It's funny, my husband came home in a mood tonight and it really dragged down my whole evening. When he's in a bad mood, first I ask him if he's ok and if he needs anything from me. Sometimes this calls attention to the fact that he's being a grouch and he lightens up. Tonight was not one of those times. :) If this doesn't work, I try to pull him aside and tell him outright that he's being a grouch and ask him if he wants some time alone to relax from work. This might sound condescending, like I'm putting him in timeout or something, but it's not like that. We both have high solitude needs and try to help each other get the alone time that we each need. Eventually though, his mood will start to infect mine and I get grouchy right back at him and things go downhill. So I don't really have any answers, except that it does sometimes help to approach things very nicely at first. This involves some tongue biting and reminders to myself that he puts up with my moods a lot as well.

:D Oh good. I was worried, there's no way I could do that.

I'm sorry, but is this $300-$500 per child per month or per year? If it's per month, what in the world is this being spent on?

I'm someone who is really into handwriting. I pay attention to how I write, I enjoy writing, and I notice other people's writing. When I was a young kid, I remember having really messy handwriting, and I remember deciding to change them and experimenting with different ways to write. To this day I change my handwriting every so often. That said, I do not write in cursive. I was taught it as a child and wrote in it for several years till my mom stopped caring how I wrote (I was homeschooled), then I switched to printing. My handwriting is small and neat and I've gotten compliments on it. I don't think cursive is a "lost art" but I also agree that it seems unnecessary. We've been kind of dipping our toes into school around here, picking up various subjects and trying them out for fun before we start for real. My second grader is having a lot of difficulty with her handwriting. I just gave her a practice page and it's all I can do to get her to write three or four letters. Tears have been shed over this. Already! Now, the kid is a cryer, and she's also a perfectionist. She will avoid trying something if she thinks she can't do it absolutely correctly the very first time. She kept trying to erase her letters and I said, "No, this is practice, it's supposed to look like that. If it didn't, you wouldn't have to do this. Besides, I think it's good for you to live with your mistakes and move on." She burst into tears and I sent her away to calm down. So part of me wants to drop cursive altogether (her regular handwriting is pretty neat). But I know that if she goes back to school in a year or two (I'm not sure if we will be homeschooling long term... kind of taking it a year at a time at this point) then her teachers will expect her to write in cursive all the time. In the school they just left, you write exclusively in cursive about midway through third grade. Not sure what to do about this.

I think you handled it quite reasonably and at this point I'd be tempted to email the head dean again and tell him you got a phone call from the other dean complaining about the whole situation and that you find such behavior very unprofessional. But people who try to make people jump through pointless hoops to satisfy their own power trips really infuriate me.

I'm going to try to start the 16th. If I'm ready. I haven't even gotten all my curriculum in. I really wasted the first part of the summer being wishy washy about whether we were going to homeschool or not so now I'm just trying not to freak out...

Me too! And people think I'm weird for that but I think there's a lot of good things about it. This last year, my kids' school decided to experiment with their third grade classroom by splitting them up into a boys' class and a girls' class. They had a male teacher and a female teacher and it was a great experience as far as I know. Imogen absolutely adored her teacher and when I went on field trips, it was awesome to see the rapport that the other teacher had with all those boys. There were more boys than girls so I figured the poor guy had his hands full but they really listened to him and respected him.

I had my kids in a private school and this will be our first year homeschooling. The most important thing to be aware of in my opinion is (as I'm sure you know) not all private schools are created equal! Do lots of research, talk to everyone you can in your town, talk to administrators, see what teachers the schools will put you in contact with. We picked our school because it was the only classical Christian private school and we ended up loving it. It is associated with ACCS which is an organization we had done a researched on and trusted. Some private schools seem to have a lot of kids that are in private school because they kept getting in trouble. The parents yank them out of public school and stick them in private school with a bunch of other kids who were getting into trouble in public school. So it's basically the same kids but with uniforms. Our private school had a great environment that encouraged kids to mentor younger children rather than seeing younger children as people to pick on. Not that all the kids were perfect or anything (I'm pretty sure that none of them were). Also, the school tended to expect parents to enforce the rules. If your kid broke rules (which my nine year old was fond of doing) then pretty much the most they would do is give her a talking to and inform you of the problem. You were expected to follow up on it however you felt was appropriate, but having your kid in their office repeatedly for the same offense would be a problem. Overall, my kids' experience with private schools was wonderful. In fact, I feel like I kind of gush about my kids' school, but let me assure you that it wasn't perfect. I did have some minor complaints that were worth putting up with.

Personally, I let my kids stay away from me quite a bit. They've spent almost every Friday night at my inlaws' house since we moved here seven years ago in July. Genevieve will be 8 in October. So yeah, she was quite young when she started staying over. Now, my inlaws are still young (in their 50s) healthy and energetic. They only live about 8 minutes away and are not at all overbearing and respect our parenting decisions or this would not have worked. But having every Friday night with my husband has been amazing for our marriage. We got married rather young and had kids right away so we didn't get to spend those kid free years together. Which is fine, but I do love our time alone. And my kids love their grandparents and have such a special relationship with them. If anything comes up, of course, we skip a weekend. In fact, this month has been the first month that they've spent more Friday nights at home than at my inlaws' house. My mother-in-law has just been out of town a lot this month for various things. We've had to put up with TV watching. We don't watch television at home but we figure watching a couple Disney channel shows one night a week will hardly leave permanent scars. When I lived nearer to my family, I also allowed them to keep my kids overnight. They lived an hour and a half away, the home situation was much worse in a lot of ways. I trusted my mom with the babies, but there were a lot of reasons that was probably a bad idea. But back then I was young and very stressed out and badly needed the break. My father has suggested that I allow my kids to spend the summer with him and in now way is that going to happen, ever. My father's wife is out of town most of the week so they'd be spending most of their time with my father, which is not a good idea for so many reasons I don't have time to type them all out. Also, he lives 700 miles away and I just don't feel comfortable sending my kids that far away for that length of time. So basically, I think you need to weigh several factors when making a decision like this. The age and independence of the child, the trustworthiness of the caretaker, how far away they live and how long the child would be staying. But as far as the idea that you don't understand why you would send them away, there are plenty of reasons. Don't underestimate how special that time can be for your kids and their grandparents. They will always have those memories. My husband stayed with his grandparents every Friday night growing up (so this is a kind of family tradition with them) and he was very close to his grandparents and loved his time out on the farm. I also feel that it's good for kids to be able to spend a night away from their parents and to view it as a fun little adventure. You never know when some emergency will come up and do you want that to be the first time they are without you over night? Or if some emergency happened, wouldn't you rather be able to deal with it, knowing your kids will be just fine without you over night? Also, the time spent with your husband, even if you're just curling up on the couch to watch a movie is special and can help to nurture your relationship. Our weekly ritual is ordering Vietnamese food and sitting around talking. I could never do without my inlaws, I truly appreciate everything they do for us.

I love the basement idea and I wish I could do something like that. We have two living areas and so for me it's a matter of moving some furniture around and making a school area in one side of the room. This will be our first year homeschooling, so I can't really talk about the practicalities of it, but I homeschooled as a child and for a while we had a schoolroom. We loved it. It was great to be able to close the door and school was put away and we could focus on family life. The schoolroom would get messy, books stacked up, papers everywhere, etc, but that was ok, because it wasn't getting into the rest of the house. Later my mom had more babies and the room had to be used for a bedroom and we did school at the dining room table and we liked it a lot less. There wasn't a place in the dining room to have books and supplies so we were forever carrying things back and forth. We had to clean it up every evening to get ready for dinner. My experience growing up is why I am creating a school area instead of just using my dining room table. I read comments from people disparaging the idea of "school at home", and maybe I'll end up not using it as much as I think I will. But for now, I think it'll be quite good for us. Both girls have desks of their own and I have my own desk. We have shelves for books, bins for supplies, and yes, even a wipe off board. It's not a separate room but I like the idea that all school stuff belongs in this area and we can walk away from it at the end of our day without an involved clean up. School can happen anywhere, and just because we have a place for school doesn't mean that cuddling up on couches with a book is just out of the question or something.

Why do you assume that if students are inspired, they will only be inspired to write poetry? Each person is different and each person has something they can be good at and passionate about. You CAN inspire each student and turn them into scientists and doctors and teachers and architects and writers and engineers and programmers and politicians. And nowhere in her speech did I notice her ridiculing hard work. How strange that you got that out of the speech.

What is your opinion of this list? http://www.classical-homeschooling.org/celoop/1000.html I grew up around lots of books and I have to say, there's a lot on these lists I haven't even heard of. But my husband has great faith in this list and wants to start just buying books because they are on it and having our kids read them. I just don't know for sure if this is a reliable list. What is everyone else's opinion?

Whoops. I'm really not sure how I ended up on such an old post. Strange...

How adorably whimsical! I find myself wondering how she managed to get her daughter to fall asleep on the floor so often. And the baby must be pretty heavy sleeper.

I live in Missouri, moved here from Texas. The weather here is very erratic. We get tornadoes. We get ice storms. But we also have four seasons. The summers are hot, but they don't drag on and on and on. The winters are cold and the kids can build snowmen but the snow doesn't stick around for ages. The springs and falls are completely gorgeous. Fall is my favorite season, mostly because spring is evil and I can't breath. Yeah, this area is bad for allergy sufferers. Every year it feels like nature wants me dead and is a little closer to accomplishing it. :)

I got boxes of 24 crayola crayons for 25 cents. Also markers and colored pencils are cheap.

I think it's beautiful that you've learned to recognize your husband's expressions of love when he has a hard time expressing it. That must have taken some patience on your part.

People are dysfunctional and can manage to be in love with people who are very bad for them. Think of those volatile relationships where there's tons of fighting, screaming and yelling, but they stay together for year after year because they hate the thought of being apart and the good times are just so good that they can just forget about the bad times till it all explodes all over their lives again. I think I just described my parents marriage.

There was the one by this Indian guy about something he called "hole in a wall" schools. He lived in an area in a city in India where there was a wall dividing the better part of town from the slums. And slums in India are pretty bad. Very very poor. So anyway, they cut a hole in the wall and put a computer in it, protected from the weather. They hooked it up to the internet and watched what happened. Kids who had no experience with computers would approach the computer, play with it, figure out how to do things with it on their own, and then turn around and teach other children about it. They replicated this many times in even quite remote villages. They would install the computer and leave and come back months later to find the kids had learned to do all kinds of things, even when everything on the computer was in English and none of them spoke it. It was an interesting lecture about human thirst for knowledge, fearlessness of children in experiencing something new and how teaching can happen when there is no teacher.

It was Mal's totem, but she's dead. The point of having your own is so that someone else can't create a copy of it in a dream and thus fool you into thinking you are in reality because it matches exactly. It was her totem but because she's dead, she no longer has a consciousness to copy the totem in the dream. The only Mal you see is from Cobb's memories or a manifestation of his subconscious. The fact that he walks away from the totem is interesting. It could mean that he no longer cares if it's a dream, or it could mean that he feels secure enough that he's in reality not to worry about it. :)

I don't think the whole thing was a dream. The top topples too many times in the movie, and that's only supposed to happen when he's awake, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of a totem. So I believe that the characters were real. When Cobb and Kaito (sp?) wake on the plane, they didn't have to go through all the layers of the dream. They just had to jump off the nearest building and wake up. When you die in the other layers, you end up in limbo but once you're in limbo, you can't go down anymore, so you wake up. That's how Cobb and Mal left limbo the first time, laid on the train track and died. The reason I think the ending wasn't a dream is when Cobb is sitting with Ariadne in the cafe, he asked her how they got there. Then he tells her that you never remember how you got to where you are in a dream. But Cobb leaves the plane, goes through immigration, is picked up by his father in law, and arrives home. There's a clear path to arriving at his destination. As far as his kids' ages, the movie is very careful not to tell you any time frames. You don't know how old they were when Cobb and Mal spent time in limbo, how long it took Mal to decide to kill herself, how long Cobb spent after her death before he fled the country, how long he was out of the country working. Even if I'm wrong, happy ending, right? :) Oh as far as the kids looking the same, the flashbacks or dreams or whatever don't always show things that are entirely accurate. They show Cobb and Mal laying on the RR track young and then old.

Sorry but when someone is causing that much active harassment in your life, you celebrate them being gone out of your life, for almost any reason. It's not like she's happy they were found dead in a ditch or something. They lost a house, it's sad for them, but happy for everyone around them.

My guild is the same. Most people in it are married or in long term relationships, most have kids or are in the process of having their first. We've got people on breaks because they're dealing with a new baby or late pregnancy. There's an understanding the real life comes first.

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll check them out. I've heard of Analytical Grammar. I find it challenging to find the right level of difficulty. I don't want to push them too hard or overwhelm them, but I don't want to bore them either.

I don't care if it's Christian or secular. We are Christians but I don't need every single book to be Christian. My budget is flexible but I can't afford things that cost hundreds of dollars. And I do need it to be something that they can do fairly independently though I am obviously here to help and don't mind explaining concept to them. I just can't have every subject for both of them to be totally hands on, one-on-one. I have two kids and want to keep them both challenged, and they are at different levels so I can't just put them both in the same class and have them do the same thing. We're doing science and Latin and art together, but history, math, grammar, writing are separate.