Welcome To Our Simple Days

Welcome to Our Simple Days. My name is Kim and for as long as I can remember simple living has always been a part of my life. I grew up in a very small town in Michigan and you learned to make due or do without. I can remember clipping every coupon that I could find, even as a young girl, and making the 2 hour drive to the “big city” where they would double those coupons. We would try to buy as many groceries as we could for as little money as possible. We would supplement perishable groceries at the local markets in our town, but at a higher cost.

In my early 20’s I discovered a love of natural and organic living. This came at a time when the organic movement we know today hadn’t even been heard of. I remember watching a talk show on television and it had Olivia Newton John talking about a book called “Diet For A New America” and I was fascinated! I taped the talk show on our VHS player when it replayed and rewatched it numerous times trying to pick up on any new piece of information I may have missed previously. I ordered the book from our local book store and when it finally came in I read it cover to cover several times. I was hooked. Remember I mentioned that I came from a small town… Many of my friends didn’t really understand how I could be interested in something they hadn’t ever heard about and I did get some crazy looks and a few of them thought I had lost my mind and was becomming a hippie.

In small town Michigan in the late 1980’s I didn’t know what to do or how to start. Our town had no recycling facilities, no health food stores, the local library had no books on naural living or anything on environmental issues… So I did what I could do easily, I rented a garden tiller and ripped out a good chunk of the lawn in my Mother’s back yard and put in a garden. I found that I loved to garden and that little garden really produced for me. What I couldn’t grow we bought from local farm stands. I also learned basic canning & jam making.
Over the next few years I met the man who would be my husband and we moved to Las Vegas where he was stationed with the Air Force. We moved into a small apartment and I was thrilled to find out that our complex was just starting a recycling program. Las Vegas was trying to get a recycling program started for their residents which would one day be make it possible for every home in the valley to have curb side recycling pick up (which is what we now have today). I found my first health food store in Las Vegas too. I was amazed the first time I went to Wild Oats (which has since been bought out by Whole Foods). I loved wandering through all the aisles of that store. My husband and I would go there and do bulk food shopping since it was just the 2 of us.

We were in Las Vegas for 2 years when my husband found out he got orders to be stationed in Iceland. We fell in love with Iceland. We were blessed with clean air, geothermal heating in our apartment, pure water fresh milk, eggs, bread and fish. When we needed produce that we couldn’t purchase on base, the local groceries carried organic produce. It was in Iceland that both of our children were born, had our first glimpse of the Northern Lights and I experienced first hand how kind the people of Iceland were. I also witnessed Icelandic parents parking their baby prams outside of stores, while their babies slept inside, without fear that when they came out of the store their child would not be there. I watched strangers walk up to a pram with a fussy baby and soothe the baby and wiggle the pram until the baby fell back to sleep and then they would proceed on their way. There is nothing more precious to the Icelandic people than children and all children are loved by everyone.

After our 4 years in Iceland were over, my husband was stationed back in Las Vegas. Back we went with a toddler and a baby. We bought our first house and I tried to put in a small garden, without luck. The extreme heat of a Vegas summer burned everything up. So I started looking for other options. We had 2 small children and we were a one income family, I tried to make our budget stretch as far as possible. I bought as much fresh produce as I could from our local military commissary since this was the cheapest grocery option for us at the time. I found grocery stores that sold “local” produce (which meant that it was grown in the states around us) and we found an orchard here in town that we could go and pick our own, apples, apricots, peaches and some vegetables. I would take my children to the orchard and have them help pick produce with me. I thought that if they helped with it they would eat it.

Over the years since coming back to Las Vegas, my husband retired from the Air Force & my kids grew up (they are 22 and 19 now). We have had illnesses that reaffirmed time and again that we need to do better with our health and I have been trying to find more natural choices for our family. I have also realized that I want to slow down and enjoy every day. I want to enjoy the time that I have with my children before life steps in and they start their own families.

This blog is my way of sharing my journey with you all. I want to share how my family finds healthy food options, natural health remedies, home made personal care items, chemical free cleaning options, simple living tips, and fun things we find to entertain ourselves. I hope that you all can find something here that helps you in your lives. I am not an expert by any means at all. I am a wife and mother and someone who even after nearly 30 years still loves to learn about simple and natural living.