First - my second son will definitely do Beyond. I am excited about it. I just loved Beyond so much! He didn't tag along with my eldest except for Storytime, so it won't be a repeat for him.
Second - this was the hard part - my older son I am NOT going to move into Preparing for next year. [We finished Bigger two weeks ago.] Because my long-term goal is to get the boys in the same program, for at least a few years before High School, I needed to "stall" him for a year. He is almost 9 and going into 4th grade. For him, I did what I could to make my own "program." I am going to use A Child's History of America, interspersing it with, "Ben and Me," "Seaman," and "Children of the Covered Wagon." I have a plan that we will read a bit of history each day and then each day he will do something different for a "history activity" of sorts. One day we will do vocab., one day timeline, one day work through our geography book and one day notebook. He thrives on patterns and we've had such a good one for two years now. And for Science I am going to use an Answers in Genesis book he is excited about. He will then tag along DOWN to Beyond for Storytime with his brother and he will repeat the poetry with my younger son, too. Hey - good poetry can bear repeating. If it is not challenging enough, I will do the Bigger Poetry pieces again. This is the part I am excited about for him. So often as we have done Beyond and Bigger I have asked him, "Now why do you think Mrs. Austin picked this poem for this unit?" or "Why do you think she picked this Proverb?" SO - I have made up sheets for him to assign a weekly character trait and find a scripture to go with it! I will show him how to use some online tools for finding scripture, if I feel like he keeps picking scripture that isn't challenging enough for him. That will be his Tuesday piece for history/Bible. Maybe I could even give him some of my poetry books and have him find a poem... but that might be too much from the start. He loves poetry and I don't want to turn him off. Instead he could just look through Beyond and Bigger selections to make connections.
I will do R & S English 4 with him and stay with our math program. I am excited to have finally received an answer to our prayers.
We will do DITHOR.
I hope you can be happy for us. I am so grateful for answered prayer and peace. It is going to be a LOT more Mommy work that these last two HOD years, but I am hoping it will help big the next year. When we hit Preparing, they will be 8 and 10 and will still need appropriate math/language separately, but it will be more streamlined for history and science. This does mean son #2 will "skip" Bigger... but he did all the science with us 100% this year, and he did much of the history listening. [They loved Thomas Alva Edison's experiments! We made POP!
]*Phew!*
I hope each and everyone on the board here feel as excited and confident as I do for next year.
[Ask me 5 weeks in....
] {snicker}much love
stacy
. I think you could keep some of the ease of using HOD by doing the Bigger Hearts Extension package, which is in the Appendix of the Bigger Hearts guide (it uses A Child's History of America, Ben and Me too anyway 
). It has all of the readings already scheduled out, and a rotation of CM style responses suggested to do as well. It also has science scheduled! You could use Seaman and Children of the Covered Wagon too if you still wanted to add those - maybe even for your DITHOR genres.