Getting Kids ready for TEOTWAWKI.....

from SurvivalBlog.com

My wife and I are both in our late 30s and have just started living a life of preparedness. Unfortunately, we started this journey just after building a new house on 15 acres in Northeastern Minnesota. We wish we had a few years back to build over with a different frame of mind, but we count our blessings and enjoy our rural location. We live on my single income (about $70,000) and have four beautiful children, ages 4 through 9.

While having four children makes life a little more interesting financially, by being frugal, we have still been able to prepare with our limited disposable income. In the past three years we have:

Installed a wood stove to heat the house

Installed a hand pump on the well along side the electric pump

Put away over 65 buckets of food in Mylar bags and 5-gallon buckets.

Built a small inventory of ammo for hunting and defense

Bought numerous back-up items like: medical supplies, ordered a Big Berkey, a pressure canner, a grain mill, and put together a large pantry that would feed us for about a year.

Purchased the building materials to build an underground root cellar with a small cabin (16’ x 10’) over the top of it.

How did we do all this? We quit eating out as a family once every week or two. Now, if we go out for a burger or pizza, it is once a month or once every two months. We cancelled our cell phone coverage and bought a TracFone. We stripped down our land line to the bare necessity, and then we shut off our television service. In addition, we changed investment strategies to give us more money for practical goods. We bargain shop and buy online a lot through eBay and other such sites.

Preparedness with Kids

Having supplies is great, but a true plan must have the full family accounted for. If it were just my wife and I, it would be much easier to prepare, not only financially, but logistically. With kids involved, there is much more to think about. The first step in preparedness with kids is in really getting to know them. This may sound like a dumb statement, but it is vitally important to know each of you kids’ strengths and weaknesses. I will come back to this in numerous parts of this entry.

Conclusion

We have much to learn about preparedness, and our family learns more and more each day. My preparedness plan has my kids joining my wife and I in this adventure. From canning raspberry jam and green beans to learning how to start a fire to learning how to set the hook for their first fish, we just want our kids to learn more skills that will lead to a life of self-sufficiency. The more we do now, the better prepared they will be in the future. If TEOTWAWKI happens sooner than we want, we hope our simple household preparedness steps will help us serve the Lord in a time period where people will need it the most. 

read this GREAT article here....