Our church has a once a week study type thing also but I'm not sure how many men attend. In addition to that they have a monthly breakfast meeting with a speaker. Sometimes the speaker is in person (often someone within the church), sometimes it's a video. This summer they've tried to do some additional outings like a hike, a golf tournament, and a "meat and skeet" event. We got a new adult ministries pastor a couple of years ago and he's been actively trying to get some more activities going for the men.

I chose other. My maternal grandparents came here from Norway through Ellis Island. My grandmother came as a child with her parents. My grandfather came here as a young man. So that side of the family has been here for 3 generations. My paternal grandparents were born in the US but both of their parents immigrated from Germany. I counted that side of the family as being here for 4 generations. I know a small amount about both sides of the family from the time they came state side but little family history before that other than names. There are no people of color in my lineage in the US but I have no idea what happened across the border. I would love to learn more about that. They were not slave owners. Both sides lived in the north...Nebraska and Washington.

I heard about this. It is such a bummer that we won't be able to know where he planned to go with the rest of the books.

I haven't posted in a while but I have been busy reading. I decided to finally read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Loved it!! By the time I finished that, The Snowman by Jo Nesbo had come in after weeks of waiting for it from the library. It took me about 50 pages or so to get into but once I did...wow...great book! Then I went back to Stieg Larsson and read The Girl who Played with Fire. That book seemed to hit the floor running and never stop! This week I'm reading The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I'll be sad when I'm done with this trilogy....

Thanks for the info. Those are a different version than the one I'm referring to, though. This one is in English and stars Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist. I think he'll be great! :) Here's a link - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/

He's in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo coming out in December. I can't wait!!!!

I read The Help and loved it. Also read Still Alice and really liked it so our tastes could be somewhat similiar. I recently finished Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Wiener and really enjoyed it. I remember thinking it would be a great beach or vacation read. It is a funny, feel-good kind of book, with a little bit of action thrown in. There is one part that is unbelievable (kind of corny imo). If it wasn't for that I would probably say that I loved this book!

:iagree: This is what worked for me when I was going through a particularly hard time. So when I was in the shower and the tears would start streaming down my face I would try to remember, "Just do the next thing," and I'd wash my hair. Instead of curling of up into a ball and sleeping the day away so I wouldn't have to think (that's what I really wanted to do), I'd remind myself "just do the next thing." It might have been emptying the dishwasher, reading a chapter out loud to everyone, helping a son with schoolwork, whatever the next thing was that needed to be done in that moment. I did have to consciously remind myself when the thoughts started spinning but somehow, getting through each little thing got me through the day, which helped me to know that I could get through the next day the same way. :grouphug: and prayers to you, Chris.

Awwww, what a sweetie!

13yo son wants to be an architect. 12yo son wants to be a Navy Seal. 10yo son wants to work at Comcast (our local cable company):confused: When asked why he says he likes their commercials. :lol:

I didn't vote because I have a droid and while I do like it I wouldn't buy it again. I plan to get an iPhone as soon as my contract is up. There are apps I want that they have for the iPhone that aren't available for the droid. My son has an iPod touch and he's always getting cool apps. Sometimes I can get them and sometimes I can't, hence my iSystem envy.:D

I'm not the OP but thanks for your detailed post, OhElizabeth. I've wondered about Jensen's before myself.

Yay!!! :grouphug: I'm so happy for you and hope you'll share some about your trip when you get back. Have a wonderful time! :001_smile:

Yes, I often feel the same way. Most often I feel like I do a fair job teaching them but then I'm ready for a break, so I don't spend as much time being "just Mom." We got home Saturday after a week in Disneyland and I realized that I didn't wear the teacher hat at all and was just Mom all the way. I loved that part about our vacation! So you're not alone and I'll be interested to hear replies to this one as well.

I voted an hour. People tend to come about 5-10 minutes after the arranged time. Then we usually offer something to drink with some type of munchie and get to visiting. This usually goes on for at least 30 minutes so by the time I get the food on the table and we're all seated it's been at least 45 minutes and could be an hour after the invite time. The only time I had anything happen like you mentioned was one year for Thanksgiving. My sister lived in Idaho at the time and we were staying with her for the holiday. She invited another couple over for dinner as well and I think the agreed upon time was probably around 5:00. Well something happened, never have figured out what, but the turkey took a LONG time to cook. We were sitting around playing Trivial Pursuit and munching. She kept going to check on the dinner and would come back and say she thought it would be another half an hour. We didn't end up eating until about 9:00 or something crazy like that! Thankfully we didn't have kids and neither did the other couple. My sister apologized repeatedly. Thanksgiving is usually at our house now and we all laugh about it every year. Could your hostess have had something strange happen as well?

We'll continue with: TOG Write Shop (13 yo finished this year, 12 yo will start in the fall) Megawords Harmony Fine Arts Teaching Textbooks (for 2 of the kiddos)

I haven't posted in a while but I've been reading. Last week I finished Percival's Planet by Michael Byers. It was a nice change of pace since I had just read The Judas Gate by Jack Higgins the week before. Blech! Absolutely no character development in that book. Before that I read Alone Together by Sherry Turkle. I thought it was simply going to be a book about spending too much time on electronics. Instead, the first half of the book was devoted to people (usually elderly or children) developing relationships with robots and the pro/cons this would have on society. This was something I had never heard about. The second half of the book covered texting, Facebook, and Second Life (a web site I'd never heard of before this book). So much going on in the world out there that I am clueless about! :lol: This week I'm reading my 21st book Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes.

Ooohhh!! We haven't gone here. We'll have to check it out this summer!

My in-laws live in Newport so we've spent some time in the area. There is a beach about 10 minutes south of Newport called Seal Rock. If the tide is right there are some great tide pools there. And when you're done, there's a wonderful ice cream/candy shop close by. :D

Thanks for posting this! I just bought HST+ this weekend and was trying to figure out a way to use it on both my laptop and desktop.

I've looked at this as well but haven't used it. It's also offered over at the Christian Books site and you can see a table of contents there. Not sure which one you're interested in but when I pulled up the Genesis study it showed 30 lessons. Here's a link. Hope this helps.

We did CAW last year but quit after Christmas. We tried to pick it up after the Christmas break but what you stated above was exactly how I felt about it. It seemed like it was just the same old, same old. Two of mine were moaning and groaning about it and I wasn't interested, so we shelved it in the middle of the year. In WP's defense, I did have one boy who loved it, but he's always been interested in geography. The schedule includes having a weekly event where you have a meal like they would in that country, or doing some other event....something about Guy Fawkes comes to mind. The idea was to have a bon fire and re-enact how the spend this day in England. I know some families love this kind of thing and our family does too on occasion. But it wasn't something we were interested in doing every single week. It seemed to me that was where you got to experience more of the uniqueness of each country. I also didn't care for the book written by WP. I think it was Children of Many Lands. Every country was written in the exact same format. Start with an overview of the geography, go over the history, talk about festivals/celebrations and I forget the other two topics (there were 5 for each country). It just didn't seem to flow together very well. I didn't use the Older Learner's Guide so I can't speak to that. I don't mean to sound negative but the curriculum didn't work for us and I felt that a lot of it was due to the reason I quoted above.

I just tried it and get the same thing. It must be the web site.

Thanks for this idea. I hadn't thought about handling it that way. That's what the Loom says. For "Honors," which I am guessing means AP, it says the student should complete all of the reading assignments, mapwork, etc. meaning all 36 weeks instead of 32. I haven't compared the two levels but that's what I was wondering. Thanks for sharing your opinion.

I'm trying to work this out. According to the Loom document you give 1 history credit for a student who completes a minimum of 32 weeks core and in-depth reading assignments and their corresponding Accountability and Thinking questions, mapwork, and charts. I'm assuming this to mean rhetoric level assignments. My oldest will be 8th grade next year. I plan to use that year to prepare him for rhetoric level TOG. I've started assigning him dialectic level history and in-depth reading assignments to begin this preparation. He does the accountablity questions. It is a stretch. In the fall I plan to continue doing this plus I'll add in the thinking questions. Today was a tough day for him. Part of me wants to tell him to suck it up and this is what needs to be done, but the other part of me wonders if the workload is too much. I've read that some people assign high school credit for completing all the dialectic level assignments. If that's the case then I can understand why he feels overloaded. But I'm pretty sure the Loom document is talking about doing all of this at the rhetoric level for high school credit beginning in 9th grade. If you have experience using TOG through high school could you help me understand how you went about assigning credits?