After years of bloody poop and projectile vomiting in ice cream stores I decided to have my son tested for gluten and lactose intolerance. It’s not a small test. He had to be put to sleep with anesthesia, and just as I got everything scheduled, Joan Rivers died having the operation he was scheduled to have, so I canceled it. Read more
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2.
I am a control(ish) person by nature. Mostly I have grand ideas, and I schedule these ideas, only to have reality step in and dash them all away. Or rather—what really happens—I drag my kids out on some adventure rather than being responsible at home. Read more
This is a guest post from Karelys. She is one of my favorite commenters. And it’s amazing to me that she writes guest posts when she has a brand new baby.
Plenty has been said about the merits of homeschooling (even if it’s just done as simply as transferring traditional classroom material to the home), but even more about unschooling or self-directed learning. It’s just clearly the best way for children to learn. Read more
Thi, my connection to the world of high schoolers, told me that she did not get a high enough score on her SAT. So her mom took away her phone. Thi’s score was 2180 which is the 98th percentile, but the score was not good enough for her mom.
Later Thi said she thinks her mom wants her to go to an Ivy League school. But only for bragging rights. Read more
This is a guest post by Karelys Beltran. She works as an office manager for a small company. She has a toddler son, and just this month Karelys had a baby girl!
My child comes to work with me. I am not so much of a hot shot that I can dictate that my workplace revolves around my wants, and especially not around my children. But I made a way to take my child to work because my priority is to be close to my son. It became a priority once I realized that for my sanity, I had to work outside the home. Read more
It turns out that Burning Man is filled with startup founders streaming down from the Ramen-stocked futon-furnished studio apartments in San Francisco. This is shocking to me because it used to be that startup founders were obsessed with their companies. The founders thought of nothing but their product, their market, their competitors. There were no vacations, and there were no distractions. Read more
This is a guest post from Kerelys Beltran. She has a toddler son. And she is one of the most prolific and insightful commenters on this blog. Karelys sent this email to me and I thought it would be fun for everyone to read.
I thought you were so ridiculous when you said, vehemently, that parents sent kids to school because they wanted a break. Who in their right mind would ever sacrifice their kids’ well-being for their own? Read more
In education we continue to approach the same problems with the same sorts of solutions, despite the fact that they’re not working. Instead, we need a fundamental shift in how we educate our children. Our public school system was designed to meet the needs of a long-ago era—the Industrial Age. Old ways are not working because now, we are in the Information Age. Read more
We have about 4000 books in our house. This is because I threw out so many over the years. At one point I was moving from Chicago to LA to Boston to LA and on and on with nothing but 80 boxes of books. Read more
This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a painter and a poet who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel. Earlier in the year she wrote a guest post about generation Y.
My three-year-old found the vine of morning glories growing behind our house. She plucked three and ran to me. “Mama! Let’s make pixie dust!”
“Oh?” I replied. “How do we do that?” Read more