Contained Chaos

We're out of the house now, and in my parents' house.  I thought I was doing so well.  Boxes were labelled, I kept an inventory of everything, I had stuff separated according to whether or not we were going to take it with us on our trip.  Ah, the devolution of my organization.  Blah.  

 

The storage room.  When we first started this venture, I felt like our stuff would fit the space just fine.  Perhaps we left a bit much empty space (to make it easier to look at our boxes on the shelves), perhaps we don't have nearly enough shelves.  Perhaps we just have too much stuff still.  Who can say?  But the junk just keeps going....              

My parents have an in-law suite in their basement, which is what we're using.  We're using the kitchenette as storage.  A lot of it is our camping stuff, plus the chairs to our table until our table is set up and ready to use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The living room is actually not so bad.  Very crowded, especially considering we have their couch and our couch sharing the space that just held their couch.  Plus we added my desk, another couch over by the kitchenette, and our tv stand.  Their poor house is groaning with the all the added junk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The boys' sleeping quarters.  We brought all our Sterilite dressers in the house, but we've still got clothes strewn all over the place.  Oish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other side of the room, where K sleeps.  Still a disaster zone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and the largest mess of all.  So sad.  Must work on this.  According to Bill, I have 10 days to lazily organize it all.  Hmm.....

Missed Opportunities

Missed opportunities have been weighing on my heart of late.  Change is hard.  I've lived in eight states, seven of those before I was a teenager.  Change and I are no strangers, but we're not friends, either.  So being on this side of the change, worrying and wondering what the future holds, I'm left pondering what I've not yet accomplished, things I've left undone or not fully taken advantage of while here.  

These are my gorgeous raspberry plants.  I've had them now for several years, the amount you see in the picture is more than the total number I've gotten from my many plants combined over the years.  This is a mere fraction of what awaits.  I've worked hard on these plants, and yet I have to leave them behind.  The effort I've put in is going to reap benefits for someone else.  Oh, how I wish that the harvest was mine for the taking, but I have to walk away from it.  It's hard.   

What else do I have to walk away from?  What other missed opportunities are there?  I am beyond sad that I won't get to see my Cub Scout den progress and grow this year.  There were a lot of things I had wanted to do with this house that have never materialized.  I have friends I would have liked to spend more time visiting.  One of my friends told me over the weekend that it was as if we were breaking up.  

 But, I have bold new adventures on the horizons.  Sights to see that I would not have experienced without this hardship.  Experiences and opportunities that I can only imagine.  Adventure awaits....

Lost My Enthusiasm

It's our last week in the house.  We spent this weekend packing up and taking over to my parents's house a lot of the big furniture.  We have our matresses, a TV stand and TV, a fish stand, and our kitchen table.  I'm wandering the house wondering what I'm supposed to do until it's that chaos of last minute getting things out of the house. I could weigh more stuff to take on the trip.  But I've honestly lost my enthusiasm for that.  I have five more people's dressers to weigh and account for, and I can't muster the energy for it.  I need to go through my plastic containers and see what would be useful on the trip, but I couldn't care less right now.  Pack the toiletries, or dump them?  Oh, what's easier?  So many things on my plate, so few I give a rip about doing. We're trying to eat our way through our pantry and freezer.  We already sold the big freezer, so it's not as daunting a task as it could be.  The pantry is emptying out as well, but there's still a bunch of stuff in it.

That just doesn't seem like a ton for a family of seven, but at the same time, it's staring me in the face every day.  Some of it just has to go to the 'rents' place.  Can't help it.  No way to eat 15+ pounds of rice this week.  No.Way.  What about the bread flour I haven't used in forever?  That can probably be tossed.  The whole wheat flour?  So sad, but that's a goner, too.  AP flour?  Yeah, that's hittin' the road with us.  Why the hell do I still have so many flours?  Oh, I have cake flour, too.  And corn meal.  The cake flour will be used to make some truly bangin' cookies (they are so darn tasty), if the urge overcomes me.  I do so love those cookies.  That urge may actually materialize!

I need to get on packing up the final stuff so I can get down to cleaning.  My least favorite thing.  Possibly.  I may dislike other things more, but this is what's on my plate now and I have no appetite for it.  I'm taking applications for those interested in donating their time and skill in cleaning this joint!

Packing It Up

Moving boxes are expensive.  Truly, expensive.  Back in September Bill and I talked about it and agreed we would have to sell the house.  It was at that point that I began the task of downsizing and packing things away.  My favorite store (at this point in my life) is Costco.  Before we moved from VA, I searched online for Costcos and did my house search around that.  And now, all these many years later, it has been so beneficial.  While I've been using their boxes for years as a way to distribute popcorn at Boy Scout selling time, this time around I needed boxes that had lids.  Most of the boxes there have their lids cut off or never had any lids to begin with.  BUT, the food court and the bakery keep their lids.  Ice cream boxes, churro boxes, pizza ingredient boxes...all are awesome.  They work so well for books and other heavy stuff, because they're kinda small.  For bigger boxes, you have to head to the bakery.  They break theirs down, so you have to tape them back up, but they're also fantastic.

We have so many of these lining shelves in my parents' basement.  I have 25 boxes of homeschooling materials alone.  Now, not all of those are in these boxes, but a great many are.

I am so grateful that our friends at Costco told us to check with the bakery.  They don't bring their boxes up front like all the other boxes, so we had never seen then.  As we were clearly gathering boxes for a move, one of the ladies at the exit gave us that tip.  Bill promptly checked with them.  We had to coordinate a time to pick them up, because they break them down and then put them out to recycle, so we had to come back when they were breaking down so we didn't interrupt their flow.   I am so very thankful that Costco allows us to take boxes.  We have a large liquor store across the street from us that has posted signs saying they no longer hand out boxes for moving.  What a shame.  On the spectrum of reduce/reuse/recycle, reuse is better than recycling.  I can use what's already made, I don't need more energy to convert it to something else, there's no waste...  So thank you, Costco, for being such a wonderful company!!!  

Time Flies By

We're now down to less than a month in the house.  At times it feels like so much still needs to be done, at other times I feel like we've got this made in the shade.  Local schools let out May 26th for the summer.  We've been finished since mid-February, except for their charter school they go to once a week, that ended on May 9th.

With the end of public school comes the start of our homeschool time.  Back in February, it felt like I had forever to plan and come up with a structure.  Now June is almost upon me. Fortunately, I have the tables of what they need to learn by subject.  But as I've mentioned before, I'm not so sure that's the schedule we're going to maintain on our year of travel.  Personal finance is a big one this year, we'll make sure we continue math, and we'll definitely learn about our country.  We'll work on our scout achievements, so we'll get a lot of life skills in on this trip.  Philosophy, big ideas....I want to get my kids thinking about bigger ideas than the surface level ideas they toss about.  Hand in hand with that, I'd love to have them paying attention to what's going on around them, see beyond themselves, make connections and pitch in without being asked.

I now have five days to get my act together.  Most of the month of June is going to be spent working on our research skills, but with books and on the internet.  The kids are already pretty good with this, but the purpose of this goes beyond just making sure that their research skills are up to snuff.  We actually need to get this trip planned out.  I have ideas, but I need the kids to be invested in this trip as well, so their ideas need to be heard.  This will also hit their informational oral presentations requirements.  Ah, and one on one math time with Mom.  Who doesn't love that?

Oh, and in and amongst all of this school stuff, I still have to finish packing and cleaning.  Let's hope it all goes smoothly!

Organizing the Trip

The house is under contract!!!!  We now have a start date of sorts.  We'll be in town until the older boys return from South Dakota on their scout camp.  Knowing we won't be leaving the area until early July gives a sense of security, but also a bit of panic since I put all trip organization and planning on hold while the house was being prepped and on the market.  With the house on the market I was able to start planning again, since that involves little chaos.  Organizing for me, though, involves a TON of chaos.  

This is all our stuff, weighed and recorded.  Ok, it's really only our tent stuff, minus any personal items.  Nine sleeping bags (the older boys each have two), five pads, seven pillows, and a whole bunch of goodies.  I feel like we're missing some stuff from this, but I can't figure out what it would be.  I'll figure it out at some point, I'm sure.   It's amazing how little this looks like.  All but the coolers will fit in our small, 4x4, trailer that we'll sell once we've got our travel trailer.  But this stuff has seen us through quite a few trips.  The coolers are new, because our locks on our old coolers had broken, and we had to stack things on top of them just to keep them closed.  Not so handy.  We've been really happy with our setup to date, so we'll see how we feel after months, not weeks, of camping!      

 

   

This here's our baby trailer.  She's served us well, though she gets a lot of laughs.  Amazingly, we keep very organized and can fit an absolute ton of camp gear in there.  We did need to add the car top carrier, but the two of them combined are a traveling wonder.    

This is our school gear, unfiltered.  I put something like 25 boxes in storage at my parents' house, and whittled our keep pile down to this.  200+ pounds of stuff.  Um....it can't all go. I invested in Life of Fred Pre-Algebra because NS said he loved LoF; that's so five minutes ago.  *grinding teeth* Ok, well, that's fine, I also picked up Prentice Hall's stuff.  On the cheap, thank you used books.  Now I get to spend another couple of days (or weeks, who's to say?) sorting through this stuff and figuring out what we need between now and September.  If I don't need it until after mid-September, I'm good with storing it in plastic tubs at my parents' house, since we'll be back in the area.  There are other things that probably should have been packed away, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.  As I was breaking my back pulling all the heaviest boxes off the top shelf in the garage (?!?!), I realized how stupid putting books into bigger tubs was/is.  That's ok, I'm sure I need the two kids' dictionaries and the two kids' thesauri, and the dictionary of idioms and such.  Holy cow, this is a trip, not a new home we're filling up!  Man, I need to prioritize.  I can't believe (yeah, I actually can) I was thinking packing so many reference materials was a good idea.  Clearly I am an English major and can't let go of my texts, but that ain't gonna work on this trip!  Oh, do I have my work cut out for me!

Pencils

Right now, pencils and I have a love hate relationship.  I LOVE office supplies.  Office Max and Staples are right up there on my faves list, along with Costco and possibly a ton of other places.  But I'm tired of pencils.  If I find one more stupid pencil in my house, I may ban them altogether.

When our oldest was going into 3rd grade and was still in public schools, they sent home the class supply list.  On that list was 60 pencils.  Per student.  That's an obscene number of pencils.  1500 pencils for a 25 student classroom.  Sayeth what????  I am so entirely tired of finding so many pencils in my house, I've been throwing them away.  All I can imagine is that every year, every classroom in every school in every district across the US throws out pencils.  How many tons of pencils?  How many trees is that?  My heart hurts for the amount of waste we accept as business as usual.  I need to work hard on not being so wasteful.

Selling Off Crap

I read a lot of online articles about decluttering and making space in your house.  Want to sell your house?  Go through and sell off things in your house.  You'll make money right upfront, and make your house more sellable.

Please.  I feel as though online articles are so far removed from the truth.  It's hard work to sell your crap.  You don't just walk through your closets, picking out the stuff you don't want or use any more, and set it out on your lawn and have people swarm over.  We worked on our sales for weeks.  We posted online, we advertised within and without our neighborhood, we gathered a LOT of stuff.  And then we sold SOME of our stuff.  A lot is going to donation.  We put cash in our pocket, but a lot less cash than it would take to replace that stuff.  Some of the stuff we no longer use, some we would like updated, some we just can't see the value in storing for a year.

I'm not saying that yard sales don't help, but you certainly need a plan for what to do with the rest of the stuff.  And if it's stuff you really want/like, and all you're trying to do is clear out space in the house so it looks and feels more spacious to a potential buyer, pack it up for the next house.

Tedious Business

Daydreaming about the trip.  That's fun.  Researching places to go, I love it.  Talking about the beautiful sites we'll see.  All over it.  Weighing and recording every last little thing we're going to take with us so we're not overweight.  Blech.  I think I'd rather do almost anything else.  Especially since it's literally been weeks I've been doing this.  Not all day every day, but enough of my time and energy that it's really gotten old.  I've set everything up in a spreadsheet, I've got every item attached to a person or function (I don't want all the homeschooling materials coming out of my personal allowance!), and I'm weighing things on my bathroom scale or the kitchen food scale.  I hope those are accurate enough!

In addition to weighing every.single.thing, we're having a second go at the moving sale this weekend.  Taking pictures, assessing value, posting pictures online, figuring out where (other than Craigslist) to advertise a moving sale.  I am slower than a tortoise trudging through molasses in January.  I went to a local high school event with a friend last night, and an older lady and I were talking.  I said I was tired (it was, in all honesty, my normal bedtime--of 8pm).  She went on a little rant about how I had no business being tired, she's 70, she has every right to be tired, but why in the world was I?  Even having 5 kids wasn't swaying her.  So I'm slow, I'm tired, and I'm quite pathetic.  What a week I'm having.