We go to the pet store a lot, to play with the ferrets. My son is always trying to convince me to get one. We have had them. There was a time in my life when I traveling every week giving $15,000 speeches, and since I was never home so I tried to solve every problem with money. Read more
I told my family about how my son is passionate about clothes and he runs around Chicago buying socks, and shoes and changing his outfits between cello and piano lessons.
I told them about how he uses the Internet to track style trends and then find stores that will sell the stuff he wants. Read more
The “ed market” is a term people pass around in business mostly to talk about a career death sentence. The education market is slow, the budgets are ridiculously small, and the salespeople have to be in it for the love of learning because they are giving up a lot of money they could earn in the non-ed market. Read more
I live in rural Southwest Wisconsin. In our community we are the only family that celebrates Hanukkah. We are the only family that doesn’t eat pork. People are generally respectful when they hear we are Jewish. And if they have ever met a Jew before, in their whole life, they are always sure to tell us. Read more
The generation we are homeschooling right now is Generation Z. To understand Generation Z, you have to understand Generation Y.
One of the most notable traits of Generation Y is that they hate conflict. They are peacekeepers, rule followers, look-at-the-brightside type people. You can trust me on this. I get paid to give speeches on the topic. But for those of you who don’t trust money as a harbinger of accuracy, here’s a post with tons of links to research about why Generation Y is conservative. Read more
We live a mile from the nearest house and two miles from the nearest kid to play with. And I think his mom has banned her kid from playing with my kid. Maybe because of my blog, I’m not sure. But suffice it to say, the closest thing we have to playmates around here are the neighbor’s puppies.
So I joined a homeschooling group in my area: rural, southwest Wisconsin. I was so excited to find people for my kids to grow up with. I signed up for the email list. The third email I received was someone asking for everyone to pray for a family member. For improved health, or something. Read more
Asperger’s is a developmental disorder that is almost impossible to self-identify because central to the dysfunction is very poor social skills. But poor social skills means that you are missing social cues which means that you don’t know you’re missing social cues. Everyone in the room wants you to shut up and you don’t know it.
I didn’t know I have Asperger’s until I was 35, when my son was diagnosed. I mentioned to the psychologist, that I would answer yes to all those questions for myself as well. Read more
I am in Las Vegas giving a speech. And, of course, I brought my son. I think, when I was deciding to bring him, that I remembered hearing that Vegas was becoming kid friendly. Apparently, though, that was a decade ago. And it didn’t go well, probably because people don’t spend a lot of money gambling when they come to Vegas with kids.
Hotels are tearing down whole arenas devoted to kids. And the one kid place we could find, Circus Circus, looked more like a ghost town than an indoor amusement park. I told myself it didn’t matter. He is learning a lot. For example: “Mom, all girls look good in their bathing suit.”
For the most part, my kids and I go through our days without seeing any homeschoolers. We wake up early, do chores and breakfast, and then the morning unfolds slowly, with video games and music practice, and me worrying about my work that I am going to try to do while I have the kids all day long. Then we do one or two activities, like horseback riding.
I imagined that we would be part of a community of homeschoolers, but the only community I have found, to be honest, is online, on this blog and other homeschooling blogs I read, like Lisa Nielsen’s and Peter Gray’s.
