It sounds like my household and your household have more in common that your household and your parent's hosuehold, Impish. I'm sorry you weren't better protected. My mother (who is an atheist, BTW) was always the one nixing the belly tops, panyhose, miniskirts, singing of provocative lyrics off the radio etc. It's amazing how much I appreciate that now, even though at the time I thought she was a great big prude. :) She's not, at all. She just thinks that sexxxeee stuff is the purview of people who are old enough to procreate, and acutal procreation is the purview of people who are mentally and emotionally mature enough to transition to the parenting lifestyle.

(continuing the clothes drift) "The family motto has evolved into "company is coming over - time to put clothes on!"" Here, too. We cover up all privates that have celebrated their third birthday when Baptist Aunt comes over. But we roll our eyes a bit when doing it - because the lesson is that a considerate person doesn't show their privates to people who don't want to see them, AND that it's silly to define covering up your privates as The Way God Wants It Done. We don't actually think God has opinions on nudity. But He definitely has opinions on not deliberately making your aunt feel uncomfortable over something as inconsequential as whether or not your privates are showing. When my girls are older, the same principle will apply to the question of how-short-can-my-skirt-be. A considerate person doesn't deliberately make the people around her uncomfortable over something as minor as a clothing choice. The moral issue isn't the flesh showing per se - it's the necessity of doing your part to contribute to a harmonious society. If we are relocated to Micronesia when my girls are teenagers, I won't say a darn word when they head out the door in halter tops and grass skirts - provided that that's the currently prevailing dress code for girls-not-looking-to-start-something. And honestly, the same principle would apply to a person of the opposite gender who'd taken a purity pledge. Would a considerate person who valued social harmony set out to make the kid break his/her pledge? They would not. A considerate person would back right off. I'm horrified by the mention in the other thread of purity rings being a target for would-be seducers.

"To me advocating for safer sex is like advocating for safer drugs. Yet no one is discussing how to find a reputable supplier and how to choose the best method of getting high to suit their needs because if they want drugs they're going to do it so we might as well give them all their choices. Of course I say no one is discussing it, but I'm bet there is indeed some less than yahoo who would somewhere." :seeya: I don't consider myself to be less-than in any way, but the distinction between marijuana and meth is going to be clearly made in this household, as well as the distinction between the inherent risks of an intoxicant that you grow yourself or acquire from a regulated, legal manufacturing industry, versus something you might buy on the street from the kind of person who sells illegal substances on the street. If that is what you define as "advocating for safer drugs," then that's what I plan to do. Again, I'm more than happy if my children decide never to get drunk, high or laid until they married. But I've BTDT, and here I am, a stable happy adult. THAT SAID - I really empathize with the poster who was talking about using her own life as a cautionary tale and really hoping that the things she'd done that brought her pain would not be repeated in the next generation of her family. I feel just as strongly, about other things I did as a teen - just not so much about the fornication. Or the recreational use of alcohol and marijuana. :) The things that have screwed me up, I will counsel my children against. If premarital relationships had caused me pain that I felt was disproportionate to their positive effects on my life, then no doubt I'd be pro-purity.

Thank you thank you thank you! SO many options I was not aware of...

Sorry again, I've got no scrolling capacity on this machine, so I needed to post again to make it totally clear that I do NOT believe P2P to be a form of "extreme social sanction." If you're going to advocate for chastity, then by all mean, use curriculum and get your kid together with like-minded peers to ask questions in a safe space!

"Your tag reads that you are focused on Torah - what exactly does it mean that you are not in the "purity" camp? Hoping you'll clarify this for me." We're a Reform family. We love us some Torah, but don't take it as face value literal truth about how we should be conducting our lives here in the 21st century. We see the Torah and it's commentaries (the Talmud) as a record of our people's struggle to comprehend and relate their experience of the Divine and to help Jews in every age to conduct themselves in a way that is pleasing to God and contributes to the well-being of humanity - which is why we tend to get a little bemused when non-Jews are gung-ho to literally interpret the parts of the Pentateuch where, say, the sexual purity of young women is enforced by extreme social sanction. Remember, it was the rabbis who first came up with a reasoned argument why rape victims shouldn't be offered to their assailants as brides - and that was waaaay back in the Middle Ages. There's a lot to be said for being willing to "wrestle with God" when a literal interpretation of scripture seems to be telling you to do harm. Sorry, that was probably more than you wanted to know.

:iagree: If you read the birth control thread, you'll know that I am not in the "purity" camp, but thank you thank you thank you for being willing to TALK about sexuality and your value system in a venue where questions can be asked and supportive people can help you give complete answers.

I am really excited about the possibility of a science co-op for secular homeschoolers in my town. Another mama has offered to be the coordinator, and I'm trying to help her by digging up curriculum samples to bring to the organizing meeting. Apart from REAL Science for Kids, what else should I look into? Remember, this is strictly for the Earth-is-4.5-billion-years-old crowd. Our kids get a lot of exposure to God-centered or God-presupposing modes of thinking just because of the region we live in, so we want a science curriculum that is just.about.science. We are thinking of doing Biology this year, but could switch to Physics or Chemistry if doing so would give us a really great curriculum choice for this secular mixed-age group setting. Thanks in advance, mamas!

We are not doing Phonics in first grade. We did the K level of Phonicsworks plus 40% of the 1st grade level last year, and it was soooooooo boooooooring. I can see that it was a necessary place to start, but now that DS has some fluency we are going to read, you know, real books. He seems able to internalize phoenemes (sp? lol) from encountering them in context. We'll see how it goes - I'll backtrack if I need to, but I really do believe that by the end of the 1st grade year he'll be reading SOTW to himself and I'll be thanking my lucky stars that we didn't burn time on a phonics program.

AWESOME RECIPE. I am totally making that. But I can't make it this week, because it will totally wreck dh's diet, because he is a Challah Fiend. You would never know he was the only gentile in the family. :tongue_smilie:

Thank goodness he recognizes that he wouldn't be an asset to your household. Whether he truly disapproves of homeschooling, or whether that's a cover issue for wounded pride - whatever. You don't need any part of that drama. He's an adult, he can find his own place, you can continue to be his loving family.

"Sex is not like murder. It is not like stealing extra cookies either. Both of those things hurt other people (one much less than the other, though I am pretty upset when I find there are none left for me). Sex brings joy to two individuals for a short amount of time. It is much more like kayaking than murder: risky, but mostly fun. So, yes, if shooting people did nothing worse than worry me and the daddio, I would give my kid a silencer just in case. Just as I'd give them a life jacket for that kayak." :iagree: I understand that other people have different convictions about the proper time and place for sexual relations. My conviction is, there are risks, you can get hurt, but seeing as that's true of every important decision my kids will ever make, my focus will be on counseling them to make decisions that maximize opportunties for joy and mimize opportunties for pain. If one or all of them decide that early marriage or an extended period of chastity is their ideal scenario, then hooray. And to continue with the metaphor game... my kids are not allowed to take stuff off the kitchen counter without asking (cookies or anything else), but yes, we own a stool and yes, they have been taught how to use it properly. Why would I want to set up a situation where I might have to deal with pilfered cookies AND a fall onto the hard kitchen floor? I may not HAND them the stool with which to pilfer the cookies, but it's in the house. They have free access to it. Just like they'll have free access to bc when the time comes that they might have need of it (right now, they'd just be making really pricey water balloons, so we don't have any on hand ;)).

We're working hard on making changes like this, too. We've experimented a lot over the past couple of years to find out what we can live without (no HCFS or storebought carb-laden boxed cookie/cracker nastiness) and what just doesn't work (Sorry, Barbara Kingsolver, but fresh fruit out of season is an absolute must for my 3 young children. Sorry, Nina Planck, but we're going to use white flour and sugar when we bake). What I've noticed is that when only eat homemade baked goods, our carb intake is reduced to a level that I think is sustainable. A standard RDA analysis tells me that I eat too few carbs and too much saturated fat and cholesterol, and I'm thinking "that sounds about right to me..." Right now is high season for both my garden and the farmer's market, so the adults are eating a lot of veggies and the kids are eating a lot of berries and peaches. Farm-fresh eggs and raw milk are diet mainstays for me, and we bought $250 worth of grass-finished beef and poultry from a local farm that looks like it may last a couple of months with zero industrial meat purchased from the store. My kids whined a bit when I stopped buying Cheerios, but really, it was minor. They are still getting boxed mac n' cheese a couple of times per week, which I don't feel great about, but I think their overall diet is good enough that I'm not going to sweat it. Our goal is to eat in a way that won't kill us or the planet without obsessing over diet details all the livelong day.

I'm a LL right now (beacuse the market tanked in 2008), and IMHO the landlord and the tenant assume different, but equally serious, risks. I could be out major $$ if my tenants trashed the place and left town. They could suffer a drastic and basically unsolvable decrease in their standard of living if I stopped living up to my LL responsibilities and they were stuck with a year's lease on a place with perpetually broken heat, broken plumbing etc. I hire a property manager to take care of this kind of stuff - it's worth the money to have somebody local with experience and contacts to deal with any problems that arise. If I were out trying to rent right now, I would look for a freestanding house that was being handled by a large, reputable property management firm. That would let me know that the LLs were people who weren't in this to make maximum $$ off me, but were people who wanted their place to stay in nice condition for an eventual sale. OP, if you currently qualify for Section 8, then IMO it's really important for you to at least look into getting on the list for Section 8. Not all those places are created equal. And you don't know how you'll feel a month or six months or a year from now when your number finally comes up - things may be at the point where you are ready to take the option, or things may have improved so much that you know longer qualify and can take yourself off the list. In my area (Greenville), there are Section 8 options that are NOT in huge complexes, but totally respectable multi-unit buildings that small-scale LLs have chosen to categorize as Section 8. There really are choices out there, it just takes time and patience (and a place to live in the meantime!) while you search out the good options in your county.

"FYI, Mormons do teach that sexual sins are second to murder in seriousness. It's scripture in the Book of Mormon." Thank you for the explanation. I have never read the book of Mormon, and I should. But you'll note that even Elder Holland is pretty clear the murder tops fornication on the list of Things God Forbids. Even in the context of a Mormon family teaching Mormon sexual ethics, I still don't much care for the condom=silencer metaphor. There has got to be another way to vivdly illustrate the principle. :)

"I think it is ridiculous to tell your teens/young adults "don't have premarital sex" at the same time you are telling them, "don't marry until you finish college and are settled in your career!" That is about a 10-15 year gap between physically ready and "life" ready." That's pretty much where I come down on it - and what I would choose, if I got to make this choice on my children's behalf, is a few premarital sexual relationships with all their attendant joys and heartaches, followed by a choice of life partner made when they are fully prepared for their profession/vocation, ready to leave off being a dependant in my household and establish a household of their own, and hopefully gearing themselves up for some purposeful procreation. Sex is a great pleasure. Unintended pregnancy and exposure to STDs are hazards to guard against. A+B=BC in this family. It sounds from that study Rosie linked to like we're pretty typical Jews. ;) This is a really interesting thread. I think there's a valid argument to be made for almost any POV on this issue - which probably means that there's a sound parenting strategy to be employed in service of almost any POV. One exception - giving a kid a condom put on their penis is like giving them a silencer to put on their gun? Having sex is an equivalent transgression to committing murder? What Bible are you reading? :confused: No matter how much a family may advocate for abstinence, I don't see that there's much Scriptural support for equating consensual fornication between unwed young people with the taking of a human life in terms of the damage done either to the individuals or the community. The end result of sex, after all, is a new life - and that is only a POSSIBLE consequence of sex. I shudder at the notion of teaching a child that sexual impurity is a sin of the same kind or degree as commiting murder. That's a heavy load for young shoulders - especially if your creed teaches that masturbation is also a form of sexual impurity. I can think of no better way to condition an adolescent to believe that they are bad, weak, selfish, dirty, unworthy... you get the point. Believe what you want to about abstinence, but keep your mortal and venial sins a bit distinct, YKWIM? As C.S. Lewis said, the sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

I purchased an Acer netbook last year, and for me, it was too slow. If I were buying again for the same set of needs (surfing, email, reading eBooks, occaisional Netflix viewing), I'd buy an iPad.

I use expired Benadryl. It hasn't killed me or the kids yet.

We have hanging file folders labeled by subject in our homeschool cupboard. At the end of the K year, that stuff was all pulled out and stuffed in a manilla envelope labeled "K5." If it's not a flat piece of paper, it doesn't get saved in this house. But I have no problem finishing ds' elementary school years with 7 manila envelopes that I have to hang on to. For the higher grades, I hope that all his written work will be done on the computer, but until he can write fair copy we aren't using the computer at all. So paper is a necessary evil.

:lol: at the Tent-Revival-to-Greased-Lightening transition. "Am I the only one who thinks this stuff is weird? Flowers and slow dancing is not stuff I associate with df/dd relationships. And my girls are very much daddy girls." You are not the only one. There is something really energetically ick about a father doing "date stuff" with one of his daughters. Flowers on her birthday? A spotlight dance at her wedding? Not date stuff. Handing her a single rose as he leads her out on onto the floor to dance with a crowd of other couples? Date stuff. But really, compared with what it might have been, a rose and a dance is tame. They could have asked all the dads to pray over their daughters and give them a Guardian of Purity necklace. You got off easy. ;)

Thanks for the list! We have splurged on the Dr. Seuss and Toy Story audiobooks, and they are definitely worth the money, but I was hoping to find a free phonics app. Yay!

I have a great big soft spot for the AG's outreach to "unchurched" girls, maybe more than I should, having seen them be a major source of support to girls I knew in junior high who sometimes had no other positive forces at work in their lives. But I wouldn't let my kid sign that, and I wouldn't participate as an adult leader in a group that would allow minors to sign such things without their parent's knowledge. I don't care for the notion of the AG meting out "discipline" to children without their parents being in the loop. But it's the requirement to be born again that gets me the most. You just can't require people to have a transcendent spiritual experience in order to get their merit badges. It's theologically untenable. :) If this were solely a group of AG girls, I might feel a little differently about having them sign a code of conduct making them subject to AG discipline, because both they and their parents would have some notion of what that meant. In general, codes of conduct for youth groups are OK with me, but I wouldn't let my kids join any such group run by an organization I wasn't ideologically aligned with - and I suspect that many, if not most, of the non-AG families whose daughters participate in AG groups are seriously in the dark about what the AG movement believes and how it operates.

We used a K12 virtual charter school last year, and while I was happy to discuss the pros and cons of using it with anybody who showed the faintest interest :D, my answer to a checkout girl on a Wednesday morning who would catch sight of ds and ask said "oh, is school out today?" was always "we homeschool." Nobody outside of our little homeschool world is interested in the independent homeschool/virtual charter school distinction. K12 in this state bends over backwards to explain to prospective families that it is NOT homeschooling, but geez, it sure felt a lot like homeschooling with a boxed curriculum. We spoke to his "teacher" 3 times in the entire year. We set our own schedule. I didn't care for the boxed-curriculum experience and we won't be using K12 again, but I certainly would call our experience this past year a homeschooling experience. If somebody asks me next year if it's my first year homeschooling, I will say "no." (And then, if I'm talking to another homeschooler, we'll probably have a long conversation about the pros and cons of K12.) The whole reason I signed up with K12, and I assume a common reason that other homeschoolers in other states sign up with umbrella schools, virtual schools etc. was to try and access some of that tax money I had forked over to cover my son's OT. I realize it's a controversial issue, but I think that the homeschooling movement would be increased and strengthened by a wider understanding that making use of public educational dollars to serve the needs of homeschoolers is not an anti-homeschooling goal. If a child is not in publicly funded school, it is reasonable to think that his homeschooling parents should be given a stipend (or heck, call it a tax rebate) to defray the cost of materials. It's reasonable to think that 1 day/week of classes in art, music, foreign language, PE etc. might be provided at public expense to homeschooled children. It's reasonable to think that testing or therapies provided free of charge to public school students might also be provided to homeschooled students. In our zeal to avoid government interference, I think we sometimes forget that it's possible to take the position that the public educational system offers very useful services to hmeschooled students in some states already, and that it may be worth our while to pursue similar programs in the states where using the tax dollars you've paid into the education system is currently an all-or-nothing proposition. "I pay for it all myself" is not some litmus test for homeschooling purity. It may be a litmus test for being middle-class or above, and/or having really good insurance that covers speech and occupational therapy, and/or having a range of private extracurricular and Fine Arts enrichment available for homeschoolers in your town...

We had an 8' one last year, upgraded to a 12' one this year. It's on our brick patio on a tarp. My kids are four and six. What I've learned so far is: 1. The kids love it. 2. No need for a ladder - they fling themselves in. 3. If I just put in some sanitizer/algaecide and COVER IT UP (very important!), the water does not turn green. Monthly changes of water suffice. 4. If you put in on grass, the grass rots and smells revolting and coats the bottom of the pool. 4. I have to regard the thing as disposable, because at the end of the summer it is ready to be tossed. Green slime growing on the bottom, plastic weakened be exposure to the scorching sun, etc.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idyll