Love it. You can't swing a stick without hitting a homeschooler here. A panoply of approaches, politics, religions and non-, and everyone stays respectful of everyone else. Austin is all about tolerance and being cool with Keeping It Weird. Lots of educational options, co-ops, classes, support groups, events, activities, teams, etc. The hard part is sifting through all the stuff you could spend all day doing. No reporting requirements, the APD is perfectly aware of homeschoolers and gives no trouble, and the general culture is so supportive of Alternative Anything that one more form of education is just peachy with everyone.

I believe in the existence of curses (though these days they're called, more euphemistically, "deprecatory blessings"), but their effectiveness is anyone's guess. Here's a good one from the Rituale Romanum (scroll down to #7). I may have to try it against the palmetto bugs, which are uncommonly large and bold this year. :ack2: Possibly Raid in place of holy water there at the end.

Oh, boy! The Middle Ages! These are some of the books my kids liked best: Augustine Came to Kent Son of Charlemagne The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow Sword of Clontarf The Red Keep If All the Swords in England The Blue Gonfalon A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver Otto of the Silver Hand Adam of the Road The Magna Charta The Door in the Wall The Trumpeter of Krakow And some awesome Bellerophon books: Paper Soldiers of the Middle Ages: The Crusades Paper Soldiers of the Middle Ages: The Hundred Years' War (my teenager got a lot of joy out of these paper dolls) Also Macaulay's Castle and Cathedral. Our favorite readable overview of the Middle Ages is When Knights Were Bold, which you used to have to buy used for exorbitant eBay prices, but is now free online at The Baldwin Project.

Very likely. Do you remember a lot of Housman? Perrine sure loved A Shropshire Lad.

Intinction (dipping the Host into the cup) is not permitted in Catholic churches (actually the eastern rite Catholics practice intinction, but the priest does the dipping, not the communicant). Some of us paleoCatholics don't drink from the cup because we don't believe the laity should be handling the vessels.

Middle Girl has the patience of Job and fabulous fine motor skills, so I got Peterson Directed Handwriting for her, and she now has beautiful cursive handwriting. I wouldn't have dared tried it for Great Girl, and have no plans to try it with Wee Girl. Turn-of-the-century copperplate handwriting strikes me as an extravagance, but one that I'm happy to have provided for Middle Girl. So ... YMMV. ETA: If you do choose it, the teaching guide is very confusing. What it's trying to get across is that you need to practice the various strokes a great deal, and then you assemble each letter from a combination of the perfected strokes. This sets it apart from cursive programs in which you learn to 'draw' each letter; in Peterson, all you need to learn is the strokes.

Meal moths will live in dried fruit, too.

Much more excusably, Wee Girl is convinced that New Mexico and Scotland - the only trips she's been on in her little life - are in the same place. On the grounds that it takes one day to get to both of them.

I used to worry about this sort of thing, as Great Girl clearly had the potential for a top college. But she badly wanted/needed to go to college early, and not being ready to leave home, applied to Big State U. down the road. She's deliriously happy to be starting in the fall. It's academically solid in her areas of interest, tuition is reasonable, and she can live at home and bike in. If Harvard sent her a spontaneous offer tomorrow, she wouldn't go.

I feel your pain. Note the one remaining course for my nearly graduated Great Girl. How can you not know where Israel or Los Angeles are?

Thyme. For some reason, it tastes exactly like mold to me. I can't eat anything with any amount of thyme in it. And hot cereal. When I visited Scotland, well-intentioned people kept trying to get me to eat oatmeal. Urg.

Good question. I'm guessing the photographer cajoled her that far. She kept me from losing my makeup-free self-confidence when I left my anything-goes childhood town for the west coast. Whenever I wander now into parts of Texas where women wear more makeup than here (that would be all the other parts), I remember Prof. Sullivan and her no-time-for-makeup life.

I'm not a lawyer, but I understand the point of a lawsuit as being to make whole for damages caused by someone's intentional or negligent actions. What would he be suing for in this case? If what your husband really wants is to express his understandable unhappiness, and to prevent it happening again, he should probably call the manager and perhaps the health department.

I have come to be convinced that trying to teach structure explicitly, as Perrine and MCT do, to younger children is counterproductive. I like to use Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, which teaches children to pay attention to good poetry and to write their own with the lesson poems as models. This seems to lay the right basis for more technical understanding later, and has worked very well for us. Koch provides a dozen or so lessons - enough that you can get a good feel for his method - and the teacher or parent takes it from there.

What? This is a smile. Darn right. The bionic eye helps.

No one ever tells me that. :crying: Is it that I really do need some lipstick, and maybe some eyebrow tweezing?

Regarding professionalism.... I have personal knowledge that this woman never wears makeup, has not since she began practicing law, and has argued in front of the Supreme Court with face entirely makeup-free. Her feeling was that any time spent on applying makeup was time not spent preparing, and she saw no reason to give her male competition any advantage.

Yeah! Another Perrine fan! Did you find the lack of answers for the text to be a feature rather than a bug? I would be looking over the lesson the night before, trying to figure out where Perrine was going with his questions, and discovering things about poems I'd thought I knew thoroughly.

I've mentioned each of these in another thread, but... Standard Service Arithmetics: Primary school series from the '20's. We use it in tandem with our math curriculum. Teaches students to crunch fairly large numbers with speed and accuracy, without having to write much down. Open University S103 (now replaced with a different course number). British secular general science curriculum. Mathematics needed for science is incorporated into the program. For Sixth Form level, but my middle schooler used it successfully. Perrine's Sound and Sense. Made my high schooler a lover of poetry who really understood what was going on in a poem. I prefer the older editions when Perrine was the only editor. I wanted MCT's poetry book to be a version of Perrine for younger children, but it wasn't. Scribner School Paperbacks (sometimes listed as Scribner School Editions). Significant literature with close-reading-based study guides that teach literary understanding and vocabulary, with good writing assignments for each chapter. Out of print since the 1960's, almost impossible to find - I had to obtain the Wind in the Willows edition through university interlibrary loan. (I am still trying to format & compress the study guide so as to be able to pass it on to others who are interested in it.) The disadvantage to these curricula is that there is no answer key or teacher's guide to them (except the OU science, which has answers for each chapter's questions in the back).

Middle Girl knows how to do it, but some days she remembers that she knows how to do it, and some days she doesn't. Wish there was a curriculum to fix flightiness.

Carolyn Haywood books (Betsy, Eddie, Penny) Enid Blyton (Noddy for Wee Girl, Secret Seven for Middle Girl) Rupert annuals Freddy the Pig Moomintrolls The Three Investigators

You have good instincts. There was an interesting story from Louisiana a few months ago about someone who was insufficiently careful with his anonymous internet comments: Mencken1951 Unmasked

How stupid. And evidently unconstitutional.

TOPS science units. Great Girl couldn't handle having anything not work perfectly the first time, and wasn't great at fine motor control (i.e. a little clumsy), which are not good attributes for a curriculum based on home-made experiments. Middle Girl has the patience of Job and will keep working at something until she's satisfied, and even be okay with something not coming out perfectly. She's eating up the TOPS units, having great fun, and learning a lot of science.

Wee Girl: runs down stairs so as to be the first to parents, thrusts book at me and demands I read to her. While making breakfast. Middle Girl: bounces down stairs, fully dressed, singing, finds book, tries to read while distracted by joyousness of another wonderful morning. Great Girl: drags herself down stairs, throws herself face-down on couch, snarls at Middle Girl for being annoyingly cheerful, asks if breakfast is ready yet. Wee Girl: thrusts book at Great Girl's head and demands she read to her. This takes care of the half hour between wake-up and breakfast. Then we get on with lessons.