Living on Less

My daughter kneading some bread dough with me standing by to help.

I've always been fascinated with simple living and enjoying simple pleasures. But modern entertainments are very addicting and very hard to break away from, especially when everyone you know has the latest technology and expect you to know what they're talking about. (We've resisted the new smart phones and like using our prepaid cell phones, but for some reason the smart phones don't seem to be going away!) The hardest thing for us to get rid of is Netflix.

I ran across this interesting article that talks about living simply and a couple's story about how they drastically reduced their cost of living. It gets a little soap-boxy toward the end, but I think there are some interesting principles he discusses in there.

"How We Went from $42,000 to $6,500 and Lived to Tell About It!" 

Now that we finally own our little piece of land, we have so many better things to do than to be entertained by technology! Yesterday is a good example. We did a ton of yard work. We even got my garden tilled. Yay!

Other things I got done: I dug up a random round flower bed in the yard, cut out some sod from where I wanted our garden, and laid sod over the patch. We moved big rocks (and broke the wheel barrow - oops!), dug up daffodil bulbs, marked off a flower garden, and transplanted tulip bulbs. I set my 5-year-old son to digging up a line of bricks at the end of the gravel driveway by the house and he really got into it. He was so cute to watch - digging up a single brick, exclaiming how cool it was, and running over to the flower patch at the other end of the yard to lay the brick in the trench I'd dug to mark the bed off. Back and forth, back and forth he would go so busy, busy, busy. He loved it! After awhile he and his little sister were looking red-faced from being in the sun, so I sent them inside to cool off with some lemonade and to watch some "Busytown Mysteries". (alas, that blasted Netflix!) After awhile my son started crying, and begged me to let him go outside to dig up more bricks. Unfortunately, he had finished his job, but I was so happy that he liked the work. I think children need to work, just like adults do. It's so satisfying and rewarding and it can be so fun!

I need to think more about how we can realistically simplify our lives even more, because I know we have room for improvement and there's so many things that I'd like to do, but succumbing to entertainment has wasted a lot of my time. I need to take that time back!

On a side note, I found this site that had a neat list of homesteading magazines.