Yup, everyday. But it's not random, it's in my finger joints. And the doctor can't even blame it on my fat butt (which of course, they try to blame everything on) because I don't walk on my hands. :laugh: No other aches or pains, though, which I attribute to genetic luck and walking everyday.

I had both of my children in my 40s and although I have no point of reference to compare it to, say, having babies in my 20s, I wouldn't trade my experience for the world. It was very positive! I had my first at 40 and my second at 42. I had plenty of energy both go-rounds, but who knows if I would have had more when I were younger? I was not ready to have a family any younger; in retrospect, I was selfish, impatient, and unappreciative of the positive things children offered. My kids changed that and I had more patience, wisdom, money, and appreciation for them in my 40s. We were also financially stable and had travelled a bit and lived our own lives by that time. There were three downsides: 1) The incessant worry that my children would be born with a birth defect because of my older age, 2) the inane attempts by doctors to shame and scare me because of my age (and push birth control like a drug pusher after the delivery), and 3) the fact that I kept having miscarriages when I tried to have more in my later-40s because I had just aged-out of the baby business at about the same time I realized I enjoyed and was good at the baby business.

Not at all. They are easy to take down. It would be more of a deal breaker if the house didn't have something I really wanted/

MP Latin books, History of the US, Human Odyssey history books.

We use these and are very happy with them. We also bought the pre-history one that is separate from the packet of timelines they sell, and it was stunning to use them and see how very little we had to write on them that far back in time, and how long we had to "wait" to get to some civilization that could be put on a timeline. What I really liked about them was that they were divided up into 4 history eras that matched SOTW and each timeline could be extended and hung on a wall, or easily kept in a notebook. Reasonably priced, also.

Both of my kids used the Critical Thinking Skills books for this year and we all thought they were a joke; they taught nothing at all and we abandoned them. For my daughter, we tried Critical Thinking I (we nearly died from boredom), Inference Jones (rather easy and didn't offer much in returns), and a spelling workbook (that did not improve daughter's spelling), and we ditched them all over the course of the year because they offered little of value. So I was thinking these books aren't necessary, but they seem to get rave reviews, even on here, but we just got nothing out of them. I think we are workbook dropouts, but I am afraid my kids will be missing something that I am not noticing that these books offer. Do any of you use workbooks for grammar sentences, paragraph editing, or other more targeted work (not just test prep)?

Red-shirting here is rampant, especially among boys, and I also agree with the previous poster that it is more common when parents don't need free daycare. Full-day Kindergarten played a major role in why we red-shirted our son, along with the fact that Kindergarten is now academic instead of a simple introduction to school life. I strongly felt that academics that early in a full-on day would be damaging to my kid. We felt he was young for his age, and that, coupled with a long day of test- driven academics was not going to serve him well. If the school had not allowed me to red-shirt my son, we would have gone to a private school that was more accommodating instead.

Yes to the bolded! I feel like I have had a second opportunity to get a real education this time 'round, just by learning along with my kids! We're one year in, and I can not believe how much I've learned! her suggestion...get a few major homeschool catalogs (if your wife hasn't done so already) and look at the options that are out there. Guess what, you could get public school materials if you wanted them from most major publishers or used from Amazon, the VERY SAME stuff as at school. Or you can get new, creative, challenging stuff that suits your kid (and maybe you, too) like a tailor-made suit. Sonlight Curriculum is a great one to read through for its explanations of why/why not to buy and its pictures of homeschool families of all ages and stages at work; and the profiles of their scholarship winners are pretty impressive, too. Tapestry of Grace will give you brain freeze...as will The Well-Trained Mind on the first read-through. It very typically convinces people of how much they *don't* know and want to learn, inviting them to get on board and learn right along with the kids. The Rainbow Resource catalog offers everything under the sun and can be used for a doorstop or two years' worth of bathroom reading. LOL

This sounds like my DH and I when I was beginning to get the itch to homeschool; he wasn't on board (oh, he is now) for so many reasons. But it was me who had done all the research on the local middle schools and what was available and how they operated, and it was me who had done research on homeschool styles, options, and curricula, and it was me who had done the research on what exactly it means to be educated. Anyway, in order to have an intelligent conversation with your wife, you need to do the same research, to satisfy your own curiosity and to talk intelligently about the subject. You've come to a great place for advice and information, so that is a start. The best resource for me has been this board and the Well Trained Mind book. I can't add a whole lot to what others have posted; I've only been homeschooling a year and there are decades-long homeschoolers on here. I will make a few points that served me well when I began this journey, though: 1. Educate yourself. On everything. On current public school policies, on current trends in public education, on curricula, on methods of homeschooling, on options for your personal homeschool, on what you want your homeschool to be and to accomplish, and mostly, what you want for your child. 2. Stop talking to co-workers and friends and family. That doesn't mean stop gathering information; it does mean that this decision should be made by you and your wife and not by your entire extended family and friends network. There are too many agendas in families and friend relationships for you to be able to count on getting neutral and disinterested opinions and information from them. We ran into this when we were considering homeschooling. I found that most public educators I talked with were universally against homeschooling (I think they think so badly of homeschooling because any homeschooler who fails to educate their child dumps their kid back at their doorstep). I found higher-income executive types in my 'hood automatically thought we were opting for an inferior method of education (because homeschooling was all so Ellis Island and why *wouldn't* I opt for private school, anyway?), and friends with children in the public school felt compelled to defend their choices as *oh, so perfect* because well, that's where they put their kid. Tune it out and make your decisions as a team and in private. Do gather information, but gather it from reliable, disinterested parties who have no personal stake in your children (the internet, other homeschoolers, books, information sessions like conventions). One other thing to realize is that you need to observe/read about more than one type of homeschooling family, because while one family might unschool, that may not be your style. Another may be very "schooly" and that may not suit your either. You'll need to decide how you want to school and then tweak that if necessary. 3. Keep this in mind: It isn't permanent. You can return your child to school at any time, for any reason, and you are not going to ruin your child if you homeschool her for year and it doesn't work out as you planned. That was the deal we made; we would homeschool for a year and if it didn't work out, we always left the door open to returning to school. You will have hardships that first year, but adjust as necessary and carry on. At the end of the year, assess and make a decision for the upcoming year. 4. I'm weird, so it follows that my kids will be weird (on the hypothesis that the apple won't fall far from the tree), and because they are homeschooled, they are now "those weird homeschool kids". If they were in public school, they would be "those weird public school kids. *Shrug* This is important? Good luck with your choices. ETA: I am in my 50s and public school worked "OK" for me also. I got myself through school, got undergraduate and graduate degrees in a STEM field, and by all outward appearances, I am "successful". But public education in 2014 in the urban area where we now live is not public education in rural upstate NY in 1969, the national landscape for public education has degrade badly in the past few decades (indeed, in the past 6 years since my daughter first entered public Kindergarten), and now that I am homeschooling our daughter, I realize I that my education was middling and could easily have been better. The quote that appears somewhere in the Well Trained Mind book or on this forum (can't remember where I saw it) that says "The education you wish you'd had" is spot-on.

Since I want to ditch test prep/workbooks/busywork next year, this post is geared toward those who use few or no workbooks in their homeschool. For those of you who use no workbooks, have you found there is anything in the typical standardized test (SAT, ACT, IOWA) that would have made those workbooks useful? I ask because the Critical Thinking Company markets their books as helping to increase test scores, so I wonder if there is any actual evidence to back this up. For those who use few workbooks/use workbooks very sparsely, what have you opted to use and why? Do you feel that your small selection of workbooks helps at standardized test time?

This is going to sound nuts and simplistic, but I would imagine it's worth a try: My DH had horrible acne in high school and college; Accutane was a last ditch effort and turned out to be the only thing that worked for him. So when my daughter had acne that seemed resistant to the many OTC treatments we tried and that looked like his cysts and severe acne, he thought me taking her to the Clinique counter was useless. But, their system worked in 3 weeks' time. It might be worth a try because it's relatively cheap and has no side medication effects.

A successful and happy child is the best revenge. :hurray:

We homeschool our daughter, although I am not a single parent (defined as one who does not have a live-in partner and is solely responsible for their children, not defined simply as someone who has no one to help them with childcare). I work part-time and my DH works full-time, and it works for us because I have a light part-time load and we work opposite hours, so we do not have to pay a fortune for child care and one of us is available to do some type of schooling (even if informal) most of the day. It helps that my DH readily picks up whatever needs done, despite the fact that he is the full-time, main bread-winner. The house in unkempt, but I've decided that's the price for homeschooling and both of us working and I've learned to live with it.

My daughter is a 6th grader this year and we bought ClassiQuest biology. I had high hopes for it, but it seems like all the other homeschool science I've seen, which means the kid reads a very short and shallow piece on the lesson and does a simplistic experiment. We chucked it a few weeks into the semester, and from September since I've designed my own science. So I pull readings that are more in-depth, add in videos, and I designed all of her experiments, pulling from a non-majors college text (I simplified when necessary). She loves it and I love it, but it was a ton of work for me, so I think I will look at Ellen McHenry for chemistry next year (since I used McHenry Botany as a resource this year and we love it).

This describes my son's response to art. OK, and mine too, to be honest. My son and I are so *not* art/music people, even though we try so darned hard to be that art/music person.

For my 7th grade daughter: - MP First Form Latin (Latina Christiana went so well and we've both enjoyed learning the language) - Middle Ages history (cobbled together by me, but consisting of lots of reading, reading, reading, with some essay content writing) - Chemistry (Ellen McHenry Elements and Carbon Chemistry, along with the RFP chemistry experiments) For my 4th grade son (who will be a new homeschooler): - MP Prima Latina (We're starting slow; it worked well that way for my daughter) - World History (We love history here, and since son is coming from the public school, he's had no world history, so we're doing SOTW along with supplemental history stories. Emphasis on the Greeks and Romans, as per son's request) - Geography (I get to teach him the bulk of world geography, since he didn't learn it in public school)

I'm not jazzed up about AoA either next year, but I sometimes wonder if we've been permanently turned off of anything remotely "logic related" because of our miserable experience with the Critical Thinking books we attempted this past year and had to abandon. O hope not, and I hope AoA will be a pleasant experience for us.

This tactic was really the only thing that worked to really improve my daughter's spelling. Spelling programs did nothing for my kid.

I'm struggling with what to do in the department next year also and was considering MP Traditional Logic. Could you share what you did not like about it?

If there are individuals out there who can buy the solutions manual, you may be able to find it on eBay, Amazon, or a used curriculum site.

I aa having trouble accessing my accuont properly and am wondering if an administrator can contact me?

This is reefgazer and I am trying to resolve a problem with my account.