- go out to Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Linner, Dinner and Desert--all in one day, just because I can!

Oh my goodness, yes! I'm so tired of encountering The Boys crap at random intervals throughout my day! I'm going to have them sell every thing that they don't take with them before they move! Mwahahahaha!!!

It was so nice to be an all Male house hold. I guess there's a chance that I'll have to learn to wear more clothes around the house as my daughter gets older. 😢

Oh, poor thing! I see you missed the Raise The Kids Walking Around in Their Underwear BandWagon! We didn't have AC for the first decade of The Boys life. Comfy Boxers for the win!

...Travel The Country in a Luxury SUV (Only selectively staying in Hotels on occasion) to Sight see ...Stock my house with a months worth of food and gleefully watch it last a whole month!

Sorry, I hate my kids stupid Cats too. Fortunately they're predominately outdoor cats. I wouldn't be able to tolerate cats pissing in my house, let alone my own bedding. On the plus side, she ought'a be dropping any month now.

His Plan B? He has a couple of side hustles that he'd pour more energy into and a couple of other business ideas and work those.

Well, to be clear, he's not a particularly difficult young man. He understands that certain things just have to be done and there is a good reason for those certain things. Even though sometimes it's just a "so saith-Gil" type of thing. There's not much that I have to compel him to do, but way I compel him to do academic crap that he doesn't want to do is it's mandatory for his GADGET diploma which he want's more than a GED--but due to his age he's not able to take the GED anyway without a special waiver.

I guess you'd need to survey your local homeschoolers, but scheduling events that are up during the day, not at the end of the school day would be supremely helpful. We have sports or other events at the end of the day. Chess Thematic History or Science Presentations Foreign Language Story Time Poetry / Writing Events Academic Competitions Readers Theater Groups Craft Workshops

Hell, if this were the 1800s I'd have put them out at 12 and said "I love you, but it's time for you to find your way in this world!" then I would've ridden away without looking back! There'd be so much more food in my house 🥹 and no one leaving my back door w i d e open every.gosh.darned.hour! I know, time flies like that. I can't wait for the day that the last one leaves the nest and I have blessed silence (and food) in my own home at all hours of the day and night! Anyway, back to the situation at hand... My personal hesitation is that as a man who just knows his own sons, it really feels like they won't successfully complete College later in life. My Father-Senses say college has gotta be while they're young, before other things in Life interfere and become the bigger priority. I don't care about high school or Grad School, but for their own economic safety and professional well-being I want them to have a useful 4-year degree as soon as possible. Pal (bless his heart) is aiming for graduate school since he was a kid. More power to him. Buddy was comfortable with the compromise of obtaining a 4-yr degree and using it to leverage his-way into a professional job working abroad, but then this Summer happened and now his thinking switched from "Just so long as I am not a student at 20 years old" to "Why am I still a student at 16?" 🙄 If I could just blend them into one kid who was willing to just get a 4-year degree I'd be able to sleep a lot easier. I'm 65-67% sure that I have a viable solution, but we've gotta have a couple more meetings and sleep on it a few more nights.

See, my Other Boy used to always say he wanted a PhD, so when we'd talk about that, he was aware of the fact that he'd be a student until 23 or later, but my BizKid (thank's for the name) has made no secret of the fact that he's unwilling to be a student once he's 20. He's been telling me since he was 10 that he wasn't going to "waste his whole adulthood" as a student. 🙄

I don't know, I read the Girlfriends dad remark as humor along the lines of "Fine, I'll be on the list, but I'm not coming unless it's really needed" type of thing. But I'm also a man who tells my teens "don't come to me unless there's a pint of your own blood missing from your body" Which is my way of lovingly telling them that I trust them to (figure out how to) handle the little things on their own. However, we don't have a network of solid people around us, so in all honesty there aren't many people who I would trust to intervene competently on my kids behalf in the event of an emergency when I'm not available so it's a very short list of people that they can call. Becoming self-reliant and highly capable is a necessity for The Boys.

I think the stuff that Paul Priestley teaches is Observational Art (I know very little able art/drawing, I'm just going off the word observational-- so forgive me if I'm wrong). Pal used his YouTube video lessons a lot to try and improve his drawing. I don't know if he teaches live lessons or not. https://paulpriestleyart.com/drawing-school/ It seems that his website links back to his YouTube channel.

He's been doing this profitably since last Spring. He's just making more money because he's 1) gotten better at it and 2) is able to spend more time doing it. We already attend a Local Business Group so that he can network with and learn from others and yes he has a mentor. There's no doubt in his mind that he'll be able to continue doing it in the Fall as well. 1) Once he's graduated, how would I actually compel him to do X-educational-task? 2) The Boys have been reading through this booklist for a couple of years.

While he does technically have the credits to graduate (or could if I actually recorded credits). I'm far more invested in whether or not he gets a bachelors degree or professional trade than what he does as far as high school is concerned. To be honest, I don't care much about Highschool one way or the other. I have a practical view of formal higher education--it's for work and social advantages. We've made ample use of our local Dual Enrollment opportunities and he's carrying a 4.0. He's adamant that he doesn't want to take business classes. I've recommended and advised him to take business classes or even get a AS in Business because I know my kid but he's never found the idea appealing. He loves to read on business, Small Business in our state, etc, but resists taking business classes like I'm asking him to get a tooth-pulled sans anesthesia. He's long been clear that he isn't willing to be a student in his 20s. The original path that we were working on, knowing that he doesn't want to be a student when he turns 20, is to fast track to a Bachelors, but currently, he's talking like he doesn't want to be a student at all anymore, which is what gives me pause. Simply stopping school at 16 because he's essentially bored of studying and finds other things more gratifying isn't really an option. Part of this super eagerness to talk about graduating early probably comes from his summer (which is going amazingly well) and just involves him doing his own thing without any sort of school or class in the way of anything. He's making a lot more money this summer which also a mixed-blessing. But when you have $$$ in your sights, you tend to overlook everything else.

The thing is he has made his case. I know why he wants to graduate early and what he plans to do with the time and energy. He has a couple of realistic ideas about what he wants to do after graduation, in many ways it's simply an expansion of the work and creative hobbies that he does now. He ultimately wants to be able to use 100% of his time and energy into creative and professional endeavors now--which, while I understand the desire, I don't agree with it. Yes, growing his business is important, but it doesn't have to grow so rapidly right now. The market isn't going to die within the next 25 years, let alone the next 2.5. I want him to grow his business and work at X-pace, but he wants to grow his business and work at Y-pace. I loathe incompetent adults, so they've been prepared to be a competent adult on purpose for some time. He's not the least bit intimidated about "being an adult", We're all confident that when it's time for him to launch, he'll be good with the basic tasks of adult life. The Boys work and they love working. Each of The Boys have and are working a Multi-Year fiscal plan, he's on track with his plan and--barring something catastrophic--will be able to afford to live on his own once he's ready anyway. He's got a good peer mix that isn't all age-related so he's not really concerned about college peers. I'm sober, addiction runs in the family and substance abuse still plagues the extended family so growing up with that he has no interest or intention to screw around with various drugs regardless of their legality. Anyway, I was leaning towards a decision when I posted, but I wanted to check for things that I might be missing. I'm gonna continue to sleep on it a bit more.

I would not change my families media consumption and screen culture because my kid has a loosing streak in the Charades played at the end of her Theatre class/club. You pick what your kids miss out on. That's the parenting gig. My basic stance is that Broadcast TV is bad for you and unfettered internet access is even worse. We've never had a TV for watching Broadcast TV. Our TV was used for the Nintendo and DVD player. To this day, The Boys play Nintendo Wii and Gamecube. I do not allow the more connected consoles. They can do different when they are living on their own as grown-men. They've been playing the same consoles since early childhood. They have played a good chunk of the Wii and Gamecube library and as they get older it expands the library of games that they can play.

The main reason for me to consider Graduating Early is that he asked me about graduating early. He's a strong, capable student but he's not a "school for school's sake" type of person and doesn't really care about College and definitely isn't trying to show colleges all the ways that he's more impressive than the next student. He's content with being way better than most people would expect even without them knowing it. He's far more interested in being a young adult than being a student and doesn't like school even though he does very well at it. He's not sure that he want's to take the college route at all and is mostly doing his bachelors because it's so important to me and because it's paid for. He's on track to graduate with his Bachelors before 20 but he's far more interested in investing his time and energy in other avenues and has been for some years now. I'm more worried about him not having a bachelors degree should he need one than he is. But he asked me again about just graduating early and I told him that I'd consider it. He's pretty mature and more than capable of navigating life and different social situations. Both of The Boys know how to go and find the adults they need to talk to and how to talk to them--and go back and talk to them again, they're not socially awkward nor incompetent in that regard. Yeah, that's kind of where he is. He feels he's ready to move on in life.

What are the possible draw backs of graduating early?

At the early elementary level priority is streamlining and accelerating their mastery of the 3Rs and basics. My goal was for The Boys to be so far ahead of the public school schedule that they couldn't be academically harmed by anything that the PS did or did not do as I had not planned to homeschool. But beyond the 3Rs I prioritize a specialized education over "well-rounded". My personal gift is mathematics, my professional skills are in technology and my desire for my grandkids is bilingualism so I make those our educational priorities. By the time that they "finish" highschool my priorities for them are Balanced Bilingualism--able to read, write and converse fluently in two languages at the level of an educated adult. Highly competent and capable of applied mathematics up to the undergraduate level as taught in our state university system. Highly competent and capable of professional level computer programming and networking skills. Capable of working with hardware and small electronics repair. Financially literate and prepared.

I made Drivers Ed a Diploma Requirement in my home school so The Boys are required to learn to drive. 0) Join AAA or some other Towing/Roadside assistance program. 1) Identify 2-3 large parking lots you can access at ungodly hours. (11pm - 6am) 2) Identify rural areas/tracts where there is lots of open space to use during earthly hours. 3) Make sure that your Living Will as well as Last Will and Testament are up to date and notarized in case your kids terrible driving does indeed get you permanent maimed or killed. 4) Check that your student doesn't need glasses for driving/night time driving. I found that learning to drive is like learning to swim--several "get the basics" lessons, back to back to set the foundation. And by Back to Back, I mean every.single.day. Then, enough "tweak some basics skills" lessons to keep them practicing and to help them to improve gradually and build stamina for driving. Then, follow that up with loads and loads of supervised practice. They begin learning to drive by practicing for a few months in big empty parking lots--movie theater, Town Square, plaza, Stadium, etc. Virtually any large open parking lots that have great light before/after business hours and are accessible during non-business hours or night time. Then they graduate to driving on Rural roads for a while. Once The Boys are more comfortable navigating parking lots and back-roads. They start driving in quiet neighborhoods during slow times. Once they are comfortable in those situations, they drive to and from our regular errand locations during non-peak hours at night. So, our local BigMart, or Gas Station so that they get comfortable with the navigation to/from those places where they're going to need to be able to drive first. Once they can drive reasonably in those three scenarios, then I start having them drive on errand-runs during the day but we go during slow-hours. After a few months of only driving during "controlled" conditions, I start having them drive during "normal" conditions. It can definitely be a slow-and-steady type thing for some teenagers.

Sorry, but this honestly sounds like something that can be corrected with a short period of direct teaching, explicit practice just to pound it into their heads. Followed by a couple of weeks of daily practice with immediate feedback. It kinda sounds like something that they never truly learned the names for correctly. I taught The Boys to read and spell phonetically (and they used Spalding for spelling in the early days) but I still have to look up "hard vs soft" consonants because its not something I ever had to truly learn. We just read the words. Due to teaching younger son how to spell intensively (he was a struggling speller), I mastered long-vs-short vowels but there's a ton of phonics terminology that I don't know because I never had to know.

So, for the first time in many years we're disrupting our Language learning routines. 1) They won't be doing Japanese Language Learning (aside from talking to each other) for a few months because of The Boys summer plans. 2) They're doing Spanish immersion then they'll be taking close to two months off of Spanish (aside from talking to each other).

I'm very pro learning to converse in a Foreign Language. There are too many mediums out there to learn a language that could and in my opinion should be explored before just deciding not to even try.

No, a B in a DE course isn't a life-ruining event. I think that you're right to not worry about it. If he's Preengineering, then he should be sure to guard his GPA in his core STEM courses as the Engineering school that he's aiming toward will care a lot more about his grades in classes like Calculus, Diff. EQ, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc than they will care about his grades in English, African American Literature, and Humanities.