A squash and a squeeze and some very strange meals..

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Angus and I have spent most of the last two days moving our large items of furniture into our storage unit.  It hasn’t exactly been filled with romance, but it has certainly been an excellent bonding experience, and not without hilarity.  Our storage is a large shipping container, in a secure complex just ten minutes from home, so very convenient.  We thought it would be best if we moved our sofas, armchairs, bed bases, large mattresses, desks, book cases and chests of drawers there this week, while the children are still at school before half term.  Our lovely friends, Jack and Laura, have lent us their enormous Chrysler, which is so vast that it fits a three-seater sofa down one side, a chest of drawers the other, and then a load more boxes in the gaps.  Consequently, I have had the lyrics of “Love Shack” going around my head on repeat all day. 

                “Hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail.

                I got me a car, it seats about twenty, so come on and bring your jukebox money..”

Seriously, the description “as big as a whale” is not far off!  This is my first experience of a Chrysler – it is an impressive vehicle.  The sofas were not too tricky to manoeuvre into the car, but the mattresses were almost too much for us.  A chance conversation with a friend recently led me to the discovery of “mattress bags”, which as the name suggests, are specifically designed to store mattresses.  I genuinely had no idea that it was possible to buy protective coverings big enough for all of our fabric items.  I’m loathe to buy any extra plastic at all, but I’m very glad we had that chat, as our storage unit seems a bit cold and very slightly damp, and I’m not sure how well our sofas and mattresses would have survived 18 months without some extra protection. 

Jack in his new supersafe lifejacket

The mattress bag advice to me was, “do NOT buy one without handles.  They are completely impossible to hold on to..”.  Of course, I didn’t take this advice, as the mattress bags without handles were only a few pounds, and the ones with handles were much more serious investments.  The single mattresses were no problem, as they weren’t too heavy and were fairly firm, but our king size mattress was almost impossible.  It flopped and collapsed, one way and then the other, and we were in fits of giggles as we tried to hold on to the slippery plastic and get it down the stairs and through our front door.  It lurched sideways and landed on the gatepost, and then we managed to get it vertical for just long enough to make it to the pavement, at which point it made a bid for the top of the hedge, and then we couldn’t hold it any more due to irrepressible laughter.  Finally, we managed to get the unruly mattress under sufficient control to lift it up high, and let it flop down on to the car roof bars, where we lashed it in place for the drive to the storage unit.  Angus was driving behind me, and flashing his lights wildly for much of the journey, as he thought the mattress was going to fly off (I was only doing 40mph..), but I had more faith in our knot-tying ability than that.  We made it safely.

Packing the container is like a game of giant 3-D tetris.  There’s a huge, slightly random collection of boxes, bags, suitcases, vacuum packed linen, chests of drawers stacked on top of each other, very heavy boxes, very fragile boxes, etc.  It turns out that this kind of mental puzzle appeals quite a lot to my geeky brain, but Angus is not so keen on the logistical methods of container packing.  I think we’re doing pretty well though.  There’s lots of space left, and we don’t have too much left to pack up.  Just our bikes, the lawn mower, garden shed contents, the rattan furniture…

Fun and games at the storage unit!

We still have two weeks left before we leave, and I think I may have been a little overzealous in some areas of forward preparation.  I’ve boxed up and stored every single item of our crockery and cutlery.  Our neighbours, Anna and Mike, have lent us some last-minute times, as requested by me; 5 plates, 5 bowls, 5 cups, 2 mugs, knives, forks, spoons, etc.  So this evening, after the boys had gone to bed, Eloise was thirsty, and Angus and I were trying to have dinner, and we realised that every single thing to eat or drink with or from, was in the dishwasher being washed!  Ah well, there’ll be no dishwasher on the boat, so if we stop using that we’ll be OK with our slimmed-down kitchen kit.

Whilst we pack up the house, and madly try to give things away / take them to charity shops / sell them on ebay etc, we are also in the process of “eating down the cupboards”.  This has led to some very strange meals, but we are all getting used to it.  We had a lot of lentils and split peas at the back of the cupboard that had been there for a VERY long time.  Some of them over ten years, which means we must have moved them here from our previous house.   How have we not eaten them?  I found some hazelnuts that were best before 2003!!  Marie Kondo would be freaking out if she read this!  The hazelnuts were completely inedible, but the green split peas (best before 2009) did eventually absorb enough water to be just about edible.  It took about 8 hours in the slow cooker.  The children wouldn’t touch them but Angus and I did our duty over a few consecutive meals.

This evening the children seemed surprised to be fed eggs, bacon, toast and peas for tea, and they did comment that this was more like breakfast (with the exception of the peas..).  Protein, carbohydrate, vegetables – the three components of a balanced meal - what’s the problem?!  Tea was a bit chaotic anyway because the estate agents sprung a 4.30pm house viewing on us, which was a complete shocker as we haven’t anywhere near sorted out the contents of all of the chests of drawers which we’ve moved out of the house in the last couple of days.  As an example, in the boys’ room, there are small piles of clothes lined up all over the floor, and my clothes are currently on the bookcase in the passage!  Also, the whole place looks like a campsite as we are all sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and with no bedside tables either, there are lights and chargers and wires all over the place!  The upside is that the rooms look a lot bigger with almost no furniture in them.

Tomorrow is Eloise and George’s last day of school, and Jack’s last day of pre-school.  It doesn’t really seem real, and I’m not sure it does to them, either.  A few months ago, when I still had enough time to read books by people who are doing the same as us, a mother described how she “sat down and wept at the enormity of the task she and her husband had undertaken in choosing to home school their child”.  I didn’t really get it at the time; I couldn’t imagine myself doing that.  And I still can’t, thankfully!  There's no time, apart from anything else.  But seriously, I see our children as little sponges; they want to be a part of what is going on around them, experience it, talk about it, try it out, and relive it with each other through games, story-telling and pictures / writing.  I feel really excited that we will have a fairly child-led curriculum in our home-schooling.  Eloise is interested in music, singing, shows and books.  George is interested in football, more specifically the Premier League table.  And Jack is interested in everything.  Our plan is that we will choose topics of interest, and then build the learning around the topics.  Let’s see how we get on.  Blog to follow at some point!

In less than two weeks we leave Winchester.  Mentally, I think we are almost ready to go now, but we still have a lot of loose ends to tie up; admin tasks, small jobs around the house, as well as sorting out all the piles of shrapnel that still remain in every room.  We fly on February 28^th.  We will stop in San Francisco to see Angus’ sons, Tim and Marcus, on our way to New Zealand, and we’re all seriously excited about that.  We’ve still got a little bit of storage-unit-jenga to play before then, plenty more very strange meals to eat, and lots of “last suppers” with lovely friends and families.   Thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support.  Until next time…

Laura, Angus, Eloise, George and Jack