Our Special Week

Our family tradition of our Special Week began a few years ago when Dave and I felt a great need to teach our kids to be grateful for always having food to eat, clothes to wear, toys...yes the abundance of toys, electricity, TV, microwave, warm beds, air-conditioning and all the other conveniences we are blessed with. We decided to make one week out of the summer resemble as close as possible to living without...without what? Without. Just living without. All the wants that we come to think of as needs. We don't use lights or TV. When it gets dark, there is nothing to do but go to bed. We eat things from natural sources. Fruits and veggies things that can be made from scratch like bread and tortillas. We try to rough it (laugh) as much as possible in a neighborhood. The kids wash clothes and hang them to dry. They wash their dishes by hand after each meal outside with the hose. This year I wanted them to feel a sense of duty to help provide for the families basic needs. So each morning they did hard labor for three hours. Scrubbing window sills and floorboards. Deep cleaning cupboards and lots of yard work. They would earn money for their work and then combine the money to buy the food at "the market" which was like a fruit stand I set up each afternoon in the backyard and they would have a shopping list of ingredients for dinner that night. So they were responsible for working to buy the food for that nights dinner. Which is not uncommon for children in other countries to have to earn money with the family for basic needs like dinner. If our kids didn't work...they didn't get dinner that night. Their first job of mopping the kitchen floor we had so much arguing and complaining that at the end of it I told them they weren't getting paid for that job. They did a little better after that.

Monday morning I woke them up at 5:45am to gather apples (tied to the back tree) and eggs from the barn (in the shed) for breakfast and to gather firewood (pine cones) that were scattered around the yard. They were less than thrilled to wake up at such an early hour.

Here's the boys doing some hard labor.

The food from the market. Brown rice, green beans, an onion and they had money left over for some nectarines and lemons.

Washing dishes.

Baking bread. I know lots of you bake bread a lot...I do not. It wore me out. Baking baking baking. I felt like I was constantly preparing for the next meal. Bake bread in the morning so we can eat lunch that day.


We had a great time picking peaches with the kids and it was extra fun with Jon and Heidi in town.

That is our new puppy in the picture with us....umm...that's a whole different subject.

My favorite part of our special week is to walk up the stairs by candle light and have the kids brush their teeth and get ready for bed by the light of the candle. Eventually when the kids get older we'd like to expand our special week and take them somewhere in the world in central or south america so they can actually see how other people live and do some service like working in an orphanage like my sister did or do some building projects. But for now this will have to do. Hopefully they are learning something. If not it will be a fun memory anyway. I can hear them now, "Remember when mom made us take a shower in the hose outside?...yeah that was weird."