Destinos was/is cheesy, but I have a special place in my heart for it since it is what I learned with in college in the 90's 🙂

I would be concerened about dehydration. I got sick my first few weeks at college and had a fever and couldn't stop throwing up and without my parents there I just didn't know enough to keep drinking/sipping anyway. I ended up calling my dad delirious on the phone and he drove up (took him 2 hours when ususally it's a 3 hour drive) and he took me to the ER where I got an IV and they said if he'd waited another day we might have had a very different outcome. I will pray for your son and for you!

I don't know if I've learned a whole lot since 2014 lol! But I have learned that some subjects lend themselves better to a time period and some to a specific assignment. For instance, we do Spanish with an online software program, and the activities are very varied as to how much time they take. So for that, assigning a certain amount of time works best. Same with things like Udemy drawing, which is watching a video and then doing a sketch, and literature, which is basically just reading and then discussing with me. For math, we do a hybrid of both. Everyone except the oldest dislikes math to varying degrees. So we shoot for one lesson or quiz/test per day, but if they've been working diligently for an hour then we call it quits and pick it up the next day wherever we left off. My oldest could happily spend all afternoon on one AoPS proof, but the rest of us are normal 😉 and that's not going to fly with anyone else here. For things like history they do better with specific assignments. "Read chapter 7 section 3." "Write a one page summary of last week's reading." Science is where we try to learn the skill of self-pacing. They know they have X number of days to read the chapter and take notes and do the labs. Then they have X number of days to study and the test is on X specific day. So I don't assign specific stuff in between there but tell them to figure it out and pace themselves. It works to varying degrees with varying kids 🤪 Right now my current freshmen who is very distractable and not terribly internally motivated is struggling with this method. I'm not sure if I want to change things up and be more specific or let her struggle through a little bit more til she learns it. Writing is typically one on one with me directly instructing, so it's more a matter of me figuring out the pacing and what to do each day than it is for them. I give them X number of days to complete the assignment and turn it in, usually a week/assignment once I've done the instruction portion.

You're so so sweet to worry about this, but please stop 🙂 You did what you could to clarify the situation so people will know you're not currently in need, and you explained to these kind hearted people, and they still want to give it you. Just take it and do what you think is best with it and if that means having a great free vacation and a little bit more flexibility in the Christmas budget then don't feel guilty. You don't need permission and they don't need to know what you did with it in order for all of you to be blessed!

They might be optional for admission, but if you want your kids to be competitive for scholarships I would definitely not consider them optional.

My 3 graduates are all glad we did it and they all think that me continuing to hs my 3 younger kids is a good idea. The oldest wishes we had started hs'ing sooner and is very positive about every aspect of his experience. He was glad to have been able to be accelerated and take math at his speed and have extra time to learn a few programming languages, which he feels (rightly, imo) that he wouldn't have had time to do if he was in ps. 2nd oldest is very positive about his experience as well and is glad to have been able to form the relationships and gain the leadership experience he did in his very time intensive ECs, neither of which would have been possible if he was in ps and both of which were instrumental in him earning a full tuition scholarship. He has commented that his social experience was different than it would have been had he gone to ps and he sometimes wonders if he would have enjoyed that as well as he did hs'ing, but I don't get the feeling he thinks it would have been superior in any way, just different. 3rd oldest also wishes we had started hs'ing earlier. She is very glad that she missed a lot of the stuff that her peers in college talk about as being part of their normal ps experience.

I read it and enjoyed it. I didn't think she thought her whole life was over at 40, but I did think she had an unhealthy fixation on her high school past. I felt like the book resolved that in a positive way. I mostly felt like she was very conflicted about her dad's imminent death and was trying desperately to find a way to avoid it.

I've used Pantene (supposedly the "bad for your hair" stuff) daily since circa 1990 and my hair stylist says it's some of the healthiest hair she's ever seen *shrug* So I don't put much stock in what "they" say about hair products, since most of "them" are selling something. Use what makes you feel pretty and what fits your budget or even just what smells nice 🙂

I'm sure all of that is true for some people. But she specifically told me it was because of one of my political opinions in her message before blocking me. I'm very sure that she feels her political opinions are a heartfelt moral belief. But we had weathered heartfelt moral belief disagreements before - especially when I became a born again Christian and she was very ambivalent about her faith - and we had always been able to talk and discuss our differences in love before this and stayed friends for at least 15 more years after that point. She told me outright it was this particular opinion that was a line in the sand for her, so it's not like I was assuming anything or prescribing motives to her that weren't there. She would and did say it was a political difference that caused her to end the friendship. I'm not trying to argue or make some big point, I'm really not, and I'm not trying for sympathy points here either 🙂 But I do want to say that yes, it does happen. I have no idea how widesprad it is, but it's not something that depends only on my perspective of the situation.

It did to me 😞 My oldest friend, who was in my wedding and whose wedding I was in and who I've known since the 2nd grade, dumped me over politics a few years ago. We weren't super close anymore and had grown into very different people, but I always valued her opinion and enjoyed hearing her perspective on things and still counted her as a friend. Until she told me to have a nice life over messenger and then blocked me and hasn't responded to my letters since.

I've learned that just because I have pretty good intuition and can "read" people well, that doesn't mean that I do, in fact, know what's going on inside their head. Reminding myself that unless they actually tell me what they think, assuming that I already know is a recipe for disaster in my relationships. The concept of telling myself only things that I actually know for a fact to be true in the "self talk" tape recorder that is constantly playing in my head has been crucial for me.

My 4th one was like this. Even something called a "quiz" by the curriculum which was easy and not timed and very much not a big deal induced tears and fear and bad performance. I did an at home achievement test with her several years in a row and jokingly cajoled her by poking fun at all the silly questions and how she knows this stuff and reading the oh-so-serious-you-must-read-it-just-this-way-instructions in a silly stern voice until she finally realized it wasn't as big of a deal as she thought it was. I hate hate hate hate HATED making her do a standardized test every year - that was part of what we hated about ps! - but she really needed the repetition to get over her fear. After several go rounds she finally took the ITBS test last year with no problem and even commented on how easy it was. Waaaaaay different than when she was in 3rd grade!

My kids are still friends with some of the people they were friends with at age 5, but that's because they attend the same church and always have. They are not as close to some of the ones they gravitated towards at age 5 and are closer to others that they didn't like as much at that age. So #1 for us is/was church. As they get older (7th grade and up) they have also developed relationships with people at speech and debate and drama club. Shared interests (vs being in a class that your mom signed you up for and you have to do it) coupled with intense time working on projects together is what makes the difference ime.

I zealously guard our time out of the house. Most ECs, while certainly fun and somewhat worthwhile, just don't provide enough ROI to justify their toll on our family time, especially if they just involve one kid. Wednesdays the piano teacher comes to our house for a lesson, so that's not out of the house. Then I take the 10 year old to a speech therapy appt. We all do a PE class at a local private school on Fridays. We all have speech and debate club on Mondays during the fall. Winter and spring the middle and high schoolers do drama on Fridays. That's it. We keep busy as a family with volunteering and misc get togethers with friends and church. But those aren't formal or every week or for just one kid.

I run them through the washer on the rinse cycle daily to get the chlorine out as soon as everybody comes inside, but I only wash them with soap about once a week. Then they get hung up on something similar to this in my laundry room. It hangs from the top bar of something like this in my laundry room.

Remember all that hs'ing advice that said not to plan a full K-12 education for your preschoolers but to teach the kid in front of you at whatever level they are currently at taking it a year at a time? Same advice applies here 🙂 My advice is: Don't have hard and fast rules about when you do what that apply across the board regardless of circumstances and temperament. Parent the kid in front of you as an individual and try not to look too far into the future and make decisions about a mythical block of future teenagers that you haven't even met yet 😉

HS'ing is a full time job, so treat it like one. Plans are beautiful and fun to make, but write them in pencil and hold them loosely. When in doubt, wear the mom hat instead of the teacher hat.

Purdue is a very well respected program for CS (my oldest DS got his degree in CS from there!) and not quite as competitive as U of I. I don't know if it would qualify as a target school like Farrar says, but it's definitely not a safety school.

1st and 2nd graders aren't known for their ability to appreciate nuance 😉 so I'd take what they say their parents say with a large dose of salt. It is very, very possible that a young elementary student might confuse what their YE parents said about prehistoric people not being any different from modern people and come up with "prehistoric people don't exist".

You could be right, but I don't remember that from the first book at all. Later ones yes, but I don't recall that from the first one.

Yes, totally normal. Buuuuuuut - I did have a surprise (shock) baby at age 45 so ... you also never know LOL!

Good job Mom! 🙂

We never did an actual class, just self studied. But each time they spent the first 3 quarters on learning the material and the last quarter on test prep with a book like Barron's.

Destinos has textbooks and workbooks you can buy used. I bought mine years ago, but I imagine they are still floating around out there on ebay and amazon. They have videos to watch too.

typing.com has been effective for us. I would think you could move through it as quickly as you wanted, depending on how much you practice.