Right now I’m looking for a few homeschoolers who’d be interested in reviewing my new book, Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings. Please email me at cardamompublishers at sbcglobal dot net by 2/14/12, and I’ll get you a review copy. Thanks!

This is the first of four eBooks in the Stages of Homeschooling series. The rest are:

Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey (Book 2)

Stages of Homeschooling: Letting Go (Book 3)

Stages of Homeschooling: The Empty Nest (Book 4)

Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings is available only through Amazon as a Kindle book. It’s $4.99, or free if you’re an Amazon Prime member.

Don’t have a Kindle? No worries: just download “Kindle for Your PC” (it’s free; step-by-step instructions are right here.)

Want more info? Here you go:

Are you thinking about homeschooling your child, or have you just recently begun homeschooling?

Are you looking for practical information from someone who’s lived the homeschooling life?

Do you need evidence (for yourself or for relatives and friends) of why you shouldn’t send your child to public school?

Are you looking for homeschool encouragement?

If you answered “yes” to even one of those questions, then Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings is for you. Having spent 25 years homeschooling her four children (including one with special needs), writer Barbara Frank wants to encourage and inform those who are just beginning the homeschool journey.

This book is divided into seven sections:

•  “Why Choose Homeschooling?” (Great reasons to homeschool your children)
• “What’s Wrong with Public Schools?” (Why today’s public schools make homeschooling more attractive than ever)
• “Advice for New Homeschoolers” (Homeschool how-to’s and suggestions)
• “Surviving the Early Years” (Teaching your preschoolers)
•  “Becoming a Homeschooling Parent” (Taking on your new role)
• “Handling Doubts, Fears and Hurdles” (Because the prospect of homeschooling can be daunting, especially at the beginning)
• “Nobody Told Me” (Barbara shares some unexpected benefits of homeschooling)

This book will show you that homeschooling is a great choice for your family.

At the time (last June 9, to be specific), I was reacting to a book I had just read called Why We Get Fat. It made so much sense that I decided to give the author’s recommendations a try, if only for a few days. It was easy enough to stick to that I just kept at it all summer as we packed and moved, and all fall as we unpacked and then pitched many of our belongings while keeping and placing only our most needed and wanted possessions. (See “The Downsizing Chronicles.”)

I feel great, which is a good incentive to stick to the plan, as was my recent reading of another book, Wheat Belly, which helped me understand why I feel so good now. But I can’t help wondering if my efforts were helped along by the fact that for the first time in many, many years I have the time to concentrate on an eating plan instead of being too busy with homeschooling to think about it beyond a few minutes of good intentions. Again, maybe it’s pure coincidence, but I have to wonder.

The bonus for me is that I was becoming increasingly incapacitated by lower back pain when I stood or walked. It had been a problem for about ten years. And now it’s completely gone! Where before I had to sit down after walking for five minutes, I can now walk as long and as far as I want. I keep expecting the pain to strike but it never shows up, thank God.

If you’ve struggled with your weight, I think you’ll find these books to be very helpful:

And if you feel like you’re too busy homeschooling to try losing weight, now you know that there’s always hope that you’ll lose weight once you have more time to yourself 

You see, “we” bought an Amazon Kindle quite a while back but he became so attached to it that it’s now his Kindle (he denies this, but he’s always using it!) There are many things he loves about the Kindle, but recently he found out that he can check out a book for free on his Kindle and keep it checked out as long as he wants, and he really liked that idea 

So we’ve decided to allow my newest book, Thriving in the 21^st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality, to be checked out for free on Amazon because the economy isn’t getting any better and we want people to learn how they can prepare their kids to thrive in challenging times (hint: homeschooling is definitely a part of the process!)

Of course, you can read free excerpts of the book here, but if you want to read the whole book, learn how you can borrow it for free here.

Kindergarten Stories and Morning Talks with Over 125 Illustrations, the 1890s kindergarten curriculum, is now on sale for $5.99 (reg. $9.99) for Kindle and Nook.

Thriving in the 21^st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality, my latest book, is on sale for $7.99 (reg. $9.99) for Kindle and Nook.

Please note that these sale prices are for the eBook version of these titles, not the print version. But…

… we are having a sale on the print version of The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling: for a limited time, get free shipping and a free 111-page eBook with your purchase. Just use this link to buy the book directly from Cardamom Publishers; your eBook will arrive within 24 hours and we’ll ship your book in 1-2 business days for free!

(Act now—-all three of these sales will be ending shortly.)

But some interesting things have been happening, and I hope to write about them soon. In the meantime, I wish you all a blessed Christmas.

I got up at 6:45 am and looked out the bathroom window. Seeing it was dark, I went back to bed and slept for a few more hours.

I was cooking at 4:15 and I looked out the kitchen window and it was already getting dark. I hate how few hours of daylight we have this time of year.

So, why do I look forward to this day so much? Because now we’re over the hump. From here on out, each day will get a little longer. Joy!

I’ll appreciate the extra minutes of daylight every day from now until early June. Then I’ll start thinking about the summer solstice and how there comes a day in June that’s the longest day, and after that each day will get shorter. And I’ll get depressed just thinking about that.

I suppose that sounds silly. My husband thinks so. But there must be someone like me out there who’s celebrating the fact that once we get past today, each day will be just a wee bit longer, the sun will go down a little later, and we’ll be one day closer to spring. Right?

Once upon a time, a little girl who lived in our house wanted to be a dancer. She danced all over the living room in her leotard and, eventually, in a pink tutu she got for her birthday. I don’t recall how we first found the book A Very Young Dancer, but I read it to her many, many times, and once she learned to read, she read it to herself. It became one of her very favorite books.

Though she eventually outgrew her dancing phase, she still remembers that book and recently emailed me with information about the little girl who was featured in it. Seeing the girl’s photo was like spotting a long-lost acquaintance; her face was that familiar to me. You might find her life story interesting (it’s not what you’d expect but it has a happy ending) if you, too, used to read this book to your little dancer once upon a time.

My goodness, with all the sad and scary things happening in the world these days, why on earth are people getting upset about this family? Unlike many much-smaller families these days, they don’t require taxpayer aid. Nor do they farm out their kids to grandparents, as taxpayer-supported parents often do; apparently they not only raise their own kids but they homeschool them. What’s wrong with that?

There’s a poll alongside this article about the Duggars’ baby news that shows 66% of respondents believe that even four kids are too many. To those people I would like to say that three of my four kids work and pay taxes and pay into Social Security, and you should be glad about that. Just think, if the 50 million babies that have been aborted since 1973 would have been allowed to live, they too would be working and paying taxes and supporting you in your old age (and as a bonus, maybe one of them might have even found a cure for cancer or AIDS). Many of our governmental programs, flawed as they may be, were designed for a growing population that supports its elders. Some call that a pyramid scheme, and I agree, but it’s what our society has used for decades, and the loss of so many young people over the past 40 years has damaged the framework of these programs.

I don’t understand why people have such hostility toward large families. Our former neighbors have six kids, and the husband didn’t even tell his coworkers about the last two because he’d already taken so much heat from them for having four kids. How sad is that? Their oldest four kids, by the way, now include a music teacher and an optometrist so I think you could say they contribute to society even beyond financial contributions.

Their mom and I were once at a neighborhood party where I was introduced to the new neighbor across the street, a child psychologist working for the public schools. She and her husband had no children (though they did have a dog they occasionally dressed up and photographed in the front yard, to our amusement). She quickly made it clear that she didn’t especially like children and made a few cracks about “breeders” (large families), so I felt the need to introduce her to my neighbor and then said, “By the way, we both live right across the street from you and between us we have ten children. So you might not want to drink the water around here.” I still chuckle thinking about the look of dismay on her face.

We took some ribbing from family and friends about how much stuff we had, but the fact is that I never had time to completely go through things over the years because I was too busy homeschooling my kids, and I certainly can’t regret that. Also, we kept things that would be needed for our long-held dream of living on acreage, a dream that was apparently not in God’s will, and it wasn’t until we bought this tiny house in town that we knew we could give those things up.

We took countless boxes to Goodwill. We’ve given a lot of toys and homeschooling items to friends with young children. We’ve sold a lot of things on Craig’s List. And there are a few more things that need to go, but we’re working on that.

The hardest items to give up were the books. We love books. And though we do have a Kindle with plenty of books on it, the fact is that there’s nothing like holding a much-loved book in your hands. But there just wasn’t room for all the books we loved.

I’ve sold and given away many books in the past, but there were some I could never let go of, including those I used for my kids when I first designed Life Prep for them. I’m going to be giving those away on this blog soon, because I can’t use them with my youngest.

There is an upside to all of this. As much as I miss the things we gave up, it’s very freeing to live small. The housework doesn’t take nearly as long as it did when we had five bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. The utility bills for this house are lower than the last house (90 years old with 38 windows!) and the small closets here forced us to get rid of a lot of our clothes (which weren’t getting much use anyways because we don’t have jobs and nobody dresses up at church these days.)

So I’m not complaining. And the fact that they’re predicting snow tonight and we won’t have to clean off the car tomorrow because it now fits in the garage makes me extra glad we worked so hard to get rid of all our stuff after the move