It's my understanding that a child's secondary immune system doesn't kick in until about their 2nd birthday, and so the immunity benefits are useful until then? But this is second-hand knowledge.

I read it a few years ago, and thought it was very good. I liked it better than "North and South," which is the only other book of hers that I've read. It's very short, and has some very funny buts.

You don't really NEED anything except for some tinder and a pot ;) I don't have a rice cooker, but everyone I know who has one says it's their favorite appliance.

Oops, didn't notice the title was in the Subject Line! Yes, 2nd the Book of Knowledge.

2nd. I saw this book at a house party I went to, and made a mental note to buy it when the time comes! It's totally up-front about the way things work, but I think it is very age-appropriate.

Yes, something similar happened to us. We brought in the instructions and had circled what we needed, and they just went out back and I saw them digging through a bunch of bins. And then they just gave them to us. No explanation needed, no receipt. I love Ikea: they're bare bones, but despite that their customer service can't be beat.

I've never heard of this (my daughter is young) but just saw the trailer and it looks like a great guilty pleasure! The 12 year old inside me's heart is going pitter-patter :D

I watched the show for the first time last night, and I have to say I was really disappointed. All I've heard about this show is what a shrew she is, how mean she is to her husband, how mean she is to her kids, etc. But I thought that she was very funny! A bit acerbic, absolutely... but the husband gave as good as he got! And it was never NASTY: it was just the sort of real "I love you and you love me, which means we can say what we really think and don't have to sugarcoat it" that a lot of couples have in the privacy of their own home. I saw the Valentine's Day one and the clothes shopping one, and thought they both seemed like people I could really hang out with. And the kids are soooo cute. While the jury is still out on how much fun it is to parent sextuplets 24/7, imagine how much fun it must be for those kids to live in a ready-made daycare center full of playmates!

Depends. I have a few thousand books too (for a while I was in the top 10 on their website! But that was ages ago, before so many used bookstores joined up) but I like it as a record of what I have and what I've read. It took a few months of entering slowly to get it all in there, but I have a cheap barcode scanner which made things go MUCH quicker.

Hmmm. I think I see it... well, I don't know. Not all of us have actually had a classical education, y'know. Asking us to use this much logic seems a bit... optimistic. :tongue_smilie:

Mine is my daughter. I usually use a different picture when I'm on a community that an avatar is called for, but I thought it might not be appropriate for this forum. It's related to my political leftness, and since I know that there are people who share a very wide range of political beliefs here, I decided I wouldn't burn bridges before I even crossed them :D

According to the World Factbook, the US's current replacement rate is at 2.1 and France is at 1.98. I believe they have the highest rate in Western Europe, so I didn't bother looking up other countries. The world as a whole is 2.58, and we're quickly heading to 8 billion people. I am not in any way a 0 population growth supporter (I'd like to have 4 kids) but we are in the midst (and probably only at the start) of a huge food supply problem, brought on by a mixture of too many people, very unlucky weather patterns, and very poor land use. Any ideology which claims that the world doesn't have enough people in it is a little... odd to me. Unfortunately, when some proponents of the Quiver movement say that what I think they really mean is that there aren't enough white people. Which is rather a different claim. (And, for the record NOT one that I think that you or anyone on this thread has made... everyone here is using Biblical mandates to justify the ideology. It is just a subtext that I have noticed in some of the research I have done into the movement.)

One day when I was 14, my mother and I were joking about how I was going to be a famous artist, but I needed a name a bit less mundane than "Megan." I suggested putting a silent "p" at the beginning, like pneumonia. My family got AOL right about then, and so I went with pmegan as my username. It's been my username for just about everything, since! (Though on a few websites, other people have taken it first)

My daughter's done gym daycare since she was 4 months old :tongue_smilie: Drop-off at classes I believe starts at about 4 around here, and I'm fine with that.

Well, I guess now you'll start to use salt and pepper shakers? ;) I remember the year that I sent off for a bunch of "free" magazines as a birthday present for my mother. Of course, it was the kind of thing where the first few issues are free and then they bill you up the wazoo. I was too young to understand "fine print."

As a secular homeschooler with progressive values, their well-known racist policies and past is only one of the reasons that Bob Jones University would never see a penny of my money.

That's what we did today, too! But I've been going through a really rough time lately with DD's separation anxiety. It's been going on for MONTHS and I cannot even walk in the general direction of the door without her screaming bloody murder. And then it takes about 1/2 an hour to calm her down. It's really started to get to me. So I told DH what I wanted was to be left alone all day! It was nice.

I 2nd Singing In the Rain: my absolute favorite movie when I was a kid! Shirley Temple movies are always fun. There was a whole host of live action Disney movies in the 60's: Parent Trap, Pollyanna, one with a cat that I can't remember. I'm watching Mary Poppins on AMC now, and I had forgotten how much fun it was. Sound of Music is good if you stop it before the Nazis come on the scene (which isn't that hard to do, because it gets pretty boring before that point) Not really classics, but look for the first 2 Anne of Green Gables movies (there was a 3rd one that was just awful and totally innapropriate), and in the 90's there was a great Canadian series called "Road to Avonlea" (I think it was just "Avonlea" in the States). It's a TV show, not a movie, but it's excellent.

Interesting. An idea might be to consolidate either the 2nd or 3rd pass-though of history into 3 years (so you do the logic cycle in 5-7 and then start the rhetoric cycle 8-11, or the logic cycle normally and then the rhetoric cycle 9-11). I don't think that this would be hard to do. And then senior year can be taken up with independent projects or a course with a more specific concentration. That would allow the student to take the history exams junior year.

:iagree: with everything Reya said (too long to repost it all... but it's all very well said)

I think that people who level this charge against them mean that it's one thing to hire someone who makes a choice to take care of children, and it's another thing to use your older children as free full-time labor. I can see both sides of this argument, honestly. While I think that children should be expected to help around the house, my understanding is also that the elder Duggar girls are expected to do a very large share of the housekeeping, child rearing, and cooking. I can see how people think that it's unfair that these girls are worked so hard, when they don't have any choice in the matter. And before anyone brings up "the olden days," I know that this was very common back then. Which is one of the reasons my grandmother (the eldest of 9) only had 2! Just because something used to happen doesn't mean that people liked it then or that it's a great idea now ;)

I went to Kenyon College and my sister with to Bowdoin College, and neither took AP exams for credit. At Kenyon, it just meant that some departments had special "freshman honors seminars" that you could take in whatever subject the AP was in. You could also get into these classes with 'special permission.' It didn't even get you out of any requirements. I think that most of the top-tier private colleges no longer do, because there is a question of how accurate a representation the scores are of college-level work, and because kids come to these schools with so many credits that the school doesn't want to let them skip 2 years.

Since many colleges don't even accept AP credits in lieu of classes, it seems that the main reason to take the AP exams is to get into college. Most of the private schools I know of encourage students to take as many AP exams as possible during sophomore and junior year, and not even to bother during senior year. Did any of you take this path, and how does it work with the WTM cycle? If you follow this curriculum, the student hasn't had any high school-level literature or history past 1850 by the time they end their junior year. This seems like it would make the literature AP difficult, and the US and World History APs impossible. Did you just not take them, and take foreign language, math, and science? Cram?

Can you figure out how to make a green wig? I bet the girls would have fun with that. Maybe glue green yarn to a hat or headband?

:iagree: Many men carry a stigma against professional help of this sort, so it might ease things if you go as a couple, and tell him that you are concerned that he may be right and you want a professional opinion. The counselor can talk to you individually, too.