Anyone know if this is something we can watch live (or via DVR at least :P) on TV tomorrow? If so, anyone know which network/what time, etc?

Meet the Masters looks great, I just bought it to use next year. It's currently 1/2 price if you buy through homeschoolbuyersco-op.org (which you can join for free, if you're not already a member).

I agree with checking work daily. In fact, you might even need to start out by being aware of what he's doing at the moment, i.e. "It's time to do vocabulary, right now" AND checking his assignment right after he's done it, i.e. "Come show it to me/Call me when it's finished so I can check it." Then have him move on to the next thing.

I thought I'd done this before a few years ago when i first heard of this site! But I searched and my name and my husband's were both there. (No pics though). I removed us both. Thanks for the post!

Heh. It's usually around 10 or 11 before we get started too. Sometimes we don't even start til after lunch. But now and then we do start earlier. It just depends on what's going on that day, how much other stuff we have to get done that day and so on. However, I have no problem with our schedule and I'm not looking to change it. I love that we have this kind of flexibility. Maybe you just need to embrace it lol.

It could just be hormones related to the onset of puberty.

Thank you again everyone for sharing these stories. Many of them have been very comforting and reassuring :) I was just a teen when I had my first daughter (unplanned) with my ex. She's now 19. I was 26ish when I got pregnant for the first time with my current husband- that resulted in a "blighted ovum," as in nothing ever developed in the sac and I had to have a D&C. That was a planned pregnancy and it happened very quickly from what I remember once we started trying. As soon as I was given the go ahead to try again, we did, and again I conceived very quickly and had my now 10 y/o daughter. I was 27 when she was born. Since she was born, we just used the withdrawal method of "birth control" (I know! lol) and when she was 5, my son was born (unplanned but much appreciated :D). I was 32. I had no problems at all (other than sciatica and hearburn!) with either of my pregnancies with my younger two kids (oh, and morning sickness in the form of constant nausea for the first 15 weeks with my youngest, my son), and both of their deliveries were pretty short and easy. So anyway I am hoping to still be able to conceive quickly and to have an uncomplicated pregnancy. I had all these "older women and pregnancy" stats running through my head, and I guess they are still possibilities, but many of you have given me lots of hope that I'm not doomed to suffer all of them. So, thanks again! :)

Thank you all, so much, for sharing your experiences with me.

My daughter and I are finishing "The Gawgon and The Boy" by Lloyd Alexander today (two chapters to go!), and we intend to start the second book in the Harry Potter series tonight. I finished reading "Mary, Bloody Mary" last week (young adult historical fiction, part of the Young Royals series by Carolyn Meyer) and started "Beware, Princess Elizabeth," which I should finish this week.

What your experiences were like pertaining to pregnancy after age 35 and whether you 1) had more trouble conceiving than you did when you were younger, and/or 2) had any pregnancy complications that you hadn't had when you were younger, because she's going to be 38 in just over three months and her husband has agreed to trying for one more baby (she never thought she'd see the day and she's ridiculously excited but also nervous because she's read some worrisome statistics on decreases in fertility and increases in m/c rates and increased risk of genetic abnormalities and so on and so forth). So would you share your stories with... er, her? :)

Us, too :D A small box of chocolates, we do some sort of special craft, and we sometimes bake and decorate little heart shaped cakes or make the Valentine's Day cookie pops I mentioned in my other thread about cute, simple Valentine's Day ideas (I put pics in that thread).

Here are some things I did with my kids last year, if anyone's looking for cute, very simple, homemade valentine ideas. (I found these in various places online, I'm not that creative all by myself) :P 1. Trace child's hand on construction paper and cut it out. Use a heart shaped sticker (or a little roll of tape on the back of a second, smaller construction paper heart) to attach a small lollipop. 2. Make "shiny" valentines by cutting aluminum foil in the shape of hearts and gluing those to red and pink folded construction paper. 3. My favorite- Valentine's Day Cookie Pops. Get a package of ready-to-bake sugar cookies, insert popsicle sticks into them, bake them, then frost them with vanilla frosting and decorate them with various pink and red sprinkles and candies and so on. Stick them in ziplock bags gathered and tied with pink or red ribbon. 4. Make little animals out of construction paper hearts. Oh, and a cute game idea- find a cartoonish picture of Cupid with his bow and arrow online, print it and affix it to a larger piece of construction paper, tape it on the wall, and give the kids construction paper hearts and a blindfold to play "pin the heart on cupid" with a goal of getting it as close to his arrowpoint as possible. My kids also enjoyed having to find hidden construction paper hearts and seeing who could find the most.

No idea, but that was a funny post! :D

I hope you gave it back to him!

I put "other" because I used to- I played violin as a teen. Today, I would never in a million years be able to remember how to play it, or even how to read sheet music. You would think that reading sheet music was the kind of thing where once you knew it, you knew it forever, right? Not so. It's apparently a "use it or lose it" type of thing.

Thank you, everyone, for the words of congratulations! :) I don't mind at all. I'd tell him: It's not easy. It's definitely not. But it's only "not easy" for a little while. Eventually, it isn't hard anymore. You get a lifetime of benefits for going through a relatively short "rough period" and then it's just done. The urges do go away. And I really do feel like if I could do it, anybody can do it. Get support (that quitnet site I linked to is great) and stay busy. Just keep your mind off it til the cravings pass. And they do pass. Of course, they come back frequently and quickly early on- but that gets less and less as time goes by. Congrats!! That really is great! :) Yes- I was motivated because I was starting to smoke too much and I would lay down at night and it would be hard to take a deep breath in, like my lungs would just feel heavy or something, and I would be afraid I was going to get lung cancer and die and leave my kids without a mom, and it was scary. And I kept knowing I should quit but not being able to get up enough motivation to do it until finally one day I just did. And don't get me wrong, it sucked at first lol. I think I slept a lot the first day or two. I was nasty to everybody heh. And then I just tried really hard to stay busy and distracted. And it got easier and easier- and while it wasn't easy going through that period, like I said, that period was just a drop in the bucket in my life- I have a lifetime of benefits now basically in exchange for going through a few weeks of misery. It's worth it. (And the money has been much better spent!) :)

True- but not as much of a shock as looking at the actual figure of how many cigarettes I WOULD have smoked between then and now if I hadn't quit when I did. You think of a pack of cigarettes as being 20 cigarettes or so but who really thinks about how they add up? The very thought of seventy-seven THOUSAND cigarettes' worth of tar, nicotine and so on building up on one's longs is rather staggering, and that's just for the six year period I didn't smoke! I don't even want to think about how many it was over all those years I DID smoke!

What a great example of homeschooling being a great way to teach your children according to their particular learning styles, instead of with a "one sized fits all" type of curriculum/education! Good for you guys! :)

We're only on 5th grade, but my daughter is LOVING Oak Meadow's science this year. The lessons in the book are relatively short (not overly textbookish) and written to the student. The activities they offer afterward revolve around interesting discussion, some writing assignments, reading extra books, doing some drawings, some hands on stuff, and so on. We're doing Environmental Science and we've done stuff like reading about different biomes, reading extra books about those biomes, drawing pictures of plants and animals from those biomes, and picking an area to do our own "biome observation project." We've done a simple worm bin, we've buried items in our backyard and later dug them up to see which started decomposing and which didn't, we've done a multimedia forest mural, drawn pictures of food webs, did various writing assignments including a short story, made our own bird feeders and learned more about backyard birds, and so on. 7th Grade OM is Earth Science: In Earth Science, students make observations and perform experiments in astronomy, geology, meteorology, matter, and energy. Emphasis is placed on learning about the Earth’s natural resources and thinking through practical solutions to current environmental issues. In conjunction with experiential explorations, students write persuasive essays and conduct research.

I think "great books" is a relative term and we should just read what we enjoy, and enjoy what we read. :)

I don't throw anything out :D Up until 5th grade, work is done in "Main Lesson Books" (Waldorf-inspired) - spiral bound artist's sketch pads. In the earliest years, it's just one or two books for all subjects, in the later elementary years it's a book per subject. At the end of the year, I pack everything up in a box, label it by grade, and store it in my closet. I figure it will be fun to look at down the road- either for my kids or myself. From 5th grade on, work is done on regular looseleaf paper and everything is in one binder divided by subject. But not much of it is "workbook" type stuff as our curriculum is pretty hands on/creative- so there will be writing assignments mixed in with photographs of projects we've done or assignment related drawings and so on, and those get holepunched and added to the binder. Again, at the end of the year, the binder and any loose papers or any completed "workbook" type things gets boxed up, labeled with the grade, and stored. I guess this might be harder if you have more kids and limited storage space, but as of right now, I only have two kids to do this for and I have the room to store the stuff, so why not? P.S. We don't keep rough drafts of writing assignments, only final drafts.

We are a little behind this week on how many chapters we'd intended to read a day (dd10 and I are reading "The Gawgon and The Boy" by Lloyd Alexander this week; we're doing this challenge together). We're on Page 117 (of 199) and need to finish by tomorrow and start another book tomorrow, so hopefully we'll both feel up to a good amount of reading at some point today :D I also finished a Young Adult book I was reading on my own after imp mentioned it- it was called "Mary, Bloody Mary" by Carolyn Meyer, and I started the next book in that series, which is called "Beware, Princess Elizabeth." I tend to like "young adult" books- and historical fiction- so I'm enjoying these. And my daughter is working through a Nancy Drew Files book and "Streams To The River, River To The Sea, A Novel of Sacagawea" on her own this week, as well.

:( :grouphug:

January 18th was my six year anniversary of quitting smoking :) Time Smoke Free: 2201 days, 12 hours, 21 minutes, and 23 seconds Cigarettes NOT Smoked: 77,053 :svengo: Lifetime Saved: 19 months, 18 days, 14 hours Money Saved: $11,560.50 (If only I had literally saved it all this time and had access to it now! :D) So, happy (belated) "quit-smoking" anniversary, to me! :party: Gone are the days of smelly clothes, wasting money, freezing my butt off outside just to have a cigarette, not being able to make it through a movie or a restaurant dinner without obsessing over wanting a cigarette, feeling my lungs struggle to take in a good, deep breath at night, worrying about whether I was going to get lung cancer and leave my kids without a mother, feeling guilty for being a bad influence on my kids and so on and so forth... Yeah, quitting smoking was probably the best thing I've ever done for myself. If you are also a former smoker who managed to quit, kudos to you, too! If you are a smoker who is thinking about quitting but hasn't yet been able to--- you CAN! If I could, you can! (I smoked nearly two packs a day for years). It's not easy in the beginning- but it DOES get easier. And it's SO worth it. Check out quitnet.com and good luck to you! If you never smoked to begin with- good job, you're a lot smarter than I was. LOL. ETA: My husband quit about four months after I did, btw. He'll have 6 years in May. :)

I'm just the opposite. When 10 y/o dd asks if she can take a bath, I tell her to take a shower first, to wash her hair and get all clean, and then she can fill the tub and soak and play in the bathwater as long as she wants.