Independant play and the 2yo

[puzzlement]

My son is 23 months. I realise this is very little still, but is there anything we can do to encourage slightly more independent play?

We're in the lead-up to a house-move and some of this involves packing while he's awake. His reaction to this is to cry and try and attract our attention and when that fails he starts unpacking things and throwing them. We're also starting to both start to get really grumpy and defensive, introvert-style, from spending all our waking hours with a sad two-year old seemingly insatiably wanting super-happy toddler parenting.

What we'd like is for him to do something by himself. In the same room is fine, just I'd like to be able to avert my eyes and occupy my hands productively. Does anyone know how to encourage this?

Some notes:
- he's only just verbal, so there's no way we can have a sentence-type discussion of how he's feeling. His vocabulary is still name-things-with-concretes-noun-only (so "dog!" or "book!" not "I am feeling lonely!" or "please play with me again Mummy!" or "I don't like that toy!")
- we do not have local family or friends, this is a big part of why we're moving
- we have not in the past found that less-local family or friends are dying to help out. Per my last post, we don't have a lot of parent-friends so to use free babysitting, I need to hang around and actively teach toddler-care from scratch at which point I may as well do it myself: I certainly won't be packing up my house while this happens.
- paid childcare is difficult and expensive to access: it's the Australian summer and peak holiday season, it's the centre shutdown week, and we have enough trouble affording the care we use when we are both actively earning money at the same time: care in our area runs to $25 an hour or so.

Only child syndrome

[puzzlement]

Does anyone else feel the stress of having the only child/being the only parent in view?

I feel this a lot with my friends, and all the time with my family: I am the eldest sibling and cousin, and much younger than all my uncles and aunts. (My husband is similar in a way: his sisters are childless and he rarely sees his cousins.) So at many gatherings there is exactly one child, our son, and one or two parents, us. It feels like parenting on stage. I find it very hard. Of course many older relatives remember parenting young children, but it's a little bit removed: I'm the only one who has to right then and there calm down a child screaming because either they're getting too much attention (eight adults all exhorting him to rock on his lovely new rocking horse) or too little (eight adults have suddenly switched their attention in unison to admiring someone's new earrings).

It also means that for days on end, he has two playmates, and they are us. Family gatherings are the opposite of the tribe-of-children experience they are in some families. (And I feel a bit bad for him as well, I hated being the old cousin too old for the tribe and too young for the adults, and he will have an even worse gap because at least I have a sister close in age.)

I don't know that I'm looking for advice (I can't imagine what it would be: casting fertility spells on our sisters?), but maybe commiseration!