Hannah doing her school work with a smile!

Ethan 4 and Chase 3 doing the Bears game.

Chase finished his tracing page and we were so proud of him.

Cody working like a good boy on his math.

Hannah really thinking....

PS... MOM I didnt get any pictures of Jolene at school time today.SORRY! I will be sure to do so tomorrow and post them ;)

We have been busy away with school and what else, cleaning. I'm down sizing all the clothes and toys in this house up until the day I give birth! I have already pulled 8 trash bags of clothes from the kids rooms and that doesn't even touch the laundry room or the dozen totes downstairs.Each child has a dresser and a shared closet and they are over flowing it the point the laundry room always has a table full of folded laundry and theres at least 6 laundry baskets in there with either dirty or clean clothes.Id say yes we need to down size AGAIN.So I'm doing about 8 outfits per child with a couple pjs.Ill store a tote for all 3 boys of extras clothes just in case and ill store the 3 girls in one tote of extras as well. Im so tired of looking at clothes just stacked every where and its not what I need. We are home must of the time and no need to wear a new outfit every hour! And don't even get me started on these toys. HELLO why do we have so many toys that just sit in the way and don't get played with. They use hot wheels,dolls,action people,blocks,Lego's etc.....why all the extra stuff! Because in a toy hoarder, just ask my husband. So down size here we come!! Now lets talk about our one room school house we have shall we :) I cant really say that because we do school through out the house but mainly stick to the dinning room table so I can keep my eyes on everyone.Must of the time. Hannah has not be keeping herself organized and got in a little trouble for that today.Each child has there own bookshelf to keep their work and books on. I keep Hannahs in the pantry because its big and right in the dinning room where she works. But everyday she has to search for her writing books. So its time she learns a lesson in organization. I keep Codys in the cubes in the dinning room right below the dry board because I keep all my teaching books in some of those cubes and im at the board alot. Let me first say CODY is doing amazing work this year. we had a huge bumpy patch that required some testing to see where he fell and so on. I now have my day set to have the first 2 hours with him at the table and then again after lunch we do more reading. He is really starting to improve on reading. I still battle the kids left and right on normal chores and keep up but they see now I do actually mean what I say and you will lose something. I have even brought back the dreaded running of the laps! If you know me at all you know that we use to run laps for anything that was not right. So they run from the front driveway to the side of the tree and back as one lap. The little boys find it fun as they get a chance to burn the energy, Cody could careless but if he gets to 20 or more laps he thinks about complaining then stops because he knows he will get more. Its not a long run by any means but at least they get the picture. The littles are doing wonderful in school ad Chase my goodness is just like Hannah and total book worm! We call him our professor! This child is like no other. Blows my mind.All the kids are doing great and today I brought out My Fathers World ECC maps and their faces lit up like a firecracker. They love maps and they love the games we play. Cody is our map KING.Hannah is just as awesome at maps but I think Cody holds more info in. So we are looking forward to starting that back tomorrow and going full force with that. Chase and Ethan will be doing the USA map and Chase can label 5 states so far. Ethan knows Missouri and Indiana ohh and Texas. Jolene will be right in the mix and likes to babble as she goes.You can usually find her in the middle of the table scribbling or running in the house like a mad woman. I have reserved some of the Before FIAR books we will be doing for next week. The first one we will do is "We are going on a bear hunt". With the weather not as bloody hot we can take a treasure hunt outside and enjoy our the nature.The big kids will get on this little boat with their art and do oil pastel drawings of nature.So far so good! Only a few more weeks and the baby will be here and lets see how small of a hiccup we will have with changing it up!