It was just yesterday, so many years ago, when my granddaughter unexpectedly entered the world at 25 weeks gestation - four months early! She weighed less than 1 pound 7 ounces, dropping to a fraction over one pound! She was amazing. She was beautiful. I was in awe and humbled to witness the miracle usually reserved for God’s eyes alone.

“Peanut’s” eyes were not yet opened. Her dear little hands were the size of her grandfather’s thumbnail, complete with the tiniest fingernails you can imagine. When she would grab onto his finger, it looked like an adult grabbing a large tree limb. Her feet were scarcely an inch long. Her grandfather could literally hold her in the palm of his hand. She swam in the preemie clothes made by the Ladies Auxiliary, but she deserved something to wear. I bought a pattern for a 12” doll and made her a dress. The booties and panties were way too big.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: For several reasons, the Carnival of Relaxed Homeschooling has been permanently canceled.

Greetings! Just wanted to give you an update re: the status of the new Carnival of Relaxed Homeschooling that was supposed to make its debut today. Well, obviously it didn’t.

I think I got a little over zealous and didn’t give myself enough time to prepare and promote it which meant that I didn’t receive enough submissions to pull it together.

So…I have moved the date up one month & unless the dog eats my homework (again ), I should have enough time to do the necessary legwork. In the meantime, feel free to let others know and feel free to submit a post. While called it’s the carnival “Relaxed Homeschooling”, feel free to post about anything related to relaxed, eclectic, lessons learned from life, etc. that applies to homeschooling. Also, submissions don’t have to be new; it’s OK to dig around your blog and submit something written long ago.

Lord willing, the first CoRH will be the Monday, April 6. Deadline for submissions will be Monday evening, March 30th.  For more info or to to find out how to submit a post, click here.

My apologies for any confusion!

Whose brain has been muddled all day! Ever have one of those days…..

We are a nation of consumers. We want what we want when we want it. Perhaps our plastic “money” should contain the slogan “Buy Now, Pay later.”

Gone are the principles of previous generations of “saving until you can afford it” and “when the money in the envelope is gone, it’s gone. Period. Make do.” We are over our heads in debt.

Or as US News and World Report puts it:

For more than four decades, our shopaholic nation has shown an insatiable desire to spend until our credit cards melt. … Indeed, it often seems that we have defined ourselves by our ability to buy supersized everything, from McMansions to tricked-out SUVs to 60-inch flat-screen televisions—all enabled by decades of cheap credit.

Consider just a few statistics from, interestingly enough, CreditCards.com:

• 55 percent of credit card users keep a balance on their credit card
• The average American with a credit file is responsible for $16,635 in debt, excluding mortgages
• The average credit card indebted young adult household now spends nearly 24 percent of its income on debt payments
• Total U.S. consumer debt (which includes credit card debt and noncredit-card debt but not mortgage debt) reached $2.55 trillion at the end of 2007, up from $2.42 trillion at the end of 2006
• Young Americans now have the second highest rate of bankruptcy, just after those aged 35 to 44.
• U.S. consumers racked up an estimated $51 billion worth of fast food on their personal credit and debit cards in 2006

Book One: How to Understand Economics in One Hour

This year we tackled a ½ credit course of Civics. A large part of our course was a study of Economics, which I confess, I knew very little about. Our primary text for economics, which I highly recommend, Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous post I talked, perhaps more accurately, got on my soapbox about how crucial it is to teach our kids to handle money. Learning real life money skills can and ideally should start at an early age, but if it hasn’t, it’s never too late to start, even at the high school (or adult) level.

Let me share with you some practical things we have been doing to learn about and improve our real life money skills that might give you some ideas for your family. (As a side note, this has become a learning process for our entire family )

Responsibility for purchases

The first thing we did was give each of our teens their clothing budget money - the amount we would have spent on them - and let them manage it.

Lessons learned:

• How fast it could go – looked like a lot of bucks at first, but went very quickly
• How to shop smarter and stretch the money
  • Now they check out sale racks first
  • Don’t buy anything if it’s not on sale
  • When they have time, they shop at thrift stores.
• Brand names aren’t worth the price tag
• Shock at the amount of money some of their friends spend on clothes & how important brand names are to them

Checking Account

One of the next things we did was open up a checking account.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you agree that we as a country are in big financial trouble? Do you think it would be difficult to find an American adult who would disagree?

At every level, from families to local governments to the national government, we don’t live within our means; we overspend. The mindset of  “buy now, pay later” permeates our culture. We are up to our eyeballs in debt! As Dave Ramsey succinctly puts it:

“We want it all and we can borrow to get it all before we can afford it all.”

Consider these alarming statistics about students who graduate from high school:

• They lack basic skills in the management of personal financial affairs (1)
• Many are unable to balance a checkbook (1)
• Most simply have no insight into the basic survival principles involved with earning, spending, saving and investing. (1)
• Of the 6,000 students who took the Jump$tart personal finance survey in 2006, 62% received failing scores with 60% being the lowest passing grade. (2)
• A study of 1,065 teens found that 21% of 18 and 19-year-olds have credit cards. (2)
• Nearly 1/3 of high school seniors already use a credit card (2)
• By the time they reach their senior year, 56 percent of students carry four or more credit cards, with an average balance of $2,864. (2) Read the rest of this entry »
     

Several months ago, a friend sent me this quote from the late President Reagan:

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.“

I really liked it and yet, it really bothered me. A lot. I couldn’t get it out of my head – it just kept nagging me. But why? I can be a little slow sometimes, but eventually, I realized, God was trying to teach me something.

My grandkids and I began our home education adventure late in the game, so to speak. First, my granddaughter asked to be homeschooled in March of her 7th grade year of public schooling. I knew it was the right thing to do and a week later, we began. She needed to be home where she could excel, but, as I wrote in an earlier post, she also desperately needed time – a full year to be exact - to decompress from the stresses she brought home with her. Once she was ready, she went from a struggling student who was barely pulling a ”C” in most of her classes, to one who will graduate this year with a 4.0 (so far) GPA.

The next year, in October, my grandson also in 7th grade at the time, asked to come home and try homeschooling. He is now a high school junior and doing great! His interests and style of learning are as different as night and day from his sister, but being home educated has afforded him to learn his way and pursue his interests. I know in my heart of hearts, had he stayed in public school, he would have sunk.

Before we began home educating, I prayerfully asked God to show me His priorities. His answer was very clear: “Teach them about Me and My Word, be a Godly example and trust Me to lead you as you continue.”

I confess I get side-tracked sometimes, putting my agenda before His. But, Read the rest of this entry »

We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
~ President Abraham Lincoln
National Proclamation of Prayer and Repentance, 1863

We owe humble and heartfelt thanks to the Author of all blessings.
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1904

We should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude for all He has done.
~ Ronald Reagan 1981

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
~ Somerset Maugham

Thank you.
Sue