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!

Screen Free

In the mass chaos surrounding putting the house on the market, we missed Screen Free Week.  It was the same week as putting our house up, so it would have been great to participate, especially since a local rec center gives free passes to those kids participating.  Oh, we would have loved to have gone to the pool every day!  Well, little miss decided we should do our own screen free week, and so that's what we just finished up.  Turned out to be a lot harder this year than in years past.  I've had some great ideas for camping, but haven't been able to fully research them.  I've been weighing stuff for the trip (what?  You ask?  Check it out here.) like crazy and just keeping track on index cards.  I ended up not being completely screen free.  June 1st was the first day of the library reading program, so we signed up online.  The kids tracked their reading online.  I did email another mom for a meetup.  By the last night of our week I had pretty much thrown it completely out the window.  Sigh.  But my kids followed it, and they did a great job.  We incorporated the Webelos requirement for Castaway--use as little energy as possible (not their own body energy, the other kind!).  The kids figured out that we don't need nearly as much electricity as we use.  I'm hoping they keep most of the lights off now that they've figured that out.  I, on the other hand, need light for my tasks.  Huge, honkin' flood lights.

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!

Educational Waste

Our kids go to a once a week charter school.  They finished up this past week, so I get the joy of going through their backpacks to fish out broken plastic spoons (ugh--when did he even use that????), unopened fruit snacks, multiple office supplies that may possibly not belong to us....  My touchpoint, every year, are those darn composition notebooks.  They're never used.  Not to such a degree that they're necessary.  Out of six composition notebooks this year, only one got used more than halfway.  The other five?  Two weren't used at all, one had two lines used, and the other two had no more than four pages used.  Combine that waste with the pencils, and we've got a serious tree destruction habit.

I want so bad to quit this habit.  I'm a paper and pencil kinda gal.  I'll look up directions from Google maps and then take out an index card to write the directions down.  I'm fine with that.  I use a paper grocery list.  But the amount of compostion notebook waste is mind boggling.  Teachers request these things.  I put my children's names on these things.  And these things don't get used in the classroom.  Isn't it about time we asked more of ourselves?  Why do class supply lists come out before class even begins?  Teachers have some notion in the summer of what they want, and then change their minds when they're actually in the nitty gritty of it all.  Totally understandable, I don't have a year's worth of stuff figured out at a time.

And I can hear the arguments from teachers already.  If we don't ask before school, we don't get it.  It's such a battle to get those supplies from kids, we overask so we can share.  I don't buy either of these.  I understand them, I know them to be true, but I don't see them as blockades to doing things better.  We are so used to being a gluttonous society, just go out and get new.  Replace that broken thing.  Throw out that old thing.  Get more, do less.  Oh how it all hurts.....

Budgeting

Argh.  One of our goals on this trip is to save money.  Our current mortgage is close to 2k/month, plus utilities.  We can go way under that on a camping/roadschoooling adventure, wouldn't you think?  Man, I hope so!  At this point, we want to keep all our expenses right around 2k/month.  I'm looking at $400-$500/month on camping sites, $500/month fuel, and around $1000/month for food.

I'm freaking out.  I've read sites where people plan on 4k/month.  That's about what we spend living here in the house.  I want to reduce and live more simply.  I want less stress.  A LOT LESS STRESS.  I'm feeling a bit crazy with the small budget, but I'm feeling like we can do this, with the knowledge that some months we'll just be over because there are things we don't want to miss out on.  I know there are people who make do on a lot less, so this is all about choices.  Keeping our eyes on the future, not pining for what could have been, trusting that this all works out.

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.