We’re talking about getting Dad (or Mom, if that’s how your family works!) more involved in homeschooling. I’d love your advice and opinions.
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We’re talking about getting Dad (or Mom, if that’s how your family works!) more involved in homeschooling. I’d love your advice and opinions.
{ 2 comments }
The wife was sick. No words strike greater terror into the father of four and a half than ‘sick’ and ‘wife’, especially such a father whose wife is a homeschooling, stay at home mom.
Oh, sure, everything starts out ok. I mean, how hard is four bowls of cereal (replete with banana shavings and banana chunks, since I can’t chop evenly) really? The baby eats like a champ, and I’m not foolish enough to think that this isn’t because of the novelty of Daddy doing the feeding.
Yes, my wife spoils me rotten. No, I’m not ashamed of myself. Moving on…
This is day two, and I decide that I need to get the kids out of the house. Nothing major, nothing I haven’t done before. However, today is library day.
Foolish me. I’m prepared for this. This will be cake. After all, look how well breakfast went!
We get the van loaded, the children all nestled in every conceivable safety precaution against danger short of bubble wrap. There’s some diabolical numerology involved in a three year old girl, a five point restraint, and two bowls of sugar frosted O’s; I’m sure it foretells the coming judgement somehow, but at any rate, it makes for a lot of patience being blown early. It’s ok, though, no problem.
Many Veggie Tales Silly Songs later (as much for the kids as me, I’ll own up), we go through The Pledge.
“OK, kids, we’re going to be on our best behavior in here, right?”
The children allow that they will indeed behave well.
“We’re going to use our quiet voices, ok?”
The children consent to collective quiet.
“We’ll do what Daddy says without argument, or we’ll go home, is that clear?”
The children confess to the clarity seen in my previous statement, solemn as parsons, calm as cucumbers.
I unstrap them, and lead them inside our community library. I’ve been here before. I have a list of books that I need to collect, but I’m a grown man. I served my time in the 80′s southern Pub Ed system and their insistence upon Messr. Dewey’s method; how hard can it be?
As it turns out, it can be impossible. The card catalog of my childhood is replaced by a PC, a golf pencil, and a hint of paper. The latter objects are for noting your inability to find anything in the most circuitous, infuriating, labyrinthine web application devised. When Hell upgrades their methods of moving between the inner and outer circles, the modern Dante will surely be using our library’s search engine to find his way.
I can’t find any of the books my ailing lady wife has listed, but again, I am secure in the inherent order of the building; I’ll simply make my way through the stacks and find what I’m looking for. I’m sure this is what Moses was thinking, Jews arrayed behind him, on day one of that forty year hike through the desert.
Apparently children’s books need to be split into not one, not two, but three sections, and it is of tantamount importance that they be classified in different methods in each section. Dewey makes an appearance in one of them, however my subject (China) is in great demand, as I can find every nation on earth (including, heaven help me, Uzbekistan) in the Geography section but it. I truly cannot find China with both hands and search engine, and the baby is squirming mightily.
I would ask a librarian, but they’re busy, as it turns out, readying themselves for Story Time. “Ah”, says I to myself, slyly, “I shall drop the kids in story time and try again.” This I attempt.
My daughter, however, has decided that the young mother’s baby to our right is the most interesting plaything, and is reaching for him despite said mother’s discomfort. I gently pull my daughter to my left side. Or try.
She’s not having any of it, and her insistence on the matter is getting progressively louder. I pull her away from the group and whisper in her ear that she is to sit on my left. Apparently, this is three year old girl for “arm and detonate”, because she goes off like Fat Boy over Hiroshima.
The experiment is over. I pull my children out, the smell of failure oozing from my pores. I am a terrible parent.
Why the digression, you ask? What has this to do with marrying a blogger?
The next day, at work, the first person I see says to me, “Hi Jess. How was the library?”
“Uhh, ok, I suppose.” I’m wondering, was this person there? Do I have a golf pencil still stuck behind my ear?
A little later, from someone else : “How’d you make out at the library?”
Is my name Truman? Is my poor performance the butt of company gossip? “OK, I guess…”
Later, outside our building, I run across a friend whom I haven’t seen in almost a year. “Jessssss!” he calls out, “How’d things go at the library?”
Just before I begin to drool, it finally hits me. Facebook.
Random people know about my life because my life is a part of my wife’s life, and my wife’s life is part of the collective knowledge which is the Internet, or as I am more and more coming to think of it, Them.
You people know more about me than does my pastor, my co-workers (except those co-workers following my wife), and in some ways, my children. (Although sooner or later, their reading skills will engulf an RSS feed aggregator, so this will balance out.)
I am not a public person. I have tried using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, Google+, Instant Messaging, IRC, Offline Mail, and every other electronic social interaction since before most of you knew the difference between a web page and a wombat, and you can verify that by the string of inactive accounts on servers across the face of the planet. I’ve tried, and found I can’t stand them.
I love people, but I can’t stand graffiti, and that’s pretty much what social interaction over the Internet becomes, vehicles like blogs barely excluded. If you have any experience with CB Radio over the last few decades, you’ll know exactly what I mean; the easier it is to talk over a given channel, the less intelligent the conversation on that channel becomes. This is why ham radio enthusiasts exist; you can only talk to them if you took a test and earned a license. My attempts at legislating an Internet license continue….
On the other end, I don’t have much to say, really. Or at least, I have a lot to say very, very infrequently, as evidenced by the above.
So it is fascinating to see the woman I married, who started out being even quieter, less outgoing than I, become the central hub of a huge network of total strangers who know about how I had planned to take the kids out to the library.
She is kind, my wife. I am, in many respects, an absolutely terrible human being, rife with issues and ailments that would be, to most people surfing the wave of public interest, comedy gold. Yet she has never taken advantage of this, and has always portrayed me as a good husband, father, and provider. You people believing this image is as intimidating as it gets, and I try to live up to this. It only now occurs to me that she knows this, and therefore…
No, too paranoid. Never mind.
At any rate, while I read her blog religiously (because A. Google Reader doesn’t require me to talk to people, B. I enjoy her blog, and C. What kind of idiot do you take me for?), I should really follow her on Facebook more closely, even if that does mean I have to filter through the mental quagmire of all the people I’ve friended (read as family) in order to do it. It would be easier on my paranoid reflex.
And so you know, the library didn’t go so well.
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Teaching kids at home means being able to follow the interests of your children and really dig in to the things that mean the most to your family. Ideally, the end result of all that focused learning is something worth sharing with the whole world. The folks at Crowe’s Nest Media are a homeschooling family whose passion for nature study has led them to produce some extremely high-quality educational materials for Christians and homeschoolers, one of which is Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly.
Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly is a DVD packed full of information about the Monarch butterfly, covering everything from stages of life, migration, and how to find them, raise them, and help scientists track them. An accompanying study guide for homeschoolers will be released in the spring of this year, and I’ve got a code so you can get it for free, so be sure to keep reading for a special offer!
One of my kids’ favorite things to do is catch caterpillars and watch them transform into butterflies. We’ve done it so many times, I really thought we knew a lot about the Monarch butterfly. I guess you can chalk that up to a lack of proper research, because there was a ton of stuff on this DVD that I didn’t know about Monarch butterflies.
Crowe’s Nest Media has announced that Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly is a semi-finalist in the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, and it is a well-earned honor. The video is beautifully done, and I won’t be surprised when it wins.
There are several bonus features on the DVD, including how to order tags for your own Monarch adventures, bloopers (these kids are so cute!), and a wonderful testimony from Dr. Jules Poirier, a design engineer with an impressive career in aeronautics and an expert Monarch butterflies. Most importantly, he is an unabashed lover of Christ, and the Crowes are too!
This video affirms the work of God’s hand in nature as it teaches about the amazing Monarch butterfly. Though many scientists like to try, we can never separate God from the world He created. It is His, and if we don’t acknowledge that, we miss some profound truths in our studies. Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly furthers the aim of our own homeschool to glorify God in everything we learn, and I’m really grateful for this resource.
Buy: You can order your own copy of Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly from Crowe’s Nest Media for $19.95. If you order before February 3, 2012, using the code GetAlongHome, you’ll get $1 off your purchase, plus a FREE download of the Monarch study guide, scheduled to be released this spring (ARV $8.95).
Win: Crowe’s Nest Media would like to send one Get Along Home reader a free copy of Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly.
How to enter: Visit the Crowe’s Nest Media web store, and leave a comment telling me you did. It’s that easy!
Extra entries: For extra chances to win, you may do any or all of the following. Leave one comment here to let me know about each extra entry you complete.
Spell Outloud
The Curriculum Choice
Finding Joy
Mama’s Learning Corner
The Traveling Praters
Handbook of Nature Study
Details: This giveaway is open to anyone in the US. This giveaway will be open until noon, January 30, 2012. The winner will be chosen by And the Winner Is… WordPress plugin. The winner will have 48 hours to respond to my email. If there is no response after 48 hours, I’ll have to choose another winner. Please use a valid email address in your comments so that I can contact you if you win! Please use one email address per entrant, per household, per IP address. If you cheat, I will most likely catch you, then spank you thoroughly and send you to bed. The giveaway provider (not Get Along Home) will be responsible for prize fulfillment. Good luck!
Disclosure: I received a copy of Your Backyard: The Life & Journey of the Amazing Monarch Butterfly to facilitate this review. I will also receive 10% of any sales made using the coupon code provided. I’m as objective as possible, but here’s your mom blogger grain of salt in case any of that makes you feel queasy.
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This week, I’m over here at High Country Parent giving newbie homeschoolers my half-baked advice: How Do I Get Started With Homeschooling? You should probably go over there and leave your own thoughts, so they don’t get completely lost listening to me.
Also, in case you missed it, I had a post at AboutOne.com‘s blog, In a Nutshell, about my first heart-stopping adventures in the grocery store with cash only.
Happy weekend, my friends!
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I wanted to write something new today, but math ran long. And then spelling happened. And then chores took forever. So I’m just gonna give you one I wrote for my Friday High Country Parent column recently. I thought it was a fun one. Enjoy!
OK, so not all homeschoolers have a dozen children. I’ve met many, many homeschoolers with just one or two kids. In fact, I’ve seen parents with only one practically apologize for not having more, like they’re letting down the team or something. (We’re not judging you, honest.)
For the most part, when I meet with homeschooling families, I find myself feeling like our family is on the small side, even with four small kids running around so quickly you’d swear there were at least six of them. And I have been known to look on our small (but growing!) brood as somewhat unimpressive beside the families of six children or more.
But why on Earth do homeschoolers end up with so many children? I can think of lots of possible reasons. Some of them apply to large families that don’t homeschool, I’m sure:
No Television. You know all those crazy homeschoolers think television is from the devil, don’t you? Well, there’s not much else to do after the sun goes down and the kids are in bed, so we make more kids. “You really ought to get cable.” is a line I hear pretty often when I’m out and about with my little ones, so I’ve concluded that television must be a very effective form of birth control. By the way, folks, if you think television is more fun, you’re not doing it right. ![]()
We like kids. Lots of people love kids. Not surprisingly, many of them become teachers. The rest of us, fully aware that no sane person would pay us to teach their children, grow our own. Even moms who don’t start out with a love of teaching (like yours truly) learn to appreciate kids in ways that education-outsourcing parents might not. We have to. They’re. Always. There. You learn to like kids, you decide to have more kids. Makes sense, right? Personally, I think everybody should make an effort to learn to like kids. It’s good for the soul.
The Snowball Effect. When you have one or two munchkins lighting up your life all day, a couple more seems like the next logical step. They grow so fast, after all! We want it to last! Before you know it, you’re up to your eyeballs in little people. Once you’ve got a few, why on earth not have a few more? There’s a point where it seems silly to think you couldn’t handle one more. I mean, you’re already handling five, right? Now you decide to stop?
Homeschooling is a less expensive lifestyle. I’ve had lots of people tell me they’d homeschool if they could only afford to, but I think it all depends on the kind of lifestyle you live. Lots of homeschooling families live very frugally, supporting families of far more than the average 2.1 on (typically) a single income. They wouldn’t be able to do so if they weren’t at home to do the gardening, hanging laundry to dry, upcycling, sewing, cooking from scratch, etc. Less gas is used when you stay home. There are fewer temptations to spend money when you’re not out all day. Add up all the little costs of an out-and-about lifestyle, and you can see how homeschooling not only pays for itself, but encourages family growth by providing for more people quite abundantly.
Practice makes perfect. I think a tweet I sent out this summer just about sums it up:
We need another baby soon. I’ve ruined the first four.
How about you, big family moms? Why do you have so many kids? Are you NUTS?
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I am not a girly-girl. My husband, however, happens to like girls, so I humor him by wearing my hair long—really longer than is practical for a housewife with a lot of messy jobs and small children pulling it all the time.
Since I lack the patience to spend very much time fiddling with my hair, it’s a ponytail or nothing if I want my hair out of the way. I don’t even have the patience to make a nice braid. But I do like pretty things, regardless of my inability to figure out how to use them, so I have a bag full of clips and sticks and things for my hair that I’ve collected over the years, hoping to someday get it right.
Enter the Lilla Rose flexi-clip:
That took less than ten seconds to do. Try not to mind the uneven hair color or the fact that it’s just a little bit crooked. Just focus on the fact that I finally have a hair clip that goes in my hair, stays in my hair, and looks pretty, even after just 10 seconds of actual work. This hair clip was built for impatient women! Hooray! Imagine how pretty it could be if I spent thirty whole seconds on it!
I received the Scrollwork Stoneset in Wood flexi-clip in medium. The flexi-clip has a unique one-piece design that makes it easy to use, and hard to lose—which is important when you lose things as often as I do. Sizing can be tricky, but if you find you’ve ordered the wrong thing, Lilla Rose will let you exchange it for the right size, so ordering is risk-free. Add to that the fact that they’re both durable and inexpensive, and you can see why I’m crazy about this clip.
There are sizing and styling videos to help the clueless (that would be me) figure out how to order and use the clips. I particularly like the drop bun style, along with whatever that is that I’ve got on my head in the picture. I don’t think there’s a video for that, but it’s super easy to accomplish, or I wouldn’t be doing it.
Win: Of course, I wouldn’t be showing you my own clip if I didn’t want you to have one, too! That would be mean. Gail Harris (aka The Imperfect Housewife), the Lilla Rose consultant who sent me my flexi-clip, would like to send one of you a clip of your own, valued at up to $15.
Buy one!: If you don’t have the patience to wait and see if you won, you can buy Lilla Rose flexi-clips online. I’m sure I’ll be buying more in the near future. I LOVE this clip!
How to enter: Go to the Lilla Rose website and check out the line of flexi-clips available. Then come back here and tell me which clip you’d like to have. Don’t worry. You can change your mind later.
Extra entries: For extra chances to win, you may do any or all of the following. Leave one comment for each extra entry, please:
Details: This giveaway is open to anyone in the US. This giveaway will be open until midnight, January 20, 2012. The winner will be chosen by And the Winner Is… WordPress plugin. The winner will have 72 hours to respond to my email. If there is no response after 72 hours, I’ll have to choose another winner. Please use a valid email address in your comments so that I can contact you if you win! Please use one email address per entrant, per household, per IP address. If you cheat, I will most likely catch you, then spank you thoroughly and send you to bed. The giveaway provider (not Get Along Home) will be responsible for prize fulfillment. Good luck!
Disclosure: I received a flexi-clip from Lilla Rose to facilitate this review. I wasn’t otherwise compensated for this post. I tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, insofar as I can ascertain what the truth is. Read my disclosure here.
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Don’t worry. I’m not going to make every single post about giveaways this week. There’s some other stuff coming! Read this, whether you like giveaways or not. But who doesn’t like giveaways, right?
Long-time readers will already know that I absolutely love the Tapestry of Grace curriculum. We’re not using it right now, but we stretched the Year 1 curriculum out through my oldest son’s first two official school years. Right now, we’re waiting for the co-op we want to join to catch up to where we left off so we can join Year 2 with them (hopefully). Also, I wanted to go off the beaten path this year to get a feel for what we might be missing if we tried other things.
It’s been fun, but I’m ready to get back to Tapestry soon, and you can help me! (You would like to help me, right?) We’re not exactly wealthy around here, and all this education costs money. Lampstand Press is giving away a full year of ToG Digital Edition, and we can both have one, if we’re lucky.
The prize is a free digital edition year-plan for whatever year you’d like, along with all the DE supplements (MapAids, PopQuiz, and Lapbook template, plus one level of Evaluations). They’re also including a $20 gift certificate to use for books from Lampstand Press! And hey, if you’re insane and don’t particularly want this prize, you can still enter. I’d be happy to help you find a homeschooling family in need so you can give them the blessing!
How to enter: Just sign up for a free account and catalog, then “buy” a free Love ToG Ticket. You don’t have to give them any information beyond your name and mailing address. Then put my name and email address in the comments section of your Love TOG “order” when you check out. I’m Cindy Dyer at dmajik at gmail dot com. If you don’t enter my name as your sponsor, I can’t win with you, though you’ll still be entered to win for yourself.
Thank you so much for helping me (and yourself!) out. Good luck!
Disclosure: I’m a ToG affiliate, so if you buy from them after clicking my link, I’ll get a percentage of your sale, at no extra cost to you. I don’t earn anything just from the click, nor will I receive any compensation for getting you to enter this giveaway. Unless we win, of course!
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And I really want to go! Why? Well, because everybody should want to drive 6 hours from home at 31 weeks gestation to hang out with a group of Godly women who also just happen to blog and homeschool. Where else am I gonna learn how to spin that many plates? (Not that I don’t already have some small idea how to do that, but what fun!)
Anyhow, Amy, at Raising Arrows is giving away a ticket, and I’m just a few hours under the deadline in entering with this post. I figure if God wants me to go, he’ll get me there. If not…oh, well. I’m not entirely sure my midwife will allow travel right then, anyway. I don’t think it will be a problem, but you never know.
If you hurry, you can enter, too! Go!
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The controversy over Lego’s new line of girly building sets has led Unplug Your Family to coin a new word: genderphobia, to describe our culture’s irrational fear of calling the sexes what they are. Morgan Freeberg, at the blog that nobody (but me) reads, is also trying desperately to grasp what it is that has feminists foaming at the mouth about these blocks. Both bloggers agree that the new blocks fall short of their own standards for toys, but still wonder, why the uproar? They’re just blocks, right?
Alas, when feminists get their panties in a wad (or are they gender-neutral boxers?), there is no such thing as “just a block”. Prompted by the pinkness of my daughter’s birthday haul last year, I wrote a blog post about my own thoughts on raising my girl to be a girl. It’s hard, and not because I don’t know what a good thing femininity is:
Why is that I can’t get over feeling like I shouldn’t suggest that other women, even my own daughter, would be equally happy in this role? No matter how sure I am that there is nothing more rewarding that a woman can do than give her best years to being just a mommy, I still feel the sting of knowing that this role isn’t considered important enough for an intelligent woman to devote herself to. Even worse, I am keenly aware that my being here, doing what I do, is considered by some to be “letting down the team”. And I find myself playing along with the presumption that other things are more fulfilling, and that it would be more efficient to outsource my children’s upbringing so that I can “contribute to society”.
The problem for me is that I was raised in a genderphobic world, and now I and every other traditional housewife have to overcome the false shame of being nothing more than women at home. (And really, we are so much more than our culture knows.)
Feminists would have us dispose of womanhood in favor of an androgynous adulthood where men and women can all do exactly the same jobs at exactly the same level of competence. Of course, this interchangeability is a lie. Men and women are built to be men and women, no matter how much they wish to be something else. Even effeminate men are still men, though they try to caricature femininity in their own dress and mannerisms. All they can ever be is sad, garish copies of the real thing.
But why are feminists so angry about a marketing decision based on the fact that there is such a thing as (gasp!) femininity? After all, pink is supposed to be powerful, right? I think Morgan has a good grasp on the beginnings of the answer:
And of course, confining their energies to those things leaves a gaping hole where family and community used to be. At first glance, this hole seems like an accidental side effect of (so-called) equality, but I believe it is by design–though not necessarily human design. The quest to do away with femininity (in the West, at least) is, ultimately, a quest for power. You can’t control people who exist for the sake of each other. Take manhood and womanhood away, and there is no foundation for family, the social unit that self-government is built upon.
If you want to strike at the roots of freedom you have to make families (and, by extension, communities) resentful of each other and negligent of their duties toward each other so that government can step in and fill the void. Feminism accomplishes this masterfully by demanding that each women strike out for her own “fulfillment”. Our government has set up schools to accommodate the separation from their families that women have demanded, and in just a few generations, those schools have succeeded in making us ignorant of the kind of language required to even talk about the problem, which is why we’re all floundering around with questions about pink blocks and toy guns in the first place.
We’ve been trained by years of pretense in schools, media, and law to shrink from mentioning male and female differences, not because they don’t exist, or because it is unfair (what could be more fair than treating people as what they are?), but because we are in rebellion. God’s natural order relies on complementary masculinity and femininity.
Do away with them both, and you get to make the world over in your own image.
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Looky here:
That’s my little girl, in a one-of-a-kind dress that I didn’t have to sew! It’s not the best picture in the world, I know, but after several attempts to get her to smile and hold still, it’s the best I could get. I’m not much of a children’s photographer, I’m afraid. Isn’t the dress pretty, though? I love the crisp, bright colors of the fabric and the cute little chickadee detail, though the t-shirt we put under it (because it is January) kinda spoils the effect.
Here’s a picture of the same style dress in a different fabric, and without a difficult 3 year-old sulking inside it:
Just Ducky Originals is located just a couple of hours from my hometown, in Asheville, NC, and it’s the kind of business I love to learn about. Not only do they create jobs for local seamstresses, but through their home shows, moms (and dads, I suppose!) earn cash commissions and free clothing, while others can earn discounts by hosting parties.
With so many people out of work, I’ve been looking for ways to bolster the local economy. Buying clothing from Just Ducky Originals is great way to support American workers, from seamstresses to consultants, and add unique style to your child’s wardrobe at the same time.
The options for customizing and monogramming are so extensive you could (and I did) spend hours just deciding on the design of your clothing. I had a lot of fun choosing what I wanted, and ordering was very easy. My dress from Just Ducky was here only a week after I ordered it, perfectly sewn and adorable. I can’t wait until spring so my little girl can wear it in the sunshine!
My only complaint is that this material is going to require some ironing, which I hate doing. My laziness is not Just Ducky’s fault, though, now is it?
Just Ducky Originals would like to offer Get Along Home readers a special discount. If you order online from Just Ducky’s Spring 2012 line, which just launched this week, use the code S12B13 during checkout to get FREE shipping!
Disclosure: Just Ducky Originals sent me the dress pictured above to facilitate this review. I wasn’t otherwise compensated for this post. Here’s the usual grain of salt.
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