I've never had an Erin Condren but I bought a Plum Paper for this coming year and I like it a lot so far. I shopped the EC and was unimpressed with their options compared to the PP.

I figured they thought NHS would take care of him. Maybe they couldn't afford to take care of him here. 😞

"Why don't women report it?" Anyone intellectually honest needs to ask why women ever bother to report a rape. 😞

Absolutely love my tankless water heater. We don't even think about showers, and saving water for someone else.

I feel like a failure a lot too. Even when only one of your children is especially challenging, it's amazing how much you can blame yourself, wonder what you should have done differently. It's a daily effort to let myself off the hook. To realize that even if I did make mistakes, I've been a loving, hard working, conscientious mother her whole life. And I'm sure you are too.

Don't over explain. Obviously you value this person's friendship, so SOME explanation is appropriate. But a simple, "After much consideration (and prayer, if that is appropriate), my husband and I (harder to argue with a joint decision) have decided that the co-op is not the right fit for us next year. I know I said I would join and I'm sorry to back out. I will miss meeting with everyone. I hope you all have a wonderful and productive year." Then if there are any supplies or teacher books or whatever, let her know you'll bring that to her.

I say, "I'm going out with friends Saturday night." I don't really address who is watching the kids because we are equal parents who do not need to ask if the other person will parent in our absence. This is reasonable to expect. (I'm the keeper of the family calendar and generally know if he has other plans.) You've got a man who refuses to fulfill his obligation of co-parenting, and if he's forced to, mistreats the kids?? In such a way that he feels guilty for days afterwards? First of all, this is completely unacceptable and just because it's not uncommon doesn't mean it's more ok. Secondly, I agree with a previous poster who says that both of you seem to have the idea that he should not be unhappy, inconvenienced, or uncomfortable. But it's perfectly fine for you to be all three of these things. Thirdly, he SHOULD feel guilty if he is mistreating the kids. And he should be an adult and make changes to how he interacts with them. We all have bad moments as parents, but this is not an excuse to simply decide we will parent less. I would start by insisting that bed time is done calmly, cheerfully, and by BOTH of you. Each of you takes one part of the bed time routine, or divide up the children. Then I would talk about dividing up the weekend. EVERY weekend, you need a few hours to do what you want, without kids. If he needs to put the kids in front of the TV for the time being, so be it.

What is allowance for if not for the fun stuff? That's WHY I started giving my kids allowance is I wanted them to budget their fun more carefully instead of always coming to me begging for money.

I never gave my husband the same "courtesies" as a baby sitter. Even when the babies were brand new. By the time we came home from the hospital, he had changed more diapers than I had. He prioritized MY sleep in the following weeks. We wrote diaper changes and bottles on the wipe off board so we were both on the same page (I needed this as much as he did.) He knew how to mix a bottle, swaddle a baby, and tie a moby wrap on himself. My husband is not a very nurturing guy by nature. He doesn't like babies much (though he doesn't especially dislike them.) But he's very much a "fulfill your obligations" kind of guy. He prefers to think of himself as competent at anything he must do, and taking care of a baby he helped make is an obligation and something he intends to do well. Furthermore, he sees it as partially his responsibility to make sure I don't lose my mind taking care of our children. In other words, any man can take care of babies if they cared to make it a priority and viewed themselves as equally responsible, even if not equally available due to work. They certainly don't need to be treated like a babysitter. The only thing they need communicated to them, is what feedings or medication or whatever happened when they weren't around. Basically the same thing I would need communicated to me when I left the house without the kids, or took a nap.

Typical. Once I ordered a phonics book from Abeka. I sent it to my name and paid with a credit card with my name on it. But in filling out the information on the site, they asked for my husband's name. And guess who the box was addressed to?

Incredibly strange complaint, but I'm glad it was resolved so well.

It's hard to get people to think about how education should be different when there isn't an agreement on what education is for. I feel like public school tends to treat children like buckets to be filled up and most of the discourse is about what belongs in the bucket, or the most efficient filling methods, or at what age to begin filling, or if Finland or Japan or whoever are better at filling their buckets. And you're trying to tell people that children are more than buckets and they might not know how to have that conversation. (I have two teens in public school and I'm not thrilled about it.) 🙂 And many (most?) homeschoolers are coming from a public school setting and, in my experience, have not broken away from that understanding of what education IS. So when they hear about classical education, or CM education, they think they have stumbled on a better bucket filling method and want that explained to them. 🙂

Perhaps I'm being unjust to this particular mom. And perhaps it was just the way it was worded, which made it clear she had no desire to spend very much effort understanding anything, but was looking for a "recipe." A little this, a little that, bake for several years, and you have created one classically educated child. 🙂 I definitely relate to wanting to know the practical applications of all the high minded theory that gets thrown around. 🙂 I will say that I have tons of grace for parents doing their very imperfect best they can manage at that time. I am very much that parent. Trying, failing, trying some more, never living up to my own ideals. (Including my ideal of extending grace to parents feeling overwhelmed by the task of homeschooling.) 🙂

I do understand that, of course. :) I'm knees deep in Charlotte Mason right now and can't imagine just trying to do a CM education or a classical education without knowing the WHY behind it all. :) I'm not trying to imply that the WHAT is irrelevant, but that it won't be successful without an understanding of the philosophy behind it. But hey, maybe I'm wrong about that too. :) It wouldn't be the first time.

So much this. A recent question in a Facebook group I'm part of, was (paraphrased) "Can you just tell me real quick how to classically educate my children? I don't want to read a book. I just want someone to tell me how to do it." As someone recently delving into books and articles and podcasts and so on, I felt like the question was kind of insulting to people who are spending hours teaching, mentoring, and reading, and learning. It seems to me, with my limited knowledge, that classical education is much more about WHY you do things, than WHAT you do, and if you don't want to bother learning why, then why is classical education even important to you? It's just a popular buzz word. People want to be able to say, "We're classical homeschoolers" without doing any of the work to understand what that means.

I don't know if this counts but one time I was in Eureka Springs Arkansas for a wedding. The ceremony was held at this ridiculously beautiful little chapel that's all windows, close to sunset, and then we were to head to a nearby old hotel for the reception. It was dark and we plugged the address of the hotel into our GPS... Apparently our GPS thought we should go a different way than everyone else because we soon lost all the other cars. It was dark and this town is hilly with windy roads and a very confusing layout. Soon we were on this one lane road winding through the woods thinking, "Wait, this hotel is supposed to be about a five minute drive. Where are we and are we going to be murdered here?" But we didn't know what to do, so we just kept following the bossy voice on the GPS. Then we took a turn and there it was, the hotel, right it front of us. 🙂

Very frustrating, as you were perfectly clear. I had a lot of work done on the outside of my house this year and it was a learning experience. The main thing I learned is never trust when they say things will be done by. I don't know why they lie. They must know they're lying. Did they think I'd walk away if they told me exactly when a thing would get done? I had already signed a contract and given them thousands of dollars, it's not like I was going to flip out and try to back out of the deal if I knew the windows were going to take a week and a half instead of three days. Just TELL ME THE TRUTH! Unlike you, I wasn't even on a deadline. So why not tell me when it'll actually happen instead of making stuff up?? I don't get it.

Wooooow. And this basically confirmed all my worst assumptions about you. You know, based on actual things you posted. Also, yeah, you sound super unruffled. 😉

Yeah I'm on the side of being much more worried about "concerned" neighbors than about what might happen to my child during five minutes unattended. And I would be weirded out if a neighbor stopped by for a "friendly chat" to tell me that my kids were safe, when they were only a couple minutes behind them. The other day I stopped off at the UPS store to drop off an Amazon return. I parked right outside the front, and the whole thing is glass windows, and my five year old has a cold and isn't feeling well, and it was below freezing outside. I knew it would literally take less than a minute. Walk in, drop off the box, they ask "Do you want a receipt?" and I say, "No thanks!" and walk back out to the car. But I made her come in with me anyway. Not because I thought there was a chance of anything at all happening to her. But I thought there was a chance that someone might see her in there in the less than a minute I was outside, and call the police. I hate making decisions based on what people will think of me instead of what is actually best for my kid. (Snuggled up under her blanket in her car seat in a cold-but-recently-heated car was definitely better than getting out from under said blanket and walking inside.) Even if the OP had no intention of calling the police or family services or whatever, those fears that you might do so would probably have occurred to the mom had you be able to have your "friendly chat." It's insane to me that parents have to live in fear of other people's fear of what "might have happened" but actually didn't.

I downloaded Signal and got all my family switched over. The functionality and look and feel is VERY similar to Whatsapp. https://www.wired.com/story/ditch-all-those-other-messaging-apps-heres-why-you-should-use-signal/

Thank you. I really wish people would just decide what the rules are. My daughter is in tenth grade, researching schools, but she can't know for sure at this point which schools she will want to apply to... I hate to think that decisions we are making now will eliminate schools in the future that might be a good fit for her. But oh well. 🙂

Thanks so much for the info. Are all these credit caps usually from DE or does that count possible credits awarded from AP tests as well? (I forgot to check this post because I almost never peek into this forum, it's so intimidating!) 🙂

For the purposes of being able to get scholarships? Do I need to be concerned about my child taking too many college credits? Will she be able to apply as a freshman to college? I'm sorry if this question gets asked all the time.

Ok, I'm in the market for another messenger app like Whatsapp that has end to end encryption but IS NOT run by someone who is so careless (to be as charitable as humanly possible) with user's data. My family uses Whatsapp to communicate every day. I need to be able to set up various chat rooms on different topics with different people. Discord was suggested in the past but I believe they are not secure.

"It's our policy" are among my most hated words. It's a thing to say when what they mean is "I don't care if it's logical, right, fair, or makes any amount of sense. We're going to do it this way and I don't even have to explain it because I can just say the magic words... it's our policy."