Each day I receive one or two books from authors and publishers. I want to tell you I give most of them away, but most of them are terrible. In a lot of cases even our local library will not take them. Read more
Time magazine asks the question: What is it about families that have a bunch of super-successful children? And the answer is fascinating. Read more
We were in Aspen a few weeks ago and I stayed in the wrong part of town for where we needed to be every day, so we spent a lot of time on the bus and in cabs. I took a lot of pictures, including this one from the Aspen Art Museum (which was a great place for kids) but I don’t have any pictures of the kids with headphones on, even though they probably had their headphones on for most of the trip. Read more
This is a guest post from Julie Dutra. She lives in Portugal with her toddler and husband. You can find more of her writing on her blog happymamahappybaby.net
School was an intensely lonely experience for me; I was at worst bullied and at best felt left out. By homeschooling my son I get to be the leader of the pack, not the outsider. I know, I know. I can’t expect my son to take on my interests and hobbies. But even if he chooses something I find mindnumbingly boring like boules or chess or even accounting, I get to be there with him: not his friends or teachers. Read more
This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids. Lehla’s family lives in Italy.
“I will read when I can read,” were my sons words. At age ten he is on the edge of flying into the world of words. The ‘not being able’ to read phase will soon be a sweet memory. I sit with him as he speaks the words out, I see a big complex word on the page and part of me hopes he will stumble, which is a funny thing to admit, since it is counter to how I was a few years ago around reading. You see the tipping point is coming, he is on the edge of it and it is a delicious honor to witness a child learning to read at their own pace. Like that moment when they learn to walk, or swim—it feels magical to me. Read more
For the first couple of weeks in August, we went to Aspen for music lessons. The Aspen Music Festival is huge, and famous, and drives up the price of hotels in Aspen (as if they can be driven up any further.) So we stayed in a town nearby, Snomass. It’s a ski town in the winter but in the summer, it’s a corporate training getaway. Read more
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She homeschools five kids in Washington state.
I have yet to meet a mom who does not wish she didn’t yell. I have yet to meet a homeschooling mom who has not had blowouts with their children. But people always end their yelling stories with their heads hung in shame. They stop the story before the best part: the part where the anger spurs them on to change: Read more
Tall people make more money as adults. There is lots of great research about this topic, but the most interesting, to me, is that on average, tall people contribute more to a team than shorter people in a business environment. Probably this is because tall people have more self-confidence because they get treated better because they are tall: geometrically multiplying advantages, or a sentence as an homage to Escher. Read more
My ex-husband’s father is from Peru. So when we were engaged, we had a big party in Peru. I was shocked to see that my husband never learned Spanish, so he couldn’t talk to anyone. I had already learned French and a little bit of Hebrew and German, so it was not difficult to teach myself a little bit of Spanish before the trip. Read more
Did I ever tell you about my failed reality TV show? I need to talk about it one more time because I still have photos from it. The show had a buyer, so we made a pilot. And then TLC said we are too normal. Read more