2-3 gallons of raw milk/week for our family and I kefir all of it. :) http://www.realmilk.com/where4.html http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~dna/kefirpage.html

Another vote for staying put. We sold our very affordable condo because we could afford so much more and when my husband was unemployed for 15 months we burned through our emergency savings. (Luckily we didn't end up in debt due to our substantial savings.) When he found a new job this spring, it was for about half what he made before and now we're having to sell the house for less than we bought it for (but still more than the mortgage balance), plus we have to rebuild our emergency savings, which would not have been nearly as depleted if we still had the condo. I grew up on a cul-de-sac with a bunch of kids and we all ran around together. I'm really glad my parents stayed and now that all the kids are grown up the neighbors keep an eye on each other. Everyone has been there for 30-35 years. They help out with fixing cars, gardening, cooking of someone is ill, etc. My parents thought about downsizing but couldn't bear to leave their neighbors.

I like the Peters projection, which you can read about here: http://www.petersmap.com/ (Click "Next" to read the other pages.)

The hardest I've laughed was while watching Coupling (the British version) but it's definitely not clean humor. Arrested Development has made me laugh more overall, though, and the writing is excellent. There are so many running gags I've watched all 3 seasson twice and found so many new things. IMHO the best American TV show written in the last 15 years. The portrayal of the mother is priceless. And I don't know why, but I find Golden Girls very funny. (I'm typing in small font to represent my secret guilty pleasure.) ETA: Caddyshack. 'Nuff said.

I was also disappointed not just with the $, but with the way it set back my credibility with my husband when it came to expensive homeschool purchases. Ugh. Not only did I not find it interesting, but as others have said, it was creepy.

Expedit is more flexible, has the option of an added desk, and makes a better room divider if you decide not to back it against a wall. IMO. :tongue_smilie:

I haven't yet joined a coop so I'm not qualified to speak about it, but I can speak to why we want to join. (We haven't joined yet as we need to move first.) The coop is ILM Tree http://www.ilmtree.org/ and it's an Islamic school coop in the SF Bay Area. We want to join because we are raising our children as Muslims but neither one of us is really qualified right now to teach them what they need to know. I was raised Muslim but didn't practice for a long time and am now trying to get back into it. My husband converted and knows even less than I do. So we're learning, but we don't want the sole responsibility of teaching things we are learning ourselves. While we feel confident we could teach the kids basic Islamic studies (oldest child is only 6), we are definitely over our heads when it comes to teaching Arabic and the Quran. So there's that, plus the coop offers Arabic lessons for adults, which we really need. Then there's the social aspect. We'd like the kids to make friends with other homeschoolers and to get support from other families. And lastly it's held on a ranch and we like the access we would get to outdoor activities such as archery and taking care of animals. We live in a fairly dense urban area and have to make some effort to access non-yard nature. :001_smile: The pricing and schedule is complex, based on how many days, and whether you do half days or full days, and if you include private or semi-private Arabic tutoring. You can see the rates on the web site if you're interested in the info. If you do the full-time coop you also have to work a certain number of hours depending on how many children you have in it. But you can also pay a fee to opt out, and there are classes available in the afternoon from afterschoolers that do not require work hours. Anyway, I am looking forward to getting involved. Now if we could just sell our house!

Wow, what a story. And yet I bet it's more common than I'd like to believe. May she rest in peace. Some drugs can do such terrible things to people and make them into monsters. I was going to suggest contacting your congressional representative for help. I know it's too late now, but I'll add it anyway in case someone searches for an elder abuse thread later. :sad:

You also get trace amounts of copper in your food. ;)

Hi, Subbing... I'm in the same boat (a 6 yo who needs to learn Arabic, and neither my husband nor I are native speakers).DS goes to Islamic school once/week but we're thinking of changing to a coop where the teachers are native speakers and doing longer classes twice/week. I'm just not good with languages. Here's a link we use for flashcards, if that's any help to anyone: http://flashcarddb.com/cardset/study/4168 UmmAbduRahman, thank you very much for the links. I'll be checking them out tonight after the kids are asleep!

One of my favorites is Walk Slowly Live Wildly: http://walkslowlylivewildly.com/ She and her family kept downsizing until they eventually ended up in an RV traveling the country and unschooling. What's fun about the blog is she has a great design sense so you can see how much she does with so little. You don't see it as much now that they're on the road, but if you look at tags from 2009, like the "home in bozeman" tags: http://walkslowlylivewildly.com/category/home-in-bozeman/ or for photos of the changes they made, it's really inspiring.

We've simplified a lot since December. We decided to put our 3000 sf house on the market and move to something about 1/2 the size. In the process of staging it we removed almost everything from the house (we're staying with my parents while it's on the market) and donated/recycled about 1/2 of that we own. The rest went into storage. The house is on the market now (fingers crossed!) and I'm looking forward to moving stuff out of storage into the new place. I plan to purge even more right at the storage unit by not even letting maybe 1/3 of the stored items into the new house. Knowing I would have this second opportunity really helped during the first purge, allowing me to make quick decisions to keep certain items about which I was ambivalent and move forward. It felt really good to do this. The kids will be surprised when they see it though. We've purged the TV. :tongue_smilie:

My parents have the Ingolfs. I put them together and they are very solid. After 6 years of daily use they are like new. Maybe the newer ones are not as good? Love those chairs...

Yes, I'm really excited about this program and will order it as soon as I have the $. I like the idea of introducing philosophy to kids early, of getting it into their minds as a regular area of study. Rosie, thanks so much for your reply. It put into words what I was trying to think about but was unable to properly tack down. Aoife, thanks for the link to the other thread!

So much of this is based on cultural viewpoint. I have been raised in the Pakistani culture and I see many things that seem like they shouldn't go together, but in my culture, they do: --Very involved parents, homeschool or other --Children who live at home for a long time, even after marriage sometimes --Parents who would not let their children go off on their own, nor tell them they have to leave the house at 18. (The joke I just received in email from another Pakistani American: "You know you're Pakistani when...your kids have to move back in with you and you're delighted.") --Almost a complete absence of typical American adolescent behavior (rather, rebellion is considered an American marketing tool) --Parents who insist on coming to orientations, college visits, etc. and review papers and homework in their child's senior year --A lot of kids who have everything paid for and do not work part-time while going to school AND --Kids who are quite mature by college age and tend to marry younger than the average (or at least get engaged, if they are pursuing advanced degrees, which many of them are). I think there is a place where parents can be really involved and the kids are quite mature. What makes the difference? IMHO, it mostly has to do with family expectations for success and an attitude that the success of one person in the family depends on everyone else as well. So there is a lot of time spent together and a lot of guidance and coddling. At the same time, the expectations are very high. Yes, I'm generalizing. But in my generation (first born to immigrants) I was in the this culture. I was the only one out of our Pakistani friends who had a job before college, went to school far away, and had more independence. And in some ways I think it turned out better and in some ways worse. But I can say for sure that those coddled kids went to college and worked very hard, became surgeons and engineers, and married in their mid-20s (or a few years later after medical school residencies and such.) So I wonder what the expectations are of the parents of these 20-somethings in the article? Is there little or no concern of how these children reflect on the family? (And I have to admit I'm secretly a little happy that there are more diverse paths for people than there were a couple of generations ago.) :)

Yes, thank you for your reply. It does answer my questions. We will be starting with SOTW so what you said makes me feel relieved.

We're just starting science over here but I've already pawned it off on my husband to do on weekends. We're both very science-y but I don't want to deal with the experiments at all. I just have this UGH feeling when I think of it all.

**bump** Anyone? :)

I'd appreciate any help with my conundrum. :) I'm interested in starting my first grade son on RFP's Philosophy for Young Thinkers Program: http://rfwp.com/series44.htm#487 The program looks great and like something he would be interested in. He is not gifted, but is fairly bright and has some deep questions. (Since this is a "gifted" program should I be posting in the Accelerated Learner Board for this if he's not accelerated?) I appreciate the WTM method of looking at the larger world in the context of history, as opposed to the more "me-centric" model in which a child starts out focusing on themselves, their family, their city, state, etc. until the finally focus on the rest of the world. That appears to be the order of things in this program. So while I like where the program ends up, I'm concerned about the method for getting there. OTOH, I think it would be difficult to start with the "big questions" on a global scale with young children so I can see why the program is structured as it is. --Does anyone have experience with this program? Can you share what using it was like? --If I am concerned about the "me" focus in the early years, can someone tell me if it's a program we can easily jump into later, skipping the earlier years? --Is there another program that may suit us better? Thanks in advance for any help.

Wow, your blog is the most helpful thing I have found while trying to plan SOTW for my K'er. Thank you so much for the great ideas and pictures!

Because she is a student and an avid reader perhaps she would like a lap desk. There's one in your price range at the Levenger web site. It's called the Lapreader and is $38.

I think of this everyday. No attribution, sorry: "We're not raising children, we're raising adults."

No problem. Lack of sleep here too, plus the weather makes me tired too. By "signal-to-noise ratio" I meant if our enemies are using data mining to get information, it seems they would have the sift through a lot of data to find the patterns. Adding false info to the gathered data would make more "noise" and make it harder to see the patterns. Again, this is not to encourage "loose posting" by people, but to make up for people who post things w/o realizing the impact of what they are doing. Posting false info (systematically, by the gov't) would be the "countermeasure". I just wonder if they do it.

I understand what you're saying and I already said I agreed with you at the beginning of my first post. I never said it was a conspiracy. Geez.... Agreeing with you....leads me to wonder whether because people don't know how far information spreads, the gov't tries to offset that by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio with misinformation and we see some of that as well. Sorry, I don't know how to be more clear that I agree with everyone but am just thinking about gov't countermeasures to deal with the ignorance and loose lips. Do people think there are no countermeasures? (That's the discussion I was trying to have.) I thought I would explore a different facet of the discussion instead of simply saying "me too". :)

I'm not sure what you're saying. How would you "test" it? I was only speculating that if people are seeing a lot of this I wonder if some of it is deliberately planted by the US Gov't. I wasn't suggesting anyone do anything or endanger anyone. Sorry if I wasn't clear(?)