Weekly Assignment, Food Storage and Emergency Preparedness Ideas (Week of July 21st)

Hi Carson Ward Family, Family and Friends,

We are back! We spent the last two weeks traveling and with our children and grandchildren in Utah and witnessed the Name and Blessing of our 20th grandchild. What a fabulous time we had with our family! Two of our children and their children caravaned back with us to California! And of course, there was the wonderful treat of homemade ice cream from the Cache Diary in Beaver, Utah. A must stop each time. And of course, we could not forget the "squeaky cheese" for our son-in-law. A fun treat, when you bite into it is squeaks!

Blessings of Vegetable Gardens and Grandchildren:

This week after getting back from Utah we have our daughter and grandchildren visiting from Missouri. We are having fun being together. Our grandchild especially love our vegetable garden and finding ripened tomatoes each day and eating them in our salad. Today we harvested our carrots we have been growing.

What fun they had digging in the dirt and finding surprises, large carrots, fat carrots, small carrots and ones that braided themselves together as they grew. What a joy it was to spend time with them and talking. They also loved the worms we found throughout the dirt. Now we will scrub the carrots, peel them, slice them, blanch them and then freeze them to have all year. I will get one more crop once I plant new carrot seeds. We will have some with our dinner tonight.

The corn is coming along, and so far we are enjoying fresh tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, bell peppers and other vegetables we planted.

The blessings of a vegetable garden are spending time as a family tending and harvesting the vegetables as you talk, especially with our grandchildren, harvesting the vegetables and eat them immediately, sharing with neighbors, freezing and canning them for future use, saving money and it adds to our food storage. Planting a small seed and watching it grow is such a miracle to me and my grandchildren. That from that little seed you get carrots, radishes, tomatoes, corn. zucchini, yellow squash, bell peppers, pumpkins and many other vegetables.

It is still not to late to plant some vegetables. I will get another crop of carrots and corn. After the Fall harvest I will plant the cool vegetables, which are lettuces, celery, broccoli and others. Living in California we can have a vegetable garden almost the whole year.

Weekly Assignment: 72 Hour Individual Emergency Stressor Kit...

If you have been following the blog this past two weeks you should have completed each family members 72 Hour Individual Emergency Preparedness Personal Hygiene Kit. Now we are onto the last kit, the Stressor Kit. If you have missed any of the weekly assignments go back to the last week in December 2013 to complete Food and Personal Hygiene Kits.

What is a Stressor Kit? A Stressor Kit is a kit that will help you and your family members during a disaster or stressful situation. If provides things to do. There are 10 items in this kit. We will add one or two items each week.

This week add the following:

1) Paper pad and a pen or pencil (with a sharpener) for each members Stressor Kit.

2) For the parents--a copy of all your insurance. Auto, Homeowners/Homeowner-Condo/Renters, Life, Personal Articles, Personal Umbrella, Business Policy(ies), Medical, any type of insurance you have. If you do not want to make copies (which is better because it shows your coverage and information), then list the insurance company name, phone number and address, the type of policy, the policy number, your insurance agent or broker name and phone number. Note: You can reduce the size of the insurance policy and get several on one page the others on the back of the page.

Emergency Preparedness Ideas:

Why do you keep a tent in your car? While on our road trip to Utah, some of our grandchildren asked me why we have a tent in our car. I explained that we always need to be prepared. What if we were out and there was a natural disaster or an emergency situation where we could not get home. We would have our 72 Hour Individual Emergency Preparedness Backpacks and a tent for shelter no matter where we  might be trapped. They seemed to like the idea. I am all about be prepared no matter where I am!

How can our food storage help us with our personal finances? Last night at our BYU-Idaho Pathway Gathering we were talking about finances and how to avoid debt and other financial issues. We are currently Service Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints BYU-Idaho Pathway Program.

Being an Emergency Preparedness Leader and advocate of always being prepared, I explained that having food storage and emergency supplies could also help with our finances. If we lost our jobs, had serious health issues and could not work, or were hurt on the job and ended up on Disability, we would have our food storage to help us through by not having to spend a lot of money on groceries for ourselves and our families. Several years ago our 6 months of food storage help us greatly when my husband was injured on the job and could not work for 3 months. Disability does not cover all the bills.

Comments: All your comments, ideas, suggestions and experiences are welcome! We all learn from each other. Thank you for your comments.