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How My Husband Got Me Interested in Prepping

Before I met my husband I was not a prepper.  Growing up we did have a garden each year and Dad hunted and we fished and put that up in a freezer, but that was to save on groceries.

I remember my Mother being afraid of canning because a pressure canner once blew up in her home as a child –in the1930s. We also went camping but that was just a hobby not preparing for anything that was ever said. My Dad had grown up very poor and this was what he could do to save money.  The evenings that we sat outside in the front yard and shelled peas and lima beans and snapped green beans to put in the freezer are now fond memories.

On the other hand maybe that was a part of prepping that was just normally done back in the 60’s when I was growing up. However, after my husband and I got married, and it did take years, but he finally convinced me that prepping was a way of life, and oh how that way of life has blessed our family time and time again. There have been many times that one or the other of us got sick or hurt or as a family we moved and because we had food storage, we did not have to worry about being hungry.

Our daughter moved away from home and got married we would take her food from the storage at least every month.  When she moved back into town she said she really missed the food storage because there were times when she went hungry because they did not have enough money.

I’ve talked to many people that said they did not have enough room for food storage and I told them if it was important enough to you, you would find the room.  Just from a money standpoint food storage makes sense.  You buy food when it is on sale for the times it is not on sale.  It is not that you have wheat, honey, salt and powdered milk in bulk in the basement and you say I have my food storage. Food storage is all of the food you have in your home, even what you are eating on at the time. It is going to Farmer’s Markets and buying in quantity when food is in season and in bulk and putting it up for a rainy day.  I say the squirrel is “coming out” in me, it’s a natural thing to do.

When most people used to live on a farm they put food up when it was time for harvest.  During the fall the stores will put baking supplies on sale, you just purchase enough to last you till the next fall when it goes on sale again.

The final straw was when my husband asked me what I would do if I had to take the mark of the beast or whatever the government would hold over you, or not be able to feed our children. How could I look our children in the eyes and tell them we do not have any food.  We provide for our children in every way we can, if we hear of food shortages all over the world and not have food storage already put aside, what are we telling our children?

The way I look at it is we have food storage FOR our children more so than for ourselves. And that goes for the rest of prepping; their safety, heat, lights, health, clothes, hygiene, education, spiritual health and anything else that they would need.

Prepping is not a quick fix, but a way of life that we are thinking about what to do next, to provide for our children.  And with us it has not only provided for our children but now for our grandchildren and are they not worth everything we can do?

How we got started in Preparedness

How we got started in Preparedness

My husband and I have been married 35 years and we started from the beginning of our marriage putting extra food by for a “rainy day”. Then the more my husband taught me about preparedness, the more I understood the importance of it. So we ramped up our ‘rainy day’ storage to include material, larger clothes for the kids and camping supplies and clothes.  After we joined the LDS church we had the Bishop’s storehouse available to us, so we really started to increase our supplies by adding bulk grain and beans to the ‘rainy day’ storage.  At that time we did not have the money to buy the cans and boxes so we put the food up in 2 liter coke bottles and juice bottles.  We also added water storage at that time.  Then when job pays became more generous we started putting food up in #10 cans and 6 cans to a cardboard box.  At that time we started getting cramped in space and got more creative in our storage, which we will talk about at a later time. I did object to food storage for a little while until my husband informed me of the importance of it.  He said what would you do or give up to get food for our children when they are hungry?  Some good shows to watch were “The day after”, “Red Dawn” the older one, “Dante’s Peak”, “Enemy of the State” and “The Day After Tomorrow” were ones that I watched and helped describe to me what [and why] we needed to prepare for.

Growing up I had some exposure to preparedness, we always had a garden and put food up from the garden. Then we would go to the local farmer’s market and get more peas and green beans and pecans. We would fish and put that up and my Dad would hunt.  Mom would buy extra paper products, toilet paper and paper towels. I also remember my mother and me taking my Dad to work early in the morning and my mother was dressed in her housecoat and slippers and I had my pajamas still on.  Now that I think about that, what would have happened if we had been in a wreck or if the car would have broken down.

That was the extent of it growing up, but I did have some prior training.  My grandfather loved to put food by for the winter, we said it was the squirrel in him, but he said it was just common sense. I remember the family at barbeques when he would cook a whole goat and then everyone would take some of it home and every time mother would warm some of it up for dinner, I would remember my grandfather.

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