COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 43

We're in the home stretch for getting the house packed and staged: Over the weekend, I organized and purged the attic, we continued packing boxes and putting them in the POD, and we cleared out and cleaned up the pool and backyard. Yesterday we rented a carpet cleaner and I cleaned the first half of each of the three bedrooms. Today I'll move the furniture and do the other side of those three rooms and hopefully also the basement carpet, and also the Fire Department will (may? there's a little confusion on the scheduling there) come and hopefully give us a certificate of compliance for the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Tomorrow the tile guys will come back and finish replacing the tiles in the kitchen and patch a few spots of cracked and missing grout in the kitchen and guest bathroom. Wednesday our housecleaners will come and do a deep clean throughout the whole house. And on Thursday, the POD will be picked up and - weather permitting - the Matterport photographer will come and photograph the whole house in order to create a 3D "virtual tour".

Which is all to say that I'm letting the kids pretty much go feral in regards to homeschool today, and probably for the rest of the week as well. I have asked them to work on their Google Classroom assignments from 8:30-10am, at which time they may watch their usual Facebook Live presentations and then take a quick break. From 10:45-11:30am, they should both continue with school assignments. They should take a lunch break from 11:30am-1pm, including getting their own lunch. Although if I'm taking a lunch break at the same time I might give in and make them something like scrambled eggs or macaroni & cheese, just because I'd happily eat that as my own lunch. And finally, my son has a Google Meeting with his class at 1pm that will finish up his day, and my daughter can continue with her classroom work. I have also asked them both to keep a record of what they work on and at what time. We'll see how well that works out.

As for me, I spent several hours moving the furniture to the other side of the bedrooms so I could clean the remainder of the carpets, and I also cleaned the first half of the basement carpet. Hopefully that carpet will be dry enough by the end of the afternoon that I can finish cleaning the rest of the basement carpet so we can return the cleaner, but if not, we'll just keep it an extra day and finish it tomorrow morning.

Next I'm going back up to the attic for the final sweep of purging and organizing up there. The majority of what's up there is nicely organized in bins that will be easy to have the movers take care of, but I'd love to get most of the un-binned (or at least un-boxed) items into the POD. Being campers, we have 5 or 6 rolled sleeping bags and 2 or 3 tents in bags. Being big Christmas decorators, we have several train sets and a Christmas village set in giant cardboard boxes, a 3-foot high wooden Nutcracker that's only wrapped by being covered with a kitchen trash bag, several wreaths in boxes, and a large and heavy artificial tree in its cardboard box. There's a large stack of framed pictures and large mirrors. And there are some random items, like a large HEPA filter, a tabletop humidifier, a bunch of hula hoops, and several collections of theatre costumes in oversized hanging bags.

In addition, I remembered that the closet under the stairs needed to be sorted. It was full of bag after bag of CDs that we had taken off our bookshelves in the living room a few years ago but couldn't quite bear to part with yet. Four heavy-duty 55-gallon drum liners later, we've borne the parting. I also discovered that my husband has a secret stash of tennis rackets, I found where the two-person camp chair was hiding, and I also discovered where the hamster had made her nest when she escaped last Christmas while we were on vacation.

I've also created a new packing category called simply "Long Things," which includes a hockey stick, a projection screen, a particularly tall folding camp chair, two rolls of plastic picnic table covers, and my husband's camera tripod.

I'm torn between feeling accomplished that I keep finding stashes of things to sort, purge, and pack, and feeling terrified that we'll never finish the job in time, or at least that we'll have more stuff than the movers can fit on the truck. I just keep telling myself that I drive a minivan and we're moving less than half an hour away, so as long as the movers take the big stuff, we can always come back for the smaller bits and pieces.

As for the kids, I think they did some schoolwork today, and they didn't kill each other or stop me from getting stuff done. So...yay! Good day.