There are books set in Mexico, China, Japan, England, and Italy in other FIAR volumes, so you might consider branching out to those instead of coming up with lesson plans for entirely new books. I am adding a bunch of Southern Hemisphere books to our FIAR studies. For Africa I chose: My Rows and Piles of Coins (West Africa/Tanzania) Bintou's Braids (East Africa) The Butter Man (Morocco) I don't have a book for Peru, but we're using Mia's Story which is set in Chile.

The way the site is organized suggests that the whole thing is just an exercise in search engine optimization (for example, all the repetitive links in the sidebar, written as search terms and not as human beings intentionally organize information). "See this authors research by clicking here" (at the bottom of the page) is a link to a coupon site. This is simply not a webpage put together by someone who cares about its content. Whoever put this site together makes money from clicks and links. They grabbed this old, awful article off the web and pasted it into their site to draw eyeballs. The more people who look at it and link to it, the more money they get - so posting a dumb, biased article that people will feel compelled to refute is actually in their best interest. I vote for not giving them any attention. Edited to add: Yep. Try Googling for a good-sized search string, and you'll see that the article has been posted and reposted, almost exclusively (Greg Laden is the sterling exception) on sites which are obviously just link farms. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADSA_enUS384US384&q=%22When+I+asked+myself+the+question%2c+How+do+you+feel+about+home+schooling%3f+I+first+thought+%22Why+would+anyone+do+that%22+So+I+researched+exactly+that%2c+What+are+the+reasons+that+people+give+of+why+they+choose+to+homeschool+and+how+valid+are+they.+%22

We read and loved a wonderful short, heavily illustrated chapter book called The Cat in Numberland. It presents a lot of concepts related to infinity, and really captured my daughter's imagination.

We're using Five in a Row, a combination of Miquon Orange/Red and MEP 1a, and easy reader books from the library. In theory we'll also do Discovery Education Elementary Spanish, but we started K on June 1 and haven't gotten to any Spanish lessons yet.

Yes, if you've had a mc you may want to ask your midwife or doctor to check your progesterone levels early in your next pregnancy. If it is low, you can be prescribed progesterone suppositories. I took it for the first 13 weeks and my healthy 17-month-old is sleeping next to me right now. Using progesterone can cause spotting. It's good to know that in advance because wow is that scary. My midwife explained that it makes the surface of the cervix more delicate, and that the spotting isn't dangerous. Good luck!

The end of Assateague near Ocean City is opposite from the end near Chincoteague, and there isn't a road connecting the ends on the island - you have to go around on the mainland and I think it's about 50 miles. That really surprised me - I hadn't realized that the two ends are so cut off from each other. The Tom's Cove Visitor Center on the Chincoteague side is small but nice, and they offer naturalist programs led by park rangers.

I don't have any concerns about the ingredients in vaccines.

College students make great PT nannies - they often don't want a FT job because of their class schedule. I have a fantastic student who watches my kids three afternoons a week. You do need to check upfront about availability over college vacations, and I have found that I should be prepared for calling-in-sick during finals week.

Any suggestions? Elementary-level resources for U.S. geography would also be very helpful.

We just went to Chincoteague for the first time in May, and it was WONDERFUL. It's a lovely, relaxed little town. There aren't any high-rise hotels on the island so you don't get the jam-packed Ocean City effect, although the town will certainly be full in mid-August. We stayed at the Dove Winds: http://www.dovewinds.com/ and were really pleased with our townhouse, which was a bit shabby but very comfortable and clean. I liked having separate bedrooms and a kitchen where we could cook breakfast and lunch. There are something like 17 miles of beaches on Assateague that are walk-in only, so even if the beach is a bit crowded near the visitor's center, you only need to walk up it until you come to a spot with more breathing room. No development is allowed on Assateague so there aren't beachfront hotels or a boardwalk or anything like that. It's a much more wild atmosphere. I loved it. Surprisingly, the best food we had was at a Vietnamese restaurant next to the Chincoteague library.

Does anyone have recommendations for an atlas focusing on historical U.S. maps? In particular, I'm looking for maps that show how the U.S. grew as it acquired new territories. This is for a pretty young child, but she is really interested in U.S. geography (studies maps for fun, has memorized the names and locations of all the states) and of course we would help her interpret the maps. An Amazon search turned up George Tindall's United States History Atlas and Amy Romano's A Historical Atlas of the United States and its Territories, but I can't really find any details about either book.

I don't think it would even occur to me to worry about it.

Secret Door is one of the rare examples of children's board games that I actually like to play.

I am an academic, and I routinely recycle pieces of my work. A section that I initially develop for a grant application often goes straight into a journal manuscript. The written descriptions I come up with for measures I often use probably go everywhere: articles, grant applications, whatever. Same with diagrams and figures. I would not publish two journal articles which presented the same results, or results from the same study which are cohesive enough that they should have been in the same paper. I wouldn't publish more-or-less identical theoretical papers. I might write similar review papers for different audiences (say, a medical journal and a psychology journal) and re-use some chunks of material, but I would put a substantially different spin on the material based on the target audience. My graduate professors and mentors have always told me "you can't plagiarize yourself." Of course, that's real academia. I fully understand why you wouldn't want a student to get credit for the same paper in two different courses - the individual writing assignments are supposed to be separate learning opportunities. But I'm not writing as learning opportunities, I'm writing to secure grant funds and disseminate findings.

Would a young man who got a girl pregnant also be expected to make a public confession and show of repentance? I have only ever heard this mentioned for pregnant girls.

What does it mean to be "friends" on the board? Is it just an expression of liking? Or are there useful features associated with it, like the ability to sort threads for your friends' participation, etc? If you kept noticing someone's name and thinking, "wow, they post cool stuff," would you designate them as a friend on the board? Or would you only do that if you had the sense that the person knew who you were?

My 5yo has similar issues with tantruming when something is hard or she doesn't immediately see how to do it. I found Carol Dweck's mindset work very compelling: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ Her argument is that when kids think of ability as something fixed, something you just *have* (I am smart, I am good at math), they fear taking risks or trying hard things - in case it proves that they aren't so smart after all. When kids think of ability as something that can be improved through effort, they welcome challenges. Dweck talks a lot about the effects of praise on children's mindsets, but I think that some bright kids are just extra susceptible to feeling threatened by hard tasks. I have to do a lot of direct teaching with my daughter about how trying hard things makes us smarter. I've also tried to eradicate "you're so good at ___" from my vocabulary.

ToGMom, I also had a congenital dislocation and no proper socket, and they put me in a cast from the armpits down for I think an entire year. In my case, however, being immobilized in the cast led to something called "avascular necrosis of the femoral head." That means that blood flow to the ball of the hip joint was cut off, and the bone died. I wound up with a weird football-shaped head (ball) of the femur that never fit into the socket right and caused a lot of pain and disability. I also had several surgeries as a child to try to carve out a socket and reshape the joint. None of it worked until the hip replacement.

I am 36 now, so I've had my hip for 13.5 years. I, too, am really hoping to make it to 20. I know that 23 is crazy young to get a hip replacement, but I was having to use crutches and take narcotic painkillers every day, so I finally decided that it made no sense to delay. I wanted to have my best years when I was young & relatively poor & having kids, even if it means that I may have more trouble when I am older and have worn out two or more hips. I have a cementless joint, which was a brand new thing when I had it done in 1996. The ball and spike are titanium and the socket is mostly plastic, although I think it has a metal base and I know that it's partly held in place by metal screws. I am interested that you ride horses, because I was told that horseback riding was the one thing I couldn't do because of the stress it would put on the inside joint there. Maybe that isn't really true?

Also: even if you are on crutches and can't cook or do barn chores, you are NOT useless. Your value comes from who you are, not what you do.

Oh my gosh, I am so sorry. I had a hip replacement for the same reason when I was only 23. I've just recently started to have more pain around the hip, and it makes me worry that it's wearing out and that I'll need another. So I absolutely understand what you're going through! I agree with the advice not to borrow trouble until after you've seen the specialist. Once before I struggled with a lot of new pain and it turned out that my muscles had gotten deconditioned due to changes in my activity level. (I had recently had a baby. Yep, that changes your activity level, all right.) I personally find that only a little less exercise leads to big mobility and pain changes for me. Hopefully your problem is one that will be easily fixed. But also, if you do need a second replacement, I know that the quality has improved dramatically in the last several years. So the next might really be your last. That's what I hope for myself, too.

I want to come do school at KarenAnne's house. Not for my kids - for me.

We are Unitarian-Universalists. At five, my daughter already knows that she will one day be expected to figure out her own answers to religious questions - but she'll be doing that within the context and support of our religious community and our UU beliefs. She already has a good sense of religious identity and will explain to people that "We're Universalists, and that means that we think God loves EVERYBODY." When she's around thirteen she will go through a formal Coming of Age program at our church. After that, if she chose to attend services for a different religion or to stop church altogether, I would accept her decision. But yes, I am more cautious about conservative/ fundamentalist Christianity than I am about many other religions. I don't want her exposed to ideas like hell, the devil, total depravity, human unworthiness, etc., until she is much older and has the intellectual and emotional sophistication to evaluate them critically. "Follow our religion or you'll be ****ed to eternal suffering" - I wouldn't want my child to be threatened like that.

I was in the Charlotte NC airport this weekend. In the women's room - a typical huge, dirty, crowded airport restroom - there was a three-foot padded bench set into the wall. No back, just the wall tiles. And this palatial area was labeled: "Nursing Mother's Room." I made sure I had a conversation about it with my five-year-old: "Isn't that silly? Bathrooms are a good place for peeing and pooping, and washing your hands, and maybe brushing your hair in the mirror, but bathrooms are NOT a good place for nursies." It's never too early to start educating her about her rights. Right?

We use FIAR and really love it. I feel as though I'm spreading a banquet in front of my daughter, with little tastes of many, many different exciting things that are out there to learn about. Spending one week on each book means that we are always being exposed to something new and interesting. The style of FIAR feels very natural to me - in many ways, it's an extension of what we've been doing for years: reading books, looking at the pictures, and talking about them. FIAR doesn't have a big focus on "products," which I think is very appropriate for the early years. Many people choose to do lapbooks, but we mostly just work conversationally and I can tell that my daughter is still picking up a ton of information. You do need to add math, phonics, and handwriting. All I do for handwriting in K is to have her trace and copy the title of the book each week.