I know there are a fair number of science people here, so...help me out? :) There's a piece of land we're considering buying. There are two rivers (not streams but marked-on-the-map rivers) within a mile of the property; one is just north of it and the other is just south. There is a natural spring about 400 feet from the tract's border that fills a pretty good sized pond, but that belongs to the neighbor and I doubt we can negotiate its use. We live in an area where springs are quite common, and I think there's a good chance there is a natural spring on this tract that just hasn't been found yet. The land is about 5 acres (20k square meters). Is there any scientific method of finding a natural spring? I thought about a fishfinder, because they use sonar to detect the air in fish swim bladders, and natural springs have air pockets, but then I realized that the fishfinder would be calibrated for water and not dirt and earth, so that probably wouldn't work. I'm not expert enough to calibrate the sonar myself on a general device (plus it'd probably be super expensive). I've tried just walking the lay of the land, searching for lush plant growth and what have you, but I haven't had any luck. I also scoured Google Earth for clues, but so far every promising looking dark blob on the map has turned out to be rocks or fallen limbs. If we knew there was a spring underfoot, we could just dig a few feet and voila. The reason I ask is because we want to use a low head micro hydro turbine as an alternative energy source. Any ideas? (Please don't suggest divining rods. I've seen that recommended so many times in my Google searches that I could scream.)

Bloom Academic Planners are $14 and meet all your requirements. There's space on the monthly view for monthly goals and notes, two-page week spreads that include the weekends, it has monthly tabs, and it's secular. Most of the covers are feminine, but I think the lattice stamp one is gender neutral enough. If you wait a little while, Amazon will stock the ones for the new academic year and you can order it with free shipping.

Thanks! I was wondering about the Cloisters...I'm thinking we might take that off our list. If you were just going to see highlights of the Natural History Museum, what would you see besides the planetarium show? :)

I bought A Year of Playing Skillfully for similar reasons. There are zero worksheets. It's all about creating memorable bonding experiences through simple crafts and creativity through open-ended play. Here's the link. And here's a 40 page sample to give you an idea of what's in there. We start in September and I can't wait. :)

DH and I are planning a trip to NYC to see the Met and Natural History Museum. It'll just be the two of us. :) We are are history nerds, so it's hard for us to know how much time to plan for the Met. From what I've read online, a lot of people visit it over two days, spending a couple of hours each day. But given that we are interested in so much, and we don't want to feel like we missed out on something due to time constraints, I'm really not sure how much time we should budget. Sections we'd want to visit: Greek & Roman Art European Sculptures The Greek Exhibition Egyptian Art Arms and Armor The American Wing The Temple of Dendur The Lehman Collection The Cloisters What do you think? Three days? Five days? I really have no idea. How much time did you spend there, and how much do you wish you'd been able to spend?

Yes! My DH likes to say that having a good boss can make a hard job seem easy and having a bad boss can make an easy job hard. The only person I have to answer to is my husband. In a good relationship, one's spouse would be the very definition of a good boss, therefore making even hard days seem relatively easy. I hope no one thinks I'm saying a husband should hold his wife accountable for every little thing, etc. or that he is "above" her per se. I think it was Chesterton who pointed out that being a SAHM means you are queen of a certain dominion, and I definitely feel that way. I can't just run totally wild with my ideas or my habits without making sure DH and I are on the same page, but I have a huge amount of autonomy, and I know that even when I screw up (which is a lot), the person who I have to confess my negligence to, happens to be the most understanding and forgiving person I know.

I apologize, I wasn't clear in my post. I was responding to your quote about Tsuga, but I didn't mean for what I said to be directed at you. I was referring to Tsuga's earlier post where she talked about growing up under Reagan and being drilled about the poor being lazy. I should have just quoted that post directly so there wouldn't be any confusion. I didn't say "No one says that," I said that that argument is not the conservative platform. There are plenty of individual conservatives who hate the poor--and individual liberals who hate the poor, too, I'm afraid. What I tried to communicate is that hating the poor was not the position of Reagan. And that is not the position of the Republican Party today. It seems to me that Tsuga doesn't quite understand what people who disagree with her politically think about the issue of welfare and only sees it through the lens of, "If you care about the poor, you're liberal, and if you don't, you're conservative." As to your last statement, the GOP is not calling for the utter dissolution of welfare and other government programs. I didn't say we should only rely on voluntary charity. Anyway, this seems to be getting away from the original question of whether it is socially acceptable for a woman to stay home if she has one child or less.

What gets me is that very few people are actually arguing "the poor are just lazy." That isn't, by and large, the argument that conservatives make. It's a straw man. I'm sure some people do have the prejudices she expressed against the poor, but conservatives are generally not saying, "The poor are lazy, and that's why we shouldn't help them." The argument is actually, "These government programs aren't the best way to help them, and may actually hurt poor people in the long run. They need reform." Making the safety net as local as we can so it goes to the right people in as timely a manner as possible is one concern. Promoting voluntary charity so that we as a culture don't just shrug our shoulders and say, "The government will take care of it," is an ethics issue that needs to be talked about more. Conservatives also support "workfare," but not because they think poor people are intrinsically lazy, but because they believe that a requirement to work in order to receive benefits helps people in a "teach a man to fish" way--you don't even necessarily have to be working at a typical job, as "work activities†that are specified in conservative welfare reform proprosals are defined very broadly to include unsubsidized employment, government-subsidized employment, on-the-job training, up to 12 months of vocational education, community-service work, job searches and the completion of one's GED. All of those things help an unemployed person get back on their feet. It's fine to disagree with all those points from an ideological point of view. But let's not pretend that it's as simplistic as essentially saying, "Liberals love and care for the poor, and conservatives think the poor are lazy scum who don't deserve a thing. So why is it okay for housewives to be lazy, huh?"

Well, I don’t necessarily want to tell other people how to live. I think that there are some advantages to having a woman stay at home and a man work, largely based on the couple having children or possibly doing so in the future. If a couple is sure that they are never going to have children, the advantages of the wife staying at home become less pronounced. I think that with how busy and complicated life can be, that it is nice to have one member of the family who can take care of cleaning, cooking, paying bills, and so on while the other works. In most cases, it probably works out better for the woman to do that even if the couple is sure they won’t ever have children.

This quote from Wendell Berry from What are People For? springs to mind: "That feminism or any other advocates of human liberty and dignity should resort to insult and injustice is regrettable. It is equally regrettable that all of the feminist attacks on my essay implicitly deny the validity of two decent and probably necessary possibilities: marriage as a state of mutual help, and the household as an economy. Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on teh other hand a sort of private political system in which the rights and and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers and outside employers..." He goes on to talk about the myriad ways a woman who stays home is a producer in the most organic sense, and how many feminists degrade the wife who is not a careerist by gauging her worth solely as a wage slave to other people. I'd quote the whole chapter if my fingers weren't tired.

I'm an atheist, and ideally I think women shouldn't have to work outside the home. Kids or no kids. I mean, if a woman wants to work, that's fine. If the couple feels that it is essential that she also work, to either maintain their standard of living or stay out of poverty, that's fine too. But without going into a long thesis on why, I just believe that's it's equally fine for women to stay home and they don't need an excuse to do so. Then again, I also strongly feel that a wife should never call her husband's place of work and bug him about what time he comes home (and if she did, the husband shouldn't tell anyone about it).

Has anyone read When Children Love to Learn or Pocketful of Pine Cones? I'm not Christian, so I wonder if it might be too religious for someone not coming at it from that perspective.

I understand that you want to do what's in the best interests of the children. It's just that it's been very rarely--essentially, just cases of extreme abuse--that I have ever seen the intervention of cps actually be good for the children. Also, I'm not sure you should have so much faith in how well you can gauge what's going on from the outside. Even if you have testimony from the girl yourself, honestly kids don't always give the clearest picture of what is or isn't being taught.

We're really early in the homeschooling journey, but I've started planning our September - May year using our preschool curriculum, A Year of Playing Skillfully. I put the pages in page protectors and crossed out the activities I wasn't interested in or that were too advanced. Then I created a table with each month's activities, so we can pick and choose two or three things to do each day. Here's October. I plan on putting it in a page protector and hanging it on the fridge so I can mark off things we do throughout the month with a dry erase marker so I know which activities we've already done (though we'll probably do repeats). I'll use this teacher planner to plan out field trip ideas, daily goals (15 minutes playing a game, etc.), special projects, and any particular read-alouds I'd like to do. When we're actually schooling, I'll use it to record which activities we do each day so I can look back on it later and make changes as needed.

Bump!

I hope there's something else out there!

While I completely understand why the WTM Online Conference is being postponed until next year, I can't help feeling bummed! Are there any other online conferences happening this summer that I should know about?

If she's still a beginner, Das Ist Deutsch is a gentle introduction to grammar.

Yes! You can buy GF crackers (but also have regular crackers on hand because honestly, if you're not GF there are better crackers out there). I'd also slice some summer sausage. Mimosas and Bloody Marys for drinks. Simple but refreshing and elegant.

Well, they don't NEED it per se, but isn't it a cool idea to read adventure stories about kids who love science? I mean, the appeal is kind of like Indiana Jones. As flawed as those movies are, I think they inspired a whole generation of geeky kids to hone in on the fields of archeology and anthropology.

So Sassafras and Quark are terribly written and light on science. Is there really nothing similar out there that is up to par?

As a college math teacher, you should know that BA is a bargain. Think about how high quality the pictures are, and how sophisticated the math is compared to other books. A lot of work goes into them. When I compare the quality of BA to a college math textbook, and Google tells me college math textbooks cost an average of $210 (twice that of BA), then it really puts things into perspective. i am honestly surprised they can sell it as cheaply as they do.

We're using The Homegrown Preschooler: http://www.amazon.com/Homegrown-Preschooler-Teaching-Your-Places/dp/0876594518/ Plus some learning apps listed in my signature. We'll use A Year of Playing Skillfully this fall when she's closer to three: http://www.thehomegrownpreschooler.com/?product=a-year-of-playing-skillfully-printed-version

I'm not sure why you gave up diet soda? It doesn't cause an insulin spike (if it did, we'd know it by now with how closely diabetic patients are monitored--and the American Diabetic Association recommends diet drinks as an effective way to satisfy a sweet craving without the sugar). Studies have shown it helps people who are consciously trying to lose weight lose more weight than non diet drinkers. The only people it doesn't help are people who aren't on a real diet and use it as an excuse to overeat ("Since I'm drinking Diet Coke, I can order a Big Mac"). If your goal is to get in ketosis, I think trying to do it gradually is going to backfire. Like others have said, the sooner you get that first week over with, the less you'll crave carbs. You'll also drop five pounds or more of water weight, which is an awesome motivator to keep going. I found it helpful to have treats around that aren't high in carbs, so when I do indulge, it's not that bad. Breyers Carb Smart Ice Cream Bars (6g net carbs) are a favorite. I also eat quesadillas or taco salads several times a week with low carb tortillas to help satisfy bread cravings. If I feel especially cagey, I go out to eat and have steak and broccoli to remind myself that food is still delicious even without carbs. i also try to make snacks ahead of time: boiled eggs, egg salad, tuna salad, pepperoni slices, babybel cheese, pork rinds, carrots and ranch, Boars Head deli meat (so much better than store brand), and cocktail sausages. The Reddit keto group is a good resource too!

Do you have a link to the talk by Richard Ruszyck? :)