outsourcing the home

As you may recall from our Christmas letter 2009, Ben and I have a plan for a book. With lots of action-packed life going on non-stop around us, it's been on the back burner this year. Nonetheless, at this point we have general plans to cover three areas of life: birth, education, and death. Being that it is our first official year of home educating our children, the education section is the one that has the most potential if you will. So as we see it, time elapsed is not time lost, but rather more time to realise exactly what it means to take a front seat in a child's education.
Last night, for the first time in a long time, we revisited our ideas, and pray God will give us an opportunity to join forces soon. Until then, we are just gathering sources, and taking care not to outsource ourselves (it is very easy to do - ie: the T.V. babysitter!).
One book that will definately make the list is a book I took up again recently, "Making God real in the Orthodox Christian Home" by Anthony Coniaris. While there are obviously some faith-specific components, the overarching concern can and should be shared by all Christian families. An exerpt from the introduction follows.

"Where do our children receive their values? How do they learn to evaluate and judge for themselves the things they meet and hear? Many will ask, "Well, what's the Church for? Isn't this the Church's responsibility? How much time do children spend in Sunday School and church? If they come regularly, 36 hours a year! That adds up to about a day and a half a year! In whose hands are they supposed to be the remainder of the time? The parents! And those parents who drop their children off for church school and Church should not be surprised when the children follow in their footsteps and become what their parents are - drop outs.
Who is raising the children?
We hear much today about the subject of women priests. Why don't we ordain women as priests? Why should we? God has already ordained them into the sacred priesthood of motherhood. Who can ever be a more effective priest to her children than a dedicated Christian mother? We talk about the inequality of the sexes. It is not a matter of difference in equality of nature. It is a matter of difference in function. No one can ever take a mother's place in the home. No one is endowed by God as she is for the raising of children. We need to emphasise this point. For we are trying to do everything we can today to take mothers out of homes, to destroy their sacred priesthood, to leave the home front unattended. This, in itself, is producing so many problems that it could very well lead to the downfall of our nation.
[ . . .] The Church can do nothing without the home. The most influential school in the world is not Oxford, or Harvard, or the Sorbonne or Yale or Cambridge. It is the home.
The question is not, "Is there a school under your roof?" The real question is, "How good is the school under your roof?"
[...] "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord: and you shall love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise." (Deut. 6:3-7)