I wrote something about the housework the other day, and then my computer locked up and I gave up. But now that the thread is going again, I'll try again and hope it doesn't lock up! Housework. I was shocked at how much time a baby takes up in a day. I don't have the breakdown anymore since my youngest is now 11, but back in the day I added up the time and over each 24 hour period, it takes 8-10 hours just to tend to the baby. Feeding, diapers, bathing, whatever. I mean, how can it possibly take 8 solid hours out of every 24 just to tend to the baby? It does. And you do that on wonky sleep. Those aren't 8 hours in a row: they're spread out all over the place. I find that when I go on limited or interrupted sleep, everything takes me twice as long. So, when you have a baby, you literally have a 40 hour a week job. So you're doing all the chores has to be done in the in between times between caring for the baby, but it's still the same 24 hours that a working person has. And if a working person has trouble fitting in chores because they work 40 hours a week, then a mom with a newborn has the same trouble. (Edited to add: I forgot that with a baby, you don't get the weekend off. So it's 8 hours a day for 7 days a week. You have a 55 hour a week job.) And that's just one kid. Let that one grow up a little and then have another one. Yikes! Now you're working many more hours a week, tending to kids. I didn't do the math once I had two. But it's an amazing amt of time just to tend to babies and toddlers. And then you start homeschooling them. You need to sit with them to teach them, plus you have to have time to prepare to teach them. Depending on the curriculum you use, this could be simple and fast or complex and time consuming. Right now, at the high school level, here's my schedule: 6:00-8:00 Exercise, bathe, eat breakfast. I'm lucky because all the other people in my house can now do these things on their own. If you have to bathe, prepare breakfast, and spoon the food into another person, this can all take hours. Exercising would be out the window. 8:00-5:00 Homeschool. This includes lunch time (which I no longer have to cook for my kids--again, I make my own and they make their own. A HUGE relief to me now) and time going to karate or in the car diving to Spanish. 5:00-7:00 or 7:30. I cook dinner and then we all sit and eat it and watch our favorite shows together as a family. 7:30-8:30/9:00 I write up notes for the next day's lessons. Except on Tuesday. On Tuesday I leave the house at 6:30-ish and go to the $5 movies. Because it's very necessary for me to have 3 hours to myself once a week in a quiet theater with no interruptions. This means I work extra long on Monday because I know that Tuesday will be movie night. 8:30-10:00 I relax. And um...notice how there was no time for cleaning in there. At all. Let's keep going: Saturday: Errands, crash, try to get together with friends, work with the high schooler on any work that he didn't get done that week (happens about once or twice a month and takes a few hours.) Clean a bit. Make sure I spend time with the kids that isn't all about school (a biggie to keep the relationships good.) Sunday: 6:00-7:30 Shower, eat breakfast 7:30-9:50: Drive to church, attend, drive home--separately from the family. They stay for Sunday School, but I need to get started planning for the week. For 8 hours every Sunday, I need to prepare for the coming school week. Those hours are interrupted by eating lunch and dinner. My husband often cooks the dinner on Sunday, so that I'm not stuck working until 8 at night. If he doesn't cook, then I work from 10 in the morning until 8 at night on prep, eating lunch, and preparing and eating dinner. Him (or is it "his"?)cooking gains me an extra 1 or 1.5 hours to get my planning done. My husband does a lot of the cleaning around the house. At this point, he does more cleaning than I do. I work more hours than he does a week. I work at least a 55 hour week. Fortunately, we have low standards and don't mind the dust bunnies in the corners or smudgy windows. DH has never thought that housework was "women's work." He does not expect that I'll be doing it alone. He does get irritated if he walks in the front door and we've left our lunch dishes and schoolbooks scattered all over. I can understand that. We're good now about cleaning up our lunch stuff asap and putting the books away each evening. Other than the lunch dishes and scattered books, he's never acted like I'm doing something wrong by having such limited time to clean the house. This has been a BIG relief to me in my marriage. If he expected me to do my job (55 hours a week or more when DS needs help with homework on Saturday), and maintain the house, while he only works a 40 hour week, I'd be pretty angry. But he doesn't so we're good. (And I'm hoping that I can change things up next year so I don't have to do so much prep. I picked a biology and world history class that requires a LOT of teacher interaction. It's too much.)

I was in your shoes last summer, as I was preparing a schedule for biology. Biology is an incredible amount of information to cover in a year. The size of the books! Sheesh! I was disbelieving, "Surely not the *whole* book...we don't need to do the *whole* book? ...Do we?" Well, I came to the conclusion that we did need to do the whole book because I wanted my son to take the SAT II Biology test. And now that we're halfway through the school year I'm waffling on whether or not I should have him take it or not. There's just so much info to cover and the test asks for so many little detailed things. We'll have about 2 or 3 weeks at the end of the class to focus on test prep, but I'm just not sure if it's worth all the cramming at the end to take the test. I dunno. We spend 1.5 to 2.5 hours a day on biology--5 days a week, for 34 weeks to cover our book. It's not Holt, but I've seen the Holt book and my book is the same size. Biology is a big time-suck on our day. I wish I'd outsourced it. I don't feel I'm doing a good job of wrapping his and my head around exactly what parts we need to spend our time getting down cold, and which parts aren't as important. I'm am soooo outsourcing science next year (Chemistry.). Well, that probably wasn't helpful other than to say that if you're thinking, 'There's just no way!' I've btdt.

I went to the 20 items or less checkout line today with about 70 items (30 cans of catfood alone!). After ringing me up, the cashier told me I was in the wrong line. It was embarrassing, but I didn't mean to do it. :(. Not sure if the people in line behind me believed me when I said, "Oh, I didn't see the sign!" I'm usually careful about that, but not this time.

1. Get high school out of the way: GED. This is a Must Do. There is no way around this. Must be done. 2. Get an AA or some sort of vocational certification. Even if it runs out and you need to do it again, it won't run out for a number of years. Before it "runs out", you'll be covered with some marketable skills. And if accounting will help you without you needing it to be a job, then that's killing two birds with one stone. Also, it will go a long way to giving you confidence and forming you into a well-rounded person. This is very important. I didn't realize how important this was when I was young, but it is. A confident, well-rounded woman is a better wife, mother, coworker, organizer, what-have-you. 3. Parenting advice. Three things: 1. Be gentle. 2. Be gentle. 3. Be gentle. The parents who are gentle with their kids have such better relationships than the ones who yell and punish and try to dominate. And if you have relationship, that goes a long way to making all other parenting challenges manageable. I love planning. I don't see anything wrong with it. I'm a flexible planner, though, so if things don't go according to plan, I just regroup and head off in a new planning direction. It sounds like you're that way, too.

Direct. I'm not so good at understanding hints. I take people at their word. If they say they're busy this weekend, I assume they're busy, so then I ask again for the next weekend. How humiliating to have it suddenly dawn on someone that the person wasn't busy. Direct. As uncomfortable as it is.

I don't think I had plans. I just sort of figured that this is how my life would turn out: I'd probably get married. I'd never, ever, ever have kids because they cry and throw tantrums and have snotty noses I'd probably be poor and live in an ugly apartment with bugs I'd have a little car I'd have a job somewhere, not sure where--an office or something I got married at 19, worked for a health insurance company(office job), had a decent apartment, then 2 decent houses--small but not with bugs. I'm not poor, but am somewhere in the middle of middle class, probably just below the middle of middle class. I finally did have kids after 10 years of marriage and what a shock to find out that I loooooove them more than I believed was possible for a person to feel love. Homeschooling and homemaking was never on the radar. Just thought I'd work my little job and drive around in my little car. I'm currently pretty crummy at homemaking, but pretty decent at homeschooling. Not the best ever, but I work hard at it.

It could be your color. It took me a bit to figure out that I look really nice in jewel tones and not so nice in pastels. If I try on a dress that is pastel it looks wrong on me. If I try on the same dress in a jewel tone, it looks awesome. That color is probably your color and when you try it on, something about it makes you look extra good.

I love it when you and I get out together for dinner with friends. We order a TON of food and no one cares. Appetizers, main dishes, desserts--no comments from anybody about who is eating too much or too little. And there is a wiiiide range of sizes and clothing choices and hair choices among us all and it doesn't matter. We come clothed in something, we eat or we don't eat, and no one says a word about it. Refreshing. At the WTM meetups, I'm just so thrilled to see everyone in person that I don't notice who is eating what. I'm busy trying to listen in on the 3 different conversations that are going at the same time so I don't miss out on anything good.

My son is in the middle of 6th grade. This is what we use: Art: Discovering Great Artists book. This is not a study of the artists themselves, except for a very short paragraph on each artist. It's a book of art projects. We've done 17 projects so far and all of them have worked beautifully. Grammar: Christian Light Education (CLE). I've learned that for us, the entire year's worth of grammar is too much. We're only doing 1/2 of the year in 6th and we'll do the next half in 7th. History: Mystery of History. I'm condensing a 4-year rotation into 3 years. We're definitely doing Vol I and II of MOH, but I might switch to something else for Vol III and IV, just to shake things up. We get bored with the same curric after a while. Literature: All the Harry Potter books. Don't judge. I wish I had a reader, but I just don't. I have a huge (huge!) collection of quality children's literature that he won't touch. These Harry Potter books are the only things I've been able to get him to read without a fight. I'm content for now. Logic (sort of): Perplexor workbooks, Analogies workbooks, Rush Hour game (there are little cars on a board and you have to shuffle them around.) Math: CLE Music: A book titled "Music" by Donna Latham. It teaches about American music. We've studied classical music in depth in the past and so this book is a fun way to learn about American music: Puritan hymns to jazz to rock and roll. Science: BJU, 6th grade plus Bill Nye the Science Guy episodes. Typing: typingclub.com (free) Writing: Rod and Staff grammar book, but we use just the writing lessons, and Figuratively Speaking. We bounce back and forth between those books. I wouldn't have bought Rod and Staff grammar books for the writing lessons on their own--we just happened to already own the books, so we're using the writing portions of their grammar books.

I haaaaaaate it when people talk about what I eat. I hated it when I was skinny and I hate it now when I'm not-so-skinny. I hate it when people tell me I'm not eating enough or when they wonder why I'm going back up to the buffet yet again. And I haaaaaaate it when people infer that I'm overdressed. I don't own jeans, people, so no matter what I wear it tends to look too dressy. No matter that it's just the yoga-pant material pants from Walmart with a button down shirt. If it's not jeans, "Why are YOU all dressed up?" Because jeans always feel like they're too tight in my crotch and it's not socially acceptable to tug them down from those places. Did you really want to talk about my jeans?? Eyes on your own paper.

Yeah, I've recently discovered that. There's always a sale on something. A sale on everything makes it easy, though.

We just did the one below on Friday. It was a big hit with both my 9th grader and my 6th grader. Before I did that one, I took us to a parking lot and we drew a 10 foot diameter Sun with chalk. Then we drew circles the sizes of the planets within our circle of the sun. If the sun is 10-feet across, then Mercury is only .4 inches across. It was pretty cool to see the ratios like that with the 10 foot sun. Then, for the below activity, we chose to make the Sun 5 inches across and then walked up our street for a little over a 1/4 mile, plotting each planet as we walked. (If the sun is 5-inches across, you need .33 or more of a mile.) It was cool because the end of our street has a field and Pluto ended up being in the middle of the field. It was great to look .33 miles back down the street to see how far away the "sun" was. I said to my 6th grader. "Now, how about we walk to the next star? Alpha Centauri?" DS11: Yes! Me: Ok! It's only 60 miles... DS11: Wha....?? Me: ....past Mom-Mom's house. (Mom-Mom lives over 2500 miles away.) DS11: (Falls down in middle of field.) Note: I borrowed one of those measuring wheels where you walk and push it and it tells you how many feet you've walked. If we didn't have that, I would have had us count paces. About 30 inches per pace. We've done numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 10 and they were all a success except for #10 which didn't work at all. *Show a scale of how far the planets are from each other, bigger. Will take 1.6 miles of length: (LARGE) (NOTE: We dropped it down to only .25 or so of a mile--use the program to change the diameter of the sun to a size you can handle.) http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/index.html

We're in the middle of 9th grade. This is what we're doing: Biology: CK12 biology text book, I don't use the teacher's guide, but I do use the worksheets and tests (click on the "resources" tab for answers.) All of the above is free, except for your printing costs Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments--bought the kit that is recommended to accompany the book. By this Friday we'll have done 17 of the labs and then we're done labs. For 2 of them, I had my student write a full lab report. For the others, I found generic lab worksheets online for him to fill in. Geometry: Myhomeschoolmathclass.com which is taught by a WTMer (Jann in TX) and an associate Spanish: Takes a class at a local tutorial World History: Our Human Story text book, Three different Great Courses video series: (Brief History of the World, High School Level World History, Turning Points in Modern History), Stanford Reading Like a Historian lessons: (free here) Student keeps track of dates with a book of centuries that I made myself. Introduction to Astronomy: Two Great Courses (Understanding the Universe, Our Night Sky) Books: Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Rocket Boys, Contact, The Stars by H.A. Rey, Joined the local Astronomy Club These activities (we've done 6 so far this year): 1*Phases of the moon In room with lamp one: Daytime one: http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DaytimeMoon.pdf Phases of the moon: how you can see a new moon at night. https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/nasa/measuringuniverse/spacemath1/p/animate-phases-of-the-moon 2*If the entire hx of the universe was represented as a calendar, then when did certain events occur: http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/astro/act2/H2_Cosmic_Calendar.pdf 3*Remember the egg. Teaches the eye to look for variations on smooth white surfaces. http://www.astrosociety.org/education/remember-the-egg/ 4*Light pollution (will look at the same constellation at different places to see if they can see more of the stars when it's darker. http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/44/lightpoll4.html#4 ?*Maybe: chart how a star's magnitude gets brighter and dimmer over a month of time. http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/32/starscience3.html 5*High school level crater demonstrations. Need a bunch of supplies--may be difficult to find. http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/23/crater2.html ((ETA: For the above activity: I used the supplies listed below, instead of the more complicated sounding ones in the above. It worked well enough to get the points across: Flour instead of sand Hot chocolate powder instead of powdered paint Marbles instead of the ball bearing A golf ball, a ping-pong ball, and a rubber ball for the three balls of the same size, but different mass.)) 6*How high is space? Calculate and make a drawing to actual scale. http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/activities/I11_How_High_Space.pdf 7*Show a scale of how far the planets are from each other using 1 meter of paper. (SMALL) http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/PocketSolarSystem.pdf *Show a scale of how far the planets are from each other using a 200 sheet roll of TP (MEDIUM) http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/family/materials/toiletpaper.pdf *Show a scale of how far the planets are from each other, bigger. Will take 1.6 miles of length: (LARGE) http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/index.html Amazon link to feet measuring wheel so know how far to walk between planets. https://www.amazon.com/1000FT-Walking-Counter-Survey-Measuring/dp/B004L181E6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 8*See sunspots. Use tracing paper to see how they change over a period of time. http://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/05/stars2.html 11*Make a pan cookie using chocolate chips to create constellations from a template of actual constellations. http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/family/materials/constellationcookies.pdf 10*Build our own spectroscope http://www.livescience.com/41548-spectroscopy-science-fair-project.html 9*Make another astrolabe (or find in the bin downstairs.) http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/AtHomeAstronomy/activity_07.html English: Grammar: Analytical Grammar, a page or two every 4 weeks Lost Tools of Writing for writing World author novels (no American or English authors--we'll devote entire years to those in the future) We read and discuss and then use those novels as topics for the Lost Tools of Writing essays. These novels: Epic of Gilgamesh Odyssey 1001 Arabian Nights Don Quixote The Three Musketeers 6 Russian short stories and 2 Russian poems We've finished the above and have these three to go: The Hiding Place (autobiography) The Little World of Don Camillo Picnic at Hanging Rock

There's a homeschool book shop about 50 minutes from my house. It's called a curriculum exchange, and works as a consignment shop. Looks like a lady who has a farm built a building on her land. Homeschoolers give her their old stuff, she sells it, and she and the seller each take a cut. That little building is stuffed with curriculum. I drop stuff off once a year there and after a few months get a check for a bit of money. It's effortless except for the drive.

This reminds me of the pessimist thread from a day or two ago. That thread asked that if someone who is normally pessimistic can make themselves more optimistic. There was chit-chat back and forth defining pessimism and discussing the benefits of it vs the benefits of optimism. For me, my "pessimism" comes out in things like the OP's walk alone in the park. I see a woman with a bruise on her face and my first thought is, "Did someone hit her?" I walk alone in the woods and my first thought is, "Is there someone who will see me alone and take advantage of that fact and attack?" I walked from a restaurant to my car, which was parked in the back of the restaurant alone tonight. I was with friends and they managed to park in the front. I looked all around me and considered if I felt safe to walk behind buildings alone at night. The restaurant is in a small town and there wasn't anyone in the area where my car was parked. I walked there, but I had my eyes open and was observant the entire time. Usually, I listen to my darker thoughts and then have to consiously reject them and not let myself live in fear. I have walked alone in woods before and yes, I have always felt a little uncomfortable doing so. I know logically that the chances of something happening are very low (I live in low crime area as well. One murder in the area every 10 years or so.). But there's always a part of me that feels like a deer walking through a wood where there juuuust might be a wolf. Not likely, but maybe... I am envious of the people who don't feel this sense of ...not fear...high alert perhaps? This sense of always being on high alert. I am often on high alert when I'm alone. My kids were watching Superman Returns the other day and a huge longing rose up in me to be strong and bullet proof. I'm tired of worrying that someone who is bigger will see me as prey and I'm tired of wondering if I'll get hurt by someone else.

Oh--my bit of advice: do the mapwork if at all possible. My boys enjoyed doing them, and they effortlessly learned where most things are. No, they don't know every country in Africa or some of the finer points of where things are, but they know the general places that most things are. They won't be utterly embarrassed if anyone asks them if they know where Scotland is or someplace like that. They won't point to South America or something like that. My boys enjoyed coloring in the coloring sheets while I read out loud to them. And they don't like coloring other things, just the SOTW activity sheets with markers. Don't know why. There was just something about those sheets they loved coloring. I liked reading it out loud because I would pause every paragraph or so to discuss what we were reading. I found that if we didn't pause and discuss, they didn't remember it as much. We also did a few of the projects that struck our fancy. There aren't any coloring sheets in Volume 4, which really bummed out my kids, and I think the maps didn't ask you to color things in a certain way--you just labed the maps in Volume 4. Prior to Vol 4, the instructions for the maps had you using different colors and drawing arrows or little pictures on the maps (pyramids in Egypt or something like that.) For Vol 4, I would tell them to label things in different colors and draw some arrows and they never knew that it wasn't in the book to do so (the colors and arrows.) Starting in book 4, I had them outline after we read and also had them write a narration. My boys hated doing that part. Not sure I'd slog through the outlines and narrations again or not if I could go back in time. If I had to do it again, I think I'd have them outline and narrate every other chapter, switching between chapters. That way, they'd get the point on how to do outline and narrate, but it wouldn't feel as burdensome. My boys did SOTW together. The oldest was in 5-8th and the youngest was in 2-5th.

Yes! Though some things aren't straight answers as they're subjective. They'll give you tips on what to point out and bring to your student's attention to be sure they're understanding what they're reading. Click on any lesson and look at "quick view" under the picture and you'll see exactly how it's set up. ETA: The answers are included as you go through the lesson plan. They're not in a separate spot. If you read a lesson plan, you'll see what I mean. The lesson plan walks you through step by step for each worksheet, giving answers when you get to that part of the lesson. Answers aren't all on one page at the end. They're interspersed in the lesson plan.

I have my own plan for US history for next year, but I like to read these threads anyway. You asked above about primary documents in the FundaFunda course. I don't know if they're there or not, but if not, here's a website with free lessons using primary sources. Bascially the lessons are all teaching the same thing: you can't know exactly what happens in history unless you corraborate documents against other documents. We've been working through the world history lessons and that's the main point of them all, yet I still keep doing them so that we're exposed to the primary documents. Anyway...it's free. You print out the lesson plan and the documents and then the student reads the documents and answers questions. They student sees how the documents either support each other or oppose each other and then the student decides what probably actually happened. The lessons use only excerpts, but immediately under the link to download the lesson plans are links to the full documents. https://sheg.stanford.edu/us It takes my student about an hour to do each lesson, but I don't know why. I could breeze through them in about 20 minutes. Or less. However, I've always been a fast student. If your student is fast, the work is pretty straightforward. If your student isn't fast, then it's an hours' worth of work. Just tossing it out there as a decent free resource for primary documents.

30 miles isn't much at all. It depends on what you're used to. When I lived in a Baltimore suburb, 30 miles or any drive over about 12 minutes seemed like FOREVER. Then I moved to farm country PA and the grocery store that I go to is 10 miles away and a 22 minute drive and seems like a snap, because everything is far away. I'd stay in the place 30 miles away. It'll be a 45 minute or so drive, which is what I commonly drive to get places around here. If it's over an hour, that's when it starts to feel far. Then again, my friend lived in Washington DC when I moved up here and she pointed out that even though her grocery store is only 2 miles from her house, it often took her 22 minutes to get there from all the traffic. Any idea what sort of traffic you'll encounter on those 30 miles? That might change my answer. If it's a straight shot, no problem. If it's through a city, that's a problem.

We did. It's not necessarsily written for that high of a level, so I'd assign some extra reading for the boys. It might not have been perfectly at their level, no, but they learned a ton from it.

I've not heard of that either. I'm keeping careful notes of every lab we do, giving the briefest of descriptions of what it is and what our goal was for the lab and how it turned out all on a Word document and I'll also be keeping my son's lab reports or worksheets he did for the labs. I included the supply list for each lab since I used a kit and it had decent chemicals and equipment in it. Not just hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cupboard but things like hydrochloric acid and stains and a microscope and all the doo-dads that come in science kits. I have no clue if anyone will ever request it, but it's super easy to jot this stuff down on a document and will be easy to stuff the lab sheets in a folder somewhere. It takes me less than 10 minutes per lab. It makes me breathe easier to know that the information is there if there's every some sort of question about it. Though, I highly doubt there will be a question about it.

My kids are super picky and I'm sort of picky. We have 7 meals we can eat and we eat the same meals each week: Sat: Beef Stirfry Sun: Baked Chicken Mon: Spaghetti Etc.. I am so tired of those dishes sometimes, but it does make planning easier. Sometimes I get the boys frozen tv dinners (they each like only one kind), and I make something different for DH and me.

Gasp! This has been happening around here, too! Oh, I have to go and muse about this for a while....

I used a 6 day cycle of classes. Instead of getting our subjects done over 5 days for 36 weeks, I do it over 6 days for 30 weeks. It's still 180 days of instruction, but I could spread my classes out over 6 school days. I did NOT work on Saturdays. I labeled my cycles as A day, B day, C day, D day, E day, and F day. I divvied up my subjects among the 6 days. After a weekend, I'd just pick up on whatever day we left off. So if this Monday is an A day, then next Monday would be an F day. Then the next cycle would start over with Tuesday being an A day again. I tell you this because then I could do the subjects spread out an extra day and could have more time for things like read-alouds every day. About 80% of our subjects were done daily, but the rest could be done 2 or 3 or 4 times a cycle. It's hard to explain, but it worked out really well. Some subjects like art and music were done only once a cycle, so instead of 36 art or music lessons there were just 30. But I was ok with that for those types of subjects. I used the 12 lessons I "lost" in art and music to devote to other things, like read-alouds.

Wait...this is a good ideal. I'll intersperse our orange and cracker dinners with some of the casseroles and soups and pasta dishes that my kids won't touch.