We are nearing the end of dh being gone on a 15 day business trip on the other side of the planet. So I have been flying solo for 2 weeks now and we have no family near us to help out at all either...so yeah...mine are driving me nuts too! At this point I am counting hours until dh gets home and I can have an afternoon off.

I am not a yoga fan at all either. I say if you aren't into it, just find something else. There are so many great ways to exercise. If you find something you really love you are so much more likely to do it regularly.

My kids will be 5 and 7 in the fall and this is my plan. We will see how it works out in reality. This will be my first year trying to incorporate 2 kids into school time (beyond busy bag type activities that my younger one had been doing to the school table along side us)

Charlie's soap. I discovered it when cloth diapering :-)

Lots of beach days, camping, hanging out a lot with friends who we don't get so see much during the rest of the year because they are in public school.

I agree with this. My dh is a perfectionist and struggles with this A LOT at his job. He simply doesn't have enough hours in the day to do every single thing to perfection and he has a really hard time letting things...ANY things....go. His boss, who is a wonderful lady, is constantly trying to help him work on this skill...knowing how to pick and choose where to put in the effort, and where to just get things done and move on. I think that it is a valuable, and necessary life skill. DS is also a major perfectionist and sounds a lot like the the OP's son. Although he is only 6. I am constantly working with him on this. We homeschool, so I can avoid certain assignments, but it still comes up. For example, handwriting has been a nightmare for us because he wanted it to look perfect from day 1. He still gets really upset if he accidently writes a letter backwards or forgets to put a space between words or something. I will second a suggestion someone already made to model making mistakes. Ds loves to correct me when I am reading. I have got to remind myself to try that more often in other areas.

My 2 cats sleep in outr bed at night. One stays at the foot of the bed. The other sleeps on top of my chest usually, lol. She was my "baby before I had my human babies" and I think she tries to take full advantage of nighttime since it's now the only time she can get me to herself.

I am so so sorry...it's unbelievable.

Thx!

About half way through this year I stared planning following the methods Chelli lays out in her blog posts...see here: http://www.theplantedtrees.com/p/homeschooling.html Scroll down and there are links to her whole planning series. It has bee SO helpful, especially the "planning your subjects" link. I will definitely be planning this way for next year. It's so flexible and user friendly.

This drives me nuts too. I am the opposite though. I taught high school history....how that qualifies me more than anyone else to teach my first grader to read is beyond me, lol.

Just agreeing with what everyone else has said. I use SE and a friend of mine uses US. I recently looked at both to compare and the only real difference I could see was in the HIG. The topics covered looked pretty similar to me, but I only looked at the first grade ones.

We are on level 2. For compound words I just tell my son in advance which word is a compound word. For words that he misses that follow rules we have already covered: After every dictation I ask him to reread his writing and see if everything is spelled correctly. I figure this is just a good habit everyone should have for most things they write. If he doesn't catch the mistake on his own, then I tell him there is one mistake and give him a chance to find it. Usually at this point he figures it out and we briefly discuss the rule that he forgot. If he still can't find the mistake I will point out the word that is misspelled and see if he can figure it out. As a last resort, I will say something like "why did you decide to use 'k' here instead of 'c'" or something like that. He actually gets really excited when he is able to catch his own mistakes. :-) Also, I just wanted to note that it did take me a bit to adjust our speed in level 2. We have had to slow down significantly and do a lot more review than we did in level 1 for things to really "stick". Hope that helps :-)

Anyone ever used either of these? Our charter umbrella is offering them next school year, but we have to pay for them out of our allotment. Trying to decide if it's worth it. Thanks!

These books are awesome!

I just got an email for them. They are editing the language arts guides now and plan to post samples of them soon. I noticed they have some science samples up now.

Hands down my favorite sandals of all time are OluKai sandals. They are not cheap, but IMO worth every penny. They last forever, and they even come with a year warrenty. I wear sandals every single day, and when I was about 7 month pregnant with my first child, my feet were killing me. I found a pair of OluKai sandals, tried them on in the store, fell in love and have worn nothing else since. Here is the link to their store online: http://www.olukai.com

Definitely check out the sequels to my Fathers Dragon. The Cricket in Times Square was another favorite. The literally would have had me read the whole thing in one day if I had been willing. The Chocolate Touch All the Little House books Charlotte's Web and Trumpet of the Swan were another 2 that my kids really enjoyed.

Does BookShark language arts look basically like SonLight minus the God stuff? I am curious to see a sample of that before deciding on our language arts plans. I have looked at the SonLight online samples at length, but I am not sure if BookShark is the same or if they have made significant changes. Thanks :-)

I emailed them this week and asked about this. They emailed me back and told me that they are planning to add the second grade reader options (regular, intermediate, and advanced) to the first grade package by June 1st.

I agree Champagne pond is awesome!

I live on the Big Island, so I am going to bias and say you should come to this Island. It is actually prey easy to find vegetarian food here, especially on the Hilo side of the island. For things to do: you could easily spend a couple of days in the volcano park. There are lots of cool hikes. You should definitely hike through the Thurston Lava tube. The crater rim trail is a good hike if your little one is a descent hiker. The steam vents are also really cool to see. I would also make an effort to snorkel at some point. The Waiopae tide pools are great for kids to snorkel. They are these little pools that you can just set the kids down in. I put goggles on my 4 year old and give her a noodle to float on and she is happy to look at the fish there for hours. My favorite beach on the island is Hapuna Beach, which is on the other side of the Island. The resort there, Hapuna Prince Hotel is a great place to stay and has beach access, though it's not cheap. Richardson's beach in Hilo is a nice, easy to get to black sand beach. Be sure to stop at "4 mile" on the way there. There are ALWAYS turtles there, so it's a great photo op :-) there is also Green Sand Beach. It's a track to get there, but really cool too. For relaxing and seeing some sights, the Big Island is awesome. If you can do 2 islands, Oahu is also great and there is more "stuff" to do, but it's also going to be WAY more crowded, especially the beaches. The Polynesean cultural center is awesome though. They also have the aquarium and zoo, though they are nothing special if you have been to good aquariums and zoos on the mainland. They have lots of shopping too, which is why most of us who live here go over there :-) My favorite island for beaches is Kauai. One after another, beautiful white sand beaches. I really recommend getting "Big Island Revealed" book. There are ones for each island...."Oahu Revealed", "Maui Revealed", "Kauai Revealed" .....they are the best Hawaii guide books I have found.

I live in Hawaii and every house here is "shoes off". It would be really weird to keep your shoes on, though I don't think most people would be offended by it. It would just be like wearing a big giant flashing sign that says "I am not from here". Lol. I have lived here for 13 years now, and I find that when I go back to the mainland to visit relatives I feel really weird leaving my shoes ON when I go into a house, like in am being rude or something. My kids were totally confused when we went back to the mainland. They automatically took their shoes off and left them at the door everywhere we went. Most of our friends and relatives found it amusing. :-) So I think it is totally just what you are used to. Kids and adults alike here also all run around barefoot....everywhere, indoors, out doors, etc. I do require my kids to wear shoes outside. I find it gross to run around a playground or other public area in bare feet, but I don't feel like it's gross to go barefoot in someone's house. That said, my dad just can't bring himself to take his shoes off when he visits, it makes him feel uncomfortable, so he wears shoes in our house and it doesn't bother me.

I have our board hung low on the wall so my kids can stand in front of it and use it. Luckily for me, my little one never was too messy and has always been pretty good about staying away from things I tell her she can't touch. Honestly, we mostly use the board when learning a new rule, after that my son prefers to use paper or a white board or the cards, etc. As for the cards, I don't move them behind the mastered divider until they can read them fluently....meaning without salunding out each letter. I don't review all the cards every day though, maybe about 10-15. The AAR games with Ziggy book has some really good games for practice with whichever word cards you are using. It officially goes with level 1, but I still use the games with level 2 and my kids like them. If the review words are piling up we may take a break for a few days and just play games with the cards until we dwindle it down a bit. The fluency pages in level 2 are long, and some of the stories, especially in the second book are too. I would just set the timer on days you are doing those and take as many days as it takes to get through it. With the fluency sheets, my son liked it if I gave him something to do while reading them, like highlight the vowel teams, or underline the consonant teams. If he was really resistant sometimes we would make a game of it. For example, pretend you are a ninja and to save the emperor you must defeat the enemy army...each word is an enemy soldier and once you have read it and crossed it off then you have defeated that soldier, lol....my son loves that type of stuff, so it has helped a lot...it does make the lessons go a bit longer though, because I usually end up getting a lot of dialogue about the back story. Also, I always copied the fluency sheets so he could write on them, but we could reuse them if needed. I definately reccomend rereading past stories. This has helped my son a lot with fluency and confidence in his reading. The first time through there is usually more sounding out going on, but by the second or third read through it's much easier. Someone else mentioned getting the AAR level 1 readers for fluency practice, and I agree that would be a great idea. I hope that helps.

I was not a fan of James and the Giant Peach either and have shied away from Dahl's books since. Some recent ones we have really enjoyed have been: Trumpet of the Swan The Cricket in Times Square The Chocolate Touch My Fathers Dragon Those are the ones that stand out in my memory from what we have read so far this year.