I hope you keep singing it this year, Laura! Wishing you peace.

Auntie Mame did it, so you can too. 😀 "For I've grown a little leaner, grown a little colder Grown a little sadder, grown a little older And I need a little angel sitting on my shoulder Need a little Christmas now.."

@lynn, I 100% support you, as the host, setting a date and time for however you want to have a celebration dinner. There is nothing wrong with saying, “I’m hosting a dinner on this date. We’d love to have you come if you can, but we’ll understand if it doesn’t work with your schedule. Would you please let me know a week ahead of time if you can come or not? That way I can make my plans with an accurate head count.” However, this whole thread has made me sad. I am in a very similar situation, but, in my case, I am the DIL. Let me please urge you to give your son’s chosen life partner the benefit of the doubt. She is probably juggling the emotion-laden expectations of many people that she wants to “play nice” with. May I give you one piece of advice? I urge you to take your DIL out to coffee and have a woman’s-heart to woman’s-heart talk with her. Say something along the lines of, “The holidays are important to me, and I have deeply held dreams of having my family members with me at my table. However, I also respect that you have deeply held dreams for the holidays, too, and that your dreams are not the same as my dreams. Are there ways that we can connect those dreams together in a mutually satisfying way?” Approach this issue as any two mature, responsible adults would, who need to negotiate and compromise, respecting each other for being different individuals but who need to work together on a task. If you work on building a warm, affectionate, respectful relationship with your DIL, based on all the good qualities that your son fell in love with her for, it will pay off. Good luck to you!

Marbel, good for you! You've worked so hard on a long, tough book. Congratulations!!!

Tingtang, I've been thinking for a few days now what I could say that would be helpful. Just this: You're not alone. Sometimes the struggle is really too much. You're a good mother, but sometimes, the combination of the mom's personality, the kids' personalities, and the outside situations make things unbearable. Remember: often it's much more than just "homeschooling". As a friend of mine said about a month ago, and my husband and I have been repeating to ourselves since then, "Parenting is brutal." My best wishes to you.

You may want to try Teecino. Order a variety pack, and see if you like any of them. My daughter and I love all the flavors we've tried so far. I'll put in a special plug for Dandelion Caramel Nut. I still need to try Hazelnut - that's next for me. Good luck!

(Please don't quote this because I'd like to delete the personal details later.) Hi Melissa. By "mature" I didn't mean anything specific at all, and I hope that you didn't read it as condemnation in any way, because I only meant support. (Personal details removed.) Please know that you are not alone. That was the only thing that I meant by my post. Just many, many hugs to you.

Ummm... Grace... I don't want to tell you how much time I've spent watching cute beaver videos since I went looking for the trailer for this movie... 😊 Must... close... Youtube....Dishes....Laundry...Dinner.... But they're so cute! (This post is just another way to say thank you again!)

Why, no! I've never even heard of it! Thank you! Oh wow, now I need to see if I can find this movie. (I'm.a sucker for furry wildlife.)

Barely any reading done lately, but the one book that I did finish was a fascinating non-fiction: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip It was a really interesting, very readable piece of nature/environment writing. The author is a college writing professor who fell in love with some beavers who lived in a creek near her house, and then went on a quest to find out all that she could about the animals. I think it turned me into a "beaver believer" too!

Another boardie recommended Cranford to me a while ago. It's a fun read! Enjoy!

Oh, Amoret, keep going! I loved Pickwick! Honestly, the second half is much better than the first. It ends gloriously. I really think that Pickwick was Dickens' warm-up novel. You see him working out everything there that you come to love in his later works.

Thank you! I'll look into that one, too!

I had the very same reaction to Frankenstein.. I read it summer 2022 (without wanting to) because my daughter was going to read it for a class the next semester. I was amazed that I really enjoyed it! What a great discussion book - it brought up all kinds of questions to think about.

Oh, thank you! I'll put those on my list as well!

Just hugs.

@bookbard, remember a few weeks ago when you urged me to read The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge? I finished it a few days ago, and I loved it! Thank you, thank you, thank you! How could I have ever gotten to my age and not read that book? It was absolutely beautiful. ❤️

@PeterPan and @kbutton, you both are spot on! Thank you both for your words - they helped me today, too. @Tap, just following on to what PeterPan said about getting her in touch with her feelings - it's obvious that this fish is more than a fish, wouldn't you agree? It meets some need of your daughter's. Does the fish give a very calm, quiet presence to her that her dog doesn't? Also, just another thought: Since you mentioned that you like fish as well, could your daughter's purchase be her way of saying, "I want to be like you" or "I want you to like me"? Her intentions and feelings may still be genuinely innocent. Hugs to you, Tap. I get it.

@bookbard, thank you for the recommendation. I'm going to put it on hold from the library right away!

Hi, reading friends! I love learning what all the rest of you are reading. It's inspiring! I had an ambitious list of books to tackle this summer, but one (recommended by @Jean in Newcastle on the Education board a while ago) went right to the top: Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge. (The first book I've ever read by her!) It was an easy, comforting children's book, with the kind of setting loved by classical homeschool moms: Four siblings go out to the English countryside, meet an eccentric old man, have adventures, and end up with changed lives. That eccentric old man is a retired classics teacher, with pets named after characters from the Greek epics. It felt very much to me like, "The Pevensie kids get a classical education but don't get to go to Narnia". There was magic that creeped into the book so slowly that for a while I wasn't sure if it was a "magical" book or not, until it obviously was. I wish I'd done it as a read-aloud when my kids were younger, but it was a nice, gentle read for me now.

Hi @Carrie12345, I know that this thread went to sleep a while ago, but maybe this little explanation will help. (Caveat: I'm an amateur at the physics of sound, and rusty at that, but it has been an interest of mine.) When you're measuring volume in sound, what you're really looking at is amplitude of the sound wave, which can dissipate quite quickly based on circumstances. So your decibel measuring device wouldn't register all that much a few miles away. However, because it's the bass that you feel (even more than you "hear"), what you're thinking about is pitch, which is determined by frequency, which is related to wavelength. And here's how that affects you: Low pitch means long wavelength, so it's just bigger (in a longitudinal-wave way) and harder to "squash". A longer wavelength can go around stuff, and through stuff, all the way from the speakers at the concert venue to your tummy. So you will feel that pulsing bass three miles away, but you don't feel the ultrasound waves from the probe aimed right at your body, because the ultrasound wavelengths are so short. (I suspect that there is more to the physiological response than that, but that's way beyond my understanding.) That's the physics, in a very broad stroke. (I'm sure that acoustics engineers would tear my explanation apart.) However, regardless of the physics, if this music festival is disturbing you from three miles away, it doesn't matter what the decibel level is or what the wavelengths are. Someone at the county level should know that it is causing disturbance for four evenings straight. Hope you're feeling better by now! (My apologies to those who can speak with greater precision on this topic than I can!)

@elegantlion, thank you you so much for writing so much of your story to encourage and inspire me. (Please excuse me for taking so long to get back to you - life got in the way this week.) I definitely have 1.5 of your top three things: I have the passion and drive, and I have my husband's support, but I'm not sure that my kids would recognize "Mom has her own stuff to do right now - take care of yourself! I, too, am in my 50's, and feeling pretty insecure about the idea of writing a paper again, which I haven't done in over thirty years. However, even in the last week I've been dreaming about topics that I might be able to pursue at least at the level of a master's degree. Why not? Life is too precious, living is too interesting, to have nothing higher to accomplish than keeping up with the dishes and the mending and the laundry. The next step is to send up a few test balloons. I'm going to try enrolling in a continuing education course just to try out the class-taking experience again. Wish me luck! Thank you again, and good luck to you as you finish! I wish you much motivation in tackling that dissertation!

Good for you, @YaelAldrich!!! Wow! Please keep us updated! @caayenne, thank you for these words and this encouragement. I really needed this. @elegantlion, I hope this doesn't sound like I'm gushing, but I really admire you for going so far in a career that most people would say is "impractical". This may be worth its own spin-off thread, but I'm wondering if you would have any advice for others (me!) who want to pursue a passionate interest rather than just take a job because it pays the bills - though income is always a consideration, of course. (In case you're wondering, it's not medieval history that I am passionate about, though I think what you are doing is really fascinating. My interest is more in the 19th century. Crazy thing, I just feel at home whenever I read something written from then or listen to music composed then. I love reading more and more about how society was changing during that time period. This is why I keep quoting Thoreau on the forum.)

@TexasProud, I don't really have any particular books to recommend to you, but I just want to wish you a great time. You're going to some of my favorite places in the world. 🙂 However, if you have time before you go, you may want to see if you can watch the movie Somewhere in Time to get in the spirit for Mackinac Island. Have a wonderful time! ETA: Make sure you eat a pasty!

Seemesew - just want to tell you how much I feel for you. In the last few years, I felt the same as you - it wasn't homeschooling itself, it was everything around homeschooling that dragged me down. No real advice for you, since I wasn't able to find a way to continue homeschooling with the way that life turned out. Just know that I hope you can find ways to protect and heal your heart. Please keep us all updated. I will definitely be praying for you.