I'm trying!! Been taking a lot of baths and trying to read more good, non-ed, non-psych-related books 🙂

Weeknights are really, really difficult for us. We are self-employed. We work late on the nights that the kids don't have sports, in order to make up for ending earlier on sports nights. I work until midafternoon on Saturdays as well. I figured out a time on Saturday when I'm not working and there aren't any family plans, and let him know that if she can make that time work, I will make it so they can see each other.

Yep, he does that already. We are definitely open to the "half the driving" idea. I believe she lives in a single-parent home, so that is part of the issue. We've done the driving before, on weekends.

No, her parents won't help drive and it would be plus/minus an hour round trip for us. We are looking for a compromise solution. We're not trying to be inflexible. It's just that these plans/proposals keep getting sprung on us last minute while I'm on my 5 minute break between work sessions.

For new patients, 6 week wait 😧 We're on a cancellation list...

No, DS15's girlfriend cannot come over on weekdays because 1) DH and I are working and don't want to spend the evening driving her home and 2) DH and I are working and can't supervise their time together and that is something that we value as parents while they are this young. He is angry and sad because we have family coming this weekend so he won't be able to see her this weekend either. Ever since his episode of self harm a couple months ago DH and I are on eggshells all the time. We are so afraid that enforcing even perfectly reasonable rules is going to push him over the edge. Hanging on by our fingernails between therapist visits and can't wait to get him in to see the psychiatrist and get him on meds. Not looking for advice, just sympathy.

((hugs)) for you. I'm so sorry that's happening. If they can't do subject tests, can they do CLEP? Just trying to think of alternatives. Anyway, I hope you get it figured out 😞

This isn't academic, but monitoring screen/device time. I'm so over it. I wish we'd never allowed them to have phones or laptops at all, even though I know they needed the laptops for school and there were good reasons to get the phones at the time we got them.

That's not very easy to interpret 😛 Is this something that can be treated with vitamins if we choose the right ones? During my research a while ago I did see that often depression can be a sign of B-complex deficiencies as well as vitamin D deficiency, so I started both kids and DH on multivitamins recently. I've always been the vitamin person but never really made the rest of them take them.

We don't have many very cool family stories, but there's one that we found out about after my grandpa died. Grandpa was a priest in the Episcopal Church, and his father was too. In Grandpa's study, we found a typed-up testimony from great-grandpa. Shortly after great-grandpa arrived in the US from New Zealand (where his parents had moved from England), he heard of a young lady parishioner who was a concert pianist (debuted with the Boston Symphony) but was now dying of stomach cancer. Great-grandpa went to visit. Over the next few months, he would go to see her about weekly, pray with her, and put her under hypnosis. (I guess in 1908 this was cutting-edge healing practice?) Well, she was healed of the stomach cancer! And they got married, and eventually had my Grandpa. They had one child, before Grandpa, who died of spina bifida around age 1. They named him Philips after the man who wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem, because supposedly great-grandma was related to him. Grandpa never knew Philips (the brother not the composer), but in his childhood he received Christmas gifts signed, "With Love from Philips." I find this a bit... macabre, but that was one of the ways the family had chosen to keep their lost child's memory alive. We still have a children's book (Heidi I think?) with "Merry Christmas to Frank, Love Philips" inscribed in the flyleaf.

I'm not sure what this means--like, too much methyl in the diet or too little? The only place I've heard of methyl is that my vitamins have methylfolate in them 🙂

Hi @Gavin Orok, I've been watching this thread develop for a while but haven't posted because I just wanted to see how it would develop. I'm still a little unclear on the scope of the project your group is undertaking--is this something being submitted at the end of the semester, or is it like a capstone project that you have multiple semesters to work on? I like the college admissions resource idea that has come up in the most recent posts, but it sounds like a lot of work for an undergrad class, assuming you've only got about 4-8 weeks to get from the genesis of the idea to submitting something to the teacher. One thing that is probably becoming clear to you at this point in the thread is that crisis homeschoolers and public school teachers who have been thrown into online teaching are a completely different group from by-choice homeschoolers and professional online teachers. (I'm both of those.) If you're specifically inspired by the pandemic and want to help out folks who are new to homeschool/online schooling, I'd recommend hunting down Facebook groups for those folks. I have no doubt there are many, although I'm no longer on Facebook so I don't know where to direct you to start looking. Those of us who were in this game before the pandemic have generally come up with systems that work for us already and prefer to teach hands-on rather than using edtech 😉 So most of the things you could help us with would be organizational. To that point: My current "pain point" is that I use Google Classroom to organize the work that I teach my kids on my own, but their online courses are operated through Blackboard. My older kid attempted a course that used a different Learning Service Provider, and having to juggle Google, Blackboard, and that LSP became his undoing. He has difficulties staying organized, and having to access three different "Class Calendars" broke him. I would love to try other online courses with the kids, but when one provider uses Moodle and another Blackboard and another its own proprietary system, that's too much for middle/high school kids to keep track of. It would be so, so great to have a calendar clearinghouse service that would populate all assignments from all classes onto one calendar, no matter the learning service provider. In fact, I've often wished for such a thing in my work life as well--I teach classes for several providers that have their own proprietary calendar systems and flexible course schedules, so it can be quite a hassle to schedule personal appointments (like the dentist) while consulting 3 different calendars to make sure I have nothing else scheduled during that time block. I would pay money for an app that would link up my multiple work calendars with my personal calendar.

Thank you everyone for your comments. My DH has a psychiatrist whom he trusts a great deal, who isn't prone to overmedicating. So we are going to start with getting an appointment with her. I'm intrigued by the concept of interoception--this dc has a lot of trouble expressing feelings or even recognizing them at all beyond "I wish I were dead," I will get a book about it and see if we can implement. DH has a constellation of issues including type II bipolar, so we are aware that this may not "merely" be depression and that mood stabilizers may be what's required. DH has been through the wringer and been on many different combinations of meds over many years before finding the right thing. He's frankly more nervous about medicating the DC than I am, because he has personal experience of when meds don't work, and knows how hard it can be to make changes.

(A few additional details provided on p. 2) After struggling for years (off and on) with major depression and anxiety, one of our dc (now teenage) has started abusing substances and at least one close call with self harm. The therapist has suggested that we look at putting the teen on meds, such as an SSRI. We will probably get the teen evaluated by a psychiatrist rather than going thru our regular family doctor, and when push comes to shove we'll trust the psych's opinion. But this is new territory for us, so I'd appreciate hearing from people who have been here before with their DC. Positive and negative experiences welcome. Hugs also welcome if you don't have experiences to share 🙂

Hmm. I'm pretty sure the Charlotte Mason method is a bit more memorization-intense, and I know sometimes those two things are conflated, although I'm not sure that Charlotte Mason is a Trivium-based system. Maybe CM folks can chime in. The only other thing I can think of is that I know some Catholic homeschoolers who do Latin right off the bat. I don't know for certain about the memorization aspect, but there's a book on my shelf called The Harp and Laurel Wreath published by a Catholic press, that is a collection of poetry for memorization and dictation for the three levels. I don't recall it giving any particular guidance about when to start that, though. I didn't do more memorization with my kids than appears in First Language Lessons, and we started Latin rather later than recommended in TWTM, and I haven't found that it made much difference; I have one kid who struggles academically and one kid who doesn't, and both of them did the same memorization and Latin 😉

Writing With Skill is a good writing program and I think a kid who went through all 3 levels of it would be very good at expository/analytical writing and note-taking. However, he wouldn't be very experienced at persuasive writing yet, and while the program does try to teach sentence variety and vocabulary building through thesaurus work, my kid who is finishing up WWS3 still doesn't have great sentence variety/vocabulary choice when she's working by herself. We're planning on using Killgallon's high school program next year and the year after, in order to really focus on that element. I don't think it's a bad plan to use WWS if you really think your son needs that level of remediation! But it's a pretty dry program, and I know there are a lot of folks on these boards who prefer BraveWriter, Killgallon and other programs over WWS. So you might want to look into other approaches before settling on one 🙂 If you're open to materials with Christian content, Progeny Press has study guides available for a lot of well-known youth/classic literature. They typically involve a fair bit of vocabulary study, analysis questions that you can use for discussion (rather than writing the answers, so he doesn't get bogged down with the "thoughts to words --> words to paper" transition), and essay prompts at the end. I imagine there are similar non-religious materials out there, but I'm not very familiar with them. That would be a good way of connecting the vocabulary to its context.

Welcome! Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind is a solid curriculum, but it does move fast. I'd recommend dividing it up into 4 parts--8 "weeks" each--and redo those 8 "weeks" at least twice before moving on to the next set of 8 weeks, and do the same thing. My kiddo did first language lessons for 2 years before starting GWTM, and this is our third (?) year with GWTM, and we still won't be making it all the way to the end of the textbook!! It's very difficult after about Week 20.

We will meet Monday, 3/1 at 8pm EST to discuss In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. If you're interested in participating, PM me for the link!

Late to the party, but DD is starting 9th and I'm excited. I think she is too 🙂 🙂 Math: Saxon Alg 1 History/Great Books (TWTM style): She's eager to do Medievals, so we're skipping Ancients for now and maybe we'll circle back around do it in 12th. She'll do the WTMA Medieval History course with Mr. Caro, and I'll homebrew a great books study for her. Grammar/Composition/Rhetoric (also TWTM style): We'll use Sentence Composing for High School in fall semester, Grammar for High School in spring semester, and Vocabulary From Classical Roots C throughout the year. Also A Workbook For Arguments, possibly supplemented by Thank You For Arguing. Science: She's waitlisted for Dr. Bennett's Bio course at WTMA, which her brother adored. Really hoping she gets into that class. Foreign Language: Girl wants to learn Korean. Right now I'm thinking we'll just do LingoDeer and I'll figure out how to give her credit for that. Extras: Youth group (she's currently in 2 different ones), volleyball, and we're looking for a place for her to play tennis.

Bump! I'm very curious.

I am so sorry. That sounds so difficult and I really don't have any advice but ((hugs)). If you haven't tried therapy, that's the one thing I would suggest. An evaluation would tell you whether you're working with a kid who's a garden variety jerk, or who has some kind of neuroatypicality going on.

I think as a bride-to-be I would have really enjoyed reading people's stories like that! As a guest, though, having now experienced a married life that is a lot harder than I anticipated (and frankly, I did anticipate that it would be hard), I would struggle to come up with answers for some of them. If you know your guest list well, and you know that most of them have at least a few fun stories that would come out of a game like this, it's probably fine. But if there are people in attendance who are going through rough patches, they won't know what to fill in the blanks and might better appreciate a piece of nice notepaper to write in a more open-response fashion. Maybe in reply to a prompt like, "What are your three do's and don't's of marriage?" or something. I would definitely say never let your husband transfer your laundry to the dryer without your direct supervision. Your nicest bra will be rendered unwearable 😉

I reread the Rhetoric Stage section of The Well-Trained Mind, and also read Rethinking School. I agree with the other posters that a lot of it is kid-specific, and it might not be worth it to do much detail work of planning more than 9th grade. I knew that I wanted my kids to have the option of college, so I followed TWTM's general outline of what kind of credits colleges are expecting to see. Then I actually had a couple sitdowns with the kid involved to find out where their head was at--was there something they wanted to study, or did they want to leave it all up to me? Kid 1 didn't/doesn't care and is fine with leaving it in my hands. Kid 2 has some requests/preferences. Then I started thinking about what to outsource. I'm relatively hands-on/managerial, so I decided that I really only wanted to outsource science and foreign language. Eventually I added writing classes for both of them, just to get some outside criticism of their writing. Wish I'd done differently? Well, I wish I'd come up with my work-checking system years earlier so I would have caught that Kid 1 wasn't doing any of his work. He just kept claiming to have lost it or "accidentally thrown it out," and I was maxed out from working a full-time job along with teaching them and didn't have the energy. Now we are catching up in Math, and I figured out how to keep track of his work better. I also wish we didn't rely on my income so homeschooling could be my total focus. However, it has been way better since rearranging my schedule so that I don't ever see clients before noontime. At least I have the 4 hours in the AM to set them of track for the day. I re-do the sitdown with each kid (and DH) each grading period and talk about what's working, what isn't, where they could improve, and what they hope to accomplish in the next 3-4 months. (Not just academically, but overall.) Expect their goals and priorities to change vastly. Kid 2 wanted to be a nurse practitioner when she grew up. Then she took a chemistry class. Now she wants to go to library school 😄

I agree with the above that my answers to this would either be super personal and not applicable to other couples, or perfectly obvious to anyone with a modicum of emotional intelligence. The "always" and "never" elements sort of wind up making any answer sound pat. Never belittle your husband is one thing I would say. But I would say never belittle anyone--not just your husband. Always start with the benefit of the doubt. Again, something I'd recommend not just for spouses but for everyone. Agree in advance that if one of you ever asks to do marriage counseling, the other will immediately agree and you will be in that office within 2 weeks. Read (and follow) Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Do pick your battles, and don't assume that if he has a problem with a certain behavior of yours, it means he has a problem with you on a personal level.... And we're back to advice that's not marriage-specific. 😁

Hooray, planning thread!! We don't know if DS will do 11th at home. Last night we had an info session for the DE charter school (on the local CC campus, just for 11th-12th graders, with the goal of getting everybody to graduate high school with an A.A. in hand). I think he will enter the lottery for that. BUT just in case... Math: Finish Saxon Alg 2 and continue to Advanced Math, which I plan to do over 2 years. History/Literature: I love TWTM's approach of meshing Lit with history and we've always done it this way since starting homeschool. DD (9th grade) will do Medieval at her request. I'll probably have DS do the same, just to make things easier for me. Science: Not sure whether he'll do science this year. We'll have to see. He needs one more lab science credit but I don't know if he knows enough math to do Physics yet. It's always so up in the air with this kiddo. Writing: We'll just do writing across the curriculum. I don't think he's bound to be a rhetorician. Foreign Language: He needs those 2 language credits and ASL, which we've tried and failed for 2 years running, isn't cutting it. I speak fluent Japanese, I don't think he'll love it, but I know I can teach him to a reasonable level and get him to pass with like a C. I really hope he gets into the charter, honestly. He's not bound for 4-year college--not for now, anyway--but I would love, love, love for him to have at least the 2-year degree so he has some kind of credential to work with when job-hunting.