How are you going to celebrate the holiday? Do you do anything special? Couple of interesting sites: http://www.usmemorialday.org/backgrnd.html http://homeschooling.about.com/cs/unitssubjhol/a/memorial.htm

Good for you and lucky for your kids. You're right, though. That's an underreported benefit of HSing. Oh and you are a way better mom than I. My kids caught a lizard and wanted to keep it as a pet. I told them that we should let the lizard live in the freedom of the world, but that we could name him, read books about him, keep an eye out for him, write a story about him. Inside my head I was screaming "EWWW. No way! I know the baby will let that thing out and it will somehow get in my bed or my shoe or ....!!!"

Here are a few suggestions. I've tried baking soda and cayenne and they help. Haven't tried the vinegar suggestion, but I'd try it on a non-precious plant first to make sure it doesn't hurt the plant. 10 Ways To Kill Ants… Organically 1. Baking soda is poisonous to ants, spinkle it around your plants to ensure ants will stay away. 2. Flour & Baby Powder will keep ants from reaching your plants, ants will not cross the powder – so circle your plants with it. 3. You can use coffee grounds, chili powder, cinnamon, peppermint or black pepper. All deter ants and if you pour coffee grounds directly on an anthill, they will eat the coffee grounds and implode. 4. Grits, instant rice & cream of wheat can be sprinkled around plants. The ant will eat a piece of whichever you sprinkle, drink water and the grain expands and kills the ant. 5. Fill a spray bottle with 1 part vinegar and 1 part water and spray on plants. The acid in vinegar will kills ants. 6. Mix together one-third cup of molasses, six tablespoons of sugar, and six tablespoons of active dry yeast into a smooth paste. Use the mixture to coat strips of cardboard. Keep out of reach of pets and small children. You can leave mixture on a saucer outside anthill and they’ll eat it and die! 7. Fold contact paper in half, with the sticky side out and make a circle around base of plant. The ants get stuck on the paper – problem solved. 8. Cut off the bottom of a paper cup and cut a slit up the side of the cup and coat outside with vaseline and place around base of plant. You can also use packing tape. 9. Mix one cup of borax, two-thirds a cup sugar and one cup water. Dip cotton balls in the solution and place in areas near your anthill Ants will leave the plants alone and ingest the sweet mixture. The borax kills the ants. 10. Diatomaceous Earth is a commonly sold organic pesticide that will destroy the insects outer skeletons, causing the pests to die from dehydration.

Recipes - do as much as possible ahead of time so you're not spending all your time cooking and cleaning up. We like kebabs, brats, quinoa salad, fruit salad, grilled pizza, etc. Lots of great camping recipes if you search. Whatever you choose, just try to prep - brown meats, chop all veg possible... As far as purchases - do you have camping chairs or portable chairs that will work for camping? We got each of our kids their own. They love them and it allows us to all comfortably sit around the fire. We also go to the dollar store before camping season and let the kids get camping toys - usually army men, craft kits and more army men. I stock up on glow sticks or bracelets, whichever is cheaper, and the kids get one each night. Educational purchase that is fun - portable microscope. You can pick them up reasonably cheaply and my kids love exploring everything they find with them. Oh, and I second the headlamp suggestion - huge hit here. Another thing my family likes is taking ownership of camp chores. Our oldest son is responsible for "kitchen" organization, the next oldest is in charge of keeping the sleeping area tidy. They each pick a meal that they are responsible for - even if it's just juice and muffins for breakfast. Sounds like they would hate it, but actually they love their duties. Happy camping!!

This underscores the concern I have with what's going on in TX - there is a lot of misinformation out there. When I first read about the changes a few weeks ago, I was shocked. However, later I read a more informative, less emotionally charged account that sounded much more reasonable. I haven't read the actual report, so I don't know exactly what is in there. History - as mentioned several times in the boards - is a tough subject and it's almost impossible to make it unbiased. There is more history than time in any school so teachers/textbooks/administrators/BOE have to decide what to include and what to cut. No one will ever be happy with that because invariably something important will be cut.

There is an online game like this for kids. Argh, I can't remember it and my machine is searching verrrry slowwwwly. My mom, a schoolteacher, says her students LOVE it and it teaches them what is involved in city planning (utilities, transportation, etc) and allows them to budget. If I can remember or find it, I'll post it. If someone else knows it off the top of his/her head, please help my poor memory out. :)

Interesting point. Let me see if I understand your point by putting it another way, have we abdicated our common sense and responsibilities to the government? Is it a chicken and egg argument - did we abdicate or did it usurp? I'd guess the answer is yes to both. Again, I see this as a cultural shift and one of the many forces pulling this country in opposite directions. I have friends who are delighted to have gov't take care of everything is does and look to it to take on more. They view the goverment as a force of good and a referee in the game of life. I have other friends who would like to pull all authority from the federal gov't that is not clearly specified in the Constitution. They view government as a power grabbing tyrant.

An offshoot question - what do you (everyone in general) think the reaction would have been had the president chosen last year to break tradition and not laid a wreath and/or chooses this year not to do so? Would that be the desired end result of the signers of the letter? (Obviously we cannot presume to read people's minds, but we can make some guesses and inferences.)

How sad that my first instinct was to ask you to post it or at least your bibliography? Your thesis was way more interesting than mine - an economic analysis of the impact of the savings and loan debacle. Also had a better title, but I know the word debacle was in it often - great word. Though not that riveting a read, I must say that research has been quite useful given recent events.

Well that wasn't nice at all. I had lots of things to get done and instead I got sucked into your links. :) Just kidding. I found the Ransom article extremely interesting and am printing out a couple of Punch mags for the kids. Thank you for sharing. Random note - the Pledge of Allegiance wasn't written until well after the Civil War in 1892 and has been modified four times since then. I hadn't known that until you mentioned indivisibility which caused me to look it up.

The above post (in which I inadvertantly deleted my intro and was too long to edit it in) is a posting of a view of the civil war that I think several posters are mentioning. You may not agree with it all, I don't agree with all of it. However, I think it brings up important details. Oh and the choppy writing is my fault. I exceeded the character limit on posts. My apologies for poor deleting.

Was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war. The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states. Instead, America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996). The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp). The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely watched Eastern Theater. In the five great battles fought there from July 1861 through September 17, 1862, the changing cast of Union generals failed to win a single victory. Then came Antietam on September 17, the bloodiest day in the entire war; the Union army lost more than 12,000 of its 60,000 troops engaged in the battle. Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union. Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be "forever free" on January 1, 1863 – one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued – but only if a state remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Regarding slaves in states loyal to the government or occupied by Union troops, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments in his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress. The first was that slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be freed gradually over a 37-year period, to be completed by January 1, 1900. The second provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property. The third was that the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals." As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000), "It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and that you couldn’t have one without the other." Congress refused to consider Lincoln’s proposals, which Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune labeled whales’ tubs of "gradualism, compensation, [and] exportation." None of the Confederate States took the opportunity to rejoin the Union in the 100-day window offered and the war continued for another two years and four months. Eight months later the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery ended everywhere in the United States (without gradualism, compensation, or exportation). Black and White Americans sustained racial and political wounds from the war and the subsequent Reconstruction that proved deep and long lasting. Northern abolitionists wanted southern Black slaves to be freed, but certainly did not want them to move north and live alongside them. Indiana and Illinois, in particular, had laws that barred African-Americans from settling. Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive. The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way: "The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North… the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue." In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point: That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop. Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical: Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.

Did it make anyone else laugh that this happened in the parking lot of a Friendly's?!! :) Perhaps next time y'all should meet at a Testy's. Nothing else to add except to reitterate that this could have been just a bad day for her. (sleepovers here don't lead to a lot of sleep and I know I'm not always at my best the day after - still not an excuse for her behavior toward you.)

Ok, I've got three kiddos running around so my thinking cap is not on all that tightly now. Can you explain your thoughts further, please, cause I think you're on a similar line of reasoning that I ended up on? I get your first sentence. It seems to me that America was founded on people wanting freedom to do what they want, rugged individualism, etc. However, it seems to me that that is not necessarily still true. Freedom to make your own choices and deal with the consequences is no longer acceptable to many in our society (pick a gov't handout depending on your political views - big business bailouts and favorable regulation, socialized healthcare or increased welfare, etc). We're demonizing certain groups of fellow Americans (lazy, corrupt gov't bureaucrats or executive fat cats, whichever group of -ists who don't agree with you, etc.) for making decisions we don't agree with. Question about your second paragraph - so then why should we stay together as a country if we don't have shared values? (not snarky, really just a follow on question.) Put another way, why stay together in a boat when we as a population in general cannot decide which direction to head and each side views the other as an anchor holding them back? I know there is something - could be as simple and elegant as Rosie stated - because we're Americans - but is there more to it? Is that enough to keep us together as our population continues to grow apart? Can we strengthen whatever that glue/value/belief is? I appreciate everyone's comments and am enjoying reading your thoughts.

I agree. I always thought BoR and Const. were the glue, but current debates about living document vs. framers' intent, 2nd and 10th amendment, weight of international law on SCOTUS rulings, etc. show that Americans have very different views on what those docs say and how important they are.

Recently, I got to vacation with some good friends from diff. walks of life and political beliefs. Conversation turned to the recent boycott of AZ by certain cities, then onto secession and finally focused on American culture. I enjoyed the time, but left with many questions and thoughts and hoped that the hive could provide some more perspectives. Summary of the general discussion followed by my questions: Boycott - most were dismayed by cities boycotting AZ (not to be confused with support for AZ's law. Discussion was more on US cities boycotting a US state triggered by the girls basketball team story.). They felt that this was unseemly and improper for fellow US gov't entities. Outrage and displeasure ought to be shown in other ways - official statements, letters to legislators, etc. A couple of ladies, though, found the recent actions of AZ so distasteful and unAmerican that they were disgusted that AZ was part of America. This then led to... Secession - Friends on both sides of the aisle then began talking about secession - is it legal, would it be beneficial, which states might or might not (should or should not) withdraw from the union, logistics of a peaceful secession, etc. What concerned me most about this part of the discussion was how very differently my friends of differing political beliefs saw the country and its goals. This led to... American culture - As we discussed and debated, it became clear that each side holds many significanly opposing views about what America is and ought to be. Quite frankly, the goals of my liberal friends were the exact opposite of the goals of my conservative friends and each side thought the other was holding the country back. This got us all musing about what it means to be an American. What are American values? If we hold such opposing views, what is the glue that keeps America together? Lest I portray any of this incorrectly, I wouldn't describe any of my friends as radicals and certainly noone was espousing secession. This was more a philosophical discussion. However it raised many questions for which I didn't have answers. Primarily, are we becoming two separate peoples sharing one country? Anyone wish to share his or her thoughts?

GB Italics has a book called Write Now for older students/adults. I'm doing it while my kids are doing their own hw. Not babyish and not time consuming. One day I'll have pretty writing.....ok, legible writing.

Have you looked into local farms to see if they are willing to trade work for food? Also, check out local small restaurants/groceries for the same thing. Our Panera gives away leftover bread. Our local natural foods store will sell older produce for incredibly reduced prices. Check churches and local volunteer organizations. I volunteer with a group that holds an annual garage sale as a fundraiser. We have ladies come and trade work for clothes, etc. during the whole year. You get first dibs on some great stuff and can network. It's a great time to network for babysitting, pet sitting, house cleaning, etc. jobs. Review your skills and see what you can do to earn some income. Lots of threads on the boards on this topic with some creative and very useful advice. Big hug!!

Haven't heard of it either. When you have a moment, please share why you like it, what makes it special, pros, cons. Thanks!!

Sorry, have nothing for you, but had to thank you for this thread. Ended up on many a rabbit trail (and a long list of books to read. Dh may ban me from reading the boards if my book list gets much bigger) :) Also read a bio of Philip Johnson - interesting guy. Regardless of which side of the debate you're on, I think he'd be an interesting guy with whom to chat. One of his quotes seems to speak to what you're saying: "What I am not doing is bringing the Bible into the university and saying, "We should believe this." Bringing the Bible into question works very well when you are talking to a Bible-believing audience. But it is a disastrous thing to do when you are talking, as I am constantly, to a world of people for whom the fact that something is in the Bible is a reason for not believing it... You see, if they thought they had good evidence for something, and then they saw it in the Bible, they would begin to doubt. That is what has to be kept out of the argument if you are going to do what I to do, which is to focus on the defects in [the evolutionists'] case—the bad logic, the bad science, the bad reasoning, and the bad evidence."

You don't need to shorten the program to devalue degrees. Look how much they have already been devalued b/c so many colleges inflate grades, graduate students who cannot do simple arithmetic, etc. Agree with PP that some colleges allow you to go faster than the typical student. I remember a column by a prof. at Stanford I think, about a foreign student who took a heavier than normal class load and took summer classes. She graduated at least a full year early if not more than that. Doesn't sound like that's what your SIL did. Just sharing a random aside. Sputterduck - which university do you attend? Sounds very forward thinking!

You've got a few choices: 1 - Go cold turkey - completely switch your diet. Shock your system. Miserable for two weeks or so, but then you adjust. Pros - you can plan it all ahead, get psyched up, plan rewards, etc. Cons - it's freakin' hard and it may not be a long term change. 2 - Gradual change - add one fruit or veg a day. Have it with dip, alone, roasted, raw, hidden, whatever. Pros - easy, more likely to lead to long term change. Cons - hard to stick to it. I'm great at saying I'll do that and at the end of the week, meh, not so much remembering it. 3 - Somewhere between - Plan out two weeks worth of meals and snacks. Make one meal each day incredibly veggie/fruit filled. Plan one of your snacks to be veg or fruit. Pros - easy, you won't starve and be bitter all day 'cause you're hungry. Cons - mix of the previous two. Pick your poison. You know your personality. You can best assess what will work for you. Water - 64 oz is a guideline. Just aim for more water. Mix it up - add lemon, lime, cucumber (ew, ok, I don't add that, but I have friends who do). Heck, add one of the water flavor packets. I fill a 32 oz nalgene and keep it with me in the car instead of a coke or coffee. Then I refill it and finish before I eat dinner. I'll add one more item to your to do list - exercise. Don't know if you're already in a routine, but if not, add it. On days that I workout, I'm way more motivated to be healthy.

I would guess it would vary by camp. In Chad, they are served sorghum, millet, or maize meal and split peas, lentils or vegetables. Interesting idea. Are y'all using the money that you would have spent on other foods to donate to a particular camp or charity? What about a prayer challenge? Not trying to grill you, just curious about the specifics. A friend's church likes to do this sort of thing and would be interested.

We can hear trains and boats and birds in our house. I bought a cheap box fan and we use it at night. Cheap and quick fix. Totally muffles the sound. Eventually, I'd like to get the soundproof glass windows. Friends had these when we lived smack in the middle of a big city. Amazing. You couldn't hear a thing and they lived on a very noisy street. We're also looking at blowing some extra insulation into the walls and attic. Helps reduce sound and keeps utility bills down. :)