How was he doing before your break? I know I've heard that some schools end up spending the first month or two reviewing the end of the previous year, because long breaks aren't conducive to math education for many kids. I totally understand why yours was longer this year and you did exactly what you needed to, but it seems more than reasonable to spend a month or two reteaching after a long break. In other words, I wouldn't immediately assume that there's a problem with the curriculum, and in a situation in which in a non-mathy parent has experience with and is comfortable with a curriculum, I'd prefer to rule out other possibilities before switching. I wouldn't move on to RS C in this circumstance, but if he was doing better before the break, I would keep doing all the RS activities, and re-do the lessons on addition and place value in RS B. You can always make your own worksheets. If after practicing for a month or two he still doesn't have it, or if he didn't have it before the break, either, then I'd consider a curriculum change. I can't speak to how well MM might work for you in this situation, except that if the break might have impacted him, I would stick with a spiral program, not switch to mastery.

In this time of declining need for handwriting, I think the writing we do should be beautiful. If I want utilitarian, I can type.

We have or have had at one time all of those except the trampoline (we live in an apartment). So it sounds like we're good! Thanks for your response.

If you go to the AoPS site and check out their course schedule, you can see the breakdown of how go through it week by week. Pre-A is two semesters through them, so look at both listings.

We do have most of those, but no space for a sewing machine. Both grandmothers have them, so they're still available. Thanks again, everyone! It's nice to hear from people who have no vested interest in this (i.e. people who don't live in my house, or who want to buy every other thing they've ever laid eyes on for their grandchildren ;)).

I use an app that silences my phone between the hours of my choosing, letting only calls (no texts) through from numbers I've specified. For instance, if my mother calls me in the middle of the night, it's for real and I need to answer it. But otherwise, quiet phone. It's called Agent.

The funny thing in my case, is that my husband took my last name. I'm also proud to be married to him, and he to me, but no one calls him Mr. go-go-gadget.

My mother sent me a card addressed that way, and when my kids read the envelope they asked me ''So... is this for you or for Dad?''

The article uses the words ''prosthetic penis,'' not ''dildo.'' She consented to be penetrated by this person, and she was. You're trying to say that because the person turned out not to be the kind of person she thought they were, that her consent was based on a falsehood and therefore invalid. But if she had had sex with someone she thought was a great person but turned out to be a murderer, she would also not have been raped by them. You'd have to come up with some way of measuring for a court of law how accurate a person's impression of another person is for their consent to be valid, and that's not possible. Similarly, when a man has multiple families and is lying to all of them, he can be prosecuted for bigamy, but not rape.

She consented to be penetrated with a penis, and she was. The fact that it wasn't the kind of penis she was expecting is the tricky bit. What if her partner had a prosthetic finger, and penetrated her with that? Is that rape?

Not always. In the case of full reconstruction (as after a radical mastectomy), a nipple can be grafted out of other tissue and injected with dye to achieve a ''normal'' look, but stimulating that nipple probably won't have the same physical effect as it would on an natural nipple. ETA: even more relevant: entirely prosthetic nipples Or maybe some people could rewire their brains so it would, like the ones who learn to orgasm by having something other than their genitals stimulated, after trauma to the genitals. Still, it's definitely true that there are women walking around with entirely reconstructed breasts that don't respond the same way a natural breast would. That doesn't mean that the woman attached to the breast would respond differently, since so much of sex is visual and psychological. But in the same vein, a person with a prosthetic penis could also respond sexually to using the prosthetic in sexual acts, for the same visual and psychological reasons. ETA: I wonder if the emotional response is different because we think of breasts as passive body parts and penises as active ones. If a woman with a prosthetic breast blindfolded a man and put her prosthetic in his mouth, it wouldn't functionally be different from this case. Yet perhaps breasts are associated with soft and friendly vibes and penises are associated with dominance, there's a different emotional response to what is rationally no different.

No one has argued that she has no right to feel violated. People are just saying that it's probably not ''assault' as such. I do think that the prosthetic-ness of the penis isn't the real issue (we wouldn't have much sympathy for a man who found out his new girlfriend's boobs were fake and got his briefs in a twist about it), but that the person attached to the prosthetic penis had engaged in a pretty significant deception. The woman has every right to feel deceived and violated, but it's probably not assault (which does have a legal definition).

Thanks! Yes, they do very well in the grandparents department. Yes, for I am a First World dweller.

Thanks, everyone. I was inclined to think everything was fine, but I suddenly worried that I was allowing my desire not to have a ton of stuff in my house cloud my thinking. Part of it might also be that we have some close family friends who do kind of the opposite (and seem happy with it, so that's all good, just not for us), and sometimes I feel draconian by comparison. Oh, well. Thanks. We've had lots of science kits in the past, and we have more board games than we could play in six months of weekly game nights. I'm into fiber arts, so that kind of thing is around. They cook about half the meals (I'm in grad school, plus homeschooling, and my husband works start-up hours). They do their own laundry, and have helped build computers, etc., so they're doing well on skills. and Thank you both! Thanks. Your post reminded me that my daughter actually asked for all of us to go to Of Monsters and Men as her birthday present next month, rather than a bunch of smaller gifts.

Yours is different because you had two methods of communication involved: one asking for a file through a text, and the medium through which you sent the file after. If the only medium involved is texting, my statement stands.

Can't you tell by the context of the messages which was the original? I mean, one is the question, and the others are answers to the question. Put the number that sent the question into your contacts list, and text.

This is most definitely the take-away from this situation.

I have two parts to a question I'm wrestling with, one mostly philosophical and the other practical. My husband and I consolidated quite a lot of things this past weekend and decided to take a lot of the art and craft supplies to my MIL's, because she loves that kind of thing and he and the kids are going to go have a regular craft time with her on Saturdays. Everyone's looking forward to that. But as we consolidated stuff and got the arts and crafts stuff ready to go, I started to realize how few ''toys'' my kids have. They're 10.5 and nearly 9 now, and when they were smaller, my living room looked like a Montessori classroom from kid height down, and like a grown-up place upwards. We had tons of puzzles, blocks, Lego, art supplies, train sets, science kits, games, books, dolls, etc. As they've gotten older, we've put away the things they've grown out of, and I suddenly realized that they have less ''stuff'' to do than I thought they did. We still have tons of books, and even more games. We've kept basic art supplies like colored pencils, markers, art paper, origami books and papers, and my daughter's paper flower-making things. The rest of it will go to MIL's, where it'll hopefully get used a lot more than it was here. My kids also have a room at my parents' house--where they spend a night or two a week--with lots of stuff to play with. That brings me to the philosophical question: they don't spend much time playing with stuff anymore, though. Is that because they're getting older and it's the natural progression of things, or is it because we don't have age-appropriate things to play with? My daughter (nine next month) just gave away her dolls to some younger friends, because she never played with them. This was entirely her idea and execution. She's played more with the Snap Circuits than anything else in the last couple of years, and my son's mainly been into collecting (rocks and gemstones, and just recently Pokemon cards), and has started some woodworking projects. But really, they spend most of their free time playing together, without much in the way of stuff. If they get a new thing, they play with the thing for a week and then it sits in a basket, rediscovered occasionally but mostly just a waste of space. We've never allowed tons of that kind of fleeting-interest stuff for that reason. I'm sure that if we did allow it we'd be swimming in it, but that each thing would still be as frequently abandoned, or perhaps even more so. They get 30 minutes of internet time a day, and they often watch Minecraft (despite not having the game) or other video/card game videos on YouTube during that time. Fine. They also get 2 hours of video game time a week, also fine. They read, swim, take jujitsu and ballet class several days a week (plus rehearsals), go to playgroups, have playdates (it feels odd to keep referring to them that way with older kids, but I digress), etc. And as I said, they usually choose to entertain each other or have endless ticklefights when they have free time, anyway. Is it okay that they don't play with ''stuff'' that much? I know that for most of the course of human history, children's play would have looked exactly like this, and that the modern era of toys everywhere and ''nothing to do'' is the aberration, but it still seems sensible, when taking the road less travelled, to stop and have a think about why everyone else is going the other way. So: should my kids have more stuff? And if so, what exactly? We're big on mindful consumption of a smaller quantity of exceptional things, but I'm having trouble coming up with idea for things that would be of long-term, scalable interest for kids their ages. This was easier when they were tiny and we had the Montessori and Reggio Emilia models. Tiny people could stack blocks, and the same people could build models of ancient civilizations with the same blocks a few years later, and so on. Now what? Or are we good?

Don't worry--I won't be taking that bait. I do think, though, that however one thinks of classical education or the educational philosophies most common to this board, they still typically fall well away from unschooling. That distance needn't be hostile (as evidenced by the few unschoolers we do have and get on with perfectly well on this board), but there does tend to be some philosophical distance.

Lu-see-uh or Lu-chee-uh. I wouldn't say Lucille is awful, but I don't care for it.

This. My daughter is in a MW writing class, and the first meeting will be Wednesday. I think that's the standard, and today's class was an aberration. My son knows who your daughter is, Butter! He's the goof who got mixed up for a minute and thought Homer would have written in Latin.

I'd put "Lucia" on the birth certificate and call her "Lucy." The relative would still be honored, and I like "Lucia" much better than "Lucille."

They're taking Ancient Lit (only DS is enrolled, but DD is listening in), and it was truly weird handing them the laptop and getting out of the way (so far, I've made it as far away as the other end of the sofa ;)). That's ridiculous, of course, but I know you all get me. So far, so good! Maybe next week I'll even go do something else while they're in class. Crazy talk!

Regarding the first bolded bit: this forum isn't an intuitive choice of audience for any other reaction than that one. Perhaps you're newer here, but this isn't an unschooling forum. This forum is primarily intended for classical educators, and classical education isn't exactly the opposite of unschooling, but it's well past the middle of spectrum. You'd be more likely to get the reaction you were looking for on an unschooling-specific forum. Regarding the second bolded bit: be very skeptical of this claim. Sixth-grade math assumes fluency with all of elementary math, including operations with fractions and decimals, ratios, long division and multiplication, etc. Saxon 65 doesn't teach these concepts: it assumes students already know them (which is why Saxon K-4 exists). Is it possible to learn all of those concepts without workbooks and textbooks? Absolutely. Is that easy to do? Very much not. From what you wrote, it sounds like someone's giving you the impression that elementary math can be learned by osmosis, and that can certainly be true up until long division and multiplication, but after that, the only students who can learn math without using a curriculum are either those with parents who have a strong enough background to replace a curriculum, or students who are so exceptionally talented that they would learn it in a vacuum.

Except I was reading earlier that Texas has a law saying dealerships have to close either Saturday or Sunday (their choice). So you'd still lose business to the ones that made a different choice, unless you had two dealerships.