Food Storage Made Easy (Step 3)

(For anybody who cares)
I've been working on step 3 of my food storage for a while now. Step 3 is to get a 3 month supply of food. This should ideally be foods that we eat already so that we can rotate it and not have it spoiling. The website gives you a great excel worksheegt to use that you just plug in foods that you eat and the ingredients and it spits out how much you need to have on hand for a 3 month supply.


So the difficult part for me is deciding exactly which things to include on my 3 month menu. I'm actually going to do it for a month and a half and then double it. Oh, I'm going to have to buy a small freezer chest in order to store the frozen foods (meats, cheese, frozen veggies, etc). I'll be able to use a lot of my recipes that we already eat, but the trouble is that I'm finding a lot of them have dairy products such as cream cheese, ricotta or sour cream. I can't really keep a 3 month supply of that! So, I'm currently experimenting with new "food storage recipes" to see if they are Nelson-Family-Friendly before I add them to my list....so this might take a while.
Oh, so I plan on us actually eating food storage foods 4 days per week once I'm done. In planning my food storage I'm going to be including a lot of canned meats, veggies, and fruits since they are shelf stable. But, I figure I can actually EAT fresh products and then throw the can of beans into a "To-Be-Donated" box as if I had eaten it and buy more so I keep it rotating.

I have to say that I'm glad that I'm doing step 3 because it will be nice to have the security of knowing that no matter what happens, we will be able to eat for 3 months independently of anything and anyone (assuming that we have power). That will be peace of mind.

Graduation

Today I graduation with my BSN in nursing with a 3.87 cumulative GPA. I've been going to school online through Brigham Young University Idaho for a few years now. Nice to be done. We celebrated graduation at home (sure beats driving 15 hours to Idaho to go wear silly hats and listen to boring speeches). This is my 3rd graduation of mine that I have not attended.





Steve gave me the best graduation gift ever which was to stay awake with our vomiting Kiera last night and let me sleep. THAT IS LOVE.

On a more serious note, I got to thinking about how much of my life I've dedicated to education and why it was that I did it. Yep, I'm a nurse, but my most important job is being a mother. SO, if it was worth it to spend those countless years reading textbooks endlessly about subjects that barely apply to my life, isn't it worth it to read a few books on parenting? I THOUGHT I was doing a fairly good job at parenting until I recently read the following:


It made me realize I'm not such an expert after all. I guess people who actually STUDY these things know more than me!
I'm not sure that I will ever attend official school again, but I do plan on continuing my education independently. It is amazing the wealth of knowledge that is out there that is very applicable to me (parenting, healthy cooking, food storage, influencing people). Here's to lifelong learning!

Goodbye Paci

After Lydia's 3rd ruptured eardrum in 2 months time I've decided that its time to get rid of the beloved paci. I've only really let her have it at bedtime, in the car, and too keep her quiet at church, but apparently that is enough to contribute to her ear infections. I dread doing it though as she is quite attached to it.

Sometimes I feel like my whole life is trying to wean a child from something. I'm just finishing potty training Kiera, I'm trying to get her to drink from a cup. I've been trying FOREVER to get her to drink straight water. I'm trying to get Lydia off the bottle (that will have to wait now). All of these thing make life difficult. I guess that is part of parenting!

Well, if you see Lydia at church with a paci in her mouth, don't judge me too harshly! This may be difficult!

6 years

6 years ago today I became the luckiest girl in the world when I married Steven Nelson. Anybody who knows Steve knows what a wonderful person he is. His best quality is that he is such a people-person. Everyone loves him. He prioritizes people over everything else in his life and that is why he has a ton of friends (including 9 year olds and 90 year olds). In our 6 years of marriage he has taught be quite a bit about "being social". Steve is going to make a FABULOUS dentist some day based soley on his people skills. He is a great husband and father.....6 years later we are still living happily ever after.



Here we are celebrating our 6th anniverary yesterday (so that we didn't break the sabbath). Interesting note: this is our FIRST TIME ever celebrating an anniversary since every year someone has either been deathly ill or we've been traveling 14 hours in a car, etc.....
Here's to many more years together.....and CELEBRATING more anniversaries!

Potty training and swimming lessons

On monday we threw all of Kiera's diapers in the garbage (and then fished them out later) We are full-on potty training around here, which is difficult enough...but we also added daily swimming lessons to the mix. Kiera so far does nothing but wail the whole time and still won't do anything but reach for the surface when she is dropped into the water. I'm hoping that that will soon change though as we have a great teacher.
I had to add the 2 cute pictures that were not related just to remind myself that it is not ALL trauma and drama around here....although it is close.

Starting "Food Storage Made Easy"

After several recommendations, I'm going to acquire and organize my food storage using the information on the website FoodstoragemadeEasy.com
The site is great and truly does make it simple and it keeps it organized too which is hugely important to me. I want to have everything mapped out on paper and not just random foods stocked in my house here and there. I'm going to posting my progress (slow as it may be).
Step 1: Food storage space. Done-- I've got closet in a spare bedroom. What I still need to acquire is a deep freezer.....
Step 2: Water storage. For our family of 4 we are supposed to have about 30 gallons of water. I've been filling up cleaned juice/soda bottles over the past 2 years and filling them with water to store in my garage. It was time for my yearly water rotation so we dumped them all out on my dying lawn:

To my dismay I found that about 1 out of every 5 of them had some mold stuff growing in the top. Yuck!

I learned that it is best to use a bleach solution to clean the bottles out (not just dish soap) and I also learned that I can't store them in the heat of the garage nor fill them up with the hose (the hose has chemicals).

So now they are all stored on the bottom Shelf of my closet. Rotating that much water every year in such small containers is going to be a PAIN so I think next year when it is time for rotation I'll just buy 10 3-gallon containers of water from the store.

Camping, Aquarium of the Pacific, Celebration park

We went camping yesterday with our friends the Records. It was our first time camping with kids (other than the once in the backyard) and I'd say it was highly successful. Kiera loved it. She loved the tent and danced in it for 15 minutes after setting it up. She loved her little camping chair. She loved roasting marshmellows and hotdogs (below is a picture of Kiera's first experience with a roasted marshmellow-- a little sticky!). She loved playing with her little friend Jamisen and was so excited to sleep in the tent. She had a little pleased look on her dirty little face the whole time we were there.
Oh, funny side note: as we were packing steve asked "So what exactly are we going to DO from 5pm to 10pm?" Obviously he isn't much of a camper. Thats ok because his little daughter is. Lydia wasn't too excited about it because I wouldn't let her play in the dirt. Maybe once she learns to walk....






We went to Celebration Park in Moreno valley which is a fun little water park. Too bad Kiera was interested in everything but the water. We played in the hot sun for 2hours and of course she wouldn't drink anything (she always does that when we are somewhere new and different). On the way home she was dry heaving from heat exhaustion.
Our 2 swimming expeditions this week were a little more sucessful.


We went to the Aquarium of the Pacific which was fun. Lydia appriciated the fish more than Kiera did. Kiera was excited about the stairs and climbing up on the ledge below each window (but not to see the fish-- just to climb).