Childhood's End... What I took away from it is that we might not LIKE what "adulthood" for our species would look like, it might be so far out of our frame of reference. I kind of got that vibe from Octavia Butler's books about the oankali.

So, I'm not much help on the other pieces, but the thing that helps me is regarding afterschooling as a part-time job. I let everything else go when I'm "on-the-job" which means that the dishes are piled up in the sink and my house looks like it was hit by a natural disaster half the time. But I figure that if I don't stop my paid job to fold the laundry, I won't interrupt this. I have time slots allocated and during that time I'm 100% on even if dinner is something reheated that I cooked in advance.

Sort of. I've been thinking about it and talking to the kids, but they mostly want activities. Like another 2 hrs of dance per week. I'm beginning to miss all those plastic cheap toys they used to want...

It's sad, the first thing I thought when I read the title was, "You don't." They might do SOMETHING for you, but in my very limited experience: When they say all classrooms offer differentiation, it really means: whether and how well they actually do it is the luck of the draw... mostly in the form of the teacher/class you get that year. And even if you have a great year with a teacher who can really differentiate well (and who has a classroom mix that allows it) the next year might be terrible.

My daughter is at a dance place that doesn't do competition until the girls are much older and even then not a lot.... but there are apparently only 2 or 3 in the area where we live. It seems like the competition ones are everywhere, and very popular... the classes are huge comparatively. I get the impression the few non-competition type ones that have survived, and have been around for decades, are struggling now against the general trend. I do wonder if it will eventually swing back toward a more balanced mix.

Another thing to consider is whether male/female matters. Peripherally related to my actual paid work, I'm aware that in MOST cultures women are considered "adults" at earlier ages than men.

How often do you use and for how long, say, per school week? We are using it, but so infrequently (she gains maybe 1 skill a week in addition to keeping the review bar thing filled) I'm not sure it will stick unless we spend more time...

I think I always knew he was a hero. I actually liked Dumbledore a lot less after the Snape flashback chapter. I did however believe until the very end that it was going to be Neville, not Harry.... ultimate red herring.

Right, and I know people who waited until they were financially ready and then weren't able to have children because biology isn't on the same timetable as finances. Still, one major reason we stopped having children at 2 was finances. We weren't destitute growing up but money was very tight for many years. It can affect your day-to-day life and your psychology for years to come. e.g., It's not like we were ever starving growing up but I was always aware of the cost of food and how much I ate. I still am reluctant to eat anything but the bare minimum before the kids are full-- even though there's plenty on the table. There was just a constant consciousness of scarcity because so many things were luxuries to us.It may be materialistic, but it was hard being made fun of for not having the "right" clothes (I wore hand-me-downs) for 6 solid years. So, yes, my daughters wear some hand me downs, but they also get some new things that are "in fashion" and not totally inappropriate to my eyes. I never told my parents and I don't really think they know, even now. They were pretty much working miracles as it was, telling them I felt guilty eating much or that people made fun of my clothes was not going to help. I sound so neurotic sometimes -- just saying that economic scarcity, even if its just perceived, can be a real reason to limit family size. Maybe my kids will feel cheated that we didn't have a houseful of kids. They are free to choose differently, I'm sure there's ups and downs to every choice.

I know a child who is very strong in math and did something like this -- used Math in Focus in school, and his mother layered the extra Singapore word problem & other books on top of it for extra practice at home. But for him it was just extending what he knew and challenging him. In contrast, my daughter had Montessori through K and then Envision (wimpy version of Singapore) starting in K. She is in Envision Grade 1 and in Saxon 5/4, in addition to going through LoF elementary series and a bunch of living math books.... so basically, we are all over the place, in terms of level and approach. For her, doing math from all different perspectives works. She is bright but she is more of a language arts person. I do sort of think that except for the math drill part, doing the mixed practice is pretty much like doing the whole program. At least that's what takes most of the time in my house.

Haha, we're not churchgoing people, so when my older daughter heard the expression, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" on the radio, she said, "Are they talking about A Wrinkle in Time?" Still, though, she said "Meh" to "King of the Wind" and my heart broke a little ...plus I didn't realize before that incident that people REALLY ever said "Meh."

We are in 5/4 but have been using it since K. We supplement it with other stuff (LoF, challenge math, etc.) but it really does seem better than its reputation.... at least better than its reputation here. IRL the homeschoolers I know who use it, love it, but it seems to have a terrible reputation online.

I work (mostly at home, sometimes in an office), afterschool 2 kids, and do all the inside housework/laundry/dishes. He does the outside and our outside looks AWFUL! But unlike the outside which we can let go for a while, we can't just stop doing the dishes. At one point we added up hours and money. It turned out that I was working (either taking care of/teaching/driving kids, the house, or working for pay), 112 hours a week. We talked about whether we could afford a babysitter, someone to clean the house, landscaping, etc. It basically turned out we didn't have the money to have an immaculate house and my sanity too. The numbers just didn't favor it. I can't lie -- the conversation patched things up but my husband still thinks -- especially when he's had a bad day -- that I have it easy. Logically he DOESN'T think that, but on a bad day things tend to overflow. Subsequent to this conversation, I have a babysitter now 5 hrs a week, so I'm only working 107 hours a week total, I guess. And my standards for housework just keep dropping. Friends tell me, "My time is valuable, I can't spend it cleaning the house." I say, "So is mine, that's why I leave it messy."

I've never had this, but now I want it. We do eggs in a basket often though.

This really works, especially a high ponytail -- instant layering! This was my basic hair cut in college, because I used to color my hair and I needed a lot of trims (and really couldn't afford them). My husband has some seriously weird and energetic hair, he cuts it himself and when the humidity hits you can't tell the difference between that and a professional haircut.

It's fine unless you do it a lot... some school districts have a rule that you can have X number of unexcused absences because they EXPECT you to have at least some. I've never known ANYONE (even people with 20+ unexcused) to get in trouble in our school district, I think it's more of something that draws attention to you if there are other red flags too (unexcused absences are more like slightly yellow flags...).

I'd agree with this. I am wondering if I'll EVER do a theme based book since my daughter loves learning the IEW method of writing from Andrew... but not so much from me.

Other? In general, I think it should just be classrooms with a child with a life-threatening allergy. But at my daughters' school they do have "nut free" rooms. Even if there were no children (in a given grade) with a nut allergy, if you are in a nut free room, you don't bring nuts... I guess to make there be "safe" places for kids with nut allergies?

I've tried it, bizarrely it's good. Many things come in cans that I am reluctant to eat from cans, but a few years back we lost power quite often and for a while didn't trust putting too much stuff in the refrigerator. It was too expensive to replace our refrigerator and freezer full of stuff every few weeks, and the insurance company more than implied they'd drop us if we actually used the thing where you claim your refrigerator's contents.

Interesting, and so familiar. In the well-regarded public schools where we send our children, like most things reading seems to be taught as a mishmash of good and bad. They do learn all that eagle eye and tryin' lion stuff (complete with the pictures), but they also do things that seem less crazy like letter stories and lexia. I'd still take AAR over all those but the irony is that most kids do seem to learn, at least on the surface. As previously mentioned, when Kumon and other tutoring is common, it can hide a multitude of failed teaching methods in the public schools.

I really hesitated to post since there is some heavy disapproval & many think it's selfish... but we had an adults-only wedding. We could only afford about 80 people, counting ourselves, which was a factor. But I would have loved to have kids there. However, my husband did not want some SPECIFIC children there -- I didn't even know them but he was certain it was a terrible idea. He didn't want their parents there either -- but his parents invited them in advance of us ever having a guest list. And upon investigation my family actually voiced that they did NOT want to bring their children to a Friday night event in another state, so the children my husband didn't want there would have been the only ones! The easiest thing was to have no kids. We did get some nasty reactions from that family, like we'd deeply offended them... which I guess we did, but not as offended as if we'd uninvited them entirely I guess. I'll leave the story as, we got a card implying we were terrible people from them in lieu of a wedding gift. Anyway, I never expect for my children to be invited. And I always expect that there is more to the story than I hear as a guest.

Just for me... I don't pay for anything but swim (safety thing) and camps (for day care reasons) until we aren't paying preschool/K for them. For us, that means first grade. Then, they get 1 activity added per year, up to 2 activities total, BUT they can request something additional as a gift. My older daughter picked 1 dance class per week this year and got it. But if she wants to do ice skating or a second day of dance this year, she can ask for one of those for her birthday and that's all she'd get for her birthday. I would stay with the preschool, mostly because you already committed and it sounds nice. I'd be honest and tell your daughter if she wants gymnastics she can ask Santa, or for her birthday, or wait for next year.

I saw this advice on this board a while ago and it helped us (Saxon 5/4 with a younger student with not much attention to detail): Make a chart, & record the type of errors they are making, i.e., transcription errors, read the problem wrong, math "fact" error, didn't put the label, etc. When my daughter saw certain errors were a big problem for her (day after day she had transcription errors and label errors), it caused her to focus on those more than me harping on them.

I don't know, I continually move bedtime down so my daughters have more time to read in bed before lights out. A while ago, I started read-alouds at 8:30 and then let my older daughter read from the end of read-aloud to 10:15 on her own. And she still pushed it. So we kept pushing downward as far as reasonable. We can't really start getting ready before 7:30 PM (which means read aloud is done at 8 or so, so she has a couple hours) due to schedule. The other part of it is running them crazy ragged during the day with hours outside/physical exercise so they crash earlier. It's a work in progress here like so many other things. I took Ember Falls away from her yesterday at 9 since she'd been running for maybe 3-4 hours during the day and she looked tired, and then came back and she was reading a dictionary...

I'm so sorry for your loss. :(