My mom has kept 2 of the kids for the past several days.  She has been so supportive of the homeschooling idea.  She has done their work with them, taken them on field trips, and even researched on the internet to find things to go along with our tree unit.  Love ya mom.

It has been nice to have time alone to work on truly organizing the house and getting things really cleaned up.  I can't believe how dirty my house was.  I hired a cleaning company to come in and actually clean while I am organizing and getting rid of stuff.  It always seems if I work on a "project" the rest of the house goes to pot.  But without all of the kids and having someone to clean at the same time I am beginning to really see a difference.  Now if I could just get the piles of stuff I have gathered up all of the way out of the house and out of my life, it will all be good. I'm hoping I will do a better job at maintaining.

It's amazing how quickly you can accumulate so much stuff.  We always have the weirdest little piles of things laying around here.  I never know what to do with or even where it came from half of the time.  Does anyone else have that?  I'll have to post a picture of one of these such piles and see if anyone recognizes it.

We also joined a gym so that the kids can have lots of activities to do over the winter (basketball, swimming, raquetball, etc.).  I decided I should try to start working out too.  So I signed up for some classes.  I'm hoping I can stick with it and not make a complete fool of myself.  I didn't buy the membership for me to do that so hopefully I will keep up with it.  I bought the membership for the kids.  If I had bought it for me then I'm sure that I would not continue going regularly.  I'm trying to play the reverse psychology card here.  I'll keep you updated on how it's going.