Thanks for the practical advice, those of you who offered it! I told my man about this thread and he laughed at the idea that the best solution was me staying home, and reminded me that he and I don't have a heteronormative marriage. He also reminded me that the norm in most homeschool families is for the mother to be the primary teacher, but we aren't doing it like that - we have four people giving homeschool lessons. He agreed that he has some anxiety over doing math "right," but that he feels ok about arithmetic (which actually surprised me - so it was good to talk about that!). He talked about the issue of resistance coming up, and we agreed that our daughter is a "moody b***ard" like he is (we swear in my family, lol), and that the fact he is like that too will actually help him to help her deal with the moodiness. He was also reassured when I told him that for the reading lessons, I am literally reading what they tell you to do from the book - like I did before I started using the reading book, he thought there was some kind of magic to it that he had never learned. When I talked about the difference between rational attitudes and irrational ones, that is the same language he and I use to discuss issues like this - I wasn't calling him "irrational" as an insult, I was attempting to start discussion about the impact of traumatic emotions from childhood on decision-making. I think something was lost in translation from my original post....

I am the primary breadwinner by choice, and supporting my family with a business that gives me a very flexible schedule. I'm not cutting any more than I already have been! It's not that he isn't into it all together - he is into the same topics he was into as a child, and not into the same topics that were a source of conflict with his mother. I definitely agree we all wish we got a better education - I went to public school, and I want to homeschool because I think it will allow my children to go at their own pace and give them a better education than I got!

My husband and I have been talking about homeschooling since we started talking about having kids. But, this past summer (before our daughter would have started kindergarten), he started saying he didn't think it was a good idea because he was homeschooled and he doesn't feel he got a good education. The situations are very different - his mother was an immigrant who didn't finish high school and whose native language isn't English, and she was the only teacher. On the other hand, our kids have me (who has a PhD), him (who is VERY smart although not highly educated), my mother (who has a masters degree), and his mother (who is better when she isn't responsible for creating the learning environment and isnt doing it every single day). My mother and I have both worked in education, and I am confident our children will get a good education. After discussions with my husband, it is clear he does rationally agree that homeschooling is the best choice for us...:but he still has irrational fears, and he is hesitant to start giving lessons. He is excited about things like history and music, but resistant to helping with the daily "learning how to read" lessons and things like that. I think this is because he and his mother always fought about this, and then once he learned to read he was on his own (and he mostly enjoyed learning history and music!). He didnt learned math beyond the basics until he was an adult, and is still convinced he is terrible at math even though he has a very mathematical mind and can do mathematical estimation that astonishes me.... *I didn't realize until a few weeks before homeschool kindergarten started that we would be working through my husband's trauma as part of the homeschool process!!* Does anyone have suggestions for how I can help him get over the anxiety and get involved? I am the primary breadwinner and I need to know that he will do the d*** reading and math lesson if he has the kids for the day! I love him so much and I have a lot of anger about how I was educated - which clearly he does too - I want to support him and I hope that doing this as a family could be healing for him. But also I am kind of feeling like we had an agreement we would be homeschool for years, and I need him to fulfill that agreement and be involved. Advice and emotional support would be greatly appreciated!

Hi - I looked through the topics, so I apologize if this is a repeat (I'm new!) I am multi-lingual, my husband speaks only English. His mother is Latina and we would like to teach the children Spanish, ages 5 and 3...he wants to learn with them. Although I can speak Spanish relatively well (I would say when I was most in practice I was fluent...I could get back to fluent with some effort), it is not my native language and it's hard for me to keep up just speaking it with the kids all the time. Unforunately, my MIL refuses to speak Spanish with our kids for reasons that have to do with advice from doctors 40 years ago about how "bad it is" for young children to learn two languages.... I'm trying to decide if I should buy a curriculum that we can follow, or if I should do it more on on my own. I would combine songs, conversation scripts, vocabulary posted around the house, etc...I am comfortable speaking only in Spanish while giving lessons, and intend to do math in Spanish at least once a week, working up to a more bi-lingual education model. In your experience do you think having a structured curriculum will help us, especially given that my husband wants to learn along with the kids? I'm considering just buying Rosetta Stone but it feels wrong! I feel like all you need to learn a language is a grammar book, a dictionary, and reading material in your target language.....but am I being overly ambitious if I think I can use that to teach a 3 year old, a 5 year old, and an adult man a language that isn't my native language?? Thanks for the advice!

I'm a Quaker and our tradition is to have a potluck wedding (has someone already said this?? I just joined and haven't read all the replies). One way to explain it is that potluck is the Quaker form of communion - it is breaking bread with your community. In a Quaker wedding, it is the community that marries the bride and groom, affirming this by signing the marraige certificate. When I got married, we had mostly non-Quaker guests coming from out of town so we didn't do a full potluck. I've been to plenty of Quaker weddings that were potluck, and we did potluck at my first wedding. However, to honor the Quaker testimony of simplicity, I catered the wedding myself and hired some of my students to be the wait staff (college students...I did nothing during the wedding itself except assure them they were doing a good job). We did a potluck dessert, which was awesome - quite the spread. It was a great wedding...New Years Eve party, with a jazz band, plenty of dancing. Part of what we did was explain in our invitations the tradition of potluck in my faith.

Hi - My daughter started her official first day of kindergarten today with myself, my husband, and my mother as the primary teachers. I'm looking forward to learning more about how people are going about their homeschool stuff! We are progressive LGBT-friendly Quakers, and I'm implementing Well-Trained Mind with some modifications to the history curriculum to make it less euro-centric and to include more history of gender. We will be including Quakerism as part of homeschooling, along with world religions. I would love to connect with more progressives implementing a classical education approach.