This is the most recent thing I could find. I saw her Graham Norton interview this past week (and that whole episode was really good) and she was her usual self. I'm sad. I admire her for dealing with her stuff. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/culture/2016/dec/23/carrie-fisher-heart-attack-london-la-flight

I'm Jewish (not Orthodox) though we did most of the things Yael outlined in her post when my father died a few years ago. I did not avoid EVERY joyous occasion as a few happened spontaneously when I was already present, but both my daughters had fine birthdays that were much smaller family only affairs that were palpably different from before/after when I was mourning. And you know what? I didn't find it restrictive. I found it a relief. I found that when I explained I was still recovering from a loss that people understood and protected me. I look back on it now and feel a certain measure of peace about my grief. That said, it wasn't all peaceful, though this really isn't about Judaism. No one else has mentioned it but I had huge fantasies about my father for a very long time after he died. Dreams too. Imaginary conversations where we'd resolve differences or appreciate one another. He and my mother did love one another but sometimes he confided to me that he felt she talked him out of doing some things in life that he wanted to do. Things like get a boat, or take a job in Hawaii and go live there, even have more kids. Those things came back to me and I'd find myself washing dishes and daydreaming he'd faked his death and was sitting in a beach somewhere. I feel like thoughts like that are nuts but I had them.

Any updates on this?

I would not think anything was up in the OP's scenario. I do however think something is wrong if couples air their laundry on FB or post snide comments on each other's page or start posting passive-aggressive articles about how to be better spouses and things. Also, too many "I married the best wife or husband in existence - share if yours is too" type posts make me nuts and I start wondering what the person is trying to cover up.

I can't decipher what it means for you but I want to know why your husband thought it was a good idea to tell you this? Does he think the neighbor paid you a compliment? If not why would he tell you that someone said something about you that wasn't? If hubby knows you at all he'd know you'd spin wheels parsing it.

This website helps me navigate food expiration issues: http://www.stilltasty.com/

One of the most interesting and thoughtful gifts my mom got me was this year's birthday gift, one of those Ancestry DNA test kits. She got it on sale and awe both like it because when the results get back it'll bring about more family bonding and conversation.

My eight year old who felt she couldn't draw and I both had a great experience with Bruce McIntyre's "Drawing Textbook". It's a small book for around 8$ at Amazon or Rainbow Resource and the lessons are very easy to follow. It took us almost two years to get through it. Now we've gone on to work on his nature (plant) drawing book. This one is shorter as all the basics were in Drawing Textbook and it assumes you have experience with that. Both of our drawings are a million times better and she feels confident about just picking up her colored pencils and getting something on paper. My next child will be only enough to do it in a bit and I think my older daughter and I would benefit from a repeat in a few years.

It's been several months since you posted this, Farrar. Any updates? What did you switch to?

You are not going to want History Odyssey if the aspect of BYL that isn't working is the copywork and memorization. Between the use of History pockets and writing dictionary definitions, it is a ton of writing. My kid hated that though she loved the books. I second the suggestion to just use the SOTW activity guides. I'm also considering Layers of Learning, but it seems pricey to me. It relies heavily on the UILE for history. Edited: Grammar.

Can you link where you bought this. I saw one on Amazon for 200$. I'm guessing that's an OOP version but there must be one in print.

I have two daughters, an 8 year old 2nd grader and a 6 year old Kindergartener. We're primarily an eclectic CM method family and I draw our books and resources from multiple sources, but it's really heavily read & narrate oriented. I don't really do cool hands on crafts or activities much, and my 2nd grader has complained that we never do fun things like her other homeschooling friends (or b&m schooling friends too). By this she means, building boats that can hold pennies, or popsicle stick pyramids, or theme recipes. It's just not me. Well, I've been thinking about it and I don't want her to feel it's all boring books for school, balance is good in all things. So, I'm looking at things like Layers of Learning. I really just want a supplement as I'm not interested in changing the bulk of what we do day to day. I love the education she's getting. Is it worth the money if I just want to add one or two activities a week? Are there enough hands on things or is it mostly just a book list? Can I do just as well trolling Pinterest or is it better to have it compiled like this? Does it complement a CM education well or will we be mostly making stuff I'll toss out a few weeks after we make it (which is a hangup of mine)? I'm thinking about just getting an early year two unit to try out. We were just reading about feudalism and Henry II and Richard the Lionhearted. I'm mostly thinking about history here, because we use BFSU and CM oriented nature studies for science. What made me think I needed a plan instead of just Pinterest is because my younger daughter is not nearly as academic as my older daughter, and I have serious concerns that the stuff I did with the first one will not work well with the second one when she starts 1st grade next year. I was already looking at either making Wee Folk Art slightly more demanding or perhaps using BYL with her. I just really don't like the four year history cycle (which seems super arbitrary to me) and BYL starts with ancients. I was hoping to start daughter #2 with US history and then embark on a more leisurely spread out history cycle, like I did with daughter #1. So, I was thinking maybe with this Layers of Learning program, if I like it with daughter #1, then it could be a larger proportion of what I do with daughter #2. Does that make any sense? So, I'd welcome any feedback.

So, I called the homeschool store close to my mom in NC. It's a re-sale store. We'll be visiting in December. They said they get copies in occasionally and said if they get one before I come they'll call me. I can have mom drive over. I've decided thus to wait. If they don't get one before I leave then I'll decide what I want to do at that point.

Thanks. That's a good perspective that I guess I haven't learned yet just due to inexperience. MBTP was a sore lesson for me though.

Thanks. To be honest, I do have a gut feeling we'd be ok with this, but I easily get sticker shock. My husband always gives me a hard time about researching things to death.

If it's ok with you, I'd like to PM and ask more questions.

Thanks. This sort of list is exactly what I needed. Just some criteria to help me weigh the pros and cons. 1. Yes I can use for more than one child IF willing to buy a second consumable workbook. 2. ? I have seen good posts about Shiller here but it seems like it isn't a well-known product. 3. Have briefly seen it (see comment immediately before this one) but wasn't evaluating it for our family at the time. Will potentially be a long time before I can see again. 4. Can return within 30 days, but have not seen resale value yet. Where would I look to learn about this? I do not trust that 30 days would be long enough for us to know. When we used MBTP (see original post) it was several months before I worked stuff out. 5. I don't think Shiller could be considered a fad, and it's principles are heavily Montessori based which are definitely not new. 6. Not applicable in this situation. I'm also working on a hunch. 7. See answer to 3. There's a fun aspect to it with songs, not so many manipulatives I'd be overwhelmed but enough to keep things interesting. I could tell from when I saw it that we'd do it in 20-25 min a day or less which is my goal time amount. I also liked that I'd no longer be printing and evaluating each day's lesson to see which bits to use or cut. Of course, I'd still plan on a weekly or bi-weekly basis if there were lessons we needed to add to or could skip, but I'd be cutting my prep time down considerably. That's a big plus for mom, but I'm not sure what that means for the kids. 8. I did get the sense it was and there are reports on this board of good customer support. So, looking back on this list I feel like I've moved from nervous/unsure to feeling positive but still needing a little more research. Thanks again.

Several of you mentioned that I need to see it. I believe you all there. I did see Shiller briefly at the SEA Homeschoolers convention in Virginia last April, but I wasn't sure at the time because I hadn't yet thought more deeply about Math, though I did have an initially positive feeling about it but I had to rush on to get to a session. Then I didn't buy it because I wanted to read reviews and not have it be an impulse buy, and I didn't realize how good the convention pricing was, it was my first time at any convention. I actually live in the Philly metro area though, and I timed a family trip to Colonial Williamsburg to coincide with the convention. I have asked around to see if any of my Philly people use Shiller but so far no one has said yes. We don't have a homeschool bookstore here and the next conference I can get to will likely be next year in April. So, that's that. Now my mom lives in a part of North Carolina where there is a homeschool bookstore and I'll be visiting her in December so maybe I can do that.

I have 2 daughters, the older is 2nd grade and the younger is Kindergarten. We've always been home schoolers. I'd like advice from others about knowing when to take the plunge with expensive curriculum. I feel worried about spending money on something when we don't have much but I need to balance that with my concern that a more expensive well developed program may be better for my kids. When my oldest was in K, I spent (what I felt) was a huge amount of money on the Moving Beyond the Page K set and my daughter liked it and we did well for about three months. After that things went way downhill (for lots of reason) and I abandoned it. I wanted to keep the literature but we'd used a lot of the manual, tearing out the worksheet pages, so I couldn't really sell it. After this we took a Charlotte Mason route and I didn't buy any more pre-packaged curriculum, just books as we needed them and one-off curricula like BFSU or Getty-Dubay. Now, two years on, for various reasons, I've been considering purchasing Shiller Math. It's expensive, in my opinion, but I really think it would work well for both of my kids, so I'd get more value there. I've been handling math so far with a combination of worksheets from MEP, reading Life of Fred, and little activities I've picked up on Pinterest for time, money, math fact games, etc. I've read a bunch of stuff that leads me to think my kids need a more orderly plan, but I'm not thrilled about just going whole hog into MEP. I understand how the lessons are set up, I'm in the yahoo group, I'm comfortable doing half the exercises, etc. But I've been going the piecemeal route because both I and my kids find it soooooo repetitive. I really think we need something slightly more hands on, something slightly less repetitive, and something that lends itself better to shorter lessons. Also, the MEP/piecemeal route has been time intensive for me, printing things, setting up games and activities, researching stuff, etc. So, considering a program like Shiller is also meant to free me up to spend more time on other subjects. I was also considering going the route of books like Frank Hall or Ray's Arithmetic or Strayer-Upton but I think that would go well for my older daughter who is really more bookish than my younger daughter who is more movement and hands on oriented. Anyway, my question really isn't about what Math to use. It's about how you know when it's worth it to plunk down a big chunk of change for a program. What criteria do you use to weigh the pros and cons of the purchase? We are aren't a no-budget family, I know some families make do with free resources because they absolutely have to. We are more of a low-budget family, where it's prudent to keep costs down, but what budget I have tends to be used for memberships to museums and arboretums and other experience type things. It's just that I want to stop spinning my wheels on math, but I don't want to make another mistake like MBTP was for us. Thanks for your help.

I agree with all the other posts that say not to worry about spelling. His writing is great too. When my kids were that age I just chose a lot of activities from the Peggy Kaye books (Games for Reading, Games for Math, etc.) and it was really our only pre-k program. One idea in the Reading book was to make a topical poster, we did ours once a month, with words from a topic the kid likes, decorate it and hang it up. My kids chose Minecraft, Ancient Rome, nature study words, seasonal stuff, words from Daniel Tiger, etc. It was activity they both liked, changing the monthly word poster. And then I did nothing with them. Hung them in their rooms. They just looked at them whenever they wanted too. Then I would see words like solstice, diamond (pick ax), or trolley show up in their stories and knew they were just getting it. The games in Peggy Kaye's books lead really well into a Bravewriter direction for language arts if that appeals to you.

Does AHG have a program for girls who live too far away from the troop? (Sort of like the Juliette in GS.) We've had two unsatisfactory years in GS but the two closest AHG groups are close to 35 miles away.

Did you look at the physics thread of BFSU vols 1 and 2 for organizing your path. You can get 5$ pdf downloads of both volumes and just do the C thread stuff.

I think that's a cool idea. Alton Brown actually published a couple of cookbooks based on the show with lengthy sections on the science behind it. You could see if your library has those. Then you could take a topic and have her do further research from whatever your library has. For example, I have one of his books, "I'm just here for the food." I just randomly flipped it open to chapter 9 about eggs. You'd have her read the chapter, lookup the scientific terms (such as "thermal," "protein," and "BTU"), devise and carry out an experiment related to something he mentions (something simple like cooking old and young eggs in double boilers) and then note booking her conclusions. Additionally, try a recipe every other week (home ec can = food science) and photograph the results to add to the notebook. Then go to the library and look up books on egg production, salmonella, measuring eggs, whatever. You could spread it out like doing a chapter every three or four weeks to leave yourself time for the enrichment activities.

I have a 7 year old daughter and a 5 year old daughter.They are 23 months apart. These are my only kids. Last year, for older daughter's first grade I did Ambleside Online year one. It went ok, we had the usual hiccups for a child learning to narrate, and we had some getting used to the readings, but overall it went well and I planned to continue with year two for second grade. I'd bought Build Your Library year one and History Odyssey Ancients level one before I found Ambleside, and didn't end up using either because last summer we were moving and I had trouble finding books and my daughter had a really hard time with all the history pocket writing used by HO. So, I began reading some of the AO readings while I figured it out (it was our first year homeschooling) and she really liked all those weird old books, and so did I so we just stuck with it. If you are familiar with AO, we did not do Trial & Triumph, Parables of Nature, or Bible, because we're secular. In fact, I substituted the Among the ... People books, mythology for Bible, and nothing for Trial and Triumph. Besides nature studies we continued BFSU, which I'd started with older daughter when she was in her kindergarten year. Anyway, now I have a younger daughter, who has been asking to do school like her sister, but has very different interests. She's way more kinesthetic and a lot more interested in arts and crafts. All last year I was thinking she would probably not have enjoyed AO the way my older daughter did. So, I began to research what might be good for her. I went back and looked at BYL 1 and History Odyssey and noted that younger daughter already has significantly better writing ability than older daughter did when she was a year older. So, I began considering that for when younger daughter turned 6. I honestly didn't think she'd be interested in school at 5 because up until recently she didn't want to hang out for casual family readalouds and ran the other when I suggested story time. Additionally, older daughter has recently expressed a desire to keep doing more Ancients. She's long been interested in Egypt but lately has really gotten into Greece and Rome as well. So, now, I'm considering switching to BYL year one and doing both together. It would allow older daughter to get more ancients and allow younger daughter to do some school in a more hands on way than AO. But I'm nervous to put them together. I don't really know how to manage it. Can any of you familiar with either program see any potential problems with doing it this way? Thanks.

Has anyone used this "Spanish For You" curriculum? It popped up in my Facebook feed and it seems interesting to me. http://www.spanish-for-you.net/shop-home-use.html Pros? Cons? Good for the money? I like that lessons are audio files for good pronunciation. I am particularly interested in whether this got your kids to speak more. I will read and do it with her rather than leaving her to do it on her own because it says grades 3-8 but my daughter is beginning 2nd. However, my husband is from Honduras and he and other family members speak some Spanish with her so we have a family culture of Spanish. I actually wish they would speak more with her but despite my best efforts they continue to switch to English around her. It's been left to me, the non-fluent parent to direct her Spanish growth. Over K and 1st we did a combination of Muzzy, SSS, folksongs from De Colores, bilingual poetry, and both bilingual and Spanish only stories and picture books. She knows a lot but she has trouble speaking it. I'm looking for a program that will require her to respond orally. With SSS she just whipped through the workbook and not answer out loud. I'd ideally like to make progress with this hurdle before we move on to an upper elementary program.