We did the last burst of cleanup (it turns out two hours of intense housework burns a lot of calories!) before the inspection.

If I had my druthers, I'd be writing and working from home from a nice apartment in Montréal. Lyra would be imbibing French and English with her every breath. If my wife had her druthers, we'd be in a nice Japanese village somewhere near Kyoto. She absolutely adores Japan and has been planning the move since before I married her. We can agree on the Bay Area (San Francisco/San Jose/East Bay), both because it's "the City" to us growing up, and because of our religious/family/cultural ties to the area, and because the job I lost was in tech - tech people just kind of gravitate there.

What is your current favorite podcast, blog, or person you follow? Oddly enough, my own. Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor is a History of Rome style history podcast starting in 1619 and coming to the present, with hints and tips along the way for making labor history of your own. What was your favorite book last year- fiction and/or non-fiction? I really enjoyed "The Secret Lives of Shellwomen" by Geneviève Bluoin. It's a short story, very strange, and very French somehow. That's what came to mind first, but I must have read dozens of books last year - in fact, still reading some of them, "finishing what I read" is one of the habits I'm adopting. Favorite purchase last year We got Lyra her own little model kitchen for Hanukkah, and that has been a Godsend. Best life hack Do one thing at a time. You don't have time to do everything at once, you barely have time to do one thing at a time. Biggest regret I enrolled in the local karate club at 12. My father had to get a special exemption for me, because Sensei Goss didn't at that time train anyone younger than 14. I quit out of teenage pique at 17. I'm 38. I still don't have my black belt. But I'm going back. What did you do to make your life easier this year? I now have a calendar and cross things out on it when I finish them. I also have implemented doing one new habit at a time, and only seriously starting a new habit when the current one is pretty well set. High point of last year Watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the drive-in with my wife, my childhood best friend, and my daughter for my birthday. Either that, or seeing the union start to take on momentum at work.

Can your friend get a hold of some of the standard textbooks? (and before I forget again: https://www.lirecestpartir.fr/)

Bonjour, all. My little Lyra remains just under two years old, and I've gotten some good advice (including here in the forums) to look into Montessori preschool/Montessori kindergarten activities. The local Montessori school has a waiting list such that Lyra might be getting her driver's license before she gets in, so I wanted to see about DIYing it and homeschooling Montessori-style. I've done some looking into on Google and YouTube, and Montessori education seems to be one of those subjects where everyone has an opinion and you'd have to already know enough about the subject to tell who's worth learning the subject from. So I wanted to come back to you guys - where would I get started learning about Montessori education, what it's about, and whether or not it would be a good fit for our family, or whether we'd need to entrust Lyra to professional teachers?

Consommes perhaps?

This seems similar to what I write, actually.

I just finished a reread of Jennifer Reese's hilarious Make the Bread, Buy the Butter and I've decided tonight that I'm going to put in the effort to finish the books I start on Kindle and try not to read too many at one time. I'm starting with Top 10 Chinese Tang Poems You Must Know! by Eric Shie, which does not have any Du Fu in it but does have other Tang poets whose names I know, so I'm still looking forward to it. (it's a bit like having an introduction to English Romantic poetry that inexplicably has no Byron, but does have Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and Burns)

Merci à tous for all the great responses. Honestly, it's a help just hearing from you all that I don't need to stress as much as I do. My wife and I talk to her a lot and toss her around and play with her, and she's just figured out drawing (and frankly, I like her spiky, stylized lines - they just radiate HEY LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!!!) and catch. Today, when I came in, she said 'bonjour' to me. It came out closer to 'buhjoo' but she's making an effort. Thanks again.

Bonjour à tous. This is mainly a vent. My little girl will be turning 2 in June. Before she was born, we got Slow and Steady: Get Me Ready (as recommended in past editions of WTM). During paternity leave, I took joy in "sciencing" ma petite Pousse with a mix of activities around the assigned week. When I went back to work, it fell off like a stone, to my wife's regret. I lost my job in August but I haven't been able to get back on the "sciencing" horse, and now it doesn't seem to match up at all - for whatever reason, she hasn't got past Mama and Papa yet (though she understands more words than that, in both languages) so all of the call-and-response or "what's this?" activities are out. She does her own thing quite a bit, so extended "put all the X in this container" stuff won't quite work. And these are the activities Slow and Steady recommends for children her age. Even in those halcyon days, it was frustrating because a lot of the supplies Oberlander et al. expected to just be lying around the house (like bobbins)...aren't lying around our house, and we often don't have substitutes, so I had to skip anything involving equipment. But I do want to get back to "sciencing" la Pousse. I'm just not sure where to pick up again, or how to proceed. Any veteran homeschoolers out there?

Ah, I had thought Amazon.fr was set up like Amazon.ca and similarly barred from ordering. I'll take a closer look at their textbook offerings. Should have realized too that Usborne would have French translations (being a British company). I'm bookmarking Bayard Jeunesse for when she's ready.

I'd like to know your recommendations for curricula for grammar, spelling, mathematics, science, history spines, logic...in French. Basically, anything but second-language instruction. She's only six weeks old yet (photo included because I am one of Those Papas) so I have some time, but I've looked over Amazon offerings and they're mighty slim, especially for math and science. My wife and I are bilingual but our little Sprout reacts quicker to the sound of French than English or Hebrew, and my wife has acknowledged that French is functionally the Sprout's mother tongue, so I would like to teach some subjects in her mother tongue as well as in English.

Kind of depends on who you are and where you come from. There's folks who'd list Boyz n' the Hood and Enter the Dragon as top-ten classics, and others who would insist on Shane and Forrest Gump, because of the influence those films and their values have had on their own communities. My own list, for my own daughter, would include Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Friendly Persuasion, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but I suspect that however beloved they are to you, you wouldn't include them in the top ten necessarily. 😛 So here's my best guess, for an American: 1) The Wizard of Oz 2) Casablanca 3) To Kill a Mockingbird 4) Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope 5) Citizen Kane 6) Frankenstein (or Dracula, or The Wolf-Man, or The Mummy - Universal horror as a whole) 7) When Harry Met Sally 😎Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 9) 2001: A Space Odyssey 10) The Simpsons Movie (here standing in for The Simpsons as a whole, as the third-largest contributors to the English language after Shakespeare and Roddenberry)

While we're a bit ahead of ourselves, as our dear little Sprout isn't even born yet, my wife and I were discussing math curricula. I talked about Singapore Math as a default based on what I've read (including WTM, obviously), and she discussed what she thought was Montessori approach. It turned out Montessori math is quite different, but she insists she's seen/heard of it somewhere (paraphrased): "Basically, we start with Euclid's Elements and move forward through time (or back, if need be) from there, with Al-Khwarizmi's algebra and Cardano's probability and later on to more complex stuff like non-Euclidean math and GEB." So it's like an Elements>historical approach. Have any of you heard of a math curriculum like this?

My wife and I are in the trying-to-conceive phase of having children, so this may be just me being baby-crazy and overthinking things, but here goes... We are both native Anglophones, but for different reasons have taught ourselves French - to a level that we regularly use French at home. We intend to raise our children speaking French, and my wife supports a mLaH approach. While we continue living in California, I feel confident that our children will also learn fluent English from the environment (especially if we teach it as a formal subject). So far, so good. My wife is Jewish, and teaching herself Modern Hebrew - another language she wants our children to learn [beyond the Hebrew school standard for b'nei mitzvot that ends up forgotten by college]. I've been hacking at it and can recognize a few phrases and the aleph bet. We are intending to make aliyah and, at some point in the next few years, and move to Israel. We would be in Israel long enough for my wife to study for her rabbinical degree, if not longer. Our family would be surrounded by a rich and dizzying language environment (including English and French), but one dominated by Hebrew. And if we only speak French at home, I would seriously start to worry about our children's ability to speak English to their grandparents. My question for multilingual families is - how have you handled the move to a completely different language environment? Have your dcs atrophied in one or more of their languages? Is it an overblown fear? How have you worked to save-guard the newly-minted "minority" language(s)?