Our Simple and Meaningful Life - Most Popular Posts

Two years ago in July 2012 I started this blog and wrote my very first Welcome Post as a way of documenting steps our family were taking with respect to "Living Simply".   With all things in life, you do what you can, when you can, and there's no "all or nothing" about Living Simply.  You simply start with one little thing and then add the next little thing and you keep going and basically never stop learning.

I know I could do a lot better with these things and I also know that I could do a lot worse as well and I'm proud of the things written about on this blog.  I recently wrote a post about the "Lifestyle Changes We've Made" towards this path of "Simple Living" and I was both surprized and delighted about what we have achieved so far.  You should try it yourself and whilst you may not think you are doing a lot, you can see just how far you have come by simply writing your little list of accomplishments down for your own records.

I thought I would gather together a list of the most popular posts so far from my blog for you to read in the one place.  Here are the most popular ones from the last two years:-

Flipflop Recycling Company

Readers Digest Homemade Book

Five Seed Bread

Slow Living Essentials May 2013

Sienna's Flannel Rag Quilt and her reaction when I gave it to her

Home Made Laundry Powder

Finding Happiness

Apple Slice Recipe

Homemade Turkish Pide

Simple Living & Being Organized

Home made Baked Beans

Adventures in Soap Making

I want to Remember

If you haven't read some of those posts before I hope they are of some interest to you on your path of simple living.  I know we all live in a modern world with technology and so many devices starting with an "I" so we have to find a happy medium of living in today's world but appreciating life's moments as well.  I know my children's lives will be so different to my childhood days because of technology, mobile phones, access to the world wide web etc.

We did not have computers at home when I was a child however my brother was 7 years younger than me so by the time I had left home Mum had bought him an Amstrad Computer.  It was all black and it had the black screen with green writing and that was a huge thing back then.  In my day we had to wait our turn to use the family phone (5 kids all wanting to chat to their friends in the evening) and of course we had to "dial" the number usually with your finger or a pen turned upside down if you didn't want to ruin your finger nails.

If you wanted to find out information for your homework you had to refer to the Encyclopedia  Britannica however our family couldn't afford this publication and instead had a set of blue Encyclopedia books from the Newsagent.  They still did the trick for homework research in my childhood days although when I visited my friends who had the Encyolopedia Britannica or a room of their own I knew they were rich.

We did have dishwashers and microwaves and TV's but all the kids in the neighbourhood road around on our bikes together, explored the creeks together collecting guppies and tadpoles, walked to the corner shop and all these activities were unsupervised but we were always together as a big group of kids.  We caught the bus to and from school including getting off half way to spend half your fare on lollies.  The bus from school to home was 10 cents and if we got off half way we paid 5 cents and then would go to the shop and get 5 cents worth of lollies (in those days you got 2 lollies for 1 cent so we would get 10 lollies like milk bottles, red raspberries, honey bears or chicko's) and then we would walk home the rest of the way.  We were kids doing things kids should be doing and whilst my kids have more advanced things like technology they don't have the childhood freedom that we did.  I'm not sure whether times have changed in terms of personal danger for children walking home from school, riding their bikes as well however I think with technology we all hear about these things the second they happen and we are more aware of protecting our children.

I know with technology I was actually watching the TV when 9/11 happened and I was watching live the 2nd plane crash into the Twin Towers and I couldn't believe what I was watching.  Apart from Professional News Camera's filming these tragic events you have just about every citizen with an iphone video device so the whole world and everyday people watch these events not only seconds after that happen but live pictures and videos as well.

So in 2014 my kids will have access to so much more technology than I did and whilst my son who is 10 loves video games (ps...I do not like them and monitor his usage like a hawk) he does have time on Friday afternoon or the weekends to have limited time with the x-box, iPad, iPod etc.    My daughter who is 8 will play for 30 minutes or even 10 minutes and then she is off outside and playing with the dirt, sticks and leaves.  I balance up the technology with good old fashioned board games like Monopoly and Scrabble which are some of our favourite board games and both James and Sienna love these games.

James and Sienna also play chess together and although I do not play chess, and personally, have no interest in it, I do encourage them to play.  I did however love Backgammon as a kid and writing this has just reminded me that I need to teach James and Sienna how to play.  Whenever I used to play Backgammon I would always have to refresh myself with the rules again before beginning to play.  Once you start playing it, it usually comes back to me but I had to remember where to put the pieces on the board to start with etc.

I think as long as you keep your kids grounded as you can with new and old, a bit like living simply in the suburbs vs the actual country, they will grow up to be lovely young people with an appreciation for everything life has to offer them.