So this is some excting stuff coming up…
This is the online meet-up spot for Brooke Benoit’s writing workshops and services.
Just Write! CNF Workshop starts Tuesday September 29th.
Month: July 2015
Why Do We Unschool?
Here’s the latest over on my new ‘family’ blog 😉
When I first decided to homeschool it felt like I needed to take in a tremendous amount of new information and very quickly. I suppose like many people I thought that I needed to be an expert of some sort to do it, so I read a lot about homeschooling methods in a very short time. I chose Waldorf-style. I liked it, it jelled with me – using crayons and drawing to learn the alphabet, as well as using other natural materials to learn with, which I have long preferred for myself, and spending a lot of time in and revering nature – this all sounded like good and fun stuff. Homeschooling was going to be fun! We started taking parent-child classes at the local Waldorf school and we both got a lot out of them. He got to bake and play, I got to study a teacher implementing Waldorf…
View original post 465 more words
Should Husbands Attend Their Wives’ Labor?
Here’s a thing I wrote for OnIslam.net:
“It’s bad for him to see you like that,” was the vague reasoning that potential care providers explained why my husband would be banned from the birth of our third child if I hired them.
When I responded that he had already seen my first two labors (and obviously he had been able to continue to reproduce, if that’s what they meant) I was shrugged off, the practitioners’ policies remained firm.
Ultimately my husband and I prematurely left our temporary residence in Morocco and returned to the US to have another homebirth. Later I would learn that barring men from attending their wives’ labor is a common practice in many Muslim-majority countries, though for varying reasons and none being evidenced-based.
Will it traumatize him?…
Zak Sketches While You Sleep
Come by and check out our new family blog…
Yes, we don’t have bedtimes for the kids. Why should we? They don’t have to be up for school in the morning. And we all know about all those studies on teens and early classes and needing more sleep and how stressed they are because of schools ignoring all these findings –right? So the little ones go to sleep when we, the parents, do which if Baba stays up later they stay up with him, but I am really done with the day by 10 pm even if I’m just reading in bed after that. And the bigger ones go to sleep whenever they do, wherever they do. This can and does cause problems with them not being around to help sometimes during midday, (which felt super exasperating during Ramadan!) but we work with that challenge just as plenty of families have to work with, “Go to bed… go to…
View original post 214 more words
Zaynab Crafts: Paper
Zaynab’s turn on our new family blog – “Blog of Nine” – please check us out!
Like many homeschooling families we have a lot of books, especially Usborne and DK Eyewitness books- those are, like, homeschooling gold. It seemed kind of easier for me to strew (bonafide unschooling method) when we were more into paperbooks, and I am still tinkering with how to catch the kids attention with e-reading stuffs. I usually email the eldest things I think that he should read and have been trying to start a wishlist or something similar with the nearly 14 year old. The fun thing for me about strewing paper books was, of course the shopping ,but I also got to pick out materials on subjects of interest to me, some of which I hadn’t explored before. The drawback was that some of the material languished. Or so I thought, but maybe having nine kids is enough diversity to catch someone’s attention with anything…
We had a paper-crafting book…
View original post 255 more words
Amine Suggests: Vsauce
Have started a family blog, you know like with the whole family of nine blogging in one spot. Here’s our first post!
Amine says “Reading isn’t my favorite thing,” but collecting information still is, so he uses other means – like a lot of video watching and question asking. Come to think of it, one of the first life hacks I learned from my kids was to use Google images to search for information. You can just skip that pesky reading stuff and go straight to images that match the ideas you are seeking out. Novel, eh?* Nowadays they video search nearly everything. Of course I worry about the content my kids are imbibing, and I try to do more than just peek at their histories time to time. A lot of the content is problematic. Some of it I really enjoy. Then there is the macabre struggle.
I remember loving Ripley’s Believe or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid. Yes, I was one…
View original post 166 more words
A Clichéd Life 