I didn't take any death-do-us-part vows. Maybe she didn't either. If your point is divorce is never, ever okay under any circumstances, ever, I think you could have found better articles to make your point. This is certainly one of the more sympathetic divorce situations possible.

This seems superficially plausible, but is there any evidence that canola oil is bad for our bodies (and, say, lard is good)? "Natural" is a comforting word, but foxglove is natural and imitation vanilla created in a laboratory.

Canola oil. I view anything from Weston Price with a Dr. Mercola-level of suspicion. The Mayo Clinic as well as all conventional outlets of nutritional information and research consider canola to be one of the safest and healthiest oils.

Sigh. I didn't ask you to learn about Judaism or change one iota of Catholic practice, nor would I. If people are interested in Jewish practice, it is a lovely thing for a synagogue to have classes to accommodate that. If people are not, that is fine also. Judaism is a tiny, insular religion of some 18 million people. It seeks no converts. It fights no wars. We are the Gadsden Flag of religions. All any Jew has asked on this thread is that if Christians learn about Jewish holidays, they do so in a form other than celebrating them. I can't find anything unreasonable in that request. Jews do not object to Christians practicing Christianity. Orthodox Jews in particular are not participants in the "religious war, take Christ out of Christmas" aspect of prevailing culture. Orthodox Jews educate their children at schools that are open only to other Jews, shop at stores that cater to Jews, and eat at restaurants that cater to Jews. They generally prefer to maintain a bright-line distinction between Judaism and other religions and do not want their children celebrating Happy Festival of Giving Presents and Decorating Trees either.

X is a short-hand for Christ. I don't belong to the Christish religion. Come on. You may not realise it, but the Jews are doing significant internal translating to try to make these subjects understandable on this board. There's a great deal of Jewish jargon that is being filtered out. Getting annoyed over a perfectly respectable short-hand for having to type "Christianity" isn't reasonable. Having an event at a synagogue to teach about Judaism is fine and good. Christians celebrating our holidays is not fine and good. If Jesus is God, and God is a god, then Jesus is a god.

Actually, Judaism is an exclusive religion, and that's not a bad thing. It's an essential part of the religion. We are the set-apart. G-d gave us a particular mission. Not everything exclusive is bad. The marine corp is exclusive. They were given by G-d through Moshe Rabbeinu to the Jewish people, and yes, to the Jewish people exclusively. If you care about the Jewish people, allow us to practice our own religion without taking the holidays we've preserved as your own. If you are unable to respect Jewish feeling on the matter, I don't think that's a good expression of caring.

Eleanor, That's because Christianity as we practice it in the modern western world is mostly creedal. When we say "Jane is a Christian," we mean that Jane professes the Christian faith. We don't mean that Jane's mother was a Christian, or Jane was baptised as a baby (usually), or that Jane's family was Christian a hundred years ago. Likewise, if Jane ceased to believe in Jesus, we'd say "Jane used to be a Christian." Judaism is nothing like this. Think of it closer to citizenship: I'm Canadian because of where I was born or who I was born to. I'm not a Canadian because I believe certain things. I could be a Spanish person who loves Canada, who sings O Canada every morning and puts up pictures of Stephen Harper on every wall, and it wouldn't in itself make me Canadian. I'd have to go through a formal process of becoming Canadian and be accepted by the Canadian government before I became Canadian. Likewise, if I knew nothing about Canada, felt no connection to it, and even left to go live in another country, I'd still be Canadian. Citizenship is a status. Jewishness is a status. Of course, the status of Canadian and the status of Jew confer on the holder obligations. For a Jew, that obligation is basically to practice Judaism. Non-Jews have no such obligation. In fact, you could be a non-Jew who believed that every word of Jewish theology was absolutely true, and you'd have no obligation to even try to be Jewish. So when a Jew does something stupid -- as a people we have a tremendous talent for finding dim things to do; for example, there are many Jewish communists -- that doesn't mean he ceases to be Jewish. If he stops practicing Judaism, he isn't fulfilling the obligations of his Jewish status, but he's still Jewish. He's just not being a good Jew. In fact, while you can renounce your Canadian citizenship, there is literally nothing a person can do to exit the Jewish people. No matter how crazy you go, you still have the obligation to return to the practice of Judaism. Obviously the theology is understanding of people who are raised without Judaism and do not find out that they are Jewish until later in life. But if a man discovers on Wednesday that he is Jewish and on Thursday he wants to go join his local synagogue, he can do that. In fact, people would be very happy to see him. We pray three times a day (okay, my husband does ;)) for G-d to gather in our exiles.

DeMille subsequently put out a book giving fairly exact prescriptions for what a TJED home and day would look like, in Leadership Education. There's also A Thomas Jefferson Education Home Companion coming out next month.

Tibbie, :grouphug: You sound like you've been working so hard to give your boys the best. I can't imagine the pressure you must be under in this terrible economy. Have you looked at the professional programs in college? My brother got his BCom in accounting and is 5/6 of the way to becoming a chartered accountant. He co-op'ed his way through school. He didn't have to do this, but he wanted the opportunity to work with accounting firms. Brother is younger and got an articles position at the nadir of the recession, just because there aren't all that many people with accounting degrees who adore doing audits for a living. But hey, it works for him. He was a terrible high school student. In fact, he was such a bad high school student he had to do the JC-and-transfer route, which saved the family money. Not that everyone who did JC-and-transfer was terrible in school, but he was ;) Engineering degrees are similar here. My mother was a high school drop out who went on to do law school and marry a lawyer and therefore raised children much more privileged than herself. Although in general she was of course happy for the opportunity, she did at times feel somewhat distant from our experience of life, because it was so different than her own. I can imagine that this is more so the case when you are in essence sacrificing large parts of your own peace and peace-of-mind to give your children opportunities you didn't have.

Such a person has left Judaism for Christianity. It is offensive to try to form a hybrid of the two. Obviously we would want him to return to Judaism.

IIRC Oliver Cromwell discouraged or forbid Christmas celebrations during his time as Lord Protector in England. I have also read that large parts of the north-eastern United States did not observe Christmas as a major holiday, unlike the south-eastern United States which did.

Pretty sure that "a god" takes a little g and "G-d" takes the big G. That would be, "You shall have no other god but G-d." Or "in Judaism we believe that there is only one god." The Christian rituals of "observing" Jewish holidays are not the (we believe) correct observances of those same holidays, and are therefore corruptions. Sabbath is not observed by attendance at a service. Passover was given to Jews by G-d so that Jews would remember what G-d did for _us_ in Egypt. I do not of course know the details of how individual Christians observe Passover, but I strongly doubt it is correct to Jewish standards -- cleaning the chametz out of the house, burning the chametz, etc. One seder does not a Passover make. Furthermore, most "Christian seders" make an effort to point out that this is what Jesus did, is tied to the last supper, and so on. Can we agree that seders in Jewish law are not held to better illuminate the life of Jesus? There is a third option: For Christians to make an effort to understand Jewish observance without celebrating Jewish holidays. Part of understanding me is understanding that I'm not you, that my religion exists in its own right and isn't a living museum of Christian origins. I know what transubstantiation is and how a mass goes, but I don't pretend to hold a mass in my home or go receive communion at my local Catholic church. I can learn about something without intruding on it in a way that would be considered disrespectful by the natives.

We don't do projects.

Yes, the Parsha is the same for everyone (pretty much. Some Reform congregations use a three-year cycle). It's similar to the Catholic cycle, but ours goes through the whole of the first five books in order every year.

Not offensive. Incorrect in essential and serious ways. Judaism doesn't consider Christianity to be just another acceptable riff on Judaism (like, say, Yeshivish vs. Lubavitch vs. Modern Orthodox), at least not for a Jew. Opinions on whether it's a violation of Jewish law as to pertains to non-Jews differ. And Jews consider the way that Christians use the Hebrew Bible to be incorrect. AFAIK Christians believe that Jews are barking up the wrong tree too, that we rejected god in man-form, rejected eternal salvation, and are going to suffer eschatologically for it.

I have used the Mott Media Spencerian books and my handwriting is quite attractive now. I would look into a lightning nib if you are a lefty, or write Copperplate with a regular nib.

One of the mistakes I made early on with Saxon was thinking that when I introduced something, the child should know the answer. Saxon relies on repetition over many lessons. Often the first time something is introduced, it's just . . . introduced. And the child won't internalise it. It will look marginally more familiar the next time the child comes across it. And with the early levels of Saxon, the child will come across it a lot.

I don't know anyone who would call it Bible. We say Hebrew and Parsha, depending on which one we're doing. Parsha is the section of the Torah we're reading right now. I think the over-riding word would be "Torah."

We're an Orthodox Jewish family. I find it offensive at worst and deeply off-putting at best when Christians celebrate Jewish holidays. First, those holidays are Jewish and were abandoned by Christians several thousand years ago. Second, Judaism exists in contradistinction to Christianity and always has. Christianity is a Jewish _heresy_, not a Jewish variation. Christians may see themselves as "grafted in," but Jews see them as an entirely different religion. Finally, the Christians who celebrate Jewish holidays do not celebrate them correctly, that is, in a Jewish fashion. Judaism is a religion of specificity. There are very strict rules on what a Sukkah is, how big it is, what it is made of, what you can put on it, where it can be positioned. It's not just any hut you throw up under a tree in your back yard. Shabbes is not just lighting candles and taking the day off of work. Passover is not just a Seder. There are two billion (give or take) Christians and eighteen million Jews, so if even a fraction of Christians attempting Jewish holidays, then more people will be celebrating pretend-Sukkos than real-Sukkos. I don't quite see the relevance of Christmas and Easter celebration by non-Christians. That's an issue for the Christians to handle. Christianity is a very different religion (it's missionary, it's a much larger religion, it's creedal rather than tribal) and might have different conclusions on the matter. I don't know any Orthodox Jews who celebrate Christmas or Easter, CVS. If someone wants to learn about Jewish holidays, that is wonderful. They are welcome at my table. I will suggest many wonderful books to them. Learning is a good thing. I have learned about, say, mass. I do not need to hold a mass in my home or synagogue in order to do this. And if non-Jews want to learn about holidays, the correct way is not by celebrating versions of those holidays in their home, or by claiming that those holidays are Christian or partially-Christian.

Nearly all children can begin learning to read at five, including children with many learning disabilities. My first was as speech delayed as your son appears to be and is reading simple sentences at 5.5. She needed fairly extensive work with phonological awareness and with the alphabet first though. Since then she's progressed at a normal speed.

Reading and writing numbers up to 130. Filling in numbers. Addition and subtraction facts up through 20. Reading. We finished Saxon Phonics K in the first half of the year and we're doing Saxon Phonics 1 now, although I may veer off-course into Phonics Pathways. Saxon is going pretty slowly for her. She decodes one lesson of McGuffey a day. Hebrew alef-bais.

I find quite the opposite in the most modern texts. They seem to make a tremendous effort to find minorities and women, even when those people are not the most interesting or compelling of the age. And I don't think that any modern textbook leaves out black people or black history. But I quite like history-by-great-personality and great events. I went to school after we'd all decided to teach children based on themes and motivations and "ordinary lives," and it was not compelling.

A number of people are discussing wanting something deeper for the history of Black Americans. Just throwing it out there that I have heard excellent things about the anthology from Core Knowledge, Grace Abounding: http://www.coreknowledge.org/grace-abounding-anthology I have not used it, although I've used other things from Core Knowledge. But as I said, I've heard from people with an interest in this area that it is an excellent treatment of the subject.

Sunday through Friday. We break for the Sabbath.

Full disclosure: I do not use the public schools and don't encourage my kids to do anything that they'd do at the public schools, even though the public schools in our area (BC, Canada) are quite supportive. Although school sports are not a big thing in my area. I think it depends on what you see the mission of public schooling to be. I think it's to assist parents in educating their children, subject to the limits the school has to create for self preservation. If music and sports education are a priority for the community, I think it would be in the best interest of the community to offer those things as widely as possible. I'm puzzled by people who think home schooling must be all or nothing. That would make it much more difficult for people with marginal incomes to home school. They're already hit twice -- taxes as well as home schooling costs. So why do we want to pile on costs of speech therapy, sports, and music? The marginal cost of one extra kid in a music class is not high.