Seriously. My littles are sixteen months apart, and even dealing with a newborn and a toddler at the same time is not nearly as difficult as dealing with my son was when he was a baby and toddler.

BTW, I wanted to mention, car-wise, that you might want to look into the Sunshine Radian carseat. We have one for DD, and when the baby goes forward facing, we'll be getting one for him. We love it. It feels so safe, but it is so narrow. We have a small wagon, and we can fit the Radian, an infant seat, and a booster across the back easily. I'm pretty sure you could fit three Radians across the back of a Prius.

What part of the process seems to get her stuck? Is it coming up with ideas, or putting those ideas words, or getting those words out in a way that she's happy with? If you could pinpoint that, it might help. I cannot watch my husband write. It is painful. It can take him an hour to write a single paragraph. For him, he is okay with coming up with ideas, he's okay with putting the ideas into words, but he just cannot figure out how to put those words down on the page in a way that pleases him. He will agonize over every single sentence, in a first draft. I just leave the room. When I get stuck writing, it's usually at the point of putting my ideas into words. I have a vague idea of what I want to say, but it's so unformed that I can really articulate it at all. Once I have a more solid idea and some sense of how to say it, though, I can knock out pages really, really quickly. Honestly, too, I think that topic stinks. Well, it's not a terrible topic, but that's a ton to cover in one paragraph. Books have been written about the impact the printing press has had on communication, and other books on the impact the internet has had on communication. Asking students to compare the two and describe their impact on communication in a single paragraph is, IMO, a bad assignment. It's just far, far too much for one paragraph. I'd get stuck, too.

The car is a big reason why DH is so resistant to going from 3 to 4. We can get all three in the back of the station wagon, but unless we stash one in the back, it won't work with four. My reasoning is that we're probably going to need to upgrade to a minivan, anyway, if we ever want to drive our kids' friends anywhere, so why not add another kid while we're at it? ;) We had been unsure of a third when #3 came along. I wanted at least one more, but DH was pretty sure we were done. I got pregnant with the baby when DD was 6 months old, so at that point I wasn't thinking of trying for #3 any time soon. I'm not sure what my argument for a third would have been if I'd had to make one. Of course, I'm not sure I'll ever feel like I'm done, emotionally. I think I could have six or seven and still feel like I wanted one more baby. So at a certain point it would have come down to a practical decision of whether we could manage one more, and I do think I could have persuaded DH that three was doable. We'll see if--in a few years!--I can convince him that four would be. My first was super hard, though, so we've always had the thought that any future kids we had could not be nearly so difficult. So far that's proven true.

Oh my goodness, this was exactly my experience with AP literature, and I have never met anybody else who felt that way! Everybody I know is like, "What? No, all AP stuff is just 'take it or leave it.'" Not the stuff I read. The stuff I read made it pretty clear that I'd raise a selfish monster incapable of empathy or human connection if I didn't identify and immediately attend to my child's every need.

A murder or an unkindness, I can never remember. Are you reading Peter Nimble?

I think we assume that there's way too much of a straight, direct line from childhood behaviors to adult ones. Development and maturity don't get taken into consideration. I never had to do chores as a child. Never. My mother wasn't so much permissive/lax as she was OCD about housecleaning. She didn't want anybody else putting things away because we wouldn't do it just right, and she'd end up redoing it anyway. I never washed dishes, did laundry, vacuumed, or do other basic chores until I was on my own. I'm not a slob. If anything, I have a bit of my mom's neurosis about needing things to be very orderly. I picked up housecleaning pretty quickly, and while it's not my favorite thing to do, I'm pretty good, I think, at keeping a relatively neat and tidy home, and can do so pretty efficiently. I was a super, super, super picky eater as a kid. You could have had a very short list of foods I would eat. As an adult, I'm not at all. I have a couple of things things I just absolutely cannot stand--pickles, uncooked tomatoes--and will not eat under any circumstances, but otherwise I'll try (and usually enjoy) almost anything. I've said before on here, the amount of stress I created for myself when my first was little, because I assumed that if I didn't immediately get a behavior or attitude under control he'd carry it with him straight into adulthood, was pretty intense and sucked most of the joy out of my parenting. If I could do it over, I'd have eased up a lot, worried a lot less, and recognized that 90% of the stuff he was doing that I was concerned about was developmentally-normal-albeit-aggravating stuff that he'd grow out of whether I did anything or not. That's not to say I wouldn't have done anything about that 90%, just that I'd have made those decisions aware that my action or inaction in that instance weren't going to be setting the course for the rest of his life.

This. I don't think it's abnormal, but you could just tell her that, when you get a compliment, you respond with "Thank you." If she wants to talk about how hard something was, she can save that for another time.

I just recently got a tumblr. I've been really lax about posting, but I love it. Tumblr makes so much sense to me. It's like the best aspects of Twitter, FB, and blogs combined. Anyway, mine is The Urban Homeschooler. ETA: I checked out your blog and I love your owls. They are so cute they make me want to squee. (We're big owl fans here.)

:iagree: Me too! Plus, you look just like one of my good friends, although you're not her, because she's not Canadian. Welcome!

Because we like to have a variety of opinions on any possible issue ;), some Anglicans consider themselves Protestant, others consider themselves Anglo-Catholic, and still others don't consider themselves either Protestant or Catholic but a "middle way" between the two.

What are you looking for, perspective-wise, other than being secular? Because these books have a very particular bias, and unless that is what you want, I'd say they probably wouldn't be right for you. (I know they wouldn't work for my family.)

My DS really wanted to learn to read right after he turned 3. In fact, he came up to me one day, crying, and I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "I don't even know how to read!" Poor kid. I did some Hooked on Phonics with him, but we only go to the short o sound before he got bored with it. I'm one to err on the side of pushing too little rather than too much, so we dropped it. We still read to him a lot but didn't do any reading/phonics instruction. Then, about six months later, he just started reading. And, not CVC reading; I'm talking about reading actual texts. He would come up behind me while I was reading a novel and start reading off of the page.

My DS is also quite naturally good at spelling, and for me AAS was too much. He liked it. He liked playing with the magnets and chips. But, honestly, it was one of those curricula where I didn't feel the time/effort yielded an equivalent payoff. We ended up dropping it. I honestly haven't found a spelling program that doesn't bore my DS (and me) to tears. I'm thinking of just adapting Phonics Pathways and making it as quick and painless as possible, just to make sure we've covered the basics.

Wow. Thanks for all of the input. This has been really interesting, especially since, while I'm not bad at math, I'm not a "mathy" person at all. I think we're going to continue to work through CLE at a faster pace and with fewer problems, because I feel like it's covering all the bases in terms of the basics. But, I'm going to be more consistent about supplementing with Math Mammoth and with Miquon than I have been, and may also start using MEP to supplement as well.

Exactly. I have a friend who got pregnant at 16, and she and her DD's father married when they were 18. Their DD is their only, which means that, when she turns 18, they'll only be 35. They'll be empty-nesters when I'm still dealing with diapers and tantrums. That's not to say I'd recommend going off and getting pregnant at 16, just that there are always trade-offs. She missed out, no doubt, on a lot of stuff in her teens and early twenties that most of her peers got to do. But, she'll have the freedom and time in her late thirties and forties to do things that most of her peers won't have the opportunity to do. I don't know, I don't think we should get too caught up in missed opportunities, because no matter what we choose, there will always be missed opportunities, and there will also always be new opportunities that arise. I think you can ruin your life by always asking "What if?" If you are going to be worried about what you might miss by getting married or having kids, then I don't think you'll ever do it, because there are things you'll miss. But there are also things you'll gain. It's just how any decision in life goes. I'll say that, personally, it's hard for me to see what really productive, necessary experiences my children would have as unmarried people in their twenties that they couldn't have while married or even with kids. But, I don't put a particularly high premium on travel--it's not something I enjoy doing, and I think extensive travel is financially out of reach for most people--and other than that, it's honestly quite hard for me to see what you could absolutely not do. Then again, I'm not a person who thinks that once you marry or have kids, you've got to settle down and buy a house in the suburbs and start stressing about your financial portfolio and live the kind of conventional middle-class American life. I think there's plenty of room to have adventures and follow your passions when you are married and have kids, and some of the most interesting, close, and healthy families I know do just that.

I would highly recommend watching Inside Job. It's certainly coming from a particular perspective, but it's fascinating and informative nonetheless.

It was quite a reach for him, but DS7 was bored this summer and couldn't find any new books to read, so we handed him The Phantom Tollbooth. He LOVED it. I think he missed a lot of the subtler stuff, but he loved the story. We were treated to about two weeks of him asking us "What does ______ mean?" about every five minutes, though. ;)

I'm going to assume your friend is a good-hearted, decent, reasonably responsible person (as opposed to a serious drug addict or child abuser or something). In that case, I think the best advice is that she really can't screw her kid up that bad. As long as she loves him or her and puts in some effort, her kid will likely be just fine.

That's so funny. I've made play dough a few times, and DS's friends have played with it. I've also made them things like homemade slushies. Those are really easy, no-big-deal things, but a couple of his friends now seem to think I'm magic. ;) They think I can reproduce any and all toys and foods that they enjoy, and are disappointed when I tell them that I can't.

I was not at all generous about my sister's marriage. It had nothing to do with her age; I just didn't like her DH-to-be, for reasons that were quite valid. But, it didn't matter. She was marrying him, and all I did by being a jerk about it was really damage my relationship with her. They've been married for 8 years now, and her husband is a decent guy. I don't know if I was wrong about him or if he's changed, or both, but I do know that what I thought about him 8 years ago does not reflect who he is today. They're happy. I don't think, given some things that happened in their relationship early on (they started dating when they were both maybe 15 or so, and then had an on-again-off-again thing until they were about 20, then married at 23, and we heard all of the unflattering stuff about him during their off-again periods, which didn't cause anybody in the family to like him much), that any of us thought they'd make it past five years. Anyway, whether he was a good husband for her or not, and whether it was going to last or not, was really irrelevant. She was going to marry him. And all I did by not being supportive was hurt our relationship. If things hadn't worked out, or he had been as much of a jerk as I'd thought he was, that wouldn't have mattered, because she wasn't listening at the time and later on she probably would have thought she'd get a "told you so" lecture from me. Outside of truly dangerous situations, like physical abuse, I really think no good can come from opposing somebody's desire to marry. And even in an abuse situation, opposing the marriage is probably much less important than helping the person see the seriousness of the situation. It's not like if they didn't marry but stayed in the relationship things would be fine.

I don't know about 12 months apart. I do think that would be hard. (I met a woman once who had two boys less than 11 months apart. She went in for her 6 week pp check up, and got a HUGE surprise.) But, my third pregnancy, which came about six months after I had my DD (she was 16-1/2 months old when the new baby was born), was my easiest by far. Until maybe the last month, when I was hot and huge and uncomfortable (although even then not as much as you might think given I was nine months pregnant in July), I often forgot I was pregnant. I was really pretty shocked at how easy the pregnancy was, especially since my first was really hard both emotionally and physically. But I think I was in denial about the fact that I was having another baby up until about, oh, transition, so that could have been part of it, too. ;)

I don't know. I think I'm less of a DIYer than most homeschoolers. I do like to knit, but only for fun, and I try to garden, but that's been mostly a fail. But, it might be just this stage of my life. I'd say that I'd probably be more of a DIYer right now if I wasn't homeschooling. With homeschooling, I need to prioritize, and things like baking my own bread, growing my own herbs, and cutting the family's hair myself take a backseat. At this point, I've even given up cloth diapering for a while, until the littles require less near-constant hands-on care. So I think I'd like to be a DIYer, and I might be one at heart, but right now I'm more about letting other people do stuff because otherwise I get overwhelmed. My DH is totally a DIYer, though. For him, I think it's the combination of his hatred of spending money and his hatred of asking other people to do stuff (even if it's their job). He'll spend hours watching YouTube videos and learning how to do something, and then all weekend trying to do it, before he lets me call a repair person. And I'd say 95% of the time, he figures it out.

My DH and I were both non-religious when we met and married. We were raised Catholic, but neither of us practiced in college (or after). I was pretty actively (I mean, intellectually actively, not in the sense of like doing things about it) anti-Christianity at the time, and DH was and continues to be wholly uninterested in all things spiritual, including whether or not there's a God. But our heathen selves wanted to marry. We put it off for a couple of years because my parents were dead-set against it and refused to support it. We most certainly weren't experiencing any family pressure to marry, but instead felt the opposite. Which is probably why we are so passionate about supporting our children fully if they decide to marry young.

I think there's much to be said for this. The bolded was our experience, as well. My DH and I met at 18, moved in together at 19, got engaged a few months later, and married right after college. For all intents and purposes, we lived as if we had an "early marriage," in that from 19 on we lived together in a committed monogamous relationship that we intended to be lifelong. We've had some really, really rough times. We had a lot of growing up to do. But, we did it together. The person I am is so shaped by the person my DH is, and the same for him. And despite having had some really rough times, we have something now that I'm not sure we'd have had if we'd met in our late 20s. We are both so connected to each other on this really fundamental level of having been, literally, the most formative influence on each other's development as an adult that not being together has never really seemed like an option. It would be like cutting ourselves in half, you know? My DH has determined so much of who I am, and I've determined so much of who he is, despite the fact that we're really, really different people (and in some ways more different today that we were when we met). I wouldn't want to give that up. I also wanted to say that I think there are some benefits to being married in college. While we weren't married, we were engaged and living together for our last three years of college; we lived like old married people. ;) And, it was good. I think we both were able to focus more on our studies than our friends who were single, because most of them weren't happily single--they wanted a partner, they were looking for a partner, and there was a lot of partying and hooking up and stuff that took a lot of time away from school. Having the security of having somebody to come home to every day made a lot of aspects of college easier for me, and made it easier to focus on academics. I totally agree that having children in college would make it much harder to finish, and if my children did marry before they finished college and intended to graduate, I'd encourage them to wait to have kids. It's certainly doable to finish college with kids, but it is harder. But I think college while married, assuming you still have the financial support you'd have from your parents otherwise, is easier than college single. It's really only harder, I think, if your parents were paying for it or intending to pay for it and then cut you off and you then have to figure out how to pay for it on your own. I also wanted to say that I'm a feminist. I may in fact be an official one, because I have an undergraduate degree and a master's certificate in women's studies. I still think that, on the whole, early marriage (and by early I mean late teens/early 20s) is a good idea. I think that changing things so that earlier marriage is more viable is a better idea that just pushing people to delay marriage longer and longer. I think respecting the fact that we are interdependent is preferable to promoting a false and unrealistic independence. I think that young people, including young women, should be treated as if they have agency and are capable of making important decisions. I also think that we have some weird ideas about what growing up/maturing entails. We "find ourselves," I think, within close relationships with other people, ones where they depend on us and we depend on them, not by backpacking across Europe. Being married and having kids, for me, sure helped me to "find myself." Before that, I thought I was a patient, kind, and selfless person; I found out I was wrong! ;) That said, while I do hope my children find their life partner when they are younger rather than older, just because I think there's much to be gained from that, I wouldn't push them to do so. But what I will be doing is supporting them no matter what choices they make regarding marriage, and I won't be encouraging them to delay marriage if they don't want to. If they meet the person they want to spend their life with at 18, like we did, we'll be happy to celebrate their wedding when they are 19, and continue to support them financially and materially and emotionally to whatever degree we'd been doing before and were able to. We're also willing to open our doors to our kids when they need us to, whether they are married or single. Our financial support and our willingness to have them live with us will not be contingent upon them remaining single. It's not, for us, about pressuring our kids to marry early, but supporting them if they decide to and doing what we can to make it a viable option for them.