One Vibrant Mama

You are here: Home / Archives for clothing

clothing

What will you do when you get that call?

by Leave a Comment

A few days ago, my best friend got that phone call that everyone dreads.

Your daddy has had a heart attack. The doctors don’t think he’ll make it through the night.

GET. HERE. NOW.

She did what everyone would do. She grabbed enough for a road trip, threw it in the car and took off for a long drive. All she could think about was getting there as fast as possible.

On the way there, she called me to let me know what was going on. Trying to stay calm, she recounted the conversation and what details she knew. She told me later that she didn’t even think about food until she hung up the phone with me, about half-way through her drive. She was headed to a large military town, but it only has one grocery store chain and no health food stores. She has multiple food allergies and doesn’t fare well when exposed to an allergen.

Her daddy did make it through the night. She was having to go to her mom’s house do laundry and had to run by the store to buy basic necessities. She was then faced with the dilemma of having to go to the limited-selection grocery store and find safe food, figure out what to fix without having any of her recipes with her, find safe pots and pans to cook it in at her mom’s house, and keep it safe and segregated in the fridge while a trail of friends and family come through the home. It took time away from being at her daddy’s bedside and provided to be a considerable stress.

Of course, if you have a cast iron stomach and can handle fast food, pot-luck, or hospital cafeteria foods for as long as you need, you’re ok in the food department. But what about clothing? Toiletries? In a rush to get out the door, would you forget something? If you have children, would you have to suffer through their boredom and confusion while you’re going through what can arguably be considered one of the most stressful events in your life?

What would you do? You’re lucky if all of your family lives locally, you can just call a friend and have them swing by your house and drop off whatever you might need and you can run home for food and sleep. But if you have any family out of town, how can you prepare so that you don’t have to worry? Is it possible to just grab-and-go, knowing you have what you need?

You need a bug-out bag.

[Read more…] about What will you do when you get that call?

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us

Busy Summer on the Mini-Homestead

by Leave a Comment

This summer has proven to be incredibly busy, much busier than I expected.  A few weeks ago, I felt like the Lord was tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to get organized quickly and declutter as much as we can. We have some elderly family members who might need assistance, and we need to prepare for that possibility.  So I have kicked myself into high gear, trying to school on our year-round schedule, do my job and handle the garden and daily chores in addition to the extra workload this presented.  And we have managed to accomplish everything on a shoestring budget while we save for some needed car and home repairs.

Despite spending time gardening and even expanding our garden, we have lost most of what we planted.  What the Mexican bean beetles and squash vine borers didn’t destroy, the chickens did when the town mowed down a post of our garden fence when they were tending the ditch with their machinery.  The chickens got in and decimated what was growing in short order.  What we have left is some green tomatoes we hope will ripen, about 5 sunflowers that are now over 10 feet tall, and we’re waiting now to see how the potatoes did.  The onions are still tiny, despite supposedly being close to time to be pulled.  We have replanted the winter squash on Monday and we’re now organizing to put the fall and winter garden in.

The last few weeks I have spent time at the farmer’s market, buying wholesale.  The Lord has plopped some incredible deals on produce in our lap.  While canning I worked a full week of VBS at our church and managed to wear myself out between the two.  We processed our extra roosters over a period of two weeks and sent them to freezer camp.  We cleaned out the freezer that needed defrosting and got everything organized in an effort to have enough space to hopefully purchase half of a cow this fall.  I found I had one whole shelf full of stock bones that I need to use. I also got all of the remaining meats grouped by type, to better help me plan our meals and use what we have wisely.

I have started setting up ‘centers’ for everything I do at home, where everything needed for that project is centrally located to where the work is performed.  I have created centers for laundry, baking, dry goods in use, personal care, herbs, school and work, gardening and more.  This inspiration came from listening to Vicki Bentley at the NCHE conference Memorial Day Weekend.  Vicki is an excellent speaker, and if you ever have the opportunity to hear her, I highly encourage you to do so.  I would be willing to drive to a conference just to hear her speak, she gave so much inspiration, encouragement and practical advice.  (You can purchase MP3s of Vicki’s presentations from the conference here.)  Her chore and star chart information alone has been a huge help to me in getting my kids motivated to do chores and take initiative without being asked.  Vicki said in one of her presentations that if you spend just 5 minutes looking for one item every morning and every evening, you waste over 60 hours a year.  I have found that I am going up and down the hallway and the stairs too often because things are not centrally located, and I wish to free up that time so I can accomplish more.

For the baking and dry good centers, I took one cabinet and placed my measuring cups and measuring spoons along with mason jars of xanthan gum, salt, baking soda, baking powder on the bottom shelf.  In racks hanging below the cabinet are all of my spices.  Each spice has a label on the lid so I don’t have to hunt for the correct one.  The rapadura, flours and dry goods are located behind me on a baker’s rack.  Each item in stored in a quart to half-gallon size mason jar with a labeled lid.  I do not have to take extra steps in the kitchen, saving me time and energy.  We also reorganized and deep cleaned the kitchen.

For the laundry center, we reorganized the laundry room so that we now have a rotating system for the clothes hangers, separated by type.  Each day when we get dressed, the empty clothes hangers get hung on each bedroom doorknob.  One child is tasked with the chore of retrieving all of the clothes hangers, taking them downstairs and putting each hanger where it belongs.  This has solved the problems with wrinkled clothing and additional ironing time because it had to be hauled up the stairs after coming out of the dryer while we hunt for the clothes hangers that fit the item.  And you know any time kids haul a piece of clothing, it’s bound to wind up wrinkled.  😉  All of the different clothing and fabric types now each have their own bin to facilitate quick sorting and washing of the laundry. We finally installed the utility sink that we purchased in 2007 in the laundry room.

For our school supplies we use daily, we repurposed a rolling cart which is now located within reach of my computer.  We also located a bookcase and the filing cabinet beside my desk in order to facilitate school, bill paying and handling my job.  Now, when mail comes in, I can handle it immediately and drop it right into the correct file folder in the filing cabinet.  Paper doesn’t have to be handled twice, nothing gets lost and I don’t worry about any bills or other important paperwork getting missed.  We located a locking cabinet with doors in an unused area of the living room that holds shoe-box sized rubermaid containers.  These boxes contain our items that are in pieces, such as the math blocks and flashcards, as well as the games and the small-piece items such as K-nex and Legos.

I updated my household binder (Flylady style) and created binders for family recipes, every mailer I have published, our school records, and the gardening and homesteading records.  I also have one binder where I keep info on ideas or things I want to try, build plans for potential projects and the like.

I obtained two rolling carts, one for each child.  These carts now hold the library books and are parked beside the homeschool cabinet. These carts are incredibly handy and stop the problem of having to haul the books to the car and into the library, breaking my back.  This has just about eliminated our hunting for a book that is due and it keeps the books out of the kid’s bedrooms.

I created two memory card boxes.  I used the Simply Charlotte Mason Memory System and made one for our scripture verses and made one for the myriad of other things I wish my children to memorize.  We have included everything from family members phone numbers to poems, science and history facts, songs and more.  These boxes set atop our rolling school supply cart.

I still have to get the dining room chairs recovered so we can reclaim our dining room table.  We are also looking for an effective storage solution for our canning jars, both full and empty.  Both of these projects are likely going to take some cash, so I’m looking for the most workable solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

—

KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us

Preparing for Winter Storms

by Leave a Comment

 

The road in front of our house after the December 2009 snowstorm.

This morning, I was much less than thrilled to hear the local forecasters predicting a major storm.  We often joke in this area that the local chain supermarket pays the weather man on the only Asheville TV station to forecast much more snow than we’ll wind up getting in a bid to sell extra milk, bread, eggs and bottled water.  Historically, they predict worse weather than we wind up getting so many people cook French Toast in their warm homes the morning after the storm, but this year that has not been so.

This could potentially be our second major storm this winter, with the prediction that we might get large amounts of snow beginning on Thursday.  We did see snow Monday and it’s been quite cold this week, so I won’t be surprised if we do wind up with another big storm. We went through an extended storm in December that dumped 15 inches of snow with 2-3 foot drifts with the power out for a few days and three downed trees on our house.  Some people in the immediate area went without power for a week.  Due to icy conditions on our roller-coaster road with no curb and sudden drops off the sides and multiple trees downed across the road, we were stuck in our house for a week.  We have one ‘hill’ at the top of our road that if you drive over at any real speed, you get the sinking feeling in your gut that you’ve just gone over the edge, like cresting the big hill at the beginning of a roller coaster.  We knew that getting out would be difficult at best since none of our vehicles have 4WD.  You might notice in the picture above that we’re living on a 3:1 slope and there are steeper places in our neighborhood.  The snow from that storm took over a month to melt on our little patch of the wooded mountain.  These storms are quite unusual for our area, but we must be prepared for them in case it does get bad.

Here is a list of what I do to prepare for a Winter snow or ice storm that could involve an extended power outage. [Read more…] about Preparing for Winter Storms

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us

One Hour

by 1 Comment

If you had one hour to leave your house, knowing that when you return it might not be there, what would you take with you?

Growing up in Florida, we never had more than minor damage to our home from a hurricane, but we had multiple friends and close family who literally lost everything but what they evacuated with in Hurricane Ivan in 2004.  They came home to unsalvageable houses after the storm, when authorities finally let them back into their neighborhoods.  What little was left from the flooding was covered in mold and severely water damaged after sitting under water for days.  [Read more…] about One Hour

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us

Sheltering In Place

by Leave a Comment

I was born and raised in Pensacola, FL, where hurricanes and their resultant tornadoes are an expected part of each summer.  We stayed home for them all and prepared for the potential flooding, damage and power outages that come with the territory, no mater their severity, realizing that it was just part of choosing to live in Florida. One of my earliest memories is getting out during the eye of a hurricane with my parents in the short period of time that it was sunny with no rain, to go check on an elderly neighbor since the phones were down.  The eye of the storm came up so quickly from the severe weather we were having that the calm was startling to me.

Currently living in the Appalachian Mountains, we don’t worry about the severe winds and surging tide from a hurricane, but we do worry about flash flooding taking out roads or ice storms and severe winds bringing down power, damaging the house and making our very steep road impassable.  We also have to give consideration to the nearby river in case it floods.  Several years ago, flooding from the remnants of a hurricane that came up through the Gulf of Mexico devastated this area and some roads are still not repaired.   Right before Christmas we had a snowstorm that brought in 15 inches of snow and had three trees fall on the house due to the ice that occurred after the storm.  We went without power for several days in severe (for this area) cold, and it was several days longer before our curvy and steep road was cleared of multiple downed trees and the road was plowed so we could get out.

Sometimes when disaster strikes, you have to stay where you are.  If you are unable to leave your home or you choose to stay during a disaster, it is called sheltering in place.  There are a number of things you can do in order to make sheltering in place a more pleasant experience.  Being prepared ahead of time for a potential loss of power, water and essential services can make life much easier for your entire family while you wait for things to return to normal.

What you should have on hand for sheltering in place depends largely on the type of crisis you could face.  Think about where you live.  Are you located near a river or body of water that could flood?   What roads cross that river and can you get around without them?  Don’t let the 100-year flood plain fool you, that 100 year flood has to happen sometime.  Anyone in weather, geology or urban planning can tell you that two one-hundred year floods can occur back to back.  Are hurricanes or earthquakes a possibility?  Tornadoes or severe weather that could take out power for a week?  What about forest fires, a flood or a train wreck taking out a road you need to reach town?  Maybe you still have power, but you can’t get to a store or easily get to medical treatment. [Read more…] about Sheltering In Place

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us

What if Haiti Happens Here?

by Leave a Comment

The world has watched in horror as the crisis in Haiti unfolds, as we did a almost five years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Haiti and Katrina have two things in common, both that we can learn from.  First, if the event is not extremely localized such as a tornado or chemical plant explosion, you can not expect help to come for 72 hours at the earliest.  Depending on where you are located and the severity of the damage, it might take much longer.  Second, the only person you and your kids have to depend on until help arrives is you.  [Read more…] about What if Haiti Happens Here?

Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us