Thanks everyone. I guess I already knew that was the right answer, but it's hard for me to let go of unknowns. Thanks for letting me air the concern.

I have a concern I've been mulling over for a while now. It's a far distant one, but I'm a planner. A few months ago, after nearly a year of deliberating while I tried to learn patience, my husband agreed to my homeschooling our kids through elementary school (with a very hesitant 'maybe' on middle school), so long as they attend school when they are older. One of my two primary reasons for wanting to homeschool our kids is so they can move forward at their own paces. As a child in public school, I found it very frustrating to be held back to the level of the lowest common denominator in the class. But if I allow my kids to move forward at their own paces, I suspect they may be far ahead of their peers by the time they hit middle or high school. If they then have to enter school with their age-peers, will they just be far more frustrated than they would have been? But then, I wouldn't want to give them less than what seemed best for them at the time in an effort to avoid a possible future problem.

Thank you all! I am looking up those Usborne books and the Barcos de Vapor books. Thank you very much for the offer, Danielle, but I don't think I should borrow books from anyone until I'm absolutely certain my daughter won't damage them. (She can sit through a whole reading of a book, listening and pointing to the pictures and turning the pages for me, but she still might try to take a bite out of the cover later.) Thank you very much though.

North County. Can you recommend any particular titles? Is everyone okay down there with the earthquake?

Have her dye hard boiled eggs and hide those in the yard. If you think you're giving too much 'junk', you are. Stop. There may be whining at first, but you don't have to keep doing something you don't feel is best just because it's what you've done in the past.

Thank you Renai!

I actually live within an hour of the border. Not that I'll be making any trips to Temecula soon, it's just too dangerous down there right now. But I'm sure I could find a bookstore down near the border with a lot of stuff in Spanish--I just don't know what's good, and I don't trust my own Spanish well enough yet to just read through and pick stuff. (I'm working on learning so I can speak Spanish with my husband and kids, but it's slow going.) Is there a list of great Spanish children's literature online, or something like the Caldecott Medal in Spanish?

This doesn't seem like too much at all. I've worked with two-year-olds at daycare/preschools for years, and almost all of these things are routinely taught at the age of two or three. (The exceptions being religious content and the phonics, which they don't really focus on until age four.) One thing that might help with your family's concerns would be to intentionally use less academic-sounding language when talking about what you are doing with your daughter with them. Preschool teachers are constantly encouraged to do the opposite of this when speaking with parents. "We've been working on manual strength and dexterity and fine motor control to prepare them for learning handwriting skills" translates to "The kids played with playdough and colored today." Your post reminds me of myself. I've got a pretty long list of similar skills to work on with my daughter when she seems ready for them, in an order rather than by age. I haven't shown it to anyone, though, for fear they'd think this meant I was planning on sitting her down and drilling her every day.

Right now I'm looking for picture books--my daughter is only thirteen months old. However, she has a very long attention span for her age when it comes to books, so I'm looking for stuff roughly between the levels of Where the Wild Things Are and Make Way for Ducklings.

Thanks very much, Matroyshka! I'll look those up.

I would especially like to find books and CDs that a latina mom might use for her own little ones. I live in San Diego, so it's not hard to find English children's classics translated into Spanish, but I've been pretty disappointed by many of these. Since many picture books are written in rhyme, the Spanish translations tend to either 1)mangle the meaning to preserve a rhyme or 2)drop any attempt at preserving the poetry in favor of preserving the meaning. So I figure that what I need to find are classic children's books (and maybe music) that were originally written in Spanish. How do I find these? Thanks.

I can't help on any of the other stuff, but my daughter also has to have control of the book at reading time. I generally get out a stack of books and hand her a different one to leaf through while I read. If she starts to insist that she really wants the one I'm reading from, I let her have it and pick up another one. Pretty soon she will want the one I've got now, and I can pick up again where we left off with the one I was reading out loud. I don't know if that would work for your little girl, though.

Susan Wise Bauer is currently writing a set of history books for high school/adult level that corresponds to the sequence in SOTW. I just finished the first one, The History of the Ancient World. It was fascinating, and well written in a narrative style. I've heard that the next one, The History of the Medieval World just came out, and she's working on two more volumes.

Mind if I ask a related question? Say you go ahead and start ancients with your oldest in first grade, then add in the younger kids as they get old enough (figuring they'll get the same cycle, just not start and stop in the same place). Your youngers are likely to hit the Modern Era material early, and SWB recommends not covering some of that history with younger elementary students. So what do you do? It seems like it would be hard to cover the information with one child and not another, especially if they are used to doing history together and the younger one likes doing history.

I knew of a woman who had four teenaged sons at the same time, and they were eating her out of house and home. The solution she found: use whole wheat. She would add some to just about every dish she made, and the boys went from eating huge amounts about eight times a day to being full and satisfied with just three meals.

My eleven-month-old daughter knows as many words as many of the new two-year-olds I've taught at work in the past, and she's just starting to put together two word phrases. Yesterday she came out with three new words: hello, Desitin, and baño (Yay! first Spanish word!)

That might be it. Thank you!

I'm trying to remember the name of a series of history books that I read a post about here a while back, but I can't remember the name of it. I want to say Oxford something. . . can anyone help me out, or direct me to the post? Thanks

I would strongly recommend not giving these books to even a highschooler. They contain sexually explicit material, including deviant behaviors. I started the series and then stopped--I would not recommend these books even for an adult. It's a shame the author chose to include the filth. She had a wonderful writing style, but it just wasn't worth it.

For me, 4 to 6 feels average, 3 or fewer as small, and 7 or more as large. But I am religious and one of five, so that is probably why. I don't think most non-religious people in my area would agree with me, though. As a kid I would get shocked responses from anyone who heard how many of us there were, and most of the families in my neighborhood had one or two kids. I recently heard a relative of my husband exclaim, upon hearing that my sister-in-law was considering trying for another baby, "But she's already got such a big family!" She has three kids.

It was pronounced "off-fen" with a silent t.

Yes, octopus is technically the correct way, but octopuses has been so widely used that it is now generally accepted as correct by 'official sources', too. Just like the word curriculums, or pronouncing the word often "off-ten". Someone asked about an official source, but I don't have it anymore. I researched the question a few years back when I was studying for my Linguistics major at BYU.

Octopi is wrong. The 'pus' in octopus is Greek for foot, not the Latin '-us' singular ending, so pluralizing it with the Latin '-i' is incorrect. Octopodes is the Greek plural, but English doesn't borrow the Greek form of pluralization like it often does with Latin borrowings. The correct plural is just octopus. (Like deer or sheep or fish.) However, octopuses appears frequently enough that it is generally accepted. Linguistics nerd here. I love questions like this.

Thank you all. I asked mostly because I'm wondering if I am just crazy or reading too much into things with my daughter. She's only ten months old, and she seems to speak a lot for her age. Not in full sentences or anything, like some of you posted, but as much as many of the eighteen- to twenty-month olds I have encountered working at daycares. People keep saying things like, "She probably just made a sound that sounded like that to you, she probably didn't understand it as a word." Okay, this could be the case in some instances, but I've counted at least eleven words which I'm absolutely certain she has used in context repeatedly. And she seems to understand so much. But I don't want to be that Mom that assumes everything her child does must be incredible.

If you don't mind my asking, when and how did you know that your children are very bright?