Preparedness - begining our journey.

I bought this dvd at Seagull Book at Christmas time. I have been to Wendy's presentation before and knew this would be good to have. I wasn't wrong. I've watched it so many time this week.

I love her food storage ideas and the idea that we should and can store food we love to eat!

After watching her dvd this weekend I decided we needed to have a Family Home Evening on preparedness.

I don't know if it was the sheer exhaustion from canning 90 lbs of chicken Saturday or not, but I realized that my children needed to take part and learn WHY I do what I do.

The first part of Wendy's preparedness plan is coming up with 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners that your family would like to eat once a week for a year! So if Spaghetti is a family favorite, then plan on having it every week for 52 weeks!

Every time I sit down to do this "homework" I never get very far. SO, tonight after watching this part of the dvd as a family, I passed out sheets of paper to each of the girls and Vaughan and I. I asked everyone to write down what they thought would be yummy foods AND things we could actually store in our food storage.

***LIGHT BULB MOMENT***

I really thought my girls realized what we were "preparing" for. It was so funny as we went around the room listening to their ideas. Here are some of the funny ones:

Breakfast: Cap'n Crunch, Waffles & Sausage (no electricity girls!), Omelets (uh, were we planning on getting live chickens?), Fruit Smoothies (yeah, they aren't getting it are they?), and my favorite - bagels with flavored cream cheese.

OK . . . apparently breakfast ideas are going to need some help. SO, I explained again. Girls, these are foods that we can store without refrigeration. NO electricity, NO grocery stores. If it ain't in our food storage we have to make it ourselves or do with out!

Let's try dinner: taco salad (really? are they not getting it?), hamburgers-hotdogs with chips and soda pop, (what part of NO refrigerator are they not getting?), Enchiladas, (you realize we will have no cheese and we will have to make our own tortillas ourselves, right?), Hawaiian Haystacks (OK, that's better), Pasta, Pasta, and more Pasta. (I'm thinking this will be a GREAT diet plan for me!)

They did a little better on desserts: Brownies, cake, no bake cookies, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream (WHAT?? Can you believe each of them had ice cream down. "But we can make it mom!" "Yeah, where do you plan on getting the ice???" Best answer ever - "Next door from the neighbors!")

Well, we had a good time laughing and as you can see there is a lot of educating that needs to be done!

Upon reflection, I decided it wasn't all bad that they didn't "get it". Maybe it's ok that they are a little naive! Do I really want them to worry and feel concern? Of course, that's why we are preparing, so we aren't worried, but I think a little lack of understanding on their part is ok right now!

I did get some dinner ideas from them and now I'm ready to make my menu cards and start figuring out what ingredients I need!

Here is the link to Wendy's blog. If you want more info you can call or email me. You are welcome to borrow my dvd and see what you think.

I plan on keeping track of our Preparedness Journey this year on this blog. Hopefully, by year end we will have accomplished much and learned much!

We have already planned to do some solar cooking this summer and try our hand at making tortillas and such. We will take each recipe and prepare it how we would under survival conditions!

I'm looking forward to our preparedness journey! I know with my girls it's going to be comedy at it's best! :)