Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any groups for kids that age. We homeschooled our daughter for our first year here, but then realized that she was coming out of her social shell and wanted friends--which we'd been unable to provide exactly because we couldn't find any English-language groups or classes for her to join, and the other English-speaking kids we knew were busy with school all day and often traveled or attended school-related events on the weekends. After a very lonely year, we put our daughter in school so she could spend time with other kids every day. We did make contact with other homeschoolers here, but their schedules were full enough that we weren't able to spend much time with them, either. We also made some friends through church, but again, the kids are just so busy ...

It sounds like, in your situation, the bathroom is a functionality issue and the kitchen is a form issue (with some functionality implications, in that you don't want to invite people over). I'd pick function over form every time--do the bathroom first. I've lived in a bunch of houses that I haven't gotten to choose, and there's always something I don't like, something a tad embarrassing, sometimes something bad enough that if I had the choice, I'd rip it out and fix it ASAP. People understand. If you feel the need to comment or apologize for your kitchen: "Welcome to our retro kitchen! We want to update it, but it works fine and there were some other things we wanted to renovate first. In the meantime, enjoy your flashback to the 70s!"

:hurray: :hurray: :hurray: :iagree: :hurray: :hurray: :hurray:

ELTL: English Lessons Through Literature AAR/AAS: All About Reading/All About Spelling OPGTR: Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading TOG: Tapestry of Grace ETC: Explode the Code RLTL: Reading Lessons Through Literature It takes a while, but eventually they all start to make sense!

OP, I'm glad you're getting some help. I wish I knew you in real life and was close enough ... You could talk to me about it.

I love my planner from Plum Paper Products (an Etsy shop). It's customizable in most respects: page layout, how many months, which month to start with, optional sections, labels of your choice (or no labels) on the weekly pages.

If I lived near you, I'd bring you meals. If I knew you in real life--enough to know your contact information and your preferences--I'd be thinking about some other way to help you, possibly by hiring a cleaning service or mother's helper who was local to you. What you went through is a real, big deal. Don't be afraid to ask for whatever form of help you need. A lack of physical injuries does not mean that you don't need time and space to heal. If you have a good church family, they will understand that.

I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Thank you for helping others--it can be hard to hold it together in the moment and help rather than following the biological imperative to seek safety for yourself first, but you will always be glad that you were able to do that. I think that none of us know you well enough to advise you about whether or not to send your daughter to school right now. From what you've described, it sounds like she'll be fine either way. It comes down to what you need. You seem to believe that you need time alone to work through what has happened. I believe that's what I would need in a similar situation ... but then I remember another event in my life, nowhere near as traumatic as what you've gone through, but still traumatic, and I *did* need time alone to process. But I also desperately needed to be responsible for my daughter (then an infant, and my husband wasn't able to be with us at that time). Her need of me is what kept me from shutting down and disengaging from the world completely. But I did still need a lot of time alone, and I was able to have that because I was staying with my mother, who cared for my daughter when I couldn't. School may serve a similar purpose for you--caring for your daughter when you can't, giving you time to work toward your own psychological healing. Because your kids will be home in the evenings, you won't be able to completely retreat from the world and shut down. It may give you the best possible combination right now. And you know they'll be home with you all summer, so your goal is to work toward being able to manage that. On the other hand, if your personality is such that long periods of time alone will not help you, but will drive you deeper into depression or anxiety, then you should keep her home. You, your spouse, and your therapist are the ones in the best position to decide what will help you most. Either way, it is not selfish to seek what you need to get through this crisis. Even if it turns out that you send your daughter to school and it wasn't ideal for her, it's far more important for her (and your other kids) to have a healthy mother than to avoid whatever negatives come from sending her to school near the end of the school year.

I know because I'm still on the SL forums, though not as active there as I am here (and I'm not all that active here). The catalog has been mailed, I believe; some may have already received theirs. I'm not sure if the online catalog is available yet or not. The new products will be available for order on 1 April. More general comments, not specifically in response to Slache: We used Sonlight for preschool (P3/4) and preK (P4/5). Even at those young ages, I tweaked. And I did not at all like the K LA that we added to P4/5. And I used it at the younger ages rather than the older, so I felt that the books were a little too advanced for my child, but--especially after reading TWTM--I didn't want to delay Core A (intro to world cultures) until 1st and not start history until 2nd, and I didn't want to do their cycle--world cultures, 1-2 years of world history, 1-2 years of American history, repeat. I didn't get the impression that their materials would help me discuss the books with my daughter as she got older, and I need help with that. And as conservative a Christian as I am, I still find a good bit of their marketing statements and some of their books (some missionary ones) to be too fundamentalist for me. I was uncertain about supporting them financially for those reasons. And then there was a big kerfluffle when they attached specific grades to the cores. I had started considering slowing down our progression through the cores, but I realized that if I did that, then I'd end up teaching my daughter with products that were labeled a grade or two below where I considered her to be, and if she picked up on that, or if my husband's employer--who pays for our homeschool expenses--picked up on that, it would be trouble. And then I realized that these kerfluffles tend to happen regularly with Sonlight, and I decided that I couldn't trust them enough to plan for more than a year or two in advance, and I'm a serious long term planner--I'm fine with changing the plan from year to year, but I want to be able to tweak a plan, not be forced to create a new one because my product supplier radically changed something. So I switched to Tapestry of Grace, and I really like it (so far, at least, one year in). I do look at the Sonlight website and book lists, and I've pulled several of their books to add to our studies, or to have available for fun literature. I'll get the catalog this year--I really want to see these book descriptions I've been hearing about for years. Removing LA from the core makes me more likely to go back to SL at some point, but even then, it isn't that likely, because my overall concerns about the company haven't changed and because I like TOG, and it's easy enough to pick up additional books from the SL list if I want to. I think bittersweet is a good word to describe how I feel about Sonlight. They were my entry into homeschooling. Having their "perfectly laid out" plans, and still feeling the need to tweak them, taught me a lot about how I use curriculum--specifically, that although I like something that has a plan, it needs to be not so planned that it messes everything up when I tweak it! They gave me the confidence to branch out into something that fits me better, but that I would have found overwhelming had I started with it. But I still also have a little bit of the ick factor at some aspects of the company--even though I know Christians who are less conservative than I am who love Sonlight, and I still want to love them. I just ... don't.

I'd go. Then again, I live in Athens, Greece, and honestly in a list containing the names Paris and Brussels, Athens kind of fits right in, if you know what I mean. So do some other cities that my husband has traveled to recently for work, and cities where friends live, and cities where we intend to visit over the course of the next couple of years. We won't let the terrorists stop us from living our lives, and since we can't predict where they'll strike next, it's not like we could travel at all (or even stay in the city where we live) and be certain we won't be there at the worst possible moment. So we take reasonable precautions, and we live our lives. Be very aware of your surroundings when you travel. Have a large amount of cash easily accessible, possibly even on your person (though be careful not to show that it's there, and consider using a purse/bag/camera bag with discreet security features, like those found in Safepac bags). Register your trip with STEP; it won't help in the early moments of a crisis, but it'll at least let the embassy know to find you and check that you're ok, and it means that they'll notify you of any security alerts that come up. Pay attention to travel warnings about specific places--I tend to ignore the ones that cover entire continents, as that's just too general to be useful. Take reasonable precautions, and enjoy your trip!

I've only been to the UK once. We spent 5 or 6 days in London and didn't get to see everything we wanted, because it's just such a wonderful place to visit and so much to see, but we thoroughly enjoyed everything we did see and do, especially the Tower of London and the Churchill War Rooms. I highly recommend the hop on hop off bus--the company we used included a river cruise that could get you to Greenwich, though we only took it from Big Ben to the Tower of London. I'm very familiar with the jet lag of transatlantic travel, though, and I guarantee you--you do NOT want to get there in the morning after a redeye flight and drive a long way in an unfamiliar car on unfamiliar roads on what will feel like the wrong side of the road. I know it's the trip of a lifetime, but you won't enjoy it if you spend the entire time exhausted. Build in some down time or you'll regret all the hours you spent pushing yourself to go, go, go, and not enjoying any of it because all you wanted to do at the time was rest but you kept pushing because you just had to get it all in. That was the way my father structured our childhood vacations, and I rarely enjoyed any of it except the evenings at the pool in the hotel. As an adult, my husband and I now are careful to structure our leisure trips as a combination of what we call expeditions (go, go, go, see it all!) and vacations (relax around the pool, sleep late, enjoy leisurely meals at nice restaurants). Trips that are all vacation are boring. Trips that are all expedition are exhausting--we may see it all, but we don't absorb any of it; we end up with cool pictures and few memories. You're planning a major expedition, and if you're anything like me, you'll regret not building in some vacation. For 10 days, I'd pick one home base, maybe 2, and do what I could do from there--mostly staying in the city where I was staying, with a day trip or two for something really special. That's what we did with London--most days in the city, with one day trip to Oxford and one half day trip to the Harry Potter studio.

Yes, this. You would "stand to your feet" for a dignitary, a bride walking down the aisle, or to show respect for the reading of God's Word in a very conservative church. You would "stand to your feet" if you were sitting and someone said something that you felt compelled, on principle, to stand up against: for example, something like, "After Bob heard Joe make the awfully racist comment, Bob slowly stood to his feet, looked Joe in the eye, and said ..." You would not "stand to your feet" because you needed to get up and go somewhere, for example. Edited to add: This was common usage where I grew up in the Southeast. I don't recall if I heard it in any of the many other places I've lived.

I skipped TOG Primer and went straight to TOG year 1 with my 5yo K daughter. We only did the history readings and some of the literature ones, and I did substitute a few history titles because the recommended ones were a bit advanced for her. Overall I've enjoyed TOG year 1. I'm very excited about year 2--I looked at all the history books in the list for it, and they look to be on her level and interesting. We'll probably hold off on the read aloud books until our next cycle again. We're also using LOE Foundations and I love it. It's a wonderfully logical and incremental approach to reading and handwriting that really works well. We're almost done with B and plan to continue to C in the summer, though I think we're at the point of dropping the pace to 1/2 lesson/day just because it takes a while.

OP: I'm so sorry. It's hard to lose friendships, no matter which one of you is moving. As for the rest, I'm with the expat crowd. I don't have a best friend anymore; I haven't since I moved away from my hometown my junior year in high school. I have people with whom I am friendly in whatever location I'm in at the time. I move every 2-3 years, and many of the people I meet also move that often. Those who don't move that often are not always willing to open their hearts to those of us whom they know will move on a schedule. It's self-preservation on their part, and it's totally understandable. It's hard all around and is one of the factors that has me occasionally re-evaluating whether or not this lifestyle is a good one for my family.