I feel silly posting, b/c I haven't in so long! But: Math: AoPS Pre-Algebra, second half, then possibly the first contest prep book to fill out the year? Language Arts: Continue with MCT Level 4, begin Level 5. And we use Kilgallon's Sentence Composition as a supplement. Spelling Workout G. I think that's it. Literature: As usual, I build my own lit list, which I can post when I have it if anyone wants to see. History: Finish parts of OUP's Medieval and Early Modern World, first 1/2 of K12's Human Odyssey: Our Modern World Greek: Athenaze Latin: Latin Prep Science: Finish Newton at the Center...and here is where I'm still torn. We have used CK-12's Earth Science text this year and LOVED it. But when I looked last, there was no Middle School Chem text. Now I see a new one, slated for completion by April, called Chemistry Concepts: Intermediate. It looks like it's on Boy11's level. I'm just making sure it's not "Intermediate Chemistry-- for when you've finished Chemistry 1" or something like that. And I feel like we should have a separate lab program, like maybe this one? He takes art classes locally and uses Artistic Pursuits. Music is pretty haphazard, but we do it. We'll do First Lego League...we do every year. And I'm adding logic back in, but I don't know what yet...Rulebook for Arguments and...?

The Hakim books are organized chronologically, so you'll have plenty of early astronomy in first one, Newton in the second, and various more modern developments in the third. I wonder if your library has them and you could do some picking and choosing? We've chosen to run Hakim's books alongside our science and history rotation, so while my Logic Stage son was learning ancients, we read Aristotle Leads the Way. Now we're in the Middle Ages, so he's started Newton at the Center. HTH

I can't help laughing about the frozen veggie thing, b/c I freeze a lot of the veggies I grow. I do that instead of canning b/c the heat of processing can destroy a lot of nutrients, and you lose more if you don't consume the liquid they're canned in. I don't buy most canned veggies, for the reasons others have listed, but I do buy canned "dry bean" beans, and tomato products when my garden has a bad year. I know exactly what bothers me about the Duggars' eating habits: anthropological dominionism. (Years ago, I simply said "dominionism" on the boards, and got schooled.) In short, having nineteen kids is...well, I have opinions about their reasons for doing it, but that's a seperate issue. But then there are all the collateral costs, like using a huge, gas-guzzling vehicle when we're having energy issues, eating all these highly processed foods, which in a smaller nuclear family...OK, it's their business. But when you're going to send nineteen people out into the world pre-programmed to raise my insurance premiums...that frankly makes me angry. Further, convenience foods b/c the kids can't cook? That dog won't hunt. The show gets plenty of mileage out of how the older kids help with the younger ones, and my 9 and 11 year-olds can cook plenty of simple things relatively unsupervised. Cleaning up...now that's another issue, lol, but they can cook, and my six-year-old can certainly make a sandwich, a salad, hummus and veggies or crackers, etc.. He can cut up cheese. He can also heat up leftovers of meals made from scratch. He loves to be a "sous chef" for the rest of us. Anyway, yeah, they sort of drive me crazy.

Oh my gosh, the McDonald's shops were the WORST. So long and time consuming for so little money. Of course, I think this was in 2002. They may have changed things up. I always looked at Volition dot com. Their forums were a good place to look for legit shops, but it's been a long time since I've done them, for the reasons others have mentioned. That said, if people are still using the Sassie scheduling system, anyone using that was generally legit, and I was working for Foresee when they were still Synovate, and they always paid on time. The best shops I did were generally banking shops (I would swap kidcare with a friend and do a bunch in a day) and Dunkin Donuts shops. That said, when Dunkin quit allowing kids, at least for me, it was a hostile franchise owner who made that happen. The problem was that they knew what mystery shoppers were going to be ordering that month, knew they were supposed to check the bathrooms, etc.. They'd watch for that, and their customer service would be disproportionately good for anyone who met those requirements. I would bring my kids, order the required items, check them myself and then split them between us, have a kid ask me to take them to the bathroom, and so on. It was a really excellent cover, and one owner got very badly burned b/c ALL the employees were out by the dumpsters taking a smoke, and they took their sweet time coming in. When they did, they sounded like kids coming in from recess. The owner disputed the shop twice, claimed I was the friend of an employee (I had just moved to town that summer and all the employees were teens and young twenty-somethings) but I stayed firm, and I'd saved all my documentation and could back up what I'd said. Ultimately, they forbade kids on future shops to pacify the person. So, just be aware that that kind of nonsense can go on. All my other shops with Dunkin were fine.

I have derived so much from SWB's writings and these forums over the years, but somehow, in the moment, this phrase is what sticks with me and reminds me to have reasonable expectations of my youngest son. On one of her downloadable lectures, SWB did a streaming narrative of herself to a Grammar Stage child, and every direction was interspersed with "Get back up on your chair. Get back up on your chair. Stop poking your brother. Get back up on your chair." I've always found it amazing how many ways my kids can find to slowly ooze off of their chairs, so my dh and I were rolling. I caught myself saying it again this morning (at this point, it makes the kids laugh) and had to come post. Anyone else have some arcane piece of SWB wisdom that has stuck with you?

Is it a fearful dog? My dog empties her anal sac :ack2: when she's frightened, and it smells like death. It releases a clear, smelly fluid, and if it gets on the dog's fur (or anything else) it's like the Swamp of Eternal Stench in Labyrinth. We've thought about having it removed, but for now she's on Prozac while we try to convince her that visitors to the house do not, in fact, want to kill us all.

Are they making the Pilot Mini fountain pen anymore? It's not on Jetpens, and I can't find it anywhere else online.

We don't disagree.

Um, I kind of hate them. They're stereotypical, and all the swag is expensive b/c of branding, but is in fact cheap Chinese plastic that won't last. (I particularly loathe Disney Princess birthday parties, for several reasons). The Beauty and the Beast movie is very derivative of Robin McKinley's book, Beauty, without crediting her (huge library, dog footstool, etc.). I agree that Disney sucks all the marrow out of real fairy tales-- give me a Miyazaki film any day! There's a very flat, caricatured, black and white dichotomy, always a marriage = success ending, etc.. I end up irritated because the things I want to like (Belle's bookishness and willingness to look past exterior appearances, Rapunzel's self-defense and art skills, Tiana's work ethic) are sandwiched between these other problems until the film as a whole is a lesson in deconstructing stereotypes...which prevents it from being entertaining. Merida is really the only Disney princess who breaks that mold, but then again, she's a Pixar character. I have much more respect for Pixar films. We have a Rapunzel doll and a Merida doll. We wouldn't have the Rapunzel one, but we went to Disney and dd had mad money from her grandparents. They have this waifish series of toddler princesses, and I think dd was drawn in by Rapunzel's abundant hair...but now that we're home, she says, "Usually a I know a doll is really mine when I can see its smile. But I can't get Rapunzel to smile, no matter what I do." It's like one of those boo-hoo babies people used to prop in the corner for decoration. I always found those things so depressing.

I'm redoing it all now. At least I know I'm not a crazy person. Part of the reason I was excited about the online is b/c so many people had liked the desktop version...I said on fb yesterday that I feel like I let a bunch of Microsoft guys into my house to stand around and act snide. It's just not very user friendly.

OMM, nukeswife, that worked! OK, so here's the thing I'm still feeling obtuse about. I can preset days for a course? Or a subject? But not a lesson plan? What if we do Language Arts 5x a week, but we only do Caesar's English three of those days? Then what? I've made a separate Lesson Plan for Caesar's English II, but of course that did no good, b/c I can't set days for a lesson plan. So, I have to add Caesar's English II as a whole separate subject or course before I can specify days? Why? It isn't one.

Ooh, OK. So maybe it reverted before I actually moved them, and I didn't realize...Can I permanently save it to display more than ten items using "save grid options"?

I deleted all the assignments from the agenda past Oct. 5 and tried this...I think on Friday? And now I have double assignments. I am positive I chose the dates correctly. I'm going to try Charleigh's suggestion, but I just find the whole thing awkward. I'd love some sort of "expand all/collapse" all, too, or some sort of daily view that's actually attractive/easy to look at. And is there someplace I can set master controls to quit reducing the number of visible assignments to a list of ten? I'm so tired of doing it by hand every. single. time. Sigh.

I'm a hair away from trying Well-Planned Day. I've looked at Olly and done the free trial, but it's not grabbing me. Here's the problem with just highlighting and rescheduling everything: I ended up doing this big stupid workaround to get certain books scheduled on certain days, not realizing that the only way to do that if I was ever going to reschedule was to make each resource a separate subject, and assign days of the week for those subjects on the Student's page. UUUURGH. And you know what? I just went and looked at the student page for my daughter to make sure I wasn't misspeaking, and I can't even set days of the week on there, can I? It's "every ____ days". Which is the whole problem. If I have something scheduled for T/Th and we skip one day, it will offset it to M/W/F. So I have to reschedule them subject by subject. Between three kids at three grade levels, that's pretty time consuming, when the programmers could just make a day setting and design the macro to bump that subject to the next scheduled day, right? Even so, I tried to go in last week and do that, and now today I've got multiple handwriting and spelling assignments for each kid on 10/1...who knows why? What I DO know is I don't want to figure it out. I've had to send kids with questions about their work away while I wrestle with this. So not worth it. I am just not seeing how this is an improvement over a paper planner.

Bumping this thread because I'm still just...so frustrated. We went on a field trip Friday, and then got stomach flu over the weekend. I'm trying so hard not to end up with a colossal traffic jam on HST, but I've got a list of undone assignments, and I need to say, "We didn't do school that day. Bump everything down." and I CAN'T. My homeschool planner should NOT be worse to deal with than the actual vomiting child who needs me to bump his work. Quick, somebody tell me where the easy button is! I totally cannot understand why such a popular planner would lack this simple tool.

Gabby, at my house your "precious" is the problem. They love using it so much that I hid it half an hour ago. I keep an entire jar of razor-sharp pencils on the table...so sharp that they aren't allowed to have pencils on the apholstered furniture. Doesn't matter. They just HAVE to use their shiny little friend.

Ooh, Jen, that's really interesting. I've won NaNo three years running, and the WTM boards are what got me started. NaNoWriMo kicked me into gear and got me writing more each day. My first year, 1667 a day was a struggle. Last year, I generally averaged 2K. I've been struggling to get my writing routine smoothed out post-move, so I'm glad NaNo is looming on the horizon. I don't know whether I'll start something new in November, or (more likely) use the energy of the event to push me to finish my current WiP. My 11 yo is a reluctant writer, so no 10K word counts here, but I figure any fun he has writing is a win. The 9 yo has a blast, and comes up with really zany and genuinely funny ideas. Even so, I thought I might be the sole NaNo'er in my house this year. But the nine and eleven year old have both come downstairs after bedtime to talk to me about NaNo planning since I ordered the classroom kit. I'm probably going to donate some of our swag to our local bookstore, Robots & Rogues, and offer to host some YWP write-ins.

That's EXACTLY where I'm at. Thank you! I will try that. Honestly, I'm so sick of doing workarounds and counting out days instead of being able to say, "I want to schedule this book every Monday, and that one on Tuesdays and Thursdays" that I have little tolerance for any additional challenges.

I think it will drive me crazy, too. I'm trying to figure out if Olly is better that way. Urgh. I have spent SO many hours inputting data, too.

I've been playing with the rescheduling tool on HST, but is there any way to bump everything down a day, either by subject or by the day? I've annoyed myself by putting too many lessons into the scheduler, and if I have to reschedule the whole doggone subject every time an assignment goes long or we have an unexpected field trip opportunity...well. Am I missing a simple bump feature? It seems like someone would have asked for it a long time ago, so I feel like I'm being obtuse.

Ooh, thank you!

I cannot tell you how sorry I am to have missed that. Also, I great big puffy-heart Tina Fey.

Not to mention the additional problem of many Americans painting all Muslims with the same ignorant brush...no one needs help making that worse. Honestly, seeing others downplay that aspect of what he said disturbs me far more than anything Pat himself said. I expect nonsense from him.

Hmmm. Adverbial phrase?

We found that to be true, also. To benefit at all from my work (we had preschool aged kids who would have required full day care at the time), I worked days, and dh worked nights. It was exhausting. We were sick exponentially more often, we ate worse, and the kids were getting spoiled b/c I'd feel guilty about the lack of time together and buy them awesome books and toys.