I’ve been reading some homemaker blogs lately. They make me feel inferior. I haven’t converted my 42 ft x125 ft city lot into a vegetable garden and I have no idea what steel cut oats are, or why you would soak them. I also don’t stay home all day. Minor detail.

With all the nesting urges I have floating around my head, taking in more information on how to be the perfect, self-sustaining, Christian homemaker according to some lady on the interweb is probably a VERY bad idea.

But these blogs are just so addicting.

Did you know you could make your own sunscreen? Seriously. Totally natural, and totally effective, even for little blonde Swedish offspring (I’m told) but totally without the chemicals found in commercial products.

Canning is all the rage again. The canning bug must skip a generation, like baldness or fraternal twins.

Apparently cleaning products might be messing up people’s fertility. Good thing I found a blog called Naturally Knocked Up to tell me how to avoid such things.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all bashing the intentionally simplified, organic, back-to-basics, wood and glass instead of plastic, crop-sharing, chemical-avoiding, frugal lifestyle. Exactly the opposite: I’m envious of it.

I’m also entirely overwhelmed by it.

Do I need to be harvesting organic rutabagas out of my own yard for me to be wisely using the resources God has given our family? What if I don’t feel like ordering zinc oxide from a website (because Lord knows Target doesn’t carry it) so that I can make my family fresh, natural sunscreen? Will my family surely shrivel up and die if we keep using Banana Boat? And what if, what IF I happen to really like my Clorox bleach wipes? ::gasp::

While half of my brain is thinking nasty, incredulous thoughts toward these women, the other half is saying “What a great idea. I should get into canning – think of the money saved!” and “She’s right. It does feel better to know you can actually breathe when you’re using natural cleaning agents”.

So, to stop myself from either a) dismissing the genuine benefits of living simply or b) going completely off the deep end, I’ve decided to choose a couple of these practices and try them out. ‘Try’ is the operative word here. If it doesn’t work for our family (which consists of¬† DanO, my tummy, and me right now), then I don’t think it would be right for me to force it. Our happiness is more important to me than our sustainability rating. (Oh yes, they make quizzes for that type of thing.)

For the time being, I’ve decided to try out:

• Glass containers instead of plastic ones for long-term food storage.
• Making 2 batches of meals at a time and freezing one for future use.
• Splitting a share of an organic CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) farm this summer-fall.
• Buying meat, veggies, and other frozen products in bulk (thus¬† the extra freezer we just purchased).
• Throwing away all commercial cleaning products and detergents (for both home and bathroom) and making my own from scratch.

::ahem::

Yea, that last one is a bold-faced lie. DanO would kill me.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under Blogging, Budgeting, Life With The Os, Walking with the Lord. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.