't make any assumptions about all of us being low income or high income or middle income. Some have one child and struggle. Some have many children and high incomes. SOme have grandparents who help out. Some have a husband who has a good income. Some have property that has been left to them. As more and more people homeschool, there will be greater differences in styles and resources. We are still military and have a certain level of income. When my husbands retires, we may have a lot more or maybe not. Currently I feel that with our very stressful family situation, the one thing that has gone very well for us this year is the outside classes and coop. With no let up in stress in the forecast, I plan to continue to use those and in fact, greater use of those next year. It is worth it to us.

I did and will again as soon as I get a new seal. I use it for one pot meals and for vegetables mostly.

My kids take two types of classes. In one type, they pay about 30, 35 a month plus a supply fee, plus a registration fee. Is it a lot? Not too much for me but my daughter got a very good education in those two classes. My other daughter was taking parent led co-op classes which cost 25 a month for three classes and no extra activity fee. Those classes were good too but I can see why the upper level classes cost more. The teachers did a lot of work outside of class. Children who took science classes with the one teacher who did Bio and Chem using BJU materials came out and scored well on AP tests. But you have to understand that for some of us, it is a choce between homeschooling with co-ops and lessons or private schools or online courses which are even more expensive or similarly expensive. At this point in my life, I have more money then I do energy or time. Many others have the same.

Well what gets me is that some question why you have ____. I was living in California when I was pregnant with my third (and come to be last). As I came from a family of three children and dh from a family with four, I certainly didn't think there was anything unusual about three. I got at least two negative comments and what was really striking was that one was by a civilian employee at the base. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with many military families, military families tend to be larger than average. I don't know if she was new or just didn't like children, the military or what. I wasn't particularly young or old, the children were well spaced apart, and it was none of her business. It gets to me how many people want to rule over other people. I want to live my life in freedom and let others do the same. Like one of you,I also don't want to support other people except for truly exigent situations like fires, hurricanes, catastrophic illness or injury, etc.

We count lots of things as school. I plan on counting the science of musical instruments camp as school as well as marine biology camp. I plan on counting quilting camp or class as part of my high schooler's sewing credit.

My first two were quite independent by age 11/12. I would do some lessons with them and have them do most on their own. My first was independent in most things with occasional backup on math and science and discussion time with lit and history. My second was mostly independent with history, lit, and science but needed math taught daily then she would work problems. My third is a different story. She is almost 11 1/2 and very little can be done independently. She is the only extrovert in the family and going off by herself and doing work is just really awful for her. We are deciding what we will change next year but she will definetely have some classes as co-op to help with this. She is much more willing to work somewhat independently for others.

I was bottle fed but only because of my medical problems. My mom was very pro-breastfeeding. Since neither my husband nor I was breastfed nor any of our three children, we don't feel any of us missed anything. We are all considered highly gifted academically (not that that matters but we don't seem to have suffered anything in the intelligence department) and while I did come down with many childhoof illnesses, my dh came down with remarkably little. He has also been very healthy as an adult.

I don't know what exactly we will do with the last two. Our first one did honors classes but no AP by choice. He did very well on his tests. He had great extra-curriculars. He got half tuition scholarships to a few colleges and chose one. Now he is home from college after 2 1/2 years and we will be happy if he gets a job. (He is suffering from major depression). This is all coloring my outlook so much I don't think I can answer well. You do the best that you can and sometimes things go well and sometimes they don't. My ninth grader will have to work this summer to end up with six credits. She is doing very well considering her health problems and the stress that her brother's illness is having. I won't be trying to get her into a pressure cooker though. We will start CC classes this fall and go that route with her. We will decide later on whether to try for any CLEP or AP tests with either of the last two.

We have enjoyed both. In the first state, we had a few classes offered for different grades and it was on a Thursday afternoon. ALl my children (middle/high school, upper elementary, lower elementary) enjoyed it. The oldest did drama and Shakespeare, the younger two did world geography and drawing. We also had field trips with that group and some fun days like end of year waterpark day. Now we live in Florida and this last year we were involved with a very orgnized home school group. We have classes for 6-12 graders where they meet for one or two days a week and a facilitator teaches. They don't call the people teachers for legal and administrative reasons. Anyway, the parents work one or two days a semester all day with monitoring the student center and help with cleanup and lunch. The other group are parent led classes with three classes a semester and all parents staying in the building. It is for one morning or one afternoon a week. The Academy is for academic classes like enlgish, science, and languages. The co-op is for classes like PE, dance, public speaking, etc. and is for pre-schoolers-8th graders. As parents of those kids, we work two sessions, and be a hall monitor (i.e. usually a break) for one. If you are a monitor with any other person, you have someone to chat to. The second group is much more organized and very well run but it is also much more expensive. Also some of the rules are silly like no shorts for any female sixth grade and up. When I am not at that group, I am in shorts almost all the time here since it is so hot. (Not short shorts, but nice long ones with nice t-shirts or polo shirts, very respectable).

We lived for three years overseas in Belgium. We had problems gettng little things like file folders, socks, certain other school suppplies. Overall, we had a lot easier time getting most art supplies over there. Each country will be different as to what is easy/hard to get. One suggestion I have is if you know what area you will be moving to, get on th internet and look at things like libraries. I know that UK libraries and there catalogs are online so maybe Australia's are too. THat will give you a good idea of what types of books they carry. I always have names of certain siubjects I look up and some authors. This gives me a good idea about how adequate a library system may be. Since it is an English speaking country, you should have no problems getting books.

It is the island Cocoa Beach is on but so are many other cities and it is a very long island. It goes all the way from Canaveral to Sebastian Inlet. It must be one of the longest islands in Florida if not the longest.

I said 5 or 5 but I was thinking of activities like dance classes or nature classes. Actually a few weeks old would be the correct answer but the child would be in a baby room and I would be close by in church. Then for other types of care, normally a over one, but I remember that my oldest had surgery when my youngest was 6 weeks old and we needed babysitting for a while. Are a lot of you reading it like I did or do most never use babysitting, drop off care, or anything similar until all children are 5 or above? I am all for homeschooling and keeping families together. We take our kids to many places others don't-art museums, very nice restaurants, classical concerts. We did that since they were little. We do like to go out at times as a couple and we also need to go to certain functions or I would need to get out when my husband would be away for weeks or months.

I live on a island. It is quite long and has thousands of people living on it. The other islands near me have names but I can't ind the name of my island. Everyone hear calls it the barrier island or beachside. I am sure there must be a real name even if it only was used historically. CAn anyone give suggestions how to find it?