Little House on the Praire
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Things were certainly different back then, most say simpler, but I'm not sure they would of used the word "simple". But what I realized last night, while sitting around the kitchen table with Taylor and Campbell sewing our Christmas stockings (thanks for that skill Mom), is how detached we've gotten from doing things ourselves. I'm not suggesting that we should all go and buy a loom and make our own rugs, but there is a certain amount of satisfaction in creating things from scratch. So far we've made almost all the ornaments for the tree, which includes paper snow flakes hung up all around the RV. Taylor and Campbell completely sewed there own stockings, and one for Daisy and Rosie, made from cheap Christmas towels we bought at Kohls.
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I literally woke up this morning thinking about Little House on the Praire, and how much I feel like we are living it. We live in a 350 square foot "house", it has one bathroom, one bedroom, two bunk beds, no dish washer, limited hot water (Jen has developed a kid bathing technique, where she fills up the 2' x 3' tub, which empties the 10 gallon hot water tank, sticks in both kids and let's them play in there a little giving the hot water tank a chance to heat up again, then she goes back in and uses the shower head to wash them), a small refrigerator, no garbage disposal, no TV, 4 bowls, 4 plates, 4 glasses, (we had ten, but one of our two RV drivers drove over a curb the other day throwing open the cupboard door and all glasses to the floor:-), we sweep the floor with that... what's it called, oh yeah, a broom, and we home school.
It's not all a party living in such a tight space, for some reason the designer of this RV created a narrow hallway, a bottle neck that connects the front and the back, I think he did it on purpose as a relationship test. During our times of limited patience and crankiness, this space is quite challenging because only one person can walk through at a time. Jen quickly coined it Anger Alley, it's only 21.5 inches wide. This is where our family will make it or break it, if we can survive Angry Alley for the year, we'll be OK;-)
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I would of thought I'd miss the "conveniences" of our old life, but having a hand, literally, in almost everything we do each day is fun and satisfying. I can't say I specifically miss anything. But to pull it off, you need more time, everything takes more time. But remove driving, shopping, TV watching, long school days, limited work hours, frees up a lot of time. We've been using that time to take more time doing things, even writing that feels anti-American in a strange way, the fact that we are not using every minute of the day to do something "productive", hmmm.