Youngandsons.com

Do you ever feel overwhelmed or unsure about parenthood?
Come gain clear vision and encouragement, and learn practical tips for raising your children.

Award-winning authors and speakers Hal & Melanie Young will be the main speakers for the seminar sessions, sharing their excellent insight from years of experience raising their 8 children. (Other guest speakers will lead some sessions.)

Gain solid Biblical perspective on the rights and responsibilities of being a parent, proven principles for training up your children, and long-term vision for true success.

Dates: Fridays from February 3 through March 9, 2012 (6 sessions)

Time: 6:45pm – 8:15pm

Place: W.E. Hunt Recreation Center, community room
201 Stinson Ave
Holly Springs, NC

Cost: Free (donations will be accepted)

Children welcome!

Space is limited.
To register, or for more information, go to www.ClearVisionParenting.com

Hal & Melanie Young are the parents of 8 children, and are popular speakers at many conferences from coast to coast. They also have written books, including the award-winning Raising Real Men. You can learn more on their website www.youngandsons.com.

Sponsored by Southwest Wake Christian Assembly

Click here to find out more …

Due to the overwhelming response to Hal and Melanie’s workshops at the Arizona Families for Home Education conference, many people were unable to get copies of the handouts. I have posted the handouts for all of our 2009 Arizona sessions online here in Adobe PDF format so that anybody who needs a copy can download them.

Ballistic Homeschooling: Surviving: Teaching, and Appreciating Boys (Melanie)

Diapers, Playdough, and Microscopes: Homeschooling with Babies and Toddlers (Melanie)

Sanity’s in the Freezer: Bulk-Cooking to Save Time and Money (Melanie)

The World, the Flesh, and the Young’uns: Protecting Your Wife in the Homeschooling Life (Hal)

Just As I Am: Homeschooling through Challenges (Hal and Melanie)

–John Calvin

Tonight I uploaded the new Youngandsons look you see here now, a radical change from the layout we’ve kept in several iterations since 2004. The content was in sore need of updating, and the “simple” updating we put in place in 2006 wasn’t cutting it anymore. So I started transitioning the content of the site over to the WordPress platform, while starting to look around for a theme that fit well with our previous layout.

After a week of searching, we decided that cloning the old layout was a. difficult and b. unnecessary, really. Instead we took the broadly available Aviation Journal theme by RFDN and adapted it to our needs–replacing header images, tweaking the new layout, and then adding the extended footer you see at the bottom. After a couple more days of tweaking, recoding, and testing of plugin components such as Twitter Blender for our “Youngs on Twitter” sidebar and building a footer-compatible CForms contact form, we decided to upload the new look and perform the rest of the updates “live”.

After a near-miss caused by too-enthusiastic pruning of database tables, the new site was uploaded and activated with the help of the URL Updater plugin (very useful, folks…). We hope the new site will give us greater flexibility in combining and displaying content, updating it more frequently, and providing methods for our visitors to join in the conversation through comment threads, contact forms, and more. We hope you find new site features such as the upper-right search bar useful in finding the information you need on the site.

Please comment back with questions, observations, or bug reports on the new design…this is still very much a work in progress, although it has finally reached a stage where we can share it with the public.

John Calvin Young

Well, there’s a lot riding on the title of a book, and Hal and I are hoping to finalize a book project in the next week and a half. However, the scope of the book has outgrown its original working title, so we’re asking our friends for suggestions. Here is a short synopsis of the book and a back-cover tag line so you get the gist of it:

TAGLINE:
A practical guide to equipping the hearts and minds of boys without breaking or losing yours

SYNOPSIS:
Boyhood isn’t the same any more. Society doesn’t appreciate the manly virtues which drive them. They are called to lead, but the culture demands they follow; they were made to be active, but told to be quiet; equipped to defend, they are urged to disarm. By changing our perspective and beginning again with the goal of raising real men, we can not only survive our sons but delight in them. We can help them become what they were meant to be, rather than wish they were something they aren’t.

Comments are open and we’ll you send a free copy of the book if we use your suggestion.