We do a lot of driving. The largest city within four hours of us is Madison, WI, so we drive there three days a week for swimming, soccer, violin , dance and social skills lessons for my kids. We drive to Chicago once a week for cello lessons. So one of my biggest worries is […]
Before I knew how to write, I would dictate stories about my life to my dad. Then, slowly, I started writing myself. I remember when I learned how to spell the word S-A-I-D. I remember saying to my dad, “Really? Really that’s the way?” I remember feeling a sense of excitement that the spelling was […]
The cover article for last week’s Time Magazine was about sibling rivalry. Specifically, how parents favor one kid over the others. According to Jeffrey Kluger, who just published a book on this topic, all parents have favorites. To illustrate this fact, he talks about how researchers went into a home specifically to observe if they could […]
My husband physically assaulted me last week. For the second time. The first time, my six-year-old saw it. Here’s the post about it. I’ve been talking about it all week. On my blog (there are 400 comments) in my family (calls from two of three brothers that I should leave) and among my friends (I’m […]
This is a guest post from Kate Fridkis, whose family did homeschooling when she was growing up. She blogs about body image at Eat the Damn Cake and she blogs about homeschooling at Skipping School. As a fourteen and fifteen-year-old homeschooler, the last thing I wanted to do was sit around the house with my […]
The boys were cutting words out of magazines while I was sneaking in reading time. I landed on a piece in Harper’s magazine called Juvenile Injustice – photos of the juvenile prisons. They made me ill. There is no way you can look at those photos and not feel sick. I think the sickness comes […]
I didn’t realize this until we started homeschooling, but adults begin child-oriented conversation with a question about school. It’s like the weather. It’s safe and universal. When we were at the grocery store, buying junk food, the cashier said to me, “Your sons must be so excited to get out of school today!” I said, […]
I am fascinated by the book Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined, by Gordon Patzer. He presents a compendium of research that shows that people do better in life if they are better looking. The research has some predictable stuff, like you get a wider selection of mates, and taller people earn […]
This guy emailed me. He said his in-laws live near our farm. He’s CEO of a homeschooling startup. So I took a chance on him and invited him and his family over for lunch. He hung out with me in the kitchen and told me his company helps schools do project-based learning and “experiential” learning. […]
Here’s an article about how the lack of recess, art and music in school is making schools mind-numbing for kids. I love this article. I read it twice. I need positive reinforcement that school is so bad that there’s no way that homeschooling the kids could be worse. Then I let the kids rip off […]