No, not the same price as pp was quoting price per month for a one hour class and CC is more than one hour. Whether the price is worth what you get will entirely depend on the family. The people I know who rave about CC have older kids in the challenge program and find motivation in the community. If that was something my kid needed and I could afford it I would pay for it.

I was just trying to give to poster who talked about riff raff the benefit of the doubt since her playground analogy did come across as incredibly condescending. I was really thinking only about the playground part, and yes there are some people who really do not belong in a children's playground. Not because those people are of lesser value but because children should have a safe place to play. But that really doesn't have any relevance to co-ops or CC...

I am going to assume that by riff raff she means the kind of people who used to leave drug needles in the sand at the playground near our old apartment :( I would have been happy if there were a way to keep them out...

Honestly, I think this depends on the couple. Personally, I say no when I am tired because I know that if I didn't I would end up resenting sex and that would drive a wedge between us. But I have at least one close friend who feels strongly that saying yes most of the time has been they key to keeping her own marriage strong. I think it is reasonable to assume that the right balance between setting personal boundaries and giving freely of self will vary from couple to couple.

Heres a great resource, I linked to the page with beginning reading and writing instruction, but there are materials for all subjects and grades. http://www.academie-en-ligne.fr/Ecole/SommaireConcepts.aspx?PREFIXE=AL5FFCP

I like detached garages.

My mom and MIL both had their last right about age 45. So I can imagine having a baby then, but it would depend on several factors including fertility and general health.

Continuing to pray.

No idea whether this would go over well with your inlaws, but what about establishing one or two types of toys that you can let everyone know you are collecting? I'm thinking of expandable open ended sets like Legos or duplos, wooden railway sets, oh, and a collection of Classic children's books.

Evolution is a scientifically supported theory, not a belief system. BUT I can believe or disbelieve in evolution. A belief is subjective, and does not have to align with scientific evidence. A person can believe anything, and the things they choose to believe make up their belief system. From that perspective, evolution may be part of a person's belief system. And not part of another person's belief system.

I don't have a high schooler yet, but I do have one child who has developed a time consuming passion. Already we are adjusting her school schedule to allow more time to pursue that passion. One possibility, if you do not have to demonstrate a certain number of credits and if, as it sounds, your son is overall a strong student, might be to focus on just one extra subject intensively at a time. So your son would continue his Mandarin and music daily, but would also work on one other subject daily until he mastered the objectives you set for him in that subject, then he could move on to another. So intensive chemistry, then intensive literature, then intensive history, etc.. If he spent 45 minutes on mandarin, 45 minutes on music, and 45 minutes or an hour on one other subject he would be finished in less than three hours and could devote the rest of the day to following his passion for math. ETA I forgot when I was writing this that you had already planned to include science, so I wasn't really proposing anything new except that science could be rotated with other subjects. Schooling year round may also help. I am guessing he is already continuing music practice at least during the summer?

Dp

I've been suffering from chocolate eclair withdrawal ever since I left France more than twenty years ago. I'm afraid that craving can never be overcome :( The things they call eclairs in most of the US are nothing like what they make in France...I'm assuming that in th UK you can get the real thing. I hope the trial period goes by quickly and you find that most things can be added back in without trouble!

I see some other posters have responded, I hope their replies were helpful. I don't have personal experience or a lot of knowledge about how a person without a sense of time functions, but I do have executive function difficulties and what I have seen is that people with good executive function abilities generally cannot imagine not having them--executive function skills seem so obvious and straight forward that only laziness or lack of caring could account for failure to use them. Examples in my own life include being in the middle of a task and noticing something else that needs to be done so I drop the first task and start the second but then a child cries and I go to take care of that and never come back to tax one or two. I frequently forget what I am doing, what I went into a room for, what I was talking about a minute ago, I forget that I pulled out an outfit to wear and go look for a different outfit, only moments after finding the first. This kind of chaos of thought is as far as I can tell not something that everyone experiences on a regular basis, nor is it something I can just decide to stop doing. My family tends to get places on time or nearly so only because my oldest daughter has strengths that compensate for my weaknesses. Left to my own devices, I doubt I would do so well; your example of timing your morning routine and checking the clock would be extremely difficult for me because I would forget to get the coffee going, would find myself without clean pants, would get distracted in the middle of breakfast by the realization that I never ran the dishwasher last night, and would not be able to locate my keys and wallet when it was time to head out the door. I imagine all of that sounds easy to fix from your perspective, but the fixes would not be easy at all for me. Add a lack of time sense on top of that (not a problem I struggle with) and keeping a schedule might be nearly impossible. I have enough struggles of my own that am extremely hesitant to judge the lives of others. I have strengths as well, and I know how hard it can be to understand someone whose weakness is my own strength. I am by nature calm and content 99% of the time, and it seems to that being calm and happy should be an easy thing for everyone--but it is obvious that a great many people find such a state nearly impossible to achieve. I wouldn't be wise to condemn them because what comes easily to me does not come easily to them.

There are people who lack the ability to gauge the passage of time, they really don't have a sense for how long five minutes or an hour is and have a hard time judging what needs to be done when and how much time it will take to do something like getting ready and out the door to go somewhere. This disability is often related both to dyscalculia and to executive function deficits. What seems rude and unreasonable to someone with a normally functioning sense of time may in fact represent honest effort on the part of someone who struggles with this issue.

I like Math Mammoth starting with second grade.

If a child is attached to to a costume I don't stop them from going out in it.

Sports. Baseball and American football. Especially if you can borrow gear from someone, I bet a football helmet to try on would be a hit! A display highlighting natural wonders would be cool as well, I'm thinking Grand Canyon, Arches national park, giant redwoods, Niagara falls...

Is he or is he not listed on the birth certificate?

I really don't understand the sizing of children's clothing. Dd 10 wears size 8 pants, she isn't petite but the size10s are huge. The need a middle size...

How our study plays out daily? Imperfectly. I have tried a variety of schedules and rotations, but we seem to always fall back on making one language the primary focus for a time while working primarily on review and maintenance in the others. Right now Mandarin is our primary focus. Dd10 is my oldest and the one who studies most consistently. In addition to the weekly tutoring sessions, she does several sessions a week with Fluenz on the computer. I try to review with everyone once or twice a week what was covered during tutoring, and the younger kids sometimes watch a video or play with a Chinese app. Right now Arabic and Spanish are primarily reviewed during our morning memory work time. We haven't finished learning the alphabet yet for Arabic, so I try to work on that and review some phrases and words we learned from the Michel Thomas CD 's. We haven't been actually learning much new recently. For Spanish, we have learned some songs etc. And review those, I need to come up with something more formal. Dd10 was working through Getting Started With Spanish last year and is planning to get back to that soon. We have picture books in Spanish that I sometimes read aloud. We focused more on Spanish and Arabic last year, Chinese has taken front seat since we found a tutor.

Do you mean a child who graduated from your homeschool five years ago and is just now applying to college? Yes, you would be the counselor and would provide a transcript. If the child has been in a brick and mortar school for high school then no you would not be playing this role.

I agree that languages that are dissimilar are easier to o study concurrently. That one reason I picked the languages I did. I have one child who wants to study French, I let him do what he wants with it on his own but prefer to emphasize Spanish right now.

We are doing Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic concurrently. Right now we have a Chinese tutor who comes once a week, the other languages we are studying our own. I speak Spanish but not Arabic, eventually I hope to find a tutor for that one. I would also be interested in any curriculum recommendations, I don't mind Islamic references.

I'm fine with skipping, but I don't skip Tolkien 's poems and songs. I have lovely memories of my dad singing them when he read The Hobbit and LotR to us. I sing them when I read to my kids too.