Ali in OR and Stacia, I would take the plunge and read at least the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. It's worth it. Great Girl read all three volumes her senior year and was greatly affected by them. Still on Goethe. It's not particularly long; but I keep having to look up classical characters (the dactyls? the cabiri?) and trying to figure out what they represent. An excerpt: PROTEUS: The sophist's tricks remain your cunning still. THALES: And metamorphosis your favorite skill. (He reveals Homunculus.) PROTEUS: A lustrous dwarf! The first to greet my eyes! THALES: He seeks to be, and needs your counsel wise. Most strangely made, as I have heard him say, For birth in his case reached but life's half-way, No qualities he lacks of the ideal, But sadly lacks the tangible and real. Till now the glass alone has given him weight; But now he longs for an embodied state. ----------- You see, the Homunculus is an incipient creation, the ideal without the real or form without matter or the spirit without the body - who has accompanied Faust into the realm of classical Neoplatonic forms in a quest to become embodied, where he has met Thales, the philosopher who understood water to be the first principle, and therefore descended into the ocean to find Proteus, the proto-god of the sea and the principle of change. Got that?

I didn't think the pictures were all that intricate - at least by Bellerophon standards. You might also look at A Medieval Alphabet (also Bellerophon). Or just get them all. How can anyone live without the Bellerophon paper soldiers for the Hundred Years' War? Or Infamous Women?

My kids will follow the food, the cat, and me (in that order). Thus, studying in the dining room - I'm there or in the kitchen, and the cat lies in the sunlight on the table, preferably on whatever book is open. So if you make the room a place where you and/or a pet want to be, and bring snacks occasionally, I bet that would do the trick.

I'd pay down the medical bills.

Grace Kelly! ETA: Not European on a technicality. :D

Does he have anxiety problems? Wee Girl has an anxiety disorder that features some of these : blinking, eye rubbing, brushing the forehead, stopping to shuffle feet while walking, picking at nails. For the picking, which is damaging, we encourage her to offer her palm to have it gently stroked when she feels the urge to pick at nails. This has been fairly successful. My universal advice: If you're bothered enough to bring it to an internet forum, then bring it to your pediatrician. No harm has ever come from getting an evaluation. You might try the Special Needs board also.

Faust Part 2 is still occupying my reading, as it veers from one thing to the next. One moment it's a satire on governments' misuse of paper currency; the next, we're visiting the Land of Neoplatonic Forms to fish out Helen of Troy. I have the constant nagging feeling that I don't really understand what's going on.

You might see if you can find a copy of her nonfiction book, The Decoration of Houses. It makes you realize how much she tells you in her fiction through descriptions of interior spaces.

They're supposed to sit? :P

Search "Violet Crown" on Wikipedia. ;)

I've made it through 3 pages, and will go back to read the rest, but so far haven't seen mentioned the aggravating factor of cultural environment. We live in (according to Forbes) one of the Top 10 Fittest Cities. 22% obesity rate, nearly all of which is the very poor areas east of the freeway. So I go out and about and very rarely see anyone who is obese. I mentioned in another thread that the state religion is football, except here, where it's Food: I swear every other conversation is some kind of foodie discussion. People go to Whole Foods like people in other places go to the mall: not because they need something, but just because it's a cultural center. It's normal to exercise like crazy: my kids get asked "What's your sport?" all the time. Middle Girl has taken up running and does half marathons, and nobody in my neighborhood thinks that's unusual. On the other hand, people are very surprised that Wee Girl doesn't quite know how to swim or ride a bike yet. I always feel fat and unfit here. When I go anywhere else in the country, I feel thin and well-exercised. Dh, when we lived in a different city for a while, gained a lot of weight; not long after we returned here, he lost it all, took a serious interest in his diet, and started marathoning. If I brought the kinds of unhealthy foods to a church potluck, or as snacks for a kids' team, that I see mentioned on this thread, eyebrows would be raised, and people would beg off, claiming gluten allergies or restricted diets. Whatever the reasons for the ways we eat and move, undoubtedly it's influenced by the social norms we internalize. Just writing this made me feel guilty. I'm off to the pool for some laps.

Dh and I turned 40 the same week of The Year From Hell. We hid from friends and family until the dates passed safely by. Now life is going quite smoothly. I really want a 45th party!

... in the masthead. Just thought I'd say that.

Hugs and my next rosary for you.

Great, next time I go to Jiffy Lube I'm going to feel dirty. (Dirty's btw has great hamburgers.)

This week I'm dual-reading Five Hundred Years of Printing and Faust: Part Two. But in a surprise book completion, I realized that I have just the other day finally read to Wee Girl the entirety of My Book House (1920) Volume 2: In the Nursery ( http://books.google.com/books?id=yYgXAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ), all 432 pages of it. There's quite a variety of writing in there, including some odd little pieces by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Anatole France.

Take this for what it's worth, but I'm going to suggest skipping Asimov's science fiction, and instead reading some of his science writing for adults. I read a surprising amount of science fiction as a child (my brother had shelves of it), and I realized at a young age that his just wasn't very good writing. But he wrote explanations of science for the non-scientist tremendously well. See if you can get your hands on the unpromising-sounding World of Carbon. I was just hooked.

All my MIL's annoying habits only annoy dh, and don't bother me: she wants to know exactly when planes he's on take off and land (so she knows exactly when to start and stop worrying), and she wants to know all the make-mom-proud stuff he does (articles published, appointments to positions, etc.). This used to drive him crazy, but I don't mind at all, as I completely share those anxieties and interests. So she's learned to just call me instead of him for all of it, and we're all three perfectly happy now.

Our babysitter, when I was a preschooler, used to talk with great hatred about a very evil man who needed to have peaches hurled at him, which seemed to me to be a fitting, if a little oddly specific, penalty for evildoing. Much, much later in life I understood that she had wanted Pres. Nixon to be impeached.

Tsk. If we're still talking about Texas, that's a violation of state law. I see a lawsuit a-comin'! I'd thought it was, Said the tart to the vicar. Have I been getting it wrong? Once again, failing as a homeschooling mom. :(

Well, I was the one who used the word "absurd," but I'm pretty sure I didn't follow that with "thus not worth thinking about." I think Jarry, Beckett, Ionesco and Lautréamont are absurd or bizarre, and I enjoy reading them and thinking about them. I was just offering my approach to reading Curious George, and why that approach lets me read it aloud to children with a clear conscience and without pausing to explain why poaching is wrong. I'm sorry to have caused you frustration. I don't explain to children that Punch shouldn't throw the baby out the window, or beat his wife Judy, either. It would just be a category error.

This has been a really interesting thread. My rising first-grader may not be quite up to the level expected at Bill's school (though pretty close), but she's been a strange one to teach, as she's (so far) incapable of oral responses such as narration or answering comprehension questions. As she's begun to write, her sentences have been very "bookish" and dissimilar to speech. No "I" sentences or fragments, and a little odd in quality. Spelling is good for her age, but she'll generally simply refuse to write a word rather than risk spelling it wrong, which has slowed her down quite a bit. She reads at a very high level, but her oral difficulties have really gotten in the way of writing.

Still not really working. :(

Ulysses À la Recherche du Temps Perdu Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire The Magic Mountain Piers Plowman Finnegan's Wake A good reader's guide to Finnegan's Wake

What others have said, with a few random addenda: Austin is a great place to live and homeschool. Almost too many choices for homeschooling. Homeschooling is seen as "alternative," which makes it not just culturally acceptable but almost a mark of superiority: people's reactions are more likely to be wistful and admiring than critical or defensive. The state religion is football, particularly high school football, which makes public schools very important to local communities; this may be an issue in some locales. (Except in Austin, where the local religion is Food.) If you have pollen allergies, you may want to visit before you commit to moving to central Texas.