The rule is that there's always another adult in the room and it's followed pretty well, but if the second adult has to go to the bathroom or something like that, she's alone with them. It really is the saying things in front of kids that moves it from "annoyance" to "need to do something" in my mind.

Thanks for the encouragement. If the direct approach with the nursery lady doesn't work or happen, I'll try that.

I've spoken with the head of children's ministries, who did take some action, but whatever it was was temporary. I would go to her again for another chance before I went to the pastor or any of the elders. I might informally talk to the pastor's wife, but that seems like a bad idea, too. My husband recommends asking cranky-lady to step into the hall to discuss it immediately after observing inappropriate behavior and then letting her tell on herself when she goes and complains about me. This Sunday evening my co-teacher (we are in a classroom that adjoin's this woman's) is going to try to talk to cranky-lady, but my friend is even more non-confrontational than I am.

I do, but she's also there for kid's activities during the week. Would you tell other parents your observations, or is that gossip?

I don't like to leave my little ones with the head of the nursery department because she is very gruff and "scoldy." She's older, about 70, and very old-school in just about every way (pro formula, day care, boys wear blue and don't touch dolls) and proud of her many years of experience. I work with her weekly and it drives me nuts. Worse, she is harsher and more judgemental with minorities. (She looked at me saying "I don't know what's wrong with him" when a 3 year old proudly showed me how he could color with 2 crayons) What would you do? The kids are mostly 0-3 and the church is relatively small. I've brought it up with her boss and not much changed. She really loves (most of) the kids and this job is a big part of her identity. She will probably remain in this positionfor another 5 years if health is the only factor.

Backyardigans is cute and not rude or scary. For example, when pretending to be pirates, they explain walking the plank in such a way that all the kids want to do it (jumping spash into the water, or something)

Not really. I don't want to sink our own money into it on an ongoing basis, and I wouldn't mind paying myself a salary, of course, but the primary purpose would be to make my kid's education as full as possible. Secondary purpose would be to help out others. After my kids are grown would be a different story, a bit. Either focusing on it more as a business or using the experience gained to get another job,

Do you happen to know the name? I'd love to read more about it, if they have an online presence.

Thank you all for your encouragement and for your warnings. They are very, very helpful to me. If we do this, I want to be able to plan it out in advance and not be blindsided by reality. Kinsa, I've bookmarked FEAST's website and will look more later. That looks bigger than I could imagine being, though. I know that taxes and insurance are going to be things to talk to a good lawyer about. It would probably involve setting up a trust of some sort. My ideal for starting out (I can dream bigger, trust me) would be to either buy something like a small church that has, sadly, gone "out of business" and renovate part to be a home, part to be the center, or to build a home with an extra 3 rooms and a very large dining room in between the "home" part and the "center" part. The dining room could then be for our big family gatherings (large extended family) or the center. Locking outside-type doors between family space and center space no matter what the set-up, though. We would then not have to worry too much about people being there if we are not, though someone else would have to be authorized to let them into the center. And if we did this and then decided to close up shop, we'd repurpose the rooms to be a nice in-law suite or something, which we would likely include if we were building, anyway. I will also have to get help with creating a viable business plan, though I have some family that should be able to help with that, some. My initial thought is that some folks, like a piano teacher, would be independent contractors, just paying us basically a rental fee for the space. Then we would likely teach some classes ourselves and hire a couple of people part-time for others. I don't think I want the kind of place where parents must sit in on the class, and I know that raises the liability and therefore the costs. The resource center aspect of it is partly the library but also the "here's a science lab that you can come and use, either independently as a family or in this class." For those paying for classes, there would be no additional fee for the library, but I'd try to have something set up so that if someone really doesn't want a group setting at all, they can pay just a little to come and use some equipment. This is an idea that may fizzle out as my kids get older as you say, Wintermom, and I really am fine with that. I just know that as several posters have pointed out, if we are going to do it, it will take lots of work in advance, not just opening up shop one day 10 years from now.

My husband and I started brainstorming about future plans together and got excited about the idea of creating a homeschool resource center/co-op in a few years. Given that I'm not even a newbie yet (my oldest child is 2), I wanted to run this by people who actually know what they are talking about to get feedback. Feel free to pat me on the head and call me an eager beaver. The plan: -Acquire (by purchasing and renovating or by building) a home with several "public" rooms, including one large space. Preferably a large room that could be used to host everything from big family dinners to small science fairs to dances, a room that could become a laboratory, and a library-type area. These rooms would be multi-use so we could also host classes. -Go as crazy as we want buying learning resources for our children, like science equipment, books, so on. -Once the resource center is reasonably well-stocked, open it to the public to become a member for a reasonable annual fee. The idea would be to have as wide a selection of curriculum as possible so that people could peruse before ordering, or borrow it if we have multiple copies. We would allow the use of science equipment, either at our facility or to reserve and take home. -Have some classes at our facility. These would focus on lab sciences, foreign language, group discussion classes, presentations, and anything else where it makes sense to bring kids together to work more easily. -Host events from time to time like science/social science fairs, dances, awards banquets, and so on. -Potentially have a space where, for example, a piano teacher could come and give lessons or a math tutor could come and tutor. Our primary reasons: -To create a strong academic and social environment for our children. -To help homeschoolers in the area have access to resources and a like-minded community -To justify buying things, like telescopes, that we wouldn't really use all that often ourselves, but that we would love to be able to share. We wouldn't be looking at this as a money-making venture, but it would be good to break even. Background: We are in a large metropolitan area in the southern US. Our degrees are in the humanities, but we are strong in math, science, and languages. We are Christians who accept evolution. We aren't wealthy, but we could probably swing this without risking our retirement or anything. My questions: If something like this was in your area, what resources would be beneficial to you or those you know? Are there any books or websites I should study to learn about this sort of thing? How ridiculous am I to be thinking of this at this point in my family's life? What potential pitfalls do you see coming if we do this? Thanks for any feedback you can give. I will be back to see it and answer any follow-up questions, but we have church tonight and I sleep occasionally.

I would go the route of finding a Russian tutor online. It may take some effort to work out a way to pay, but if you find someone who has done this before, he or she will likely have a preferred method. It should be far less expensive than a tutor from here in the states since wages are lower there. I'd recommend looking for someone with experience tutoring/teaching, perhaps an English teacher or translator. If you know any missionaries there, they will likely know a number of translators. If I were doing this, I would work with the teacher to select a textbook that you could order and that she would have a copy of, too. That way it will be easier to work independently between sessions. Alternately, she may be willing to e-mail worksheets or the like.

May want to see if he can tour a local department's CSI lab or talk to a real detective. The stuff on those shows is interesting but leads to very unrealistic expectations of police investigative capabilities. If this is something your son is interested in long-term, he may want to know "the real story" more than the Hollywood version.

As a mother of very little ones, I've been following this thread with interest and have learned a lot. Since you are preparing to share this information with other parents, may I offer the following feedback: 1. Avoid the specialized terms like "normalized.." I think I understand what you mean by them, but at first glance, it makes the whole thing sound kind of creepy to me. Like "you parents make abnormal kids and we need to fix them." I don't think that's at all what you mean, but that's how it sounds to me. 2. Find out more about upper levels. I think that a lot of us can imagine how Montessori ideas work for little ones, but I wouldn't want to put my kids into something unless I had a good idea of how it will go in the long range. Thanks again for the thread. It has been interesting and informative.

I didn't grow up with guns, but my husband is an infantry man and a police officer, so I'm stuck with them and working to become comfortable with them. I have learned that a lot of the people talking about gun control know about as much as I used to. I heard "assault rifle" and "semiautomatic" and imagined a machine gun or something. Tighter controls are very important and changes need to be made, but the need to be written by someone like my husband, who knows what he is talking about, instead of someone like me, who reacts to what looks or sounds scary. My husband's hunting rifle, by the way, is an assault rifle, technically.

As a former camp counselor, I agree with most of the above, but I really recommend going easy on the care package and think about how your child will react to different things you write in notes. At our camp, some parents sent daily care packages full of toys, candy, and gushing notes about how much the child was missed. So in a cabin of 8 , I usually had 3 or more 12 year old girls crying themselves to sleep each night because they were on a sugar crash imagining their dogs missing them. I could tell that most of them would have been AOK if they had gone the whole week with just a postcard. A care package with a book or something for rest time, a frisbee or something as an ice breaker, and a small treat to share with new friends sounds good to me. Packing a journal and sending upbeat notes like "I can't wait to hear about your fun adventures would be good, too. And a mesh laundry bag. And a bag they can actually get their sleeping bag in themselves. And a sheet to cover the camp mattress, even if they are using a sleeping bag.

This seems like the safe place to brag about my little girl. She's almost 2 and today she blew me away twice. For a few months now she's demonstrated a good understanding (not just recitation/memorization) of the numbers one and two and in the last few days finally admitted she knows 3-10 as well. As we were walking she drew my attention to an ant. "Ant!" "Yes, I see the ant" "Two ant!" "Really, there are 2 ants?" "2 ant hide. 1 ant. (pause while she thought) 1 ant hide. 1 ant. 2 ant." Maybe it doesn't translate well, but I'm pretty sure I watched her figure out simple addition and simple subtraction right then and there. Later she was looking through her books. She found one story Bible and (in and amongst many other books) a board book telling the story of Adam and Eve. She stacked them on top each other and said "Book same" then went on to look for the book she wanted me to read.

My thinking is that right now, since she's just taking off in English, she often hears us repeat what she has just said to improve her pronunciation. So if she says "Dink milk" and I respond, "That's right, drink milk," she catches on that she should add that "r" sound (and I can see that she does understand this, though she can't usually put it into practice right away, of course). So if she points to a picture and says "dog" and I respond "yes, Hund," she thinks I'm correcting her English. If I respond, "Yes, that's a dog in English. Auf deutsch das ist ein Hund," the translation keeps her from feeling like she said something wrong. Once she's got the idea that there are two separate languages, I think the immersion will go better. If I could do the one parent one language thing, that separation would be totally natural and I could do full immersion right away. I have taught English as a foreign language to children and adults from age 4-60+, and I did total immersion for all but the youngest (who at the beginning of the semester sometimes needed classroom management-type language in their L1) and the oldest (who seemed to get frustrated sometimes as they could feel their ability to learn vocabulary was slower than it used to be and I wanted classes to stay basically fun for them after a long day at work). Naturally I talked a lot more with my hands than normal to help make meanings clear. I'm sure it's a little different in a home situation, but in any classroom I've been in, as student or teacher, once you allow L1 to be used, it's very, very hard to take it away later. More likely it takes over the class and very little language learning occurs. Part of why I posted here was to get the perspective of those who have done it in the family setting.

Thank you both for the advice. I will try to find German speaking kids around here, but it's tricky. Audiobooks are a great idea I'd overlooked, also, that will help counteract my accent. I'd been debating whether or not to translate between English and German. With older kids, I think total immersion is best, but given her age, I think the translating will help get her comfortable. I'm sure if I went to the Goethe Institute there would be so much help. I just don't really like going downtown.:( I'll have to get over that, I guess.

I'm new, too, but so are my kids. We're lurking and learning, mostly. We live in Georgia, and in our community, it seems like the pressure is to homeschool, not to public school.

My husband and I currently have 2 young children (almost 2 and 6 months) and part of our long-term plan is to move overseas, probably to the middle east, central Asia, or eastern Europe, in about 8-10 years. (Hoping to work for the State Department). Teaching our children multiple languages is important to us but so far we haven't done too much with it. My husband knows a significant amount of Arabic, some German, a smattering of Spanish, and is currently studying French for a degree program. I am basically fluent in German (though adjective endings are very rusty), am conversant in Russian at a basic level, and know a good bit of Spanish. Ideally we would start now learning the language for our target country, but we haven't gotten so specific yet. It seems to me that German would be the most logical language to teach them now and that learning any second language will make the third easier when we get there. I just need a plan. When I randomly start interacting with the 2 year old in German (she's only recently begun speaking well but is clearly bright), she becomes frustrated quickly and I switch back to English. My current idea is to block off the same 30 minute period every day for activities in German. Probably 2-3 days a week reading a book (need to build my library), 2-3 days watching a short film (found a good bit on Youtube, like Curious George in German), 2-3 days coloring a page of different scenes, and every day singing songs (introducing a new song every week or two) and discussing the book/movie/scene, etc. It would be great if I had ideas for German games to play, but I don't. Naturally no written work at these ages. Whether we homeschool or just "afterschool" for languages, we will eventually get to teaching reading and writing in L2. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I'm willing to spend some money on resources but would prefer to keep that somewhat limited. There are some native German speakers in our area, but none that I know well. When the kids are older, I will take more advantage of the Goethe Institute and places like that.