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A Warning for All Moms Out There
By the time you have your third child, it’s generally understood that you have a pretty decent handle on what to expect. (Did I hear someone laugh out there?) I know that each child presents his or her own challenges. You’ll always learn new things with each kid, but when my youngest was an infant, I learned something that completely shocked me and the lesson continues to resonate with me. Yesterday, a good friend Organized SAHM, posted a picture on her Facebook page of baby toes. It wasn’t a picture of the cute little adorable toes that we are obligated to kiss and tickle and play with. (The picture just…
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Back to School! Um…wait. I Homeschool.
Summer’s over! Time to get back to school! For those in public or private school, uniforms are being purchased and supplies are sitting in nice orderly stacks just waiting to be used. Right now they’re neat and tidy – not a mark out of place. No torn covers or bent pages. Those crayons and pens and notebooks have worlds of untapped possibilities. It’s exciting! But I homeschool, so things are different now. Instead of rainbows of crayons and colors, my get back to school involves plotting schedules and choosing curriculum. The organized and savvy homeschooling parents have already chosen their curriculum and many of them are already into their school…
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Bullying Part Two: The School’s Responsibility
Recently, I posted an article about bullying. I asked if it had changed or if we, as a society, had changed. I think that this is a really complex answer and I don’t believe that it can be addressed with any measure of value in a series of blog entries. Still, this is my platform and bullying hurts my heart in a personal way, so this is my attempt. My family has dealt with severe and powerful bullying on more than one occasion. A few years ago, a little girl at my daughter’s school decided that she didn’t like my daughter. It happens all the time and unfortunately, it’s something…
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Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 3: Homeschooling Lessons – Curriculum!
If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll know that I’m sharing some lessons that I’ve learned while I’ve been homeschooling. (Iron Man is Swimming Part 1 and Iron Man is Swimming Part 2) Today’s topic has been one of the biggest learning curves for me and our whole family as we’ve gone through this process. Curriculum. We’ve used several different styles of curriculum during the course of our homeschooling years and with each one, we’ve learned something that we take with us to the next one. The first year we did an ‘online’ curriculum that promised us virtual classrooms with very little need for parental involvement. For this newbie…
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Iron Man Is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 2: More Homeschooling Lessons
Yesterday I started a short series about homeschooling with “Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade.” Today I’m talking about a few more lessons learned in my homeschool journey. Calendar: Public schools are required to complete all of their curriculum standards within a 180 day window. That’s about six months give or take holidays and snow days and such. This seems like a lot of time, but really – it’s not. In our lessons, we chose to take some extra time on some subjects and topics. We found that a lot of things were glossed over or missed in fundamentals, so we spent more time there. But the biggest thing we…
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Review: Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue
Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue Reviewed by: Lori Twichell Genre: Non-Fiction Publisher: Zondervan Publication Date: July 2010 Do you have a teenage girl? Or a tween girl? If you do, then you probably understand the frustration of entering this completely new phase of life with your daughter. I mean for me, I just felt like I could finally figure out what might come next and then hormones hit. (And honestly I believed for YEARS that the rapture was going to happen before I became the parent of a teenager. That pretty much defined my entire ‘parenting teens’ philosophy.) So I was pretty happy to…
