Hooo boy, it’s COLD out there! We absolutely love winter, though. And in eastern Tennessee, this season is particularly magnificent. The Smoky Mountains appear topped with heavy icing; it’s a gorgeous sight, especially with the deep red sunsets against them. We didn’t expect that 18 months ago when we moved out here from California. It’s been the neatest learning experience, and we love our new home base!

So much has been going on. Where do we even start? Well, we moved again, this time an hour east of the Igarashis (woe is Gena), to a city called Gray. It’s not gray, though. It’s quite a deep, lush, wet green. Anyway, you’ll have to stop in sometime for a visit; come for dinner! Gena makes Mexican food like you would not believe. See, in the South, you can’t get good Mexican chow. For some reason, folks confuse cheddar cheese with Velveeta®—at least, that’s how it tastes to us. In California, you could get “the whole enchilada”— with real spices (hot ones). Oh, my, California has great restaurants. Biscuits and gravy are plentiful in the South, though. So is pork. This is getting silly; perhaps we’re hungry. Not for Velveeta enchiladas, though. Other than moving, we’ve been touring all over the place with the family, speaking. Check out the conventions section (sidebar) in this issue for our schedule. Hope to see you this spring or summer. In fact, we’ll be back in California, speaking, in March. Oh, we can’t wait for proper enchiladas!

Barn dance! Have you ever been to one? You must host a barn dance! Laurie Bluedorn taught us how to do one up right, and we did! Check out the photos, here (we even dragged the Bluedorns out here to jig with the Igarashis). Julie Austin, one of Gena and Jen Ig’s best friends, wrote a nice summary of the event TOS co-hosted with her family. Check out the sidebar in this column—and then get to planning your own! Or at least get out here and join us in the fall when we have our second annual one.

Our family is doing very well. Everyone’s healthy, and learning is happening every single day. It’s such a blessing to homeschool. Our business is truly a family affair, as we take our kids almost every place with us. Because both of us parents are home full-time with the magazine, the kids have both of us as teachers. Words can’t express how special this is to us! God has blessed tremendously. One thing Paul and the boys did recently was to help a dear friend of ours with the building of his cabin. We regret that we could only get up there maybe two or three times, but we know our family benefited even more than his. What an educational experience! Dads working with sons: what a concept, huh? And the property (over 250 acres) on which the cabin’s being raised has a real gristmill on it! Our friend is looking forward to the day he gets it running again. Homeschoolers like his boys will learn so much by seeing it in action. Talk about a living history lesson! Our boys had a blast while up there; they were swinging hammers, mingling with the other boys and men, and laughing their heads off (Paul was probably having the best time of all!).

Have you signed up yet for The Homeschool Minute™? It’s a very short, informative (and free!) e-newsletter for homeschoolers. Every Friday you get the opportunity to grab up free stuff, too, for your home and school. Come to our homepage, www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com, and sign up! We’ll give you a free ebook if you do! And no, TOS never sells, rents, or gives away your information.

TOS just came out with three new audio CDs. One is Secrets of Successful Homeschooling (over 140 minutes). Another is Homeschooling the High Schooler (over 200 minutes), and the last is The Well- Integrated Homeschool (approximately one hour). All three can be listened to in the car or at home—anywhere you have a CD player. In fact, we grant homeschool groups permission to use any of these at meetings or as “mini-seminars.” Save money. Just buy one and let the whole group benefit! www.TheOldSchoolhouseStore.com—get in there because SHIPPING is always totally FREE (on everything!).

This is our classical issue! We can’t keep our Winter back issues in stock, and that’s probably because of the classical theme we feature each year at this time. It makes the magazines sell like little hot- cakes! We ended up printing about 10,000 more copies than we normally do to meet the demand this season. Hopefully we won’t run out of these—pretty much all our other Winter back issues are totally out of print, sold out. See? We moved to the South and now we’re getting smart by planning ahead for once. It’s gotta be all the gravy, buttery grits, and salt pork we’re eatin’ these days. Those are the things that help fuse the neurons upstairs. Good strong grease. In California, all we ever ate was granola and skinny enchiladas. All that lowfat, alfalfa nutty food works against you to unstick the neurons (they float instead of fuse) and then you can’t think right and you ultimately fail to plan. We digress. But really, we feel smarter now—and we have lots of Classical, Winter back issues! (grin)

We have some very neat, fascinating folks visiting this issue. But you can see that by flipping through the pages, right? Are you not excited? We sure are! So we’ll cut this dry drivel short. Production Director Trish Tirado gets to hollerin’ if we take too long in the writing process; she doesn’t realize that true literary art takes TIME. Slave driver cracks the whip all quarter long, and it just isn’t right. She’s from Chicago where they don’t understand us cultured and mannered folks down below. But it isn’t couth to complain in public when you live in the South. So we’re done, and we’ll let you get to readin’. Besides, anyone who can organize and design a magazine like this one is clearly amazing. She does a better, more pristine job with each issue. We adore her!

One more thing before we go. Did you know that BJUPress (they’ve been on the back cover since our first color issue) is doing a very cool special right now? If you decide to buy a grade kit from them, guess what you’re going to get? A FULL YEAR subscription, totally FREE, to our magazine. Seriously! They are so generous! They don’t want to just sell you a product and send you packing; they want to support you as the parent all year long, too. 200 pages worth of support, every quarter for a whole year. So get over there and buy a grade kit! Buy ten.

Blessings, take care, see you in the spring when we’ve thawed out. In the words of our favorite sister on earth, Jenefer Igarashi, Thank yoooooooou … and good night.