For Island, we read through Grammar Island first, over a month or two, before we started up with the other components. Then what I'd do is just take the total number of pages to read in each book and divide by how many weeks you have to get a weekly goal. And then maybe assign two of the writing assignments (or whatever you decide) from the back every week. IIRC, we did Sentence Island and Practice Island every day that we did school, then alternated the vocab and poetry, doing each around twice a week. We did the Island level in half a year and didn't find it overwhelming, so it should be a pretty relaxed program for a full year. Once you get to Town, things are laid out a little more clearly. Caesar's English and Paragraph Town each have 20 lessons. For CE we spend two weeks on the lessons with words and one week on the ones with stems. For PT we did one lesson a week for the first 10 and are now spending around 2 weeks each on the final 10. And then we spend a few minutes on poetry once a week and do around 3 sentences a week from Practice Town. Once you get going, it falls into place pretty nicely. ETA: I find looking at weekly goals rather than daily lessons is helpful for us.

Friday Night Lights Lost we've just started watching The Good Wife and are liking it so far

Oddly, our only broody hen is our one leghorn. She's quirky. She didn't get the memo about how all her maternal instinct has been bred away :).

I've been eying some of the recipes here: http://www.ticklemysweettooth.com/blog/ I haven't tried any yet, since they mostly require pretty specialized ingredients, but I put in an order for weird stuff like peanut flour last night, so I can get an occasional low carb brownie fix.

But she's not adding it...she's just not leaving it out. I assume...I mean, I haven't read the books, but I'm going to guess that SWB isn't making up s*xual stuff that didn't actually happen in order to make the books more exciting. If I were going to edit history to make it more age appropriate for high schoolers, I'd rather edit out the violence than the s*x. But then there wouldn't be a whole lot left, unfortunately...

Hmm....I think my current favorite girl name w/ historical significance might be Harriet (nn Hattie, maybe)

My mom is a (now non practicing) Catholic; my Dad is Baptist. I spent a lot of time as a kid being scared of God, and I spent a lot of time as a young adult being angry at God. Neither of those worked for me. Not believing in God doesn't work for me, either. I just...do believe. I heard an interview with Frank Schaeffer where he said that he was the sort of person who, if he wanted to be an atheist, would pray to God to help him become one. That's kind of me. Anyway, I'm not scared, and I'm not angry now, and I'm not an atheist, but I don't believe in a god that people need to be scared of, either. That god doesn't make any sense to me. I don't really know why bad things happen, except that I think we're here to figure some things out for ourselves and to help each other out. And I know that you understand love and peace and joy a lot better when you've felt the absence of those things, too. For me, bad things happening makes a whole lot more sense if this world isn't all there is than if it is. I know, of course, that not everyone feels that way, and I get that, too.

:iagree: DH is a David. He was David all the time, to everyone, until he was in high school. Now he's Dave to everyone except his immediate family (and, oddly, my grandmother, to whom he was introduced as Dave. I guess she doesn't like that name). DH honestly doesn't have a preference, though, so that's really what it comes down to. I think maybe when you're a child of the 70s named David, it's just kind of hard to get too attached to your name, since every other guy you meet has the same one. It's funny; I like David better, but I can never get used to calling him that, so I don't.

Here are some my 4th grader has read and enjoyed this year: Tuck Everlasting The Hobbit The View from Saturday Narnia books The Egypt Game A Wrinkle in Time The Giver

My 5 year old just finished it with DH, and he loved it. I read it to my then 8 and 6 year olds a year or so ago; the 6 year old was into it, but the 8 year old grumbled through it....and then read it on his own and loved it this year at 9. Shrug. I guess it depends on the kid. Oh...and the same kid who complained about the Hobbit last year is now listening to and LOVING LOTR. My kids are nothing if not unpredictable.

9, 7, and 5 and none of them has ever expressed any desire to go to school (quite the opposite, really). I'm not sure why; their Dad's actually a public school teacher, so we certainly don't vilify it. I suspect it's mostly because my oldest is really shy and would have a tough time with school, and the younger two tend to follow his lead. Or it could be because I'm just so much fun to be around :D

Err...I can second that getting a masters through a funded ph.D program is a good way to sneakily get a free master's. But I didn't mean to! I planned to finish, but then, you know, baby and all that. Stuff happens.

It's been awhile, but my understanding is that, in the humanities, funding is pretty standard for ph.D programs and pretty rare for master's (or, rather, some funding may be available, but you have to scramble to get it, and it's not guaranteed). My English ph.D program guaranteed funding for 4 years (through a combination of fellowships and teaching responsibilities), but it was generally possible for anyone who sought funding for a 5th year (and often beyond) to get it. The sciences are usually much better funded (which makes sense, since those students are the ones bringing money in through research grants, etc.). As I understand it, not many people get through professional programs (law, medicine) without taking out tons of loans.

I remember James and the Giant Peach working well as a read aloud with young kids because of the short chapters.

Disciples of Christ is all about theological questioning/disagreement/ecumenicalism and all that. The one we attend is on the liberal end of things, but many of them are much more conservative.

Finally finished (the audiobook of) Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat (and What To Do About It)....long review in my blog. Still working on Endgame and reading The View From Saturday along with DS.

My almost eight year old has a very funky grip, and nothing I do seems to change it. This is back when he was 4, but it's pretty much the same now: I eventually stopped worrying (much) about it, largely because my SIL (my husband's sister) saw the picture and told me that his grip looks very similar to hers. She told me that teachers tried for years to change it, but she always went back to holding pencils the same way, and has never understood why anyone cared. So, you know, maybe it's genetic! It was tough for me to judge whether it was affecting his writing adversely, because my older DS was Mr. Fine Motor Skills and could write as fast and as neatly as I can by the time he was 5. DS7 still writes fairly slowly (but he's getting faster)....but he writes very legibly, doesn't complain about the amount of writing required in WWE 2...and anyway he does pretty much everything slowly ;). I probably will have him learn to type sooner than I otherwise would, but other than that I don't fret much about it.

Ours live in the backyard...free run of the (fenced) yard during the day, in a run made of modified dog kennels at night. We're in Georgia, so we don't have to worry about the cold much, but on the very coldest nights we hang a heat lamp over their roosting bar (the pen is right by the basement, so we just run an extension cord through the window).

We have, complete with chicken names (because naming chickens is one of my (and the kids') favorite parts): 1 white leghorn (Super) 1 buff orpington (Nedcy) 1 barred rock (Flannery) 2 new hampshire reds (Violet and Sidekick) 2 Easter eggers (Cupcake and Galaxy) 1 Blue Andalusian (Numbers) 1 Cuckoo Maran (Peach)

We try to always buy grassfed/pastured meat (grassfed/grass finished is only going to apply to beef; pigs and poultry should have access to pasture and be able to find some of their own food, but they almost always are going to be fed grain, too)...I personally don't worry about organic, particularly if it's a local farm that I can visit and see myself. Getting an organic designation is often prohibitively expensive for small farmers (which means its also going to make their products more expensive for me).

DH's degree is in math, and, well...he's a math teacher now. But for the first 5 years out of school he was a web programmer. Had he gone to grad school, he likely would have concentrated on operations research, which is a branch of math that's all about practical applications (the example DH cites is finding the most efficient routes for ambulances. The example that makes me wish DH had gone to grad school is finding the most efficient Disney World touring plans).

As far as why....well, I think it's kind of like how I feel when someone asks why I homeschool. Why not? I don't see school as the default, so I don't see homeschooling as making a decision against something else. I don't see denominational uniformity in doctrine or central government that controls things at the congregational level as the default either. There are any number of reasons why people might prefer congregational government. It gives congregations more power and freedom to do things the way they feel is best for them. As far as your last question...as far as I know, there's no process for complaining to a central authority at either a DOC or UCC church if you don't agree with what the pastor's saying...but again, both denoms are non-creedal, so there's a lot of room for questioning and disagreement about theology. If you don't like what the pastor says, you'd...find another church.

Well, there are different types of church governance. Some denominations are much more accountable to a central authority than others. My church is Disciples of Christ, and before that I attended a United Church of Christ....both of these denominations have congregational government, which means they have very little, if any, accountability to a central authority. They're also, probably not coincidentally, non-creedal. There is a national organization in both cases, but its function is a lot different than it would be in a more hierarchical denomination.

Our 5th grade plans so far: LA: *MCT Voyage level * Killgallon *I might or might be unable to resist checking out Writing with Skill when it comes out *dictation, writing assignments, discussion from reading assignments *poetry memorization Math: *Singapore 6a/b Science: (still a bit up in the air) *Science in a Nutshell kits *PLATO science History/etc: *SOTW 2 (with his younger brothers) *Mapping the World With Art Languages: *outside Spanish class *Galore Park Spanish *Greek for Children

I like Everett the best of your list (I do know one baby Everett...not sure if it's on the cusp of super trendiness or not). A lot of the others I think are the kind of names that "date" a kid...they sound like names from this decade, you know? My less popular picks for boy names are in my sig (Gus is short for August), but I actually love a lot of more common, classic boy names, too...like, say, William and Daniel :). I think Will is a really awesome name for little boys and for grown men. Once we named Ari, I felt like those were sort of out for us--it seemed too incongruous to have one 600ish ranked name (750 or so when we named him) and then a top 20 or 30. We use the common names for middle names; I have a Daniel, Joseph, and David there. Anyway, maybe you and your DH could find a compromise with a name that's still a classic like William and Daniel, but a little less popular? I really like Owen and Jonah. Henry? Peter? Benjamin?