Imogen has decided she wants to be the first girl president or she wants to be mayor. Or an artist. Genevieve doesn't know.

Oh I certainly don't assume people mean anything negative by it. It's so ubiquitous you know? I'm probably the only person on the entire internet that feels this way. :) Edit: Also, please note that my posts only talk about what I prefer to do and not about other people at all. I never said anything about what other people might be implying. If I assumed everyone who used DH didn't like their husbands, I would have to assume that everyone didn't like their husbands. I'm talking my own preferences and why I have them.

Yes, I call my husband, my husband. I have my kids in my sig so I can call them by name if I like. My sig is very short so it's not like people have to look through a lot of information. In places I don't use their names I just say "my nine year old" or something. I don't really expect people to understand, I know this is a pet peeve I am very very alone in. :) It just seems nicer and more respectful to me than DH, DS or DD.

Ah, I was unaware we were limited on characters. I guess that makes sense. Still, even after being here for over a month, I still don't know what some of these acronyms are, and I wish I did. :)

:confused::confused::confused: How could she not? "Well, she was starting to catch on, so we gave her some dolls, so now she thinks they're with her still..."

When my dad called me up to tell me he was moving in with his girlfriend he said, "You know, it's not for the sex, I just like having someone to talk to." I literally didn't know what to say. (My family is NOT open about these things.) :glare:

Speaking as someone who is new not only to the board but to homeschooling, I actually found it really irritating. I've actually spent quite a bit of valuable research time trying to figure out what some of those acronyms mean. I know there are acronym lists and threads but it seems like none of them are totally complete so I was having to look in several places. It would have been so helpful to have those lists written out. And it's not like you have to rewrite them each time, just type them out once. Sure, it might get kind of wordy down there, but maybe choose a smaller font in a lighter color so people could skip over it more easily. I'm anti-acronym anyway. I don't call my children "dd" or husband "dh". These are the most important people in my life, I don't reduce them to two generic letters. Sure, time saving, but it cracks me up when you see people writing really long posts about things and still calling their husbands dh. :p And as a fairly fast typist, it really doesn't take much to type it out.

I'm not sure if Imogen struggled with handwriting, she learned it in school. Genevieve does struggle though and she crawled normally, hands and knees. Her struggles and related to her perfectionism though. If she can't do something perfectly the first time, it's very traumatizing. In this regard, I think handwriting is very good for her. It teaches her to live with mistakes and accept weaknesses. Plus, maybe she'll learn how to write cursive. :) Oh, and just in case you were talking about her manuscript, it's very neat. Imogen however has fairly atrocious handwriting and also crawled normally, so my poll answer works for both of them. :) She's the type that rushes through her work not really paying attention.

I rake. :glare: And not just the kids' rooms. Why does everything get thrown on the floor around here? I'm looking at my family room floor right now and there's laundry and shoes and toys and stuffed animals and books. And TRASH! My kids draw and write a lot. They're obsessed with secret codes right now so they're always writing out little messages and creating new codes and this involves a lot of paper and it's all on my FLOOR. ARG! I want to start Flylady but she just annoys me. I believe in her system but every time I subscribe to her list I'm subjected to these mushy sappy testimonials and encouragements. I know I'm being such a grouch but it just grates on my nerves and I unsubscribe. I need to just figure out the whole system and implement it without being involved in the email list.

Went by your blog. Your children are beautiful. :) I'm sorry you're dealing with so many issues, it sounds exhausting and I hope you can find the answers you need for your son.

I was at home. Imogen was 5 months old. Someone called me... don't remember who... told me to turn on the news. I turned it on, and saw both towers. They worded it ambiguously. "Someone has crashed two planes into the towers." I had just woken up and with a new baby was still rather sleep deprived. My first foggy-headed thought was, "How could two people accidentally crash two planes in the same day at the same place?" Took a second for it to hit me... that it wasn't an accident. I spent all day holding my baby in front of the tv.

Love the idea of a zombie unit study though it'd have to be for a kid old enough to handle the gore (and parents who don't mind that type of thing). Shawn of the Dead, Zombieland, maybe a couple zombie video games and for books... The Zombie Survival Guide.

Typing tests like this drive me nuts. How it is a measure of how fast you type that you can type out words that don't even make sense. I fail typing tests pretty regularly, getting anywhere from 50 to 75 words per minute on them but when typing out my own thoughts, I type much much faster. I want a typing test that lets me type whatever I want and then skims it to make sure that I am typing actual words and not simply typing "and and and and and" over and over again. That seems more realistic measure of a person's typing speed. Very very few people actually use typing to type out what someone is dictating for you. Most people type out their own thoughts.

Maybe I'm weird but I love the idea of a zombie film class. I mean, why are they so popular? What's going on in our culture that's fascinated by this post-apocalyptic idea? Is it related to vampire movies? We see movies these days where vampires are more sympathetic, from Twilight to True Blood. Why is that? :) Are good-guy vampires related to superhero movies being popular? We like the idea of immortality, but zombies are all about barely being able to hang on to survival. I think everyone sees something wrong in our society that they would like different, no matter your religious or political bent and sometimes it seems nice to be able to hit a reset button.

I guess we need to start asking public schoolers how their children will possibly be socialized. :)

What I'm wondering is when you stop buying curriculum. We started a few weeks ago and I just bought a spelling curriculum, a time line book and I'm considering a Geography curriculum that seems really cool. At some point I have to stop...

While it's tempting to want to stop doing everything you do for a week and see how she likes it, perhaps you can make an exhaustive list of everything you do for a few days and show it to her. Just keeping adding to it as you think of things or do more things. I think she's not realizing how much you do because she's just used to those things being done and doesn't even think of them.

I think the comment about there being not enough babies to go around referred to adoption in the US. If you want to adopt a baby in the US, you'll be waiting a very long time. You're better off going overseas to adopt a baby because they have plenty available and fewer people able to take them.

My sister is 20 years old with a three year old. I love my nephew. But she struggles. She works two jobs (waiting tables at two different restaurants) and goes to school full time. She has so much on her plate, and is so exhausted... If it were my child, I would research adoption with them and try to gently push in that direction. It's such a hard thing, to give up a baby, so I would never want them to feel that that's the only choice I would support, but I would want them to seriously consider the option. My sister never considered it, never looked into it. I am her main support these days, and I do everything I can, but it breaks my heart that things are so hard for her.

First let me say that this isn't really MY situation, but I'm just curious what you would do with an adult son living at home that seems to be unable to hold a job, has little education and isn't helping around the house? Also, sorry this post got so long... My parents are divorced, rather bitterly. They both live in a very small town with few opportunities nearby. My brother is 18 years old and barely managed to graduate high school. In fact, his graduation is a testament to just how desperate a public school is to give someone who pretty much sabotaged his education at every opportunity a diploma. So when he graduated, over the summer he got a real job with actual benefits and we were all relieved. It wasn't glamorous, but it was a job. My father had offered to drive him to work (because of course, my brother doesn't have a car) but then later changed his mind (I could write all day on the many ways my father is completely dysfunctional). He kicked my brother out of the house again, and that left my brother nowhere to go but my mom's house. So now my mom's stuck with him at her house. He doesn't contribute to household chores. She is constantly having to remind him to do things. And she works full time as a nurse, plus goes to school for her RN. My brother lost the job he had before because he overslept. He has never ever been able to keep a job. He's been fired from every job he ever had except the time that he begged a pizza place who had fired him to rehire him and then he quit the next day (yeah, he's just a classy guy). He has no car, I think my mom pays for his cell phone. Why? I have no idea... My family has always had a pretty strong work ethic. This is my fourth out of five brothers, he's got three older brothers who have worked since their teens, sometimes at absolutely exhausting and difficult jobs. (One time my oldest brother was living with me and had a temp job at this cardboard box factory. He would come home covered in papercuts and since he was carless I would pick him up from work and drive him through McD's and he would order a big mac meal, supersized with another big mac on the side, and he still lost weight at that job. My 4th brother has never worked so hard in his life.) So I don't understand his unwillingness to hold a job. He just no-shows till he gets fired, it's ridiculous. I just don't get it. So what would you do? I only have girls and my oldest is nine so I really don't know. Kick your son out, knowing that you make him homeless? Knowing that he doesn't even have a car to get anywhere? Knowing that he has never displayed the ability to hold down a job? Also, keeping in mind that my mother doesn't really have a lot of resources to help him, as far as either time or money. Or just put up with him being a bum?

I'm in Springfield. Not sure who else around here is... It'd be fun to meet up with some people. :)

My husband's aunt and uncle are both scientists and both their kids, a boy and a girl, are majoring in electrical engineering in college. I asked him a couple months ago when they were down here visiting, "So, how do you raise engineers?" He just shook his head and said, "I wish I knew." So do I. And hey, I played with dolls a lot growing up, but I was nine years older than my oldest sister with three brothers in between, so I ended up playing with a lot of boy toys. And I'm into art. On the other hand, my nine year old is a serious geek-in-training. She once with to Barnes and Noble with a gift card and bought herself a thick book on bugs. She would read it before bed each night! She was once reading me something out of it then said, "Here, look at the picture... isn't it beautiful?" :confused::confused::confused: It's a bug!! But I've resolved to do a lot more sciencey stuff with her because she loves it so much.

I thought I was going to put together my own spelling curriculum. How hard could it be? I'd just pull words out of history and WWE stories and use those. Well, that lasted for one week, the next two weeks we didn't do spelling and I ordered something... I don't even remember what. I came on here and did a search for spelling curriculum and picked something several people said nice things about. Mighty words or Mega words or something? I know that's hardly the best way to pick a curriculum but I'm hoping it'll work out in the end. I'm not particularly passionate about teaching spelling so I'm sure I can adapt it to fit our needs even if it's not perfect. Edit: Oh and someone posted a link to a Sonlight timeline book. I had kind of dismissed doing a timeline this year (just too overwhelmed) but I ordered the book and we'll go back and plug things in for the first few weeks. :)

I have a second and fourth grader and I'm overwhelmed at times about the one on one interaction that seems to be required at every step. My solution is to not follow the directions exactly. For instance, for WWE for both kids, I read the story to them, walk them through the questions but they write down their own narration. I remind them of what they said when they gets stuck. I know that's not following the program exactly but oh well. We do SOTW, but I don't always read the story to them because they are in volume 2 and 4 so we're in two different time periods so it's a bit nuts. Sometimes they read the stories themselves and we go over the review questions together. We do Latin together but the 4th grader gets extra words and has to write stories using derivatives. (These are my favorite writing that she does. They're so random, it's hilarious.) My second grader is very comfortable with math and grammar so even though math says I should be teaching it to her, I usually don't, because she never gets anything wrong anyway. She's in Singapore and sometimes doesn't even look at the textbook. I feel kind of bad about it because I worry that there are nuances to the lesson that she's not getting but I use that time to help my 4th grader with math and grammar because she isn't strong in either subject. I'm very new to all this so I'm still in the process of figuring out how to make this all work smoothly for us. When I was a student, I don't recall getting one on one attention from my mother except for drilling math facts and spelling words. If I had a problem with math, I waited till my dad got home. I started homeschooling in third grade but my mother always bought open and go type curriculum. Though, I really haven't customized any curriculum except our art, which I'm pulling from as many sources as I can (since this is my passion, I'm having a hard time not cramming in as many projects as I possibly can, hehe). Anyway, when I was a homeschooled student, it seems like I worked very independently, compared to what I'm needing to do for my kids.

Funny, I just googled "What is up with google's logo today?" and couldn't really find anything. Made me laugh when I saw your thread. I think I'm really tired because I spent an alarming amount of time playing with the logo.