That's great! Last year was my first year reporting and when I dropped my stuff off at the end of June, they called me later that day to complain that I hadn't submitted enough and they wanted me to "just bring in all of it, he wants to see everything you have." Cough, Sputter, Choke. Yeah right! The PA law says SAMPLES. SAMPLES, people, not "everything you have!" And mind you, I had pulled my daughter out of school toward the end of the year that year, so I'd only homeschooled for like 3 months! I politely but firmly refused and all summer I waited for some sort of certified letter bringing bad news. Instead, in September (finally!) I received a letter like you did, about how everything was in order and an appropriate education was being received. I was so happy that I'd stood my ground and that they'd backed down! This year I homeschooled for the whole year- and submitted roughly the same number of samples. It's been almost a month and so far no word! I'm figuring no news is good news, and hopefully sometime in August or early September I'll receive that same form letter. And hopefully in the meanwhile I WON'T receive any negative comments or complaints! So far so good! :)

Just to throw it out there, I attended a Catholic high school for one year when I was in 10th grade. My family was not Catholic, or Christian at all, but my mother thought it might be a better school than our local public schools were. It wasn't. It was not any "better" than the public schools were in regard to quality of teaching, or quality of students. The girls would roll up their skirts at the waist to look shorter and unbutton their top buttons. Kids would smoke in the shower rooms, bully each other, get into fights, and some of them sold pot. One of the teachers made an inappropriately hurtful comment to me, basically telling me I was stupid. So in no way do I have illusions that private school is necessarily any different or better than public, so if I were going to send my kids back to school, I'd examine my reasons for wanting to spend a lot of money on a private school and whether those reasons are really going to hold up to the cost.

I think you just need to email her and be forthright, even though I know that's awkward. Constantly saying you're "busy" is just leaving the door open for her to keep trying. I think you need to email back and tell her something like: "I'm very sorry. I did so hope that our dc would mesh well together as I know they are all close in age and in need of friends, but my daughters just do not feel that they have clicked well with yours outside of a group setting for whatever reason, and I do not feel that I can or should force a close friendship on them. I'm sure they will continue to interact at group get togethers, but I think we're going to have to let go for the time being of the idea of them getting together at each other's houses. Sorry!"

Wayyyyy over protective and unreasonable. Unless you have a valid reason to suspect your FIL of some sort of child abuse, it's a real shame you feel that way about him just because he's a male, especially if he's a loving grandfather. Kids usually adore sleepovers at grandma's. If my kids had a caring grandmother who wanted to spend that sort of quality time with them, and if my kids wanted to go, I'd absolutely love to let them do that now and then. I absolutely understand your husband's feelings, about how you may be depriving his mom of this special time with her grandkids. P.S. this depends on ages at least somewhat though. Babies and young toddlers I was never in a rush to have sleeping away from home, I'm not sure if you said how old your kids are exactly. But in your MIL's situation, if my kids were at least, say, 3 and up (or even 2 if you had a verbal kid who said they wanted to go and I was thinking there may not be many chances to have this opportunity with an unwell grandma), I'd absolutely want to try it, for both her sake and the kids'. And my husband's!

That's great!! I love the books you guys made! I didn't even know there WERE other Harold books! But now I'm going to go order a copy on Amazon, and perhaps it'll turn into a similar project :) Thanks again for all the nice responses, all!

It varies. Our homeschool group sometimes meets at various members' houses, sometimes at a community building, sometimes at playgrounds, and we do many field trips and tours. The closest I've been able to go was about 10 min to the community building we sometimes use. The furthest I've traveled for field trips has ranged between 1 and 1 1/2 hours away from home.

My daughter still does those things sometimes at age 9, usually when she is reading aloud on the quicker side, too. I haven't really been concerned about it because overall she reads fluently, has a good vocabulary, enjoys reading, can tell you what a book's about when she reads it and so on. I'm sure it'll straighten itself out eventually.

^just google "baby brianna" and you'll get a bunch of written accounts. Though they are absolutely devastating to read. It's not just hitting kind of abuse, it's sexual abuse, too. On an infant. It's awful. I'm glad she died, rather than having to continue to live with such trauma. I hope that the people who did that to her suffer the same kind of abuse in prison. Often. I really do.

Ha. Sorry! Really, though, it will just kind of fall into place as you go. Just make sure you look ahead a week to see what supplies you might need for that week. Then just open your syllabus on a Monday and start doing some of the things listed in it until you feel you've spent a reasonable amount of time on school stuff, then stop, and do more the next day. Even if it takes a few weeks for everything to get ironed out in regard to how much you can/should do on a given day to balance out a week, no biggie, it'll fall into place and you'll figure it out! Hey... in fact, if you want, PM me your regular email addy (because there are limitations to how much text you can send in a PM box here) and I can even try emailing you an attachment of my schedule (with each week broken down by day), since we're doing the same program. You might end up making changes of course, and I may be doing some things you're not (like I'm probably using a different math curriculum or whatever) but at least you can get an idea of how I'm breaking down my week using the same basic curriculum and grade you are. I've completed 30 weeks out of 36 so far, so I still need to get those last 6 done lol... but most of it is done already. So if you think it'll help feel free to let me know :) Nance

I'm sorry....but LMAO!

We like putting fresh veggies (including squash) on the grill and having it on the side with our steaks and whatnot, with just a little seasoning. Yum!

Thanks for looking, and for the nice comments! :) His daddy loved it, by the way. Harold & The Purple Crayon was his favorite book when he was a little boy. He was excited when I first found the book at a used book sale and brought it home for Ben. He loved seeing Ben's "project" with it!

I haven't but I'll keep an eye on this thread since my 9 y/o daughter has had eczema since she was a toddler. In her case, she gets it the worst over the winter. The rest of the year, it isn't nearly as bad. We use medicated cream when she has flare ups, and I try to keep her diligent about putting on lotion in between. This past winter was the absolute worst she ever had it. And it used to only be in small patches on the insides of her elbows and by her wrists, but this year those patches got bigger and the areas spread to behind her knees, and a little on her back and even under her eyes. I felt awful for her. She's seen her pediatrician and a dermatologist. I wondered if I should try taking her to an allergist but then figured if it was allergy related, she'd have it year round, not just in winter. The dermatologist gave us prescriptions but said that the key is keeping lotion on it every single day, even when there are no symptoms, and using the cream as needed. I'm hoping this winter won't end up being as bad as last winter was, because it was awful!

LOL Let me know if you find one. I went through every week and then broke it down day by day in a Wordpad document on my computer, because I like to make lists and be organized like that. It WAS on the time-consuming side- I did it here and there as I had free time over the summer. Then, over the school year, I could open up that Wordpad document each week, copy and print that week's schedule, and use it as a guideline, and it was nice being able to do that every week for the whole school year last year. I have been doing it this summer, too, though to be honest I probably didn't have to. Now that I have an idea of how things go with my daughter and OM, I probably could have just looked ahead a week at a time to see what supplies i needed, and then just opened the syllabus each week and said "okay do this and this and this today" "and we'll do this, this and that tomorrow" and just sort of saw how it went, time wise.

Well, no, because I'm 37 and I can't draw very well, either. :) We've each got our own talents and strengths. Celebrate those!

I think you are absolutely right! My daughter went to public school for all of K, all of 1st Grade, all of 2nd Grade, and most of 3rd Grade before I pulled her out. I then homeschooled her for the rest of 3rd Grade, all of 4th Grade, and I'm looking forward to homeschooling her for 5th Grade- and to having my young son with me home all along, right from the beginning. So having had the experience of both, granted I'm still 'relatively' new to homeschooling- but to me, homeschooling is LESS stressful than public school was! When my daughter was in public school, I had to wake up early, to an alarm clock, nearly every day. I had to wake my daughter up early, and she didn't like waking up early. So getting her out of bed could be stressful. She was a dawdler, so I had to stress over getting her up, ready, and out the door on time, so we didn't miss the bus. We had to wait at the bus stop, rain or shine, regardless of whether it was hot as heck out, or bitterly cold out. Sometimes I worried about whether the bus would get her there safely. Whether there were bullies on the bus, and whether there were inappropriate things being said/done by the older kids on the bus. Whether the bus driver was a good one and so on. She went to school all day but I didn't feel she was getting a well-rounded curriculum, she was being taught what was on standardized testing. I didn't feel she had much of a chance to just play, socialize, let off steam, because they had silent lunches, and mere 10-15 minute recesses- which she was often losing, even in K and 1st, as a punishment for being too chatty in the classroom. In those earliest years, there was a lot of academics, no time to blow off steam, no real "socialization," not much fun, she was losing recesses, getting a "demerit" in 1st grade (for talking too much, which led to her coming home and sobbing "I got a d-d-demerit, and I don't even know what that is, but it's b-bad!). No matter what I was doing, I had to drop everything to be at the bus at a certain time of day to pick her up again. She'd come home at the end of this long day (not getting home til like 3:40, 3:45 often), and she'd have homework. And her homework would often take her an hour or more. By the end of the day, she was tired, I was tired, we weren't really enjoying each other, and I had to play the part of the school's enforcer- taking this kid who wants nothing more than to play and run around and do her own thing, and forcing her to do homework instead. It was eating into our family time. She wouldn't finish til dinner time. She'd have very little time to go play and do her own thing, and then it was time to start getting ready for bed, because it was "a school night," and I had to get her to bed on the early side, so the next day she could get up and do the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Filling out forms, permission slips, getting necessary supplies, overseeing homework and 'reports' and doing things the school's way, parent-teacher conferences, bus schedules, school schedules, having to revolve everything in our lives around the school calendar, having to get "permission" every time I wanted to keep my kid out of school to do something I wanted us to do as a family.... I couldn't stand any of it! And then throw in all the stress stomach aches from all the pressure they put on the kids to do well on testing, the notes that would come home about how someone had lice, or foot-and-mouth disease, or MRSA, worrying about swine flu, and so on. Homeschooling? I've loved the freedom to do our own thing, on our own time, on our own schedule, no pressure, no rush... it's been great! So no I never, EVER (so far) think about wanting to put my kid back in PS or that that would be easier or any such thing. BUT if I ever started feeling burnt out about homeschooling, then like I said, I'd evaluate how I was going about it. It's fun right now- and I want it to stay fun to whatever extent it possibly can!

You can't change your mother. The best you can do is break the cycle and be a better mother to your children than your mother was to you. Which it sounds like you are already doing, so good for you!! :) (I've had to do quite a bit of that, myself)! That leaves you having to decide whether you want a relationship with your mother, now, as an adult, or not. And whether you want her in your children's lives. If you do, you're basically accepting her for who she is- meaning, you aren't expecting to change her. That doesn't mean you can't try to at least have a sit down with her and clear the air- let her know how you felt as a child and how you feel now as the mother of her grandchildren, and see how it goes from there. You can do this in person, or you can do it in a letter or email if you feel more comfortable with that. She may not change any of her behaviors but it may help you to feel better that you at least said what you needed to say instead of suffering in silence, and you'll know you tried to make things right by telling her how you feel. You might have to set some "guidelines"- like I know I can't change you as a person, but if you want to be in your grandchildren's lives, you need to keep your promises to them, or to me when it comes to them. Don't tell me you'll come to a special occasion like their birthday party and then cancel because something better comes along, etc. Anything very important to you like that, say it to her. And then you'll need to re-evaluate. Does she bother? Or does she keep hurting you, and your children? Is she worth having in your lives based on that, or not? This goes beyond a simple "should I tell her to come to the party or stay home from the party." You've got a bit more than that to evaluate, unfortunately! Happy birthday to your son, by the way! I hope he has a wonderful party, regardless of whether your mother is there!

For anyone curious, I emailed OM to get their "official" stance on it. Their response pretty much fit in with what I said I plan to do anyway, I think! They said: "Dear Nancy, This is a great question! Thanks for asking. Fifth grade is a time of transition and it is a great year to switch out of the main lesson books into other notebooks. It is a wonderful opportunity to have the student make a decision as to how she/he would like to organize the work. Some students still like to put their work into a main lesson book. Reports that are written on lined paper in ink or that are typed can still be glued onto a main lesson book page if you want to keep the work all together. Hope that answers your question!"

So my 4 y/o, Ben, brought me the book "Harold & The Purple Crayon" and asked me to read it to him. I opened it up to the first page, and had a sudden brainstorm, partially inspired by the book itself, and partially inspired by someone here who recently showed us her blog, part of which involved her covering her kitchen table with paper and laying out markers for her kids to use for a good start to their day (I'm so sorry I can't remember what your name was!!) So anyway I had this big roll of paper, and I cut a piece to fit across my kitchen table. I then gave my son a big purple crayon, sat him at the table, and started reading him the story, pausing to encourage him to draw the scenes from the story with his own purple crayon as we went. He had a lot of fun with this!! And I was so happy that he was willing to try, because it's rare that he'll even attempt much more than a scribble! When he was done, I wrote his name, age, the date, the title of the story, and labeled the things he drew, and rolled the paper up and put it away to keep/show his dad later. Of course I took pictures, and I wanted to share them with someone besides his dad lol. I'm going to have to see if we have any other books we might be able to try this with, too! Thanks for looking :)

testing photos

Maybe it's time for an overhaul. Something more, well, fun, that you can enjoy learning together. In ways you can enjoy learning it. Hands on activities, field trips, discussions, movies, games, long walks, lots and lots of reading. If you tend to be more textbook/workbookish/rigorous, maybe it's time for a long break and a big change, particularly if this feeling you're having is more than just fleeting.

No, I do not keep grades. I don't want my kids to feel like they have to prove what they know or how well they know it, or to feel like they are doing well or poorly based on some letter or number. I want learning to be just an ongoing process, not some sort of constant test for a letter grade or whatever. I just want learning to be an enjoyable process to the extent possible. As they do things, I am there with them, checking it over with them, and correcting or discussing as necessary as they go or right afterward. For now, that works for us. This may change in later years as they get older but for now, it's not one of my priorities.

Yep! If my husband wanted to assign something like that, which I wouldn't have assigned myself and didn't really deem age appropriate, I'd tell him to oversee it himself. Let him work with them, monitor them, answer their questions, check their progress, teach them what they need to know to do it the way he wanted them to, and let him see firsthand how it's going (or not going, as the case may be). And when he got all frustrated or saw that it was not going well or realistically, I'd have to have a talk with him about the age appropriateness, or lack thereof, of what he was suggesting.

Joanne, I do understand your point. But I also understand that parents might want to (and should have the right to) choose their OWN timing for explaining sexual innuendos to their children, and a public business should be more responsible than that. It's one thing for a kid to hear something on the playground, since you can't really help what other children say to yours. It's another entirely for an adult business owner to throw it out there in the public eye, IMHO. I can understand and appreciate your willingness to be perfectly open with your own children in a scenario like that. I can't understand your refusal to see or understand why other parents might reasonably feel a little differently. Anyway, as a brief update, I drove past the sign around noon yesterday and the message was still there. I drove past it at 9 AM this morning, and the message was gone. I'm not sorry to see it go!

The ones that the kids get for their b-days I usually keep for them and eventually box away with things I'll give to them when they are older, so they can look back and enjoy the memories and decide what they want to do with them. The ones that are for me, unless I think it's a super special one, I'll end up tossing it. If it is particularly sweet/special to me, I'll keep it tucked away.