My husband said he likes women in general. :laugh: He said he just thinks all women are attractive in some way, just because they are women. I"m not sure if I should hug him or smack him....... :crying:

I am TOTALLY heading out to Walmart to buy some sleeveless tops!!! Who knew??? :laugh:

You can try Ebay. Do a search for "Mennonite dresses" or "Amish dresses". There are some enterprising folks who purchase from Mennonite/Amish yard sales in their area and re-sell the dresses on ebay. You will find the traditional cape dresses in a variety of colors, sizes, and patterns very inexpensively.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Pants aren't typically very thick and I don't wear them so loose that it is possible to fit fleece tights or long johns beneath them. With pants the only layer on my legs is the material of the pants themselves. With skirts I can layer as much as I like beneath them, especially with skirts with an elastic waist. This is great for me because we heat with a wood stove in Pennsylvania and it does get cold the further you get from the stove. I would think that you could layer as much as you like for the outside and then use the suggestion of a previous poster to remove the unneeded layers once you get to work. I've been known to put on footless tights and fleece pants under my longer skirts in the winter in the early morning and then remove the fleece pants as the day gets warmer.

I had to smile when I read the OP. No matter how many friends or social activities my kids have, invariably they complain it is 'not enough'. I think it has to be up to the parent to determine if a child's social activity is 'enough'. One guideline I use is if the child's social life is interfering with his or her education, then that child has more than enough of a social life. I would say a couple social activities a week is fine, and I do like to see my kids have at least one close friend once they get around age nine or ten. Before that, it seems to me that friendships between kids are more dependent on the parent and who the parent is willing to take the child to spend time with rather than the personal preference of the child for a particular person. Typically my own kids found their own friends gradually as they got older and spent more time pursuing activities that interested them over just being in school (which my older kids attended until high school) or being involved in the generally expected round of dance classes (for girls), scouts, sports, ect. It just takes time. As for 'not fitting in', I just think that happens when kids are not subjected to so much pressure to conform on a daily basis in public school and a certain amount of 'not fitting in' is just to be expected from kids who have been able to put more focus on developing their own thoughts, ideas, and unique qualities over a focus on conformity. Sometimes homeschooled kids feel free to develop interests and talents that are not common in other kids their age, and this can contribute to a feeling of 'not fitting in' but isn't something to discourage.I also think that it can be a sign of maturity as well, and not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a child might need some coaching to help him handle social situations appropriately or to find things in common with other kids their own age, and if you suspect that one of your children might benefit from this you can do some social role-play type games in your homeschool to help him work on his skills in interacting with other boys. It all tends to even out later in life as well. Humans tend to gravitate towards other humans who share their interests and as your boys get older and have more pronounced interests they will probably find other people who share those interests to spend time with and friendships will grow naturally from that. For now, you are exposing them to a variety of social situations and giving them opportunities to be around other kids and I would say that is just fine and perfectly appropriate for the ages of your sons.

I'm not sure when the public school kids get to actually spend time with any friends since they all seem to me to be over-booked as well. The younger ones are in daycare or daycamp during the day and enrolled in all kinds of activities and sports in the evenings and on weekends. Maybe you can find out when the local schooll-age daycamp is on the playground and bring your kids there at that time to run around. I've found that is the easiest way to get my younger kids out around a group of peers. During the school year it doesn't work as well with the school age kids, but I've still been surprised to find the odd older child out there during school hours, but that time right after school seems to work out better. I started a secular homeschool group myself in order to find homeschoolers, but I have found that most people in my area seem drawn to the Christian groups. We have done scouts and various activities and sports over the years but no real friends ever came out of those. I liked the advice to figure out what you kids like to do and to go where people are doing that. That is pretty much how my older kids eventually made friends once they had developed specific interests. I want to mention also that having had kids in public school, there is no guarantee that spending all day in a class of kids the same age will result in friends either. I still went through this with my older kids when they were in public school.

I did that briefly. It was hard to do a good job with homeschooling with 'extra' younger kids who needed attention and something to occupy them. I wouldn't do it again unless we were absolutely desperate. Maybe afterschool care would be a better fit, or both before and after school care for school-age kids. That would give you your daytime free to homeschool.

One of my adult daughters once wore a dress with a white skirt to the wedding of another daughter. She also wore black bikini underwear.....which I knew because the skirt was a bit see-through, and no slip. She is known to have some racy clothing choices, so I didn't say anything to her as I wondered whether she meant to dress that way. However, weeks later yet another adult daughter was talking about the wedding and started to tease the first daughter about her underwear, and dd was horrified, and upset with ME because I didn't say anything to her at the time! Trust me, you can't win! :sad:

The best free resources are downloads. You do not need on-going internet access! My picks: MEP Math http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/ Intermediate Language Lessons by Emma Serl (Available as a download on google play or www.archive.org) Or SF Grammar and composition at http://www.sfreading.com/resources/ghb.html MacMillan/McGraw-Hill Interactive Science text, workbook, and lab activities http://www.mhschool.com/instructional_materials/ca/fwo.html This Country of Ours is a free download at www.archive.org or google play for American history, or you might check out Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ for some other history and literature books to download. They also have some fun reading books there for kids as well as some classic children's lit too. The Story of Mankind by Van Loon is a great history book too and it is on www.gutenberg.org for download.

We're programmed to gather......whatever we perceive as being something our family needs. Sometimes it's toothpaste, sometimes it's books. What helped me with my obsessive need to collect curriculum was to collect lists of free stuff. Then I started to review the free stuff. I'm about three hundred pages into it, and for me it's like the equivalent of a dog rolling in goose poop, I'm just that happy. Some day I might even finish it up and post a link.......

I lucked out and found a used laserjet printer on ebay for $20. I can refill the toner cartridge myself for under ten bucks, and get over 5000 pages out of it. THEN I found a GBC Surebind 2000 on ebay for $25 plus shipping! So, I have a regular print shop here. Ironically, I've always been a proponent of the 'paperless' homeschool........

I have one. http://www.thestingyhomeschooler.com/free-weekly-planner-for-one-child/?preview=true&preview_id=86&preview_nonce=3904bfb6c3

Our cable internet provider just instituted a limit based on how many of their services you purchase. Since we only use their internet we are limited to 150Gb. If we had cable or phone through them the limit would be higher. We can also purchase additional increments if we wanted. I guess we were using around 200 before this. The actually very nice lady at the cable company told us to change our streaming preferences on netflix from HD to a lower quality. We did that and we haven't had a problem with going over.

We actually did that for two years, before dh decided he just wasn't cut out to be the one at home. His personality just found it difficult to deal with the challenges of being at home and teaching. Unfortunately, I was the higher wage earner but I do prefer to be at home so some financial adjustments were necessary. I doubt he'll want to switch again so I'm not particularly worried about keeping up my skills in my area, in fact I'm branching out into an entirely new field that I've always been interested in and I hope that in the approximately ten years I have left before the youngest kids are done with school that I'll have developed enough of a skill set that I'll be able to continue on with it. Dh would love to be at home to concentrate on his music, but he would have to win the lottery or something, because he would prefer that I continue to manage the kids and their education and run the house.

Just watching the thread with curiosity. We have a 1995 mobile home and I would love to have even a little more space.

In my house if that sort of thing happened, I'd be questioning the usual suspects (everyone under the age of 18). I can see my nine year old screeching that there was a bug on the computer and spraying it.......

I just copied them onto index cards by hand. I didn't want to mess up the book by cutting them out.

Enthusiasm? Nope. Attitude change? Nope. My older two never did get any motivation from online courses. I had been hoping the same thing. It just turned out to be an expensive mistake. One of the girls at that age even signed up for a local face-to-face EMT course and failed it from lack of attendance after she paid for it herself. It's a tough age. I wish I knew a magic formula to share with you to help your dc get through it. I have one seventeen year old now and it's pretty much a daily struggle to keep from murdering him. Hmm......probably shouldn't post that.... :laugh:

I have a 'Week Map' sheet for each kid with the stuff I'd like each one to get through over the course of the week. There is a block for every lesson and a little check box. When it works, the child checks off the box. The lessons can be done in any order or on any day. I tried to have one posted below, but the formatting got a little messed up. I use it as a template to write in the little boxes whatever pages or reading I'd like the child to complete. Sometimes I let the child choose what he or she wants to do for a given subject and the child writes in what was completed. I keep the papers in a page protector. Depending on my mood and the child's level of maturity the sheet is either hung on the wall or the frig or lives in the child's binder.

Hmmmm....... maybe 'My Weird Kid'? "My Oddly Wired Child'? Still thinking..........

Because sometimes, parents DO know best. Kids have a lot of desires and not all of them are healthy. What my kids thought constituted 'sufficient social stimulation' usually meant what I considered ridiculous and excessive, especially as they got older. It was also disruptive to the family and made any kind of academic learning difficult or impossible since the child was more focused on his or her social schedule than on pretty much anything else. Just as I do not give into my kid's desire to eat candy for most meals I do consider it my responsibility as a parent to curb or limit any other desires I consider unhealthy and the 'desire' for increased social activity is one of those desires I do regulate. My kids get candy when I deem it appropriate, and they socialize as often as I deem appropriate. It's called 'parenting'. And yes, sometimes you do have to be the 'bad guy' and not an enabler.

Personally, I'm tired of breasts being used to sell everything from cars to soft drinks. As an OB nurse I once actually caught two young male doctors snickering at the cover of a breastfeeding magazine that showed <gasp!> a baby at the breast. How ridiculous. Maybe if boobs are literally everywhere men will get over this obsession with them and we won't hear of people freaking out and harassing nursing mothers for daring to feed their kids in public. As for the penis, as long as men have a say in it I doubt we'll see many of those on screen. At least we won't until science brings us a penis-enhancer that is effective, and then we'll have the fun of wondering if it's real or not.

We've had some luck with hanging out at the local park. I found that if you tend to go at about the same time on the same days you often fall into a group of other moms and kids who also tend to go on those days and times. Voila! Instant playgroup. You're more likely to find kids at around ages 4 to 6 than older kids, however. We aren't particularly social, but the kids do like to complain about not having friends. Well, they DO have friends, they just don't get to see them every day. Heck, I don't get to see my friends every day either, and I really don't much care for the attitude and smart comments the tweens seem to develop after a session with the 'friends', so I don't have much sympathy. Scouting for us has been more about dealing with 'mean girls' than about positive social interactions. I think there is something to be said for keeping them at home locked in the basement until they turn eighteen. :001_rolleyes:

I hated Saxon K and 1. I was a card-carrying member of the 'Saxon math haters club'. And then........one dd developed a glitch in her understanding of math and nothing worked. NOTHING. In utter desperation I pulled out an old, battered copy of Saxon 54 that I had in a dusty corner of the bookshelf. I'd picked it up years before at a homeschool rummage sale, not knowing any better. Dd loved it. It worked. I still don't know why, but it's her favorite math curriculum. Ds dipped his toes in the water and now he is a Saxon math kid too. I still hate it. I no longer want to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I look at it, but ......