We used Miquon successfully on its own - without even the Cuisenaire rods (don't tell Bill...) - for the first two girls. Of course you're never just doing a math curriculum by itself at that age, and you're probably going to have games and non-curricular "extras"; but I think that's really plenty. With Wee Girl, I'm combining it with Singapore workbooks (not the texts) just because she likes lots and lots of math stuff to do that's on the same level, and the Miquon doesn't provide enough to please her. But it's not like we're adding lessons.

We use Artes Latinae and are very happy with it. If you subscribe to the Bolchazy-Carducci e-newsletter, once a year they have a coupon for a massive discount.

:iagree: Great Girl only wanted to do math. She did math for literally hours each day when she was little (actually now that she's big, too...) Middle Girl loves math, too, but isn't obsessed by it, and we do significantly less math than her older sister did. On the other hand, Great Girl cried and cried if made to do any kind of music or art. So we just didn't do any, which I now regret a little. You do what you need to do for each child. That's why we're homeschooling, right?

All math at our house is sit-down-with math (except Alcumus, which can be done at will in the evenings). Middle Girl gets morning math with Daddy MWF, which is gentle introductory geometry, probability, or other things that he thinks she ought to get familiar with. At some point she and I do facts drill or speed techniques with Standard Service Arithmetics as our "Arithmetic" lesson; then we work through the problems in her AoPS book as her "Math" lesson. We have neither a set amount of time nor a set number of problems; I just pay attention to the level of difficulty (for her) of the problems, how she's doing that day generally, and try to stop when she's still being successful but before she gets frustrated. A fine art! :D In the end, it comes out to about an hour or more of math a day. I don't keep strict track.

It shouldn't even matter what a pediatrician's opinion of homeschooling is. Ours is clearly not a fan of homeschooling, but she doesn't address it because it's not a medical issue, and she is completely uninterested in non-medical aspects of child-rearing. (She disapproves of preschool and daycare simply because kids get sick too much at an early age.) When it turned out that Wee Girl was special needs, our pediatrician's brusque comment was "Don't put her in school until this has been dealt with. Since you homeschool I assume that won't be a problem." That was it. Homeschooling = better medical outcome, she's for it; homeschooling = irrelevant to medical outcome, she doesn't care enough to make it a matter of discussion. I like that she is confident in her area of competence, and leaves other areas of child-rearing to me.

Finished 24. Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul. I don't know why I keep reading Greene's later novels, hoping they'll be good, when I know they won't. This one is especially awful; Greene was still trying to re-write The Power and the Glory, but with the loss of his faith he became moralizing and didactic, and ruined what could have been a perfectly good book. Vocabulary I had to look up: yashmak, jalousie, lie doggo Interestingly, the book I've now taken up - Tolstoy's Master and Man and Other Stories - was also from the writer's later years, and suffers in the first of its three stories ("Father Sergius") from the same moralizing, didactic writing, with the difference that Tolstoy's faith had grown stronger, not weaker. Of course, Tolstoy on a bad day is a hundred times better than anything that's going to be on the New York Times Bestseller list all year, and the second and third stories in the collection are much better, so this is going to be a five-star book, in contrast to the two stars I'll have to give Greene. 23. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; Rex Warner, tr. 22. Gerald Hanley, Drinkers of Darkness 21. Henry James, What Maisie Knew. 20. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. 19. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton. 18. Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. 17. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm. 16. Terence, Phormio & Other Plays. Betty Radice, Tr. 15. Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. 14. Goethe, Faust: Part One. Philip Wayne, Tr. 13. Robert Musil, Young Torless. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, Tr. 12. Chris Wright, Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math: Book 1 11. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor 10. Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd (La Celestina); J. M. Cohen, Tr. 9. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; various tr. 8. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House and Other Plays (The League of Youth, A Doll's House, The Lady From the Sea); Peter Watts, Tr. 7. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind* 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 5. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case 4. Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides); Robert Fagles, Tr. 3. Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King 2. St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany 1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes 0. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars*

Yes, but it's always the same scream: "AIEEEEE! ROACH!!!! KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!!!"

There seem to be really three categories of name, not just "popular" and "unpopular," but "common," "uncommon," and "trendy." Both common and trendy names will show up in the top 100, but the common names have a (more or less) flat popularity graph across the years (though decreasing generally just because of the increasing fragmentation of the naming market), while the trendy names, though they may be less popular in numerical terms than some common names, have a spiking graph. Emily is a combination name, with a flat graph until the 1960's, a spike peaking around 2000, and a sharp decline since (though only because it went from #1 to #6, well above its mid-200s ranking in 1960). So it's a classic name that gained in popularity in the late 20th century. As a comparison, Anna is an equally classic name, but has had a firmly flat graph since about 1930, having failed to get on board the nouveau classic trend of the turn of the century. This would make it common, but not trendy. As another comparison, Kayla/Kaylee/Kaylin etc. went from nowhere to insanely popular, making it trendy (by my categorization). So the question with popular names is, if you don't mind popular, do you want trendy, or common, or trendy/common (like Emily)? ETA: I got the worst of all worlds (poor me), with a name that had been trendy, going from zero to Top 10 in the 20th century, but overused and so being dropped like a hot potato by everyone except my parents by the time I was born. Geez, Mom, couldn't you have Googled the baby name sites?

Chapter 2 challenge problems (answers in degrees) 47. 27 48. 85 49. 60 50. 30 51. Sun of exterior angles with measures angle A + Angle B and Angle A + Angle C is 180 degrees greater than the third (which we showed has measure Angle A) 52. 90 53. 60 and 20 54. Can't be in ratio 1:2:6 55. 360 56. 360 57. 21 If you want the full explanation for any of these, don't hestitate to post & I'll type in the whole thing.

Last year one house gave my girls candy canes and pastel foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. It was all quite dusty. I took the liberty of tossing it.

Strangely, it's remained a popular name around here for a long time. :D So has "Travis," the name of the county. I wonder sometimes if the local naming choices ever confuse the post office. When we picked Great Girl's name, it wasn't in the top 100, and struck us as a fresh and interesting choice. Within a few years, it had shot up into the top 10, and has lingered about in the top 5 for the last few years. She meets lots of little girls with her name, but nobody her own age. Middle Girl's name turned out to be a rising star, too, but went from nowhere to around 500th most popular girl's name, so it's still fairly uncommon. Our priest didn't even recognize the name, and, taking his cue from her middle name (Patrick, after her grandfather), referred to her as "him" all through the baptism. Still, it was alarming to read on baby name blogs after she was born how sick and tired they all were of little girls named Emma, Ava, and [Middle Girl]. By the time Wee Girl came along, we were savvier and watched the trends at Baby Name Voyager. We carefully picked a name we loved, and which is a real name with a real and reasonable spelling (just like her sisters'), but which has never been in the top 1000. But we failed to account for community trends, and the lady in the parish office, when I turned in the baptism paperwork, chirped "Oh! She'll be the third little [Wee Girl] in the parish!" :glare:

I'm reading Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul. A very light and quick read. When I finish, I plan to try to finish Iota Unum, which isn't difficult but is long.

For lying, if the child is little, I explain to her that it's wrong to lie, in whatever terms she can understand. As the child grows, I add that lying is sinful, dishonorable, and leads to others being unable to trust her. As for consequences, the child quickly discovers that she is no longer believed until she can reestablish her truthfulness. This is pretty painful, and we don't get much recidivism. Nothing helpful on sibling conflicts; their ages are so far apart that there isn't any to speak of.

I do. In Latin, yet.

... if one understands the Bible and its relation to morality in the same way that Bill does. ;) - Sharon the pants-wearing, church-talking absolutist

nm

It would be interesting to hear from an actual lawyer (anyone?) about the legalities here. It was my impression that the law is actually a little complicated. There's case law, if I'm remembering right, which says that an item is in fact yours when you take possession of it by taking it off the shelf. Or at least, the store has offered the item to you, and by taking it off the shelf you've contracted to buy it. The store can't then choose to revoke the contract (by, say, refusing to sell it to you or changing the price) but the shopper can change his mind and revoke the contract until after purchase. By this model, consuming it in the store would simply be the shopper putting it out of his own power to revoke his acceptance of the contract. It couldn't be theft, though, because the item is his once he's accepted the store's offer by taking it off the shelf.

Taking stealing as an example, it sounds like you're not actually in disagreement (necessarily) with absolutism. If "steal" means "take or use the property of another in a way contrary to the particular civil law," then of course there will be situations in which "stealing" is the morally necessary thing to do, such as helping a slave to escape, or taking a loaf of bread to feed one's starving family. But if you define "steal" as something more like "take or use the property of another in a way contrary to the reasonable will of that person," then those situations would not constitute stealing, and you might agree (I don't want to speak for you) that this could be a moral absolute.

Which is why doing ethics by counting raised hands turns out not to work so well.

Put me down as another vote for "moral absolutism," at least as far as I see it being described here. There are universal moral laws. Half of morality is knowledge of these laws. The other half is relating particular situations to what those laws require. The difficulty in doing either of these is not an argument for relativism, any more than the difficulty of doing astronomy is an argument for picking geocentrism instead of heliocentrism, depending on one's own personal conscience or culture.

Y'all are very sweet. :) I am reading a pretty fluffy book at the moment, just to rest my brain. I did forget to list the vocabulary I had to look up from Thucydides. Just one this time: peltast. At the end of the year, I'm going to list all the words I had to look up as my Vocabulary List of Shame.

We mostly use our missal; but here's a site that has the common prayers in Latin, with free audio.

I do understand why the statement would be there, and I feel a little bad (tone of voice not coming through in type so well) that my post may have sounded more negative than I meant it to be. It just struck me, as a child, as such a wildly different view of my home than was my own experience. On a side note, I nearly PM'ed you for advice; dh got a job offer in Scotland and was very very close to taking it. I was a little sad when he turned it down, esp. with this non-stop drought. It would have been so awesome.

Dang.

:iagree: That one. And The Cat Who Went to Heaven.