Lessons learned

I have been thinking a lot about this challenge and I can't believe how much I learned. I am so thankful we did this. We live on the San Andres Fault so the chances of a large earthquake where we lose power, water and grocery stores are closed is pretty high.

I have heard the Bishop select families for this the past few month, so I have been stocking up on canned food. I had a false sense that we were prepared. While overall we were ok with food. I learned several areas that we need to improve on. 

I am thankful I learned these things without an emergency so we can get prepared.

Supplies I need to get:
Paper plates- We never use paper plates so we had none on hand. If we lost water for even a few days I would not want to waste water on cleaning dishes.

Rubber gloves- These would have been great to have when I was cooking dinner. My hands had raw chicken juice in them and I had a hard time picking up the gallon jug of water with one (dirty) hand while washing off the other hand only to realize that I had to hold the (now dirty) jug handle with my clean hand. I felt like a blonde joke in action. This would have been so much easier, faster and more sanitary if I could have just pulled off and thrown away disposable gloves.

Hand sanitizer- Again to save water on hand washing.

Clorox wipes

Glow sticks- Home Depot has 12 hour snap glow sticks for $1.98. These are perfect to stick in a pair of shoes under the bed. 

Food I need to stock up on:
Canned vegetables. I almost always buy frozen so if we lost power we would be in trouble.

Canned chicken and tuna fish. My kids love tortilla soup. I made it with everything canned including the Costco canned chicken and it was really good. (recipe below) We had tortilla chips in the cupboard, but it is easy to make homemade tortillas. 

Canned soup- Since we were out of turkey and saving bread for school lunches, I had to forgo my daily sandwich for soup everyday.

Gallons of water- In addition to little water bottles, I had 2 gallons of water in the garage. These were very helpful to have next to the sink. Being very conscious of conserving water, I used a whole gallon just cooking dinner and washing off the carrots and potatoes and my hands.

Final thoughts:

On last Sunday when we received this challenge we explained why we were doing this to our girls.  It did not go over well. 

They were all very upset and Ruby started crying and said 

"Doesn't the Bishop know that you have 3 children to feed??? Can't he call someone else????

It didn't take long before they got into it and started to view it as a challenge or game and even though Ruby never understood the why, she still wanted to be obedient. Side note- On Tuesday Ruby announced to her class and teacher that we could not go to the store to get any food because our church wouldn't let us.- lovely

I received tons of phone calls from friends and family asking if we need anything.   Several people were willing to bring us anything we were out of.   While these offers were tempting, I knew that we were ok and not in serious need. It did make me grateful to have such wonderful people worried about us and I realized that if there were a big disaster we would all be helping out each other! 

You can click on the photo to enlarge the image.