Oh, yes, that is true; I saw that and then forgot it when I actually responded. Very good point. I agree that a therapist might be helpful, as well as trying to find positive ways to connect with him.

I think Juliet/Juliette (I think I prefer the feminine look of the "ette") Anna Maria is lovely! Two middle names, yes, but that particular combination doesn't seem too cumbersome to me. For the paperwork, could you use Annamaria, all one word? Love your boy choices too! I'd have used James if it wasn't already used in our family. DH didn't go for Joseph/Josiah, but a little baby Joey -- I could have gone for that! John Paul sounds good with a last name similar to what you have.

I keep them rear-facing until around age 3 and have a seat that accommodates that (Graco MyRide -- great seat, goes on sale at amazon for a reasonable price). You might look into the Cosco Scenera; it's not quite as bulky or as expensive as the MyRide (and now I can't remember why I didn't go for it instead of the MyRide), but it will do RF'ing until 35 pounds. (My 3yo's still outgrow the seat in length before they hit the RF'ing weight limit.) My current 25-month-old is 27 pounds and will be RF'ing until we need his MyRide for the current newborn, which should be in about 18 months (I tend to have big and tall newborns, so our infant seat is also one of the higher limit ones). At that point, we'll move the current 2yo to the current almost 5yo's harnessed Maestro, and the current almost 5yo will get a booster.

My children really liked the Stories of _____ (Beowulf, etc.) Told to the Children, and Our Little ____ (Celtic, etc.) Cousin of Long Ago. DD likes Edith Nesbit as well, and she has liked some of the fairy tale collections from Yesterday's Classics (Celtic Fairy Tales was a hit, IIRC).

Excessive silliness, dawdling, or bugging siblings gets you sent out of the schoolroom here. Getting sent out means you don't get your work done, and not getting your work done means no screen time (and you may end up doing your work on the weekend or missing some fun activity). Can you send your younger one out to run a few laps around the house or something, before sitting him down to work? This is very effective with my 8yo if he's being silly or unfocused, and it's not punitive like being sent out of the schoolroom is. I also give my kids the speech about school being their job. What happens if Daddy doesn't complete his work at the office? What happens if I don't complete my job of feeding babies/doing laundry/grocery shopping? This is their job. And I have no problem reminding them that the law says they have to do some work, and if they flat out won't do it for me, they'll have to do it at a school building all day long. They've never been to school, but the idea of it taking up their whole day doesn't thrill them; sometimes they just need to be reminded that being homeschooled IS a privilege. Also, I remind them that if they don't do it for me, I will report to Daddy, and they generally don't want that. (We have so many littles that typically, Daddy is the one who does the bulk of the fun adventures for the big kids. Nobody wants to disappoint Daddy enough that they lose a chance at one of his outings.) I also will have DH sit down and have talks with the kids about their attitudes; this is particularly useful for boys, I think. It's not that they don't respect me, exactly, just that if something is a big enough deal that I'll take up Daddy's limited time at home to discuss it with him, it's a big deal indeed.

I would print/get some fraction circles and have her manipulate them that way. Also, relating anything to food works well for my daughter, as does money. Does your daughter get things like 1/4 of a dollar is a quarter? I'd start with that and see if that helped. I also wouldn't have a problem tabling a topic for a very short period, but I'd be careful to present it as "let's take a break and look at something else" rather than "this is soooooo hard."

I don't worry about lining topics up for math. My one son is in Miquon yellow and Singapore 3A; we roughly alternate them by day, and they may or may not cover similar topics at the same time. I actually think that's one of the strengths of using two programs, letting a topic sink in for a bit and then revisiting it in maybe a slightly different way later, combining the best of a mastery program and a spiral one. My daughter is using Saxon Algebra 1/2 this year, but we're alternating it with supplemental problems on pre-algebra-ish topics and word problems. She seems to like this; it gives her a break from Saxon, which is effective for her but a bit tedious, and it's slowing her down a bit, because I don't want her to hit algebra until 8th grade (she's in 6th now; we'll do Algebra 1/2 over two years). It also is hitting some more practical application of math, which Saxon is a little weaker on, IMO. For things like history, we would use a spine one day, Monday or Tuesday, and then supplemental books/projects/activities/etc. the other days of the week. Those I did line up.

Ah, there's a category I missed, and that's what I was trying to get at -- what gets dropped in order for sanity to take priority. Thank you for adding your perspective!!

Miquon is pretty cheap, but not if you also have to pay $5 shipping on a $6 book, so we do it orally. For the few pages that really require writing, we just copy those few pages, but it's less than 10% of the book.

Thank you! He's doing very well. Eats a lot. 10 days! Wow! My latest (my second) was 8 days past my due date, and I thought I was going to go crazy waiting. 4 days this time was quite enough, especially since I had contractions off and on for about ten days before they finally got intense. Happy due date to you, but I hope you do not get to anywhere near 10 days this time.

This is an important point -- knowing what matters to you and your family. Of course, my husband would prefer clean house AND nice dinner, but given the choice, he'd rather have dinner than sparkling clean house. Neither is right or wrong, but one speaks to my particular DH more, and one speaks to someone else's DH more.

Yes. This nailed it. I definite "pit" or "not clean" or "from scratch" however anyone wants to define them, and I realize that those definitions will vary. My poll was more to encourage moms who do often feel that there just aren't enough hours in the day, that sometimes you have to put off your personal ideal of how you'd *like* something to go in order to do the things that *need* to be done, and that that is okay! I've also noticed that when I chat with local moms, one of us will say, "I couldn't do what you do," and that's really true -- I couldn't do what someone else does, in the context of my own situation, and vice versa (like, we do very few outside activities because with DH gone long hours and living rurally, I just don't have time for a lot of driving, but I have a friend whose children do a lot of outside activities, and teaching materials that require a lot of pre-planning on her part are not right for their faily -- it's all good). And I was just curious: if you have to let your ideal go in some area, where is it?

So which of these things are true in your house? I'm just curious to see what we moms tend to give up the most when we run out of hours to do it all.

I let my kids (the older ones, not the toddler) use the cheap styluses on the iPad, with no problems. I do have some inexpensive screen protectors for it; we had one get a small scratch in it (watch the cheap styluses, as some of them can have snags on the edges), but it didn't hurt the actual screen at all, just the protector.

A bluetooth keyboard/case and the QuickOffice HD app make the iPad able to do most things that Word can do (word processing and spreadsheet); Dropbox makes it pretty easy to transfer things between the iPad and desktop as well. I'm not saying that a tablet is necessarily a better choice than a laptop, just that it can do a lot.

I use it for planning -- the HomeschoolHelper app and note-taking apps. It acts as an e-reader. I can put music on it. Quick internet access instead of stopping to head to the desktop machine. Use it as a whiteboard or notepad; DD prefers to do her math on it, and it does make corrections easier. I scanned math tests and turned them into PDFs, so they can be written on directly. Particularly nice if you school outside the home frequently. Last year, I used it when I taught a co-op class -- I had the photos to show the boys on it, as well as my lesson plans (with annotations), and the music we listened to (not to mention the book we were reading). Curricula like Mr. Q -- too big to print, not great on a Kindle, but very nice on the iPad. Drill and practice games/apps -- math, geography, etc. Mango language app -- very nice so that the kids can take it to a quiet place in the house. Entertain the toddler when needed, LOL. (I don't do this very often.) Today's Document app from the National Archives -- I have the iPad at the breakfast table, and we look at that app a few times a week.

I don't micro-plan to the extent of "on day X, we will do Y." What I do do is to decide the order in which we'll cover things; most of it is just do the next thing in the book, so it's easy. I have a general idea of how much will be a day's worth of work, but I also know that I may adjust that -- we might be really into science and want to do two lessons, or my son's math will be easy, and he'll want to do more pages. Or a concept will be harder, and he'll only want to do a page or two, or the day is just not coming together (kids are distracted, small kids are interrupting, whatever), and we'll only do a small portion of science or history. I'm less about completing a certain amount of work (except for math and grammar-related stuff for kids who have to take standardized tests in the spring) and more about enjoying it more. But having a plan does help me to make sure that we get the extras done; it's very easy for me to default to doing math, literature, and Latin -- which is great, but they do need a bit more than that. And for science, I absolutely have to have a detailed plan, because it's not my favorite subject, and without some sort of detailed plan, I will let it slide. One way or another, whether I do it or the package does it, it has to be spelled out for me easily, so that each week, I can open and go.

I have concluded that very few homeschooling moms do it all. There simply are not enough hours in the day. Most moms seem to give something up, somewhere. Typically, one of the following seems to be true. -They only have 1 or 2 children (and no very small ones). -Their DHs are home a lot, or they have relatives nearby who help a lot. -They don't clean much. -They don't cook much. -They use very non-teacher-intensive educational materials. I have five kids, three of whom are under the age of five, and my DH works very long hours. I have great parents and ILs, but they all live far away. Because of budget and health concerns, I cook a lot. Because it works better for our budget and for our children, I use a lot of educational materials that require a lot of effort from me. Guess what I don't do much of? Yep, cleaning is last priority on my list. I'm not doing any housework right now, since I have a newborn, but my general goal is about an hour after breakfast to do dishes, swap laundry, vacuum/sweep, wipe bathrooms. Then an hour or so in the afternoon while I'm making dinner, where I'm folding laundry for the kids to put away, and the kids are tidying the house. I assign a room or two for each kid to pick up, and that's their job. I also try to tidy my school desk and the kids' work areas and get the work laid out for the next day. If the deep cleaning doesn't get done, so be it. Be gentle to yourself, mama.

I understand so much of what you've said. (((HUGS))) Somehow, two dedicated introverts (DH and myself) got together, fell in love, and had five children. In addition, I'm very sensitive to background noise. It is very easy for me to be overwhelmed by general commotion. The feeling of being "on" all the time is probably the hardest thing for me about homeschooling/having a large family. Independence. Haha. My 8 and 11 yo's do a few things independently, but for a lot of subjects, we still all work together. Or if they can do the work independently, they still need a lot of guidance and hand-holding. Little steps at a time: "You do these math problems while I take a nap; skip any you can't do, and we'll go over them later." Doing what they are able to do is what earns them their screen time.

We had a split king for a while, because when we moved into our first house, our queen mattress wouldn't fit up the stairs, but two twins did. It was a nice arrangement, and the extra space plus the separate mattresses did help us not to notice movements as much.

I didn't buy much this year either. A couple of rolls of Scotch tape. A couple of packages of pencils and a couple of packages of crayons. A binder and tabs for DD for her WWS and a couple of binders to use for their portfolios, because I like a particular type. A package of rulers. A new pair of scissors for DD, because the small ones are too small for her now. Oh, and a new pencil box for DD, since her old one was cracked. I wanted to buy more, but one, the sales were not nearly as good this year, and two, I couldn't think of anything else we needed, since I'm still using up the notebooks, folders, and paper that I bought last year and the year before when the sales were really good, and I bought printer paper and ballpoint pens earlier in the spring when I needed them and they were on sale.

I don't have a tween son yet, but my tween daughter has several friends who are boys. They are friends because they get along well and have similar interests and personalities. They're all nice boys, and if she ever dated them, it wouldn't break my heart, but I would never ever push for that and wouldn't encourage that sort of thing at her age. At some point, we may need to be more cautious about how she hangs out with them (like, right now, they all enjoy stomping around in the woods together, and at some point, we may need to put limits on how that's allowed to happen), but right now, I hear her speak about hanging out with the boys the same way she speaks about hanging out with her BFF, who happens to be a girl. I'm glad she is friends with people because they get along well and have similar interests, rather than limiting herself to "girls being friends and boys are icky unless I have a crush on them," at least at this age. I think it helps that her BFF's older brother is one of their pals, and that some of her friends, boy or girl, have younger brothers DS1's age, so it's generally one big conglomeration of kids who happen to enjoy the same sorts of things.

I love it!

When we were about 2 hours away, we went over every few months, but they also came to visit us a lot. If we went four weeks without seeing one or the other sets of grandparents (they all live in the same town), that was a lot. They tended to come to us in the summer more than we tended to go to them because they all live along the route to the beach, and going to them meant sitting in Chesapeake Bay Bridge traffic. Now that we live about 3.5 hours away, we only go to them about twice a year, usually around Memorial Day and Thanksgiving or Christmas, but also, we have a lot more children now, so it's tons more work to pack everyone up. My dad is also semi-retired now, so it's easy for him and my mom to pack up and come to visit us (they have a camper and stay at a nice campground resort nearby).

I don't think that's a silly question; I appreciate you asking it. We were given the iPad, so I didn't really research other options much at all, but eventually, we'll probably want a second tablet so the kids don't keep stealing the iPad from me, and I like reading feedback about the other options. One thing that you may want to consider, especially if you don't have a high speed connection, is the 3G capability, so that you can update the tablet via cell service. I have that capability but don't use it because I don't have a cell plan that allows for it. However, I could buy a week or month of 3G service to take the iPad on vacation. I also live rurally; the nearest library with free WiFi is 20 minutes away, so I'm not there more than once a week, but if I lived closer, I could easily see popping in a couple of times a week to update the iPad. Two or three times a week, there are apps that have updates; most of them are pretty minor and could wait easily. I have also stopped at certain gas stations or McDonald's to use their WiFi (even without getting out of the car) when I've needed directions. A lot of places like doctors' offices offer free WiFi too, although some of them block certain sites (oddly enough, one office blocks our local library). So I think with some planning, you could easily use the tablet without fast internet at home (and maybe you could download e-books with your regular internet connection, if it doesn't take too long, and you could use the tablet's USB to hook to a regular computer if you have one). One of the drawbacks to the tablet is that with WiFi, I can be easily connected to the internet -- it can be helpful (like, typing from bed or taking the tablet to the kitchen to use as a portable cookbook), but it is a huge distraction too. ;) If you have small people, I am really impressed with the iPad's guided access feature, although I don't know if other tablets offer similar. I can lock the iPad so that nobody can access it without a code, and I have it set to need a password before allowing any purchases. I can also set it so that a kid can't get out of a particular app without the code -- this keeps my school-age kids from playing games when they're supposed to be working, keeps my toddler from hitting the "home" button when I'm working on it, and keeps my toddler and preschooler in one particular app.