That's me too! I'm a sprinter. I don't think I've left the house in two days. All I have to say is I earned it. :) You're a genius!

Some people are just more comfortable with making spontaneous decisions. I get uncomfortable when I don't know the next step at the very least. Also, if things are bad enough, having the kids home to do next to nothing is better than having them in public school going through bad experiences. To each their own.

I would gauge it on your child. We do a lot of the "why" explanation verbally. The solutions manual is supposed to give some step by step instructions on how to solve the problem, so I don't think the explanation it gave is necessarily supposed to be part of the answer.

I think the photo looks good. You focused on her and the tattoo, just like you wanted.

We are doing American Lit. this year. I've come across 5+ old/broken links in 1.5 units. Not a huge deal b/c she explains what the link is, but it just slows me down. I thought I heard on this forum (quite a while ago) that this was a very student-led course. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

Thanks! Do you think the child can get a good grasp without verbal discussions? Honestly, I just don't have time to read the books along with her and I need this piece to be really independent. I plan on grading her writing (of course), but I've learned from last year that even getting Cliff's Notes for the book is more work than I'm able to put into at this time. Am I doing a huge disservice to her? She hates literature (just like I did) and is only going through it because she has to. I'm not sure if there are any tutor options, and study groups have been really fickle at coming to fruition. Just going through the first unit, I've found a few broken links, so I think I'll be making her plan on what resources to use. I could see her spending hours deciding what to do and getting frustrated. Plus, the book resources need to be acquired ahead of time.

I don't think their education will make a big difference in whether they can homeschool or not, but it will get some people off their back. It really starts with why do they want to homeschool and what do they want to achieve. Then you can just go from there.

I got EIL and I had heard so often that it's quite hands-off for the parent that I didn't look at the book very closely until now. The author provides more resources than I think someone could go through in each unit (maybe I'm wrong). If you've used EIL, how did you organize your planning and decide what resources to use? We'll be using it for 9th grade and it'll be the first time we've strayed from WTM literature setup, so this seems like a pretty big step in terms of response from the reading and context work. Just trying to wrap my mind around it...

I would ask him for a free month's rent (possibly spread out through the course of a few months, maybe $200/mo until it adds up) and then hire it all out to get done. I found people to get done really fast when I had to turn our rental over in 4 days and it was TRASHED from the previous renter. I hired movers to get all their stuff and bring it to a storage locker. All in all, that piece of it cost me about $400 (movers, rental truck, and storage locker). Drywall repair isn't hard, so you could find a friend to do it, if you trust their work. I posted on FB asking for help with stuff and had fairly good response. If he's flexible with payments like that to accommodate his lack of follow through, I'd just hire out to get stuff done and think of it like buying a foreclosed home with a bunch of junk in it.

Do the little ones happen to wake up late enough that you can work with your older child while they're still in bed? The ages are pretty tough. You're right, too, that in 7th grade it's hard to scale back to just the basics because it's time to start getting them ready for high school level work. I haven't done it much, but I have heard from many moms (and one poster on this thread already also) that working with the little ones first does help them play independently for a while during the day.

Has anyone tried the Currclick online classes? I signed DD13 up for the fall hybrid course (cheaper, but fewer live lessons). I thought paying $400 for the Rosetta Stone 5 year course was going to have us set, but I guess not. I really should have looked into it before buying it because it just doesn't hold up it's reputation when it comes to assigning high school credits for a foreign language.

I'm not sure about the science, but there's no glare on the screen, so the glare wouldn't be the issue. The issue I could see would just be the screen size and everyone being able to see it.

We're in MN also, so maybe I was counting it wrong for the second semester, but that makes sense that the semester goes in to January. I guess I never picked up on that while I was in school! I always thought the semester ended before January. Thanks, everyone! I think for DD13's history and government classes, I'm just going to have her start in August because I can't fit it all in the typical school year.

This is the first year I'm defining semesters and noticing that by following the typical school year, semester 1 is about 13 weeks and semester 2 is around 16. I'm wondering how many weeks you have each semester and how you split it up. When do you start and end?

I just watched this. Very interesting, thank you for sharing! I'm glad Hubby's 401k is in Vanguard right now!