My husband owns his own business and will sometimes take our daughter to work with him, which she loves, and as she gets a bit older (she's 9 now) what a great opportunity that could be, for learning. He takes them to those Lowe's Build & Grow workshops sometimes and does other small projects around the house that he involves them in. He, of course, supports everything financially. All the cool outings and field trips we do, all the time I spend at home and not working, all the supplies and things I use, all of it is because he supports us financially and enables us to do these things. If at any point I want his help with something, he's willing to help out. So when I wanted a big plastic tote cut down some for a landscape model, he cut it for us. When we were doing certain hands on science projects, he was willing to help out. When my daughter made a covered wagon out of a shoebox for social studies, he helped her out with it, and so on. He ran a fun hands on science experiment 'class' for our homeschool group and led the kids in all the various experiments. Those are the ones I can think of for now!

And how would anyone even know if you, you know, helped her through it? ;) I wouldn't let my kid get totally stressed out over some stupid standardized test that I didn't even have to turn into anybody. Nance, who hates the idea of standardized testing anyhow.

No. My 9 y/o is not allowed to answer the door unless she looks out and sees it is someone she knows. If it is not someone she knows, she has to get her father or I. Over-protective? Maybe. But that's the rule over here!

Definitely. I got a great deal on a used K-8 set of Oak Meadow. I used OM4 with my daughter this past year, and will be using OM5 with her in the fall. I'll be starting my son on OMK this fall and will definitely be saving all of the older grades until they've BOTH had a chance to use all of them. I love OM and will not sell it until they are both finished with it.

Toward the very end of third grade and finishing up in fourth grade was when my daughter memorized the states and their capitals, if that's what you mean. We did it gradually. I'd introduce one new state (alphabetically) each week, and each day we'd review it (which took literally seconds rather than minutes) and the following week I'd introduce another one, and we'd review both of them, and the next week another, and we'd review all three of them, and so on. Even at the end, it never took more than a few minutes a day, and now she knows all of them by heart. But do I think you have to teach them all in third grade? No. I think you could wait a year or two or three if you want to. In fourth grade, she did a more in depth study of our home state, if that's what you mean, but I don't see why you couldn't do that in a year or two either if you want to. It's all up to you. That's the beauty of it :D

Do you mean just being able to locate them on a map? If so, my daughter and I have a map of the 50 states hanging on the wall, and we like to race each other trying to be the first one to find a particular state on the map. If you play that often enough they will probably begin to learn where they are. There are also puzzles of the U.S. which they can put together. And I'm sure there are free online games where you put the states in the right spot on the map and other map games.

My daughter is 9 1/2 and we're going to read the first one together sometime this summer (we're currently in the middle of "Mary Poppins" not to mention in the middle of the "Little House On The Prairie" series, but we'll get to it)! (I've read and loved all the Harry Potter books, myself, and I loved them. So I'm excited to go back and re-read the first one with her!)

I voted for him. He's adorable! Looks like he's winning, too :)

You've been given some good suggestions for books to read with your child. But for YOU, here's a site I found back when my now 9 y/o daughter was about 5 and starting to ask hard questions about death...there is some REALLY great/helpful info here! http://www.buddhanet.net/r_talkcn.htm

I would report it. No hesitation. I couldn't live with myself if I found out a child was being abused while I pondered the issue.

If you really want to put him into preschool but can't afford it, why don't you look into whether you have a "Head Start" (also known as "Child Development, Inc." here) where you live? It's free. 5 days a week. Last year my daughter was 8 and my son was 3 and while he did not do the types of behaviors you describe, she was still easily distracted by him, so I found that putting her in the kitchen and keeping a baby gate up in the kitchen would keep him from bothering her and her from getting distracted by him. But in my case I could leave him in the living room while I worked with her in the kitchen and he wouldn't get into that kind of trouble, so not sure if that would work for you! I did find that one thing that would keep him happy for longer periods of time than most other things were, when he was getting bored, was to just give him a one hole punch and a pile of paper. He loved punching holes in the paper! Do you have any relatives who might want to come spend a little time with him for short periods out of the day, even just while you do math with your daughter? Good luck!

My son is 4 1/2 and he'd never sit for longer read alouds. He likes when I read him poems and enjoys especially Shel Silverstein poems but still likes nursery-rhyme type poems, too. He enjoys Dr. Seuss books. There's this very early "chapter book" called "Fire Cat" that for some reason he just loves, he'll have me read that over and over. Also, at the library recently we found a picture book that had no words. He loved when we sat and just made up the story based on the pictures, and that he could do that, too. But other than that, no particular favorites. He likes when I take him to the library and let him just pick out a handful of books on his own. Some of them are hits, some of them aren't, but he likes being able to choose them.

My two younger kids both did this as toddlers, a handful of times each. There were no "consequences"- it never would have occurred to me to punish them for it, they were very young and I assumed it was a pretty normal developmental thing- although I'm sure I did at least tell them it was yucky and that they shouldn't do that. Like someone else said they only did it while they were in bed for a nap or at bedtime. It was gross but it was a very fleeting stage in their lives, fortunately!

I agree with the advice you've already been given. I nursed my son for 19 months (began weaning at 15 months and finished weaning at 19 months) so we definitely went through the biting stage, too. When he did it I would say "No, that hurts!" and I'd stop nursing and put him down and walk away for a few minutes. If you can't unlatch him without hurting yourself, then pulling IN toward the breast as someone else mentioned helped. Fortunately for us he didn't do it a whole lot of times, it was a very temporary (but sometimes painful!) phase. Good luck!

I've seen it go from "just pot" to much worse with a close relative. Some people may be able to do it once in a while casually and have it not be a big deal. Some people can't. It can definitely be a serious problem.

Congrats on the new baby! If you wait til after Labor Day to begin homeschooling "officially" for the school year, which is what I tend to do, you have nearly 3 months to see how things are going with your baby. And at that point- it's just going to depend on the baby lol. If it were my son at that age- I would have found it next to impossible to do just about anything, he was pretty difficult/fussy. If it had been either one of my daughters, no problem- they were the most easy-going content babies ever. ETA: I shouldn't have ended my post there! I got sidetracked by something going on at my house, I think. I meant to say something alone the lines of so if it's one of those easy-going babies, you should be able to do what you need to do pretty easily. But if it's not, that doesn't mean you can't homeschool, just that you might need to do a lighter load for a while, be willing to play things by ear and get things done at odd times, or with breaks in between, to do the basics and try to keep things fun but don't feel like you aren't being successful if you aren't piling on hours and hours worth of work- do the basics, let the kids do "fun" educational things on their own (reading, music, board games, crafts, whatever). Let them help with the house and the baby too, that's also educational :D Good luck!

Heck no she would not be allowed to come to my house. Period. I don't care HOW mad she gets!

I'm a pretty laid-back, casual, informal type of person. I'm fine with people using my first name, including kids. If it made some kid's parents uncomfortable for them to use my last name, I wouldn't be UPSET if they didn't or anything like that. But I'd never insist on it myself.

They will send you this disc- I don't know all the details but basically we can use our playstation 3 to watch any of our 'Play now" items through our TV. Not sure what other ways it can be done, but I love that we can do that. In that manner, my husband and I have been watching "Lost" via Netflix since it's on "play now" and we can watch it on our TV! We recently finished Season 1 and started Season 2.

Well, my husband is a tattoo artist and body piercer who owns his own tattoo studio. Over the years he's had some, er, interesting requests. Will you pierce my ahem, will you tattoo a turtle on my butt, and so on. Not often, but still. Just the requests alone used to kind of bug me. But now I just take them in stride, or don't even think about them. After all, he doesn't do anything inappropriate anyway, if it can't be covered by a bathing suit, he's not touching it. (Or piercing or tattooing it as the case may be) :P

No, I'd rent them from Netflix. Liberty's Kids is even available to "play now," btw!

I'd go with the new, clean ones for body parts and keep the ones you've been using for cleaning to use for cleaning.

I'm going to be using Oak Meadow K in the fall with my son, as well. I'm really looking forward to it. I did Oak Meadow 4 with my 9 y/o this past year and loved it, so I'll be doing OM5 with her and OMK with my son. OM is secular though like Cindie said you can always add your own religious studies if you had any desire to. It's very hands on- arts and crafts, nature, story-based, music and movement etc. It's also much slower paced in the earliest years, doesn't push heavy academics- so the OMK program is really more like a preschool program- but I like that about it, personally. (The curriculum does eventually become more age/grade comparable to other curricula but always stays more hands on and creative than many others, which I also love about it).

Hi, My husband did not have anything to say really about curriculum (and didn't seem to want to); he knew that I had done all the research and that I was going to be the one doing the curriculum with her, so it was just left up to me. I did have to convince him a bit about homeschooling to begin with (especially since in my case it involved pulling my then third-grader out of public school); but fortunately we both agreed in the end! I do have a choice to do a virtual academy type thing. I'm not interested. I want the freedom to choose my own curriculum and everything else about my day. When I first pulled her out and began homeschooling, yes I was definitely a little nervous. It was a big step, no doubt! There was definitely a little voice in the back of my head going "what if you screw her up? What if you do it wrong? What if you fail? What if you ruin her life?" But I had read so much about the benefits of homeschooling, and I had put myself into a homeschool group for support and to be around other people who were doing it quite successfully (and the same with homeschool email lists and message boards), etc. And then as we started doing it, everything just kind of naturally falls into place. You have fun doing it, you can see your child is learning, you hear so many bad things about the schools and know you can't possibly do worse by your child, you start to wonder what you were ever worried about to begin with... I pulled my daughter out of public school in March, 2009. I homeschooled her for the rest of third grade doing our own eclectic mix of things. I homeschooled her this past year for fourth grade using Oak Meadow. And I'm looking forward to homeschooling her for fifth- and for starting Kindergarten with my son who will never go to public school to begin with. It's been fine. It's been going great! I have no regrets, other than not having done it with her sooner. :)

We almost always start with me reading aloud to my daughter while she eats her breakfast. She loves that.