According to Wikipedia (and I have no reason to doubt it, I’m just too lazy to double check the calculation myself), October 1st is the 274th day of the year, with 91 remaining until the new year.  We’re down to just double figures for 2014. In the words of Lance Corporal Jones, “Don’t Panic, don’t panic!”  and I’m not panicking. It might be due to the unseasonally warm weather, giving the impression that we are still in early Summer rather than at the start of October, or it might be the ostrich effect; I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve spent a couple of hours this morning helping out in Teddy’s class at school.  The hope is that I’ll get an idea of where he is with his school work, so that I can start thinking about how to approach road schooling all three boys.  I went along to his maths class where his lovely maths teacher started with a subtraction rap; the kids loved it.  Sadly, I am no rapper and, as such, I’m hoping there will be other tactics I can employ to demystify arithmetic otherwise dad will be in charge of numbers. That’s not a bad plan actually, given that I am more at home with words – literacy for year 3 this morning included working on non-fiction writing and thinking about describing words for different kinds of settlements – see, that’s more like it! On a serious note though, it is such a pleasure to be able to go into the classroom and spend time with the children without having to give any notice at all.  John and Teddy are so fortunate to go to such an open and welcoming school and it is one of the few hesitations I have about travelling because there is a very real risk that when we return there won’t be space for Teddy and Alex (John will be at secondary school).  I made a conscious decision to inform the school of our plans back in the Spring and, without fail, everyone has been totally supportive and positive which has made a real difference for the older boys who have been able to speak freely about the trip, helping them to get used to the idea themselves.  Of course Alex has no real understanding yet of what is going to happen; sadly he already seems to have forgotten most of our trip to Perth last year.  He is at the lovely age where he wonders everyday whether it will be his birthday this week as he knows he enjoys going to birthday parties and thinks it might be quite nice to have one of his own. Likewise, we talk about Christmas and he knows it’s exciting but can’t quite remember exactly why. Having all that gorgeous innocence with us while we’re travelling will be such a delight and I love that he helps us all to take things at face value now and again; to just enjoy the moment – we all need to work on that.

So plans are moving on.  We have spent time this week looking at exactly where we want to go in the US and trying to figure out if we need a rental car for the whole time.  Apparently Wednesdays are traditionally the cheapest day of the week to fly on, (according to Google, anyway) so in my mind I have pencilled in Wednesday 23rd September as the day we leave; the date being arrived at on account of it being half way though Nick’s holiday year and thus a final extra month’s money to add to the coffers.  At the risk of relying too heavily on Wikipedia, September 23rd is the 266th day of the year and thus we have 357 days to go.  Further crunching of the numbers reveals that there are 51 weekends until we leave and, so far, I have committed to work part or all of 24 of them.  We’ll be in Kent with mum and dad for another 10,  which leaves 17 weekends unaccounted for.

17 weekends to de-clutter, sort and sell or store all our things, redecorate the most tired rooms in our house, build a wall in the garage so that we can use the storage, finalise our plans for the first few weeks, organise insurances and find a tenant. Oh, and of course, keep the blog updated.

In the words this time of Captain Mainwaring “I think you’re entering the realms of fantasy here, Jones”