Shout out to my mom for offering to meet Justin halfway to pick up our big kids and take them to Camp Grandma’s House for a week so we could focus on tasks without neglecting the children. When she first offered, I thought, “Oh we probably don’t actually need that.” As soon as the first picture came through via text of them having fun there—while I was scrubbing their drawings off yet another wall here—I realized my initial reaction was plain wrong. We totally needed that.
The last time we had to get a house ready to sell, we lived only seven minutes away from my parents. So, it was easy to go drop the kids off for a few hours at a time, then bring them home for naps or bedtime, on-and-off for several days. I wrote about our frenzy to get that house ready to sell two years ago here. This time, in addition to the “big kids,” we have a still-nursing baby, so she had to stay home with me.
Justin and I had quite the to-do list between us. Paint the new front porch pillars, the front door, and the shutters; get the large “donate” pile out of the corner of our bedroom and into the hands of a local non-profit… There were things on it that probably should have been done weeks or months ago. Clean off the bathroom’s lipstick mural; get rid of the unsightly pile of rocks and wood from behind the driveway… There were brand new things, which I never would have thought to do, that our real estate agent suggested to us. Get the windows professionally washed; lower the clocks and artwork from “kids can’t reach it” height to “gallery” height.
I got a quote for professional “deep cleaning” help, panicked at the price tag, and decided to just buckle down and do it myself. This is on a totally different level, but I could vaguely liken it to how I felt when I was giving birth without drugs: This is really going to suck for a while, and then it will be over; therefore, I can do it.
Besides the House Tasks List, I was still having to do my everyday things (minus childcare items for the big kids). I still had to meal plan, so that we didn’t end up spending so much money on takeout that I could have just hired the professional cleaning company. Then I did the grocery shopping. Then someone had to cook what I planned. (Thankfully, Justin split the responsibility of cooking with me. And we did eat leftovers in between cooking days.) I still had to feed the baby, both solid meals and nursing. I wiped down her high chair between meals. I was still in charge of her naptimes and bedtime (because they involve nursing). We would run the dishwasher, and then someone had to put the clean dishes away. We were still wearing clothes, so there was still laundry to be washed, dried, folded, and put away. Cecily can’t reach very much, but she put a valiant effort into making a mess with whatever she could reach, which then had to be picked up again. And, you know, she still had emotional needs: games and giggles and snuggles and hugs, being carried around part of the time, and perhaps napping only on mommy and waking immediately upon coming into contact with the crib.
We moved some shelving out of the kitchen to make the space feel bigger for potential buyers, so some extra things from those shelves were hanging out on the kitchen counters for a while. Various cleaning supplies were scattered on the counters and dining table, too. While trying to cook dinner one evening, I was having trouble finding a clear spot for my cutting board. It would have helped to put the lunch dishes into the dishwasher, I suppose, but the dishwasher was still full of clean dishes from the morning run, and the thought of spending the time to unload and reload it in the name of clear counter space felt so overwhelming that hangry me could not handle it. Instead, I pushed some of the cleaning supplies into a denser pile and stacked others on top of the microwave. Dinner got cooked. The kitchen got even messier. I broke my own rule and left it all where it was until the next morning.
Bonus Tangent about To-Do Lists
I like to write to-do lists at night. Before settling into bedtime, I write down the next day’s goals. I try to be realistic about what I can accomplish. Sometimes I have a separate list called This Week, where I write down things that could get done tomorrow, if I finish the things on the Tomorrow list, or that can hang out for another day or two until it makes it onto another day’s Tomorrow priority list. But writing it down somewhere helps ensure that it won’t be forgotten, and allows me to stop spending energy on remembering it.
(So, I put “clean up the kitchen” on my Tomorrow list that night, and was able to go to sleep with it messy that way.)
I’ve found that having about three “big” things on my list is manageable:
Clean up the kitchen
Dust/wipe down last set of french doors I forgot about today
Wipe down all trim in the living room
I like to write down the small things that need to get done, too, so I can make more check marks at the end of tomorrow:
Schedule window cleaning
Send an email I need to send
Move the microwave to its new spot
Pick up the stray toys before realtor and stager arrive for consultation
The things that have to happen every single day, I don’t write down, because then my list would be ostentatiously long every day. But those things still take time! Wash dirty dishes and put clean ones away; feed myself; shower. And some are hard to quantify. “Make the baby feel loved and valued” is absolutely necessary daily, but looks a little different every day. It was helpful to the completion of the House Tasks to-do list that “make the big kids feel loved and valued” was on their grandmas’ to-do lists instead of mine for a little while.
Shout out to my mother-in-law for accepting the challenge of taking on the big kids for a few more days—while we wrapped things up before pictures were taken for our house listing—after they’d already been at the other grandma’s house getting spoiled and off routine.
Back to What I was Saying Before
Our house is officially on the market, now. All my kids are home, too. This week’s stress has been that every time we leave the house, we have to leave it in showable condition, just in case someone asks to schedule a showing while we’re out. Every toy put away. Every bed crisply made. Every counter cleared and wiped. Every light on (to every dad’s dismay). Every crumb swept. As a final touch, I like to towel-dry the sinks, so there are no water spots.
All of that plus the regular: every kid diaper-changed or pottied and shoes on; water bottles filled and snacks or lunch packed, depending on the nature of our outing; keys, phone, and a mask stashed in the diaper bag. So now instead of 20 minutes to get three kids out the door, it’s more like 45. Granted, we’re not leaving the house terribly frequently due to Covid, but we have gone to a few play dates, and of course we’ve had to get out of there for requested showings. I had our agent plug into the system that all showings have to give at least an hour’s notice. So far that’s been sufficient.
I’m trying to be in the habit of making beds in the morning, cleaning up everything after every meal, immediately putting away clean laundry, etc., so there’s less to do on short notice. I also packed up about half the kids’ toys a couple weeks ago, so there isn’t so much to make a mess with in the first place, and that inevitable mess is small enough for kids to clean up themselves without getting overwhelmed.
I reeeally hope we get a viable offer ASAP, though, primarily so I can go back to sort-of-normal. The next step will be the normal duties, plus packing up everything I own, plus finding and buying a new house in the new city; then unpacking and figuring out the school situation for my kindergartener in the new city, and trying to establish ourselves in the new city; and the baby might be walking by then, and I want to go visit my family again, and there’s still a pandemic going on after all; and…….
So, actually, it’s probably going to be a long time before I have “normal” again. And whatever that is will be different from what my normal was before, because it will be in a different house, different city. So, really what I want is to be able to move to our next step. The next baby step is one in which I can leave only-used-once-so-far towels hanging to be used again, not necessarily folded into perfect thirds.