I hear ya, sister. The one difference is that I wouldn't begin to attempt a feat like installing a closet system. My ambitions are small ones, and I still end up blistered and confused. ;-P

I don't think there is a rule that you have to cut your hair at any certain age. Someone with good looking, well maintained hair is a rarity at any age, imo. When I was a young thing with waist-length hair I looked awful, because I had no one to tell me what to do to take care of it, namely add lots of heavy-duty moisturizer. Now I can have good-looking hair that's swingy & shoulder length. And I'm 46. I sometimes want to go up to stangers my age and start their makeover right then and there! :p

I've been taking notes for years about what to do and what not to do. I'll be happy to spend lots of time with any grandkids, but I'm pretty sure my husband will be ignoring the little ones running around, unless they get between him and his TV. :p But I think I'll be so old by the time I'm a grandma that nobody'll trust me to keep the baby from dropping on the floor in my dementia and arthritis. I started my family kinda late. :D

Not the usual compliment, I suppose. But it works around here. :-D

Good for you, Tricia. Sounds as if this will be a good fit for you. And I share your admiration for all the hard-working homeschooling, self-schooling moms around here.

Exactly. Well done, mom!:D

heehee!

Yougottabekiddinme!! No, I know you're not. Bleah.

Ah, but 8yo boys LOVE it. My tip is to cut down on the paper coming into your house by calling the catalog companies' 800 numbers and asking to be removed from their lists. Eventually the amount of junk mail goes waaaay down. I assume you already have put your family's name and phone number on the do-not-call registry? And put on the Direct Marketing Assn's do not mail list? Time spent organizing a system is better than spending that same amount of time cleaning, imo. The latter solves a problem for a few days at most; the former solves it for a long time.

Welcome on board! (pun intended :D)

Dang, I was hoping someone would post a link to a website like "Prepositions R Us" so then *I* would know. I get the impression that lots of words occasionally wear the preposition hat, as a sort of sideline from their regular grammar jobs.

We might have used this in the past. Hmmm. I may re-think the strategy. Just heard a neighbor boy ask William "Do you *like* to read?" "Sure." "Do you have AR? We have AR. You have to read books then take tests on them. I used to like to read, but now I don't." Grrr. What we do to children in the name of 'education!' :mad:

I want an egg topper! And some nice egg cups, something other than plain white. And maybe a tea cosy. Or three. I'd have a very nice breakfast the next day, with tea, toast, soft boiled eggs, and lemon curd. [sharon twirls away in a dream of Life As It Should Be]

Sorta like John Henry, y'know? She's just a toy-playin' gal. Very sweet.

If I had to guess, I'd say more homeschoolers are on the un-organized side of the spectrum, but maybe that's just the folks I hang with. :D We're evaluating whether to continue with Cub Scouts for my 8yo son, the lack of communication is staggering. Meetings canceled with no notice, e-mail notice sent the day of a meeting that the location has changed. I don't check my e-mail every day, but from now on, I can see it's going to be imperative when DS has an activity. I agree with Mrs. Mungo's assessment of the cycle of organization.

Hugs, Julpost. Your 'friend' is definitely making a dig at you. How small minded to pick on something you don't have the ability to change at this point. For heavens' sake. I would be offended, and my reaction wouldn't be yours. I would like to confront the behavior, and stop it in its tracks. "Yes, you're telling me this, because you want me to realize that my house is smaller and not as nice as yours? Why would you say such a hurtful thing?" Then watch the back-pedalling, or if she's really rude, watch her lie and say you completely misunderstood her. In any case, it wouldn't happen again. Small houses can be wonderful. I still dream about my first house that was so tiny we called it Ibsen, after his play "The Dollhouse." My Dad thought I must be making an error when I first called him and gave him the dimensions -- no, no, the lot can't be only 40 feet wide! Oh yes, it can! I loved mowing the postage stamp lawn with my push reel mower early on a Sunday morning. You could hear the birds sing while you worked. :)

Another vote for the real problem being your defensive 'friends.' They're just looking for things to be snarky about. Try to let it roll off your back, and pass them some yummy bean dip.

I'll rarely use ink on a "good" book, but if it's a old paperback I picked up for a song, sure. But pencil underlines, made properly with an index card, make a book more eloquent, I think. It's part of my conversation with the author. If something really speaks to me, I'll copy it into my commonplace book. (BTW, I *love* that this place knows what a commonplace book is, and you don't have to explain yourself or feel like an odd duck for mentioning it.) I just finished reading and marking up Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and copying portions into my book. Now I'm going to re-read it, and see what I may have missed the first time around. More marks, certainly, but my previous notes will help me see the key points more clearly. Confession: I once marked (very lightly, with pencil) in a new library book. It's author was claiming miracle cures by avoiding - get this - vegetables. Yup. Vegetables contain toxins. On one page she admitted that she had no data to support this claim that the miniscule levels of toxins present in plant matter were 1) sufficient to cause harm in humans or 2) that avoiding eating them would solve your health problem. But the rest of the book went on, claiming silly things. I wrote in the margins next to each of the silly claims the page number where she admitted she was blowing smoke. And I'm proud. So there. :D

Amen, and amen.

Gulp. A lot. I don't buy packaged curriculum, for the most part. Lots of books, though. And I spend and spend on extracurriculuar activities and our family's travel, which I consider very educational. We're a travelling family. My DH has conferences and such that we all tag along to, soaking up the sights and trying out restaurants. Add that all together, and [ahem] it gets to be a lot.

I've become more selective in my purchasing over the years, and more ready to abandon the less-than-fantastic. Can I still be a WTM boardie?

Over-simplifies and misrepresents the arguments of the classical educators she cites. Ex: If a child memorizes something without comprehending it fully in an early grade, he must of course still fail to understand it by high school. Or: Bauer & Wise suggest that they aren't the final authorities on your child's religious education, rather, that role should be filled by the parents in concert with their church. Which of course means that being subject to church discipline is brainwashing of the vilest sort, inevitably producing robotic automatons. Pretty easy to refute, I'd say.

Has your health recently improved? An odd question, but for me, that had the odd side effect of making it harder to concentrate on my reading. For most of my life, it turns out, I had allergies most likely to something utterly common like dust, which kept me in a physical lethargy that I could shake off only rarely. The only thing I could do with depth and ease was to read and absorb information. Which made lots of graduate school possible, but made working for a living pretty hard. Finding sinus meds that cleared up the permanent infection suddenly made me soooo full of energy. My house was clean, I was able to exercise, I had tons of energy. But I couldn't read much. Every time I sat down, I would think of some chore I could do, and jump up to work on it. My volume of reading went way down. I'm only just now, about two years later, beginning to figure out how to find those spaces in the day when I can concentrate on Just Reading, without feeling obliged and really wanting to jump up and Do Something. So here are my suggestions for when to read in peace: After the children are in bed. When they are at someone else's house. When DH has taken them out to a movie. When possible of an evening, I put on some low baroque music on the CD player in my bedroom to cover up the noise of my husband watching TV, adjust the pillows just so, heat up a cup of decaf green tea, and settle in. I can get a couple of hours in on a good night. I cannot read with any noisy kerfluffle going on either. It may be old age, it may be newly-received good health, whatever it is, I've had to adjust. Good luck. It's worth the effort to figure out a strategy. Without new ideas to chew on, I get stupid.

My principle is one from C.S. Lewis. Paraphrased, he said one must say no to a great many good things in order to be able to say yes to the best things. What is your family's *best* thing? It will be different for every family, and each season of life brings a different balance. Babies and toddlers and preschoolers have to have naps. Period. That puts a certain solid lid on a homeschool family's activity level. After that, you have to balance the emotional and physical toll taken by the exertion on the children, and on you. You're important too, you know.

Excellent! I heard these topics called a child's "islands of expertise" and most kids pick something they love for years, and given half a chance, learn more about it than most adults know. You can build on the islands of expertise to teach just about everything else. For my kid, he loved history stories, and became obsessed with writing out index cards for a timeline for every single thing we read. (We were doing ancient history.) I don't know how many pictures of chariots and horses and men in armor I have from that period. A lot. What institutional schooling too often does is to quash a child's interest in his special area, mainly by taking away all his time, plus giving him busywork that is of no interest or at the wrong level. Once they start school, most children give up their island. Sad.