Imagine living in a house that has no television, no microwave, no WII game system, and basically no quick, convienent meals in a minute. A house where dinner time is about 4:30 in the afternoon, instead of 9 or 10 at night, fresh outof the microwave and onto your lap so you can watch the newest CSI whereever!
Imagine a place where clothes shopping doesn't mean the mall, watching a movie means a DVD, board games get played and books are read rather instead of part of the home decor sitting on a shelf, and library cards are actually used. Imagine a world where solitare is played the old fashioned way with a deck of cards instead of a click of the mouse.
Remember the days when a box of 64 Crayola crayons opened your eyes to an entirely different world, and now they have an even bigger box that has 96! The days where coloring books were a treat and we drew pictures to color, rather than print them out of the cool web site we found.
Imagine not going to McDonalds every week, even though Happy Meals are a mere $1.99, not ordering pizza every week, and not having a never ending supply of soda in the house daily.
Imagine a world that had stay home mothers, dinners eaten at a table that were cooked, not ordered in or premade hot and ready to put on the table fresh out of the box or bag, a world where kids had to clean their rooms and not get an allowance for it. A world where children played outside, instead of video games all day long. A world where commericals didn't infuence every toy, piece of clothing or what brand of cleaners we bought.
I remember that world fondly. And in our effort to live more simply in a high tech world, we are incorporating a lot of back to basics into our lives.
Our house has television, but no cable and oddly enough we don't even have an antennae and that craazy box to get local channels from. No satellite with Dish Network or Direct TV. We do have DVD players and movies and once in the while we rent the $1.00 movies from the Blockbuster Box at Publix, but more often we borrow them with our library cards instead.
Our house has book shelves and we actually take the books off the shelf and read them, and again we use those library cards to have access to other books we don't have.We don't have the newest game system, and though we do play some games on the computer we play Scrabble, Monopoly, Life and a huge array of other board games at the dining room table. We have jigsaw puzzles, paper, crayons, and a variety of craft items.
We have no idea what we can Shout out of our laundry anymore, or what laundry soap the tv tells us has the best scent, or what shampoo can make our hair look like the models. Over 18 months ago we got rid of cable in our home and that eliminated all the product hype, all the newest toys, movies, fashions, from our daily view. Imagine this we have five children in this house and they have all survived the lack of television.
In our world we have a 15 year old girl who has decorated the walls of her room with her own colorful drawings, not posters of the hottest celebrity, or the most recent movie star heart throb. We have a 17 year old who does jigsaw puzzles and glues them with puzzle glue to hang on the walls of his room. We have a seven year old who wants a story read each night and goes to sleep without Spongbob or whatever the newest cartoon craze is blaring obnoxiously in the back ground.
I have some children that not only read for pleasure, but have actually put books on reserve at the public library. I have children that volunteer their time for free to a variety of places. My kids no longer remember what an allowance is, it has been so long since they have gotten one, and yet for the most part they keep those rooms clean for free, because it is their room, and thereby not my job to clean them.
We don't have a microwave, it quit working nearly a year and a half ago, and oddly enough it just hasn't been a priority to replace it, even though we could for less than $50.00 these days. Seems to me we have gone this long without it, so we obviously don't need it. Of course that means popcorn cooked on the stove in our stove top popcorn maker, and my 13 year old makes the best popcorn. It also means no meals in a minute, but guess what we have that solved to, by actually cooking and eating dinner at 4:30 at the dining room table. Our meals are not interuppted by televison or telephones.
We do have a box of 64 Crayola Crayons, and I am thinking for Christmas maybe we should get one of the 96 count, if for no other reason to figure out how we have that many colors! And we have some coloring books and a variety of other craft items for pleasure. We do have a couple of the older game systems, but oddly enough we still have kids who play outside. They have bicycles, but no go carts, no 4 wheelers, and again they have survived, and I probably have a few less gray hairs from not having those particular worries.
They are all active in sports, thereby helping get them to the dinner table at 4:30, as we eat before we got to the 6 o'clock practices rather than after them. We do not have soda in the house very often at all, and though we bake something nearly every day, we have not got the endless supply of chips, Oreos, Doritos, snack cakes etc., that the store is full of. Imagine that no Hot Pockets, no pizza rolls, no Pop Tarts! And somehow on regular home cooked meals, fruits and veggies as snacks, peanut butter crackers made at home with saltines rather than the ready to open orange cracker ones, everyone is healthy. Soda is a rarity in our house, and yet they don't seem to mind having koolaid, or gatorade mix, or water instead. They have adapted well to our desire to downsize to a more simple life, less high tech and less convienence oriented.
Are they perfect absolutely not! Is this kind of life for everyone, probably not. But for us, it helps cut the bills some, giving us a little more help in me being a stay home mother. And it teaches valuable lessons in finding what your true needs are, and how to put priority in order. I know when we got rid of the cable, my kids thought the world would end. It didn't and they adjusted very well. When ordering pizza and going through drive thrus became a rarity, maybe 3 or 4 times a year, they actually began to appreciate it as an extra, looking at it as something special not something that was a part of daily life.
I am looking for even more ways to downsize our lives, and steer us more into the simple world and out of the high tech, give me, selfish world that surrounds us all. I'll keep you posted on what we try in our efforts to live simple in this chaotic high tech world.
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