School, Simple Living, and “Stuff”
We had a good start to the school day with all of us watching “The Story of Stuff”. It dealt with a lot of the issues I have been trying to teach the children and myself. Last week I started a Frugal Friday post, but didn’t finish it in time. Looking at this 20 min video confirmed to me what I was trying to put into writing (and hopefully will finish writing and be ready to post this Friday).
As we get back into the school year, and settling into our homestead, there are lots of issues to deal with. First of all we have to get used to actually doing school at home, instead of on the road, on an airplane, in between moves, at other people’s houses, etc, etc, etc. Secondly, we have to deal with doing school at the kitchen table, in a small house, without enough space to have all our school stuff out. Both are a challenge. The first one will happen eventually… slowly. The second one needs a lot of work!
I have decided to pack away a lot of the school books that sit on the shelf “in case we need them” during the year. It hurts to do this, because I love to just get up in the middle of something we are studying and say - “Hey, let’s look up some more about that in this book!” I have a LOT of old National Geographics that I got from the op shop or from friends, for example. But I don’t have the space to put them out. I am going to pack them away…. but then a voice says to me… Why are you doing that?! Once they are packed away, will I really ever look at them again?! Probably not. I guess I am thinking that one day we might build a school room in the shed, and then I’ll have lots of space to put them all up on bookshelves… and in the meantime they can just sit in the huge shed we have. The main thing is that I need to get as much as possible out of the house so that it is easy to maintain, clean, do school, etc.
I am really not that bad at getting rid of stuff. I do it all the time. We never have garage sales or sell stuff. We give it away. The Lord has blessed us by receiving free things, and we bless others in the same way. It’s just that we have moved into a house that is half the size of our old one, and I need to make tough choices. 
Back to the video “The Story of Stuff” . It generated a great discussion with the kids. They talked about toys and stuff they had that had been cheap and broke the first day they had it. They talked about things that they have had for a long time, and that they thought was worth the money they spent and worth keeping. One of these things was Lego. We still have the Lego I played with over 30 years ago. They agreed that a big thing was to stop spending, even though this is very hard to do. Daniel initially gave the example of the Playstation as a good buy…. then when I made him think about it a bit more, he sheepishly agreed that we were on Playstaition number two, and the controls had this wrong with them and that wrong with them…. I think he started to get the picture.
We talked about growing things ourselves to avoid packaging. We looked at how many things were “needed” to sell meat in the shop - the styrophome tray, the plastic/paper thingo to absorb blood & liquid, the glad wrap, the labels, the ink on the labels and the glue on the labels. Compare this to one plastic bag when we kill our own meat. I could hear the gears turning around in the kids’ brains!
It’s not easy for any of us to change our lifestyle - whether it is us as adults or the children who have to do what their parents are doing. We have moved to the country deliberately. The price paid is the highest for my dh, who has to commute every day, for almost a total of 5 hours. We want to teach the children why we are doing this - why we grow veggies, why we want to grow meat, why we want to reduce our waste… This little video was a real eye opener for all of us. For me, it confirmed that we are on the right track. For the children it explained a lot of things they had no idea about.
Steps to simple living, sustainable living, homesteading…. all of these things are part of a journey we are on. It will take time to learn, but I am glad we have made the first steps.