Chaos

I wasn't going to put a photo up to show you how chaotic my house is at the moment, because I'm a little too embarrassed but we've known each other long enough now.
Each time I move house I adopt a slow burn, where I pack and organise over a 6 week period, meaning we live with the silent stress of being surrounded by boxes and rifling through boxes trying to find thing packs prematurely.

I have once done the wham-bam-thankyou-mam approach, packed and loaded in the container within 3 days, but then I wasn't paying for that one, with The Husbands work picking up the tab.."do I want those Big W wine glasses packed in acid-free recycled paper?  Why, what a splendid idea...".

This time, the slow burn had been conducted over a shorter time frame of a few weeks, but the stress of this is amplified by the fact we have been packing to go nowhere.  We're not in much better shape still with the bulk of our belonging heading to storage for "30-90" days and us heading to a small house in a neighbouring suburb (oh you will hear all about that once the reality of living there hits).  But least it's a roof.

With a council clean up imminent we have been rampant in our clearing out of junk, with the boys playroom, an early casualty, as a grumpy husband swept through like a tsumani, sweeping armfuls of the kids toys into rubbish bags "for other less fortunate children", frantically the kids tried to salvage but they knew it was a fruitless exercise.

I am over living like a slob, but I can't bring myself to clean around the chaos, and am tolerating it as long as the bench is clear, the beds are made (excluding the 11 year olds but that has nothing to do with our move), and the lounge room is sort of tidy with some candles lit each evening - aaah, home.

However, the other night while mid way through an intense parenting workshop with our 11 year old, he suddenly pointed to a mouse sitting behind our lounge chair.  While breathing a sigh of relief it wasn't a r_t, because I couldn't have dealt with that, we grabbed plastic containers as it took off heading towards the mosh pit of crap at the bottom of our stairs.  I think as I screamed for the fly spray, the husband had one of those ephinanies where he realised that the love of his life was going to be completely useless in this (and future) situations and it was going to be down to him and his son to sort it.  And only moments later a dazed mouse (from an unlucky aim with a metal bowl) was herded onto a breadboard and flicked with force at the neighbours house.

The good thing is we have a deadline for living like this with a 12 day count down now on.  But my job has been made harder now with every pile of crap a potential hiding spot for vermin.