Fall Cleaning Update

For those of you following our Fall Cleaning, here's an update: We took a week off school to clean house. Since we school all through summer, we can afford to do this. We were making excellent progress, but the job was bigger than I had estimated. As the end of the week approached, I thought if we took a second week and pushed through, we could make it.

Thursday night, I felt like I had something caught in my throat. I had a drink of water. The feeling remained. I tried eating and drinking various things, but couldn't get rid of it. By Friday morning, I had a sore throat. Over the next several days, I had a sore throat, body aches, and chills, but no fever. We continued at a reduced pace. It took all week to finish the kitchen. I still haven't cleaned inside or behind the refrigerator, nor inside the oven. Those jobs never did get done last year because just as I was nearing the end of Fall Cleaning, we all came down with the flu. Not H1N1, but a garden variety respiratory influenza that lasted on and off all winter.

I'm feeling better now, but I couldn't see taking a third week off school. The house is looking much better, but if we don't finish the job, the remaining mess will quickly retake the house. So we decided to start back to school, but continue with Fall Cleaning, devoting an hour a day to the project until it's done.  Today we did the living room. Beyond the usual picking stuff up off the floor, that meant moving the furniture, cleaning up all the stuff that accumulates under and behind it, and giving the room a thorough vacuuming. We did not, however, move the piano. That sucker's heavy!

How did we come to own a piano when none of us play? When we were packing to move here, some friends had a piano that was only played by their daughter, who was going off to college. Our boys were just about the right age for starting piano lessons, which we thought would do them a world of good. There was room on the moving truck. The catch: we couldn't find a piano teacher willing to attempt to teach a child with autism. At that point, GL was not far behind developmentally, and his behaviors were well-controlled by medication. I think he would not have been that different than students a year or two younger. But no one would try. They wouldn't even return our phone calls. BB was not that interested in lessons. And it would have been a financial stretch for us to afford lessons for one boy, let alone two. Since then, we have tried to offer the piano to anyone who would haul it away and play it. No takers.

All that remain to be cleaned upstairs are one closet, the fridge, and the oven. Then the basement, which promises to be as big a project as the rest of the house put together.