I think they are incredible resources for some homeschoolers, but not the right fit for my kid and his teacher (i.e. me). We keeps our schoolin' and our craftin' very separate.

OP, you need to cultivate some intellectual arrogance. No, seriously. No, SERIOUSLY. If you've read the WTM, you are already leaps and bounds ahead of, like, 95% of parents in this country who have never dreamed of putting that amount of thought into what their children need to learn and how they should learn it. Enjoy this year with Abeka, and when next year comes, see if you're not ready to select texts based on what you know about your kids, and have the best year to date because the resident expert is finally making the choices. You're better qualified than anyone else in the universe to decide what is going to work best for your particular kids. What's more, you know how to present concepts to them better than any scripted lesson. In short, you rock. The more you trust yourself, the better your kids will fare.

"I liked knowing the sex of my baby during pregnancy. I felt it really helped me bond with them before they were born." :iagree: Naming my children before they were born was huge to me.

I have learned the gender of all 3 of my kids, and I was disappointed that #1 was male. But I absolutely got over it, maybe even before he was born. Certainly in the instant that he was born. Just feel how you feel, and let it pass. It WILL pass. You are an experienced mama who knows how to attach! Don't even worry about it.

I'm glad you came to an agreement.

"I think being true to yourself and your child is more important than being true to a husband who is being unreasonable." :iagree: And remember, he's only being EMOTIONALLY unreasonable. Rationally, he's consented to taking your son out of school. So deal with the ratioanl part of his brain and let the emtional thing sort itself out. Lord knows I depend on my husband to do this for me when I'm in the grip of misdirected anger.

My kids (6 and 4) love Santa movies, books, etc. They know that Santa is pretend and that their Christian grandmother is the real Santa who puts presents under the tree (yes, I have a tree. I am an AMERICANIZED Jew. I have stockings embroidered with everybody's name, too. But I don't buy Christmas presents - that's her thing, and she loves it.) They know that Grandma likes to play Santa and they enjoy doing this pretend game with her. It hasn't seemed to be a big deal at all, so far. Honestly, I think I'd have more Santa angst if Christmas was a religious holiday for me. But if putting up the tree won't make the kids grow up to be Druids, then playing the Santa game seems highly unlikely to turn them into adults who believe in magic, or Christians, or any combination thereof. I hope what they turn into is people who like celebrating and will take any excuse to do so. (I have sometimes wondered why my MIL is completely, totally fine never talking to the kids about Jesus, but can't resist Santa. I have not ASKED to to refrain from Jesus talk - she just does. It's getting to the point where the first time they hear about Jesus will be in SOTW - NOT what I expected from an intermarriage! At all!)

September 1st here. We are taking a late August vacation.

My instinct would be to move that child in on 8/7 and unschool him for a year, with in-home childcare a few hours every day so you could focus on the elders. He's got so much going on (inside his head and out) that the stress of structured schooling seems like something he could skip during his transition into your family. Now, given financial limitations and/or the homeschooling laws in your state, that approach may not be feasible. But if he could have a year at home with you to just be loved and accepted and make a little progress in the three Rs, I think you might reduce the long-term stress.

I'm sure they're being absolute jerks if they've gotten you this worked up where you were inclined to be generous before, but other than demanding reimbursement for those previous (and all future) medical costs and/or requesting an adjustment if you think you might get it based on a change in your ex's income, I'm pretty sure there is nothing you can do. His girlfriend's income is not a factor, and shouldn't be. She doesn't owe your kids any support. If she chooses to buy them things, take them on trips, etc. when they are in her home, that's great. But it's not a legal or moral obligation she has, to contribute to the support of her boyfriend's kids.

We ditched the cable after a rundown from a friend with an older kid about the taransition from Nick Jr. To Nick. We decided never to get within spitting distance of that transition. ;) My kids watch DVDs and Netflix stuff. I'm really very laid-back about TV these days, now that I know Zack and Cody no longer have a way to get into this house. I don't like modern tween anything - I'd rather have my 8-12 year old kids exposed to some adult vocabulary and concepts in consuming decent adult-focused media than have them watch and read the absolute schlock that is created for the tween market. But for now, they're little and they make very good choices from their DVD and Netflix libraries. Up. Aladdin. Dora. Walking with Dinosaurs. Et cetera. Just like with food - if the junk isn't in those, darned if they don't consume the good stuff! :001_smile:

My son still needs dotted lines to trace, so I sue Start Write. I plan to switch to zanerbloser.com once he's at stage of having the text written above a blank line - maybe in a couple of months.

I'm afraid that really bad stuff will happen, but really excited by the possibility that my teenagers will be relatively stable people, disinclined to lipstick parties or drunk driving, and that we'll be able to enjoy a really exciting life of world travel. That's the extreme I'm willing to go to. We are not planning to raise teenagers in the USA.

"...I really wouldn't want her influenced into believing it is just as good a choice, when I don't believe it is." If your sdd tells you that the girls in her high school are experimenting with homosexual behavior in absence of actual desire to be with another girl, but more to make a provocative display of themselves and how wild they are, then yes, that's disturbing. But disturbing behavior at a coed high school is not predictive of the social environment at a single-sex college. I think what you are actually trying to express is your discomfort with indiscriminate precocious sexuality among today's adolescents and the way that our society condones and reinforces it. I'm right there with you. Most adult lesbians probably are too. :)

I decided to turn it off. I don't believe I can stand to read the written accounts either. I would like to know what kind of justice was meted out.

My accountabilty org wants a grade in each subject for each quarter, all submitted at once at the end of our school year. Basically, it's a traditional "report card" format where I provide the numbers and they print something up for his file. I have decided to pick certain items to grade as we go along (math tests, some copywork, whatever worksheets in the other subject seem most amenable to grading, etc.) and add the grades up quarterly. I intend to give a quartelry grade based on about five samples from each subject - and those samples will be retained to go into the "portfolio" that nobody is ever going to ask for. I will NOT grade everything, I will NOT think about grades every day, I will NOT put any emotional energy whatsoever into my grading scheme because grading a 6 y.o. is MORONIC. :D

I went to Smith. Obviously. I graduated in 2000 with a diamond on my finger - and I didn't get it from a woman. :D I really, really liked the female-dominated environment of a women's college. The halls were quiet. The bathrooms were CLEAN. I spent my junior at Penn, which is where I met the guy who eventually coughed up the diamond, and omigod college boys are FILTHY. I hated coed living. When my own daughters are choosing colleges, I will enthusiatically recommend the all-female option. "Anyway, if I were considering what kinds of people at a college might hurt my dd, lesbians wouldn't even cross my radar. " :iagree::iagree::iagree::iagree::iagree::iagree:

I love the (Christian) Bible. I've read it through. I am fortunate to have had the chance to study it as literature. I quote the NT frequently. A lot of it is great, great stuff. But a history book, it's not. The appropriate time and manner, IMNSHO, for Biblical material to come into a comprehensive history curriculum is when discussing how JudeoChristian beliefs shaped certain societies that then went on to shape the Western world. I'm pretty sure my kids are going to emerge from their schooling more well-versed in the NT, Church history etc. than their Christian cousins. If I gave the impression earlier that I didn't value Biblical literacy and the study of extrabiblical Christian texts just because the TOG approach gives me hives, then I apologize.

"The Jewish people of today still firmly believe in the God of the Old Testament. That is fact." Um. Maybe it's a fact for the Orthodox. More likely just the ultra-Orthodox. The rest of us, the other ninetysomething percent, tend to make a very sharp distinction between verifiable historical and scientific fact and our beloved religious traditions. Guess which one we prefer to see featured in our children's history curricula? Most Jews (not all!) believe in God - though it is very much possible to be a devoted member of K'lal Yisrael and a convinced atheist. But the "guy in the sky" in the "Old Testament" who had the children ripped up by wild animals for being disrespectful to Lot? Not so much. We regard stories like that as an attempt by ancient Jews to come to grips with their experience of the divine and to reconcile the goodness of God with things that happened in their environment. OP, I would not use the curriculum. It sucks to be out so much $$$, but nothing's more important than filling your kid's heads with information that YOU believe to be true, delivered from a perspective that YOU believe to be sound. I have to do such continual on-the-fly editing in SOTW to rinse out the Calvinist taint that I can't imagine doing more - and SOTW is just one book that we read through, not a fully integrated curriculum! It just sounds like an exercise in frustration to me. :(

The adults in this family are equal, co-leading heads of a Reform Jewish household. My husband is an atheist, mind you - but it's a Jewish mama that makes a Jewish home IMNSHO. I would not call myself the leader, though, even though the rhythm of the household moves to my sassy yiddishe beat :tongue_smilie:, because I don't expect my husband to bite his tongue about his non-belief. I'm actually very pleased that my children have as role models two adults who take DIFFERENT paths to the SAME conclusions about how to live a well-conducted life (I would say, "be a mensch," he would say, "contribute to the preservation and betterment of humanity and the natural world," but it all comes out in the wash).

I think I might have marriage 1.5. I'm not sure. If so, I'm really happy with it. But I picked option 2, and here's why - there are so many things that you can HIRE people to do, if you're married to a workaholic bringing home a big paycheck (and DH has sometimes been that way, thought now he is a WAHD and as involved as I have ever dreamed he'd be in daily life with the kids). But I learned things in those years he was gone 100 hours/week. We have a cleaner. We have a lawn guy. We have a sitter I can call to come here when I have meetings/appointments. I have all kinds of support that I know the husband providesin other households, but in this hosuehold, it's done by people who get paid to do it. I cannot pay somebody to make love to me. Or at least, I shouldn't ;) So 2 is the irreplacable stuff to me.

(doublepost)

Here's the situation: it's our first year independently homeschooling (we did K12 last year, plus Prehistory notebooking). I have the books: SOTW with lots of literature tie-ins, Singapore Math, Song School Latin, FLL, HWT, Spelling Workout, Usborne and Kingfisher encycloopedias, etc. I have a file box for completed worksheets and tests. I have a planner to record lessons completed each day. I have enrolled ds in a full-day co-op on Monday that includes arts/crafts time, and I am getting him enrolled in a half-day science co-op. Tell me I don't have to make a detailed plan of what lessons we are doing on which days in 2010-11. Tell me I can just work through the texts, read the tie-ins, assign notebooking as appropriate, and be happy. Tell me it's OK to spend this time making an awesome customized copybook that ties in all his subjects instead of writing out a year's worth of lesson plans for a six-year-old. Or if this is a really bad idea - tell me that. I don't want to be wailing and gnashing my teeth in February.

sagira wrote: "...don't discount other choices as the children are not me and I have to accept the reality that most people are not as calculating (consequence-wise) and a big picture person like me." I'd guess your kids may well inherit your appreciation of consequences and ability to see the big picture - but have a very, very different experience of how kissing, etc. leads into sexual intercourse. The definition of a healthy sex life is that both spouses are satisfied, so obviously your sex life is healthy and normal - but since so many virgins can figure out how to DTD in a few minutes in the dark backseat of a Plymouth Reliant with a partner they've been dating for just a short while, I'm thinking that two weeks in front of a mirror with the love of your life is a fairly atypical learning curve. ;) Nothing wrong with THAT, though, the world might be a better place if we all had that learning curve.

"She's five. She could do Ancients next year. Make sure that she knows all about the other animals from prehistory as well, such as the early insects and mammals. Early arithmetic with books on dinosaurs. Science with volcanoes, rock formations, flora on the time of dinosaurs. Writing or prewriting copywork on dinosaurs from her books. Reading fiction books, whether interspersed with books about dinosaurs depending on her reading level." True nuff. My 5 y.o. did Prehistory during the K year, and is starting Ancients this year as a 6 y.o. But. Your child is both more obsessed and more precocious than mine. In your shoes, I think I might have a few "formal" lessons in the morning and a choice of dinosaur-themed activities afterwards. If dinosaurs are her forever love, then she should develop the habit of pursuing them just as a gifted musician of school age practices her cello after her schoolwork is done. OTOH, I found that with my son, the love of dinos could be translated to a generalized love of prehistoric natural history, and eventually to a moderate interest in the evolution of homo sapiens. So I do not regret my choice to do Prehistory notebooking the year he was 5. It was definitely not wasted time, and a year later he is a bit more interested in people and better positioned to appreciate the Ancients.