I firmly believe that every individual and family should have as well a stocked pantry as their means will allow. Included in my concept of a pantry are both food and other basics, such a soap, diapers and frequently used medications.

Living by this principle has proved it’s worth to me many, many times. No one knows when the waves from life’s storms will hit, but almost everyone knows that at some point or another you will experience illness, loss of employment, emergencies or financial stress. These are common ailments and part of life’s grand parade of experiences. They don’t have to ruin you. Preparedness is the key.

We live in a very indulgent society, a world where instant gratification isn’t fast enough. Many people lack the wisdom and temperance to differentiate between needs, wants and plain old excess, and go into huge amounts of debt providing themselves things that are unnecessary. Too many people live on the edge, incurring luxuries without providing real stability; how we have seen the error of that line of thinking in recent events, as families with multiple mortgages or homes larger than they could realistically afford have struggled to hold on to basic necessities. It has been heartbreaking to see so many families faced with this challenge and primarily because people chose debt over savings, and extra over enough.

It reminds me of a quote from Thomas S. Monson, “Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their year’s supply of food … and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year’s supply of debt and are food-free.”

There have been many news reports lately detailing people’s trips to the store to stock up on necessities before a large storm. Wouldn’t it be great if the next time a blizzard or hurricane warning was issued you had no reason to leave the safety of your home to run to a crowded grocery with quickly emptying shelves? Having the ingredients to make a few basic meals and drinking water on hand is a safety issue, and a very simple need to fill.

Chris and I have always tried to follow the counsel to have extra in our pantry. There have been many occasions where an unexpected expense has crept up, and having enough food in our home to get us through to another paycheck has kept us out of debt. There have been times of struggle with illness and school debt where an extra few months supply made the difference between just plain not knowing what to do, and being ok.

Although I love the wisdom behind having a year’s supply, it is not something we have been able to obtain. The beautiful thing is that we try, and through that trying, we have always had enough when we needed it. Like Joseph of old, store in times of plenty, and you will have security during times of famine.

If you would like to get started on stocking your pantry:

Start small. Do what you can do with each paycheck. This is, for most people, a baby-step process. It wouldn’t be prudent to put a few month’s worth of food on credit, and most of us can’t afford to spend that amount out of our usual budget. Instead it must be built a week at a time. When you go to the store, see what is on sale that you use often. Buy a few cans extra and put them in your cupboard. If you have a larger budget, buy double ingredients for a meal/s you plan to have that week and store the extra.

It may seem almost pointless to put an extra $15 of food in your cupboard this week, but if this becomes a repeated habit, in six months you could have a pantry stocked with $390 extra, and that is significant. If you make stocking your pantry a real goal, you will probably be able to do even more. Making this a priority tends to open your eyes to how much you spend unnecessarily and how much farther you could get in your goal by trading the occasional simple luxury.

Now that we have the ingredients to do a few of our favorite meals tucked away, I often pick a theme for my grocery trip. Some months I put a few dollars extra toward baking supplies (chocolate chips were on major sale last month!), other months I buy double of the shampoo and toilet paper that we would use that month. Little by little, it adds up.

One of the best things about shopping to stock a pantry rather than for what you want to eat immediately, is that once your pantry is stocked, you only have to buy most foods when they are on sale. Canned soups and veggies go on sale three or four times throughout the year. If you only need to buy these items when you can get them on sale, you end up saving on all of your groceries.

When your pantry is well stocked, you find yourself needing to go to the store less frequently, which also saves you money and time. If you need to feed guests on the fly, you have what you need to do so. When your children get sick, you don’t need to run to the store to pick up basic groceries and sanitary items. When bad weather or natural disasters hit, you stay off of dangerous roads and away from panicked mobs of people in stores.

When your pantry is well stocked, you have the assurance that you have everything that is truly essential to your family’s well being, and the peace of being able to provide for them, even through life’s storms.

Resources:

I strongly recommend the following sites for information and advice on how to best build your well stocked pantry.

Provident Living

I have to add to this. I wrote this post a few days ago, and shortly after got the news that a family at our church had their home burn down. It was a total loss, and they were immediately in need of everything we usually take for granted. When the call went out for food and diapers, I was able to fill a box with several meals worth of food while still on the phone, grab an extra box of diapers and get them there within minutes. Because this was from my storage, I felt no financial pinch. In fact, I can still stay true to my goal of shopping every two weeks because I was prepared. When you are prepared, you can help yourself and other loved ones.

So, so cool.

One of my goals for the future is to do my grocery shopping only twice a month. I’m doing this for many reasons, all of which ultimately help me reach the goal of simplicity in my life.

The first of these reasons is time. I tend to go to the store twice a week at a minimum. Once is to do my shopping, and the second is to pick up what I forgot to pick up the first time I went. The weeks when I go a third time (or heaven forbid a fourth!) it is usually in response to a craving or a last minute idea of something I’d like to eat. Occasionally it is because I’ve simply run out of a necessity like toilet paper, shampoo or chocolate. At any rate, these many trips eat up both fossil fuels and my own energy. They remove my focus from the good I could be accomplishing in my own home, and send me to the store where I inevitably buy more than we need.

This brings me to my second big reason which is money. I cannot go into the grocery store and walk out with only the items I intended to purchase. I almost always think of two, three or twenty more items, and it adds up quickly. One trip, one set of impulse buys. Three trips, three sets of impulse buys. Additionally, when I plan a menu I buy what I need. When I go to the store without direction I buy what looks good, and not what makes sense. This can really slap you in the face when you go to check out and see a cart full of only produce, or worse, only junk.

My third reason is that I want to be able to focus more on having meals planned and increasing my cooking skills to include a broad range of long term food storage items. When you continually run to the store for fresh veggies, frozen pizza and pre made goodies, you do not educate yourself on how to best use the simple, basic foods that can sustain you in times of crisis and ultimately feed your family better and cheaper. Having a well stocked pantry is very important to me, and I will address this in more detail tomorrow.

I have been somewhat disgusted with myself over the past few months with how frequently I run to the store. I haven’t always been quite this bad about it, but I’ve never been good. I get bored easily and enjoy the distraction of a quick errand. I also get overwhelmed at home, and escaping home in a trip to the store is an easy out. I can go shopping and leave the overwhelming house for another day. The trouble is, in focusing more on home, it has become less of a chore and more of a place I want to be, filled with things I want to do. In embracing my role as homemaker, the house became the good thing and the perpetual running has become the burden. I like this paradigm shift.

While shopping for this past two weeks, I made a list of the things we most often go through (including toiletries, baby needs, etc), as well as a list of 14 main meals, most that involve cooking from scratch. Some of the meals make enough to create left overs, and I also included a few basic items for lunches and breakfast. Because I know myself well enough to know that cooking a major meal every night will be too much, I included frozen pizza and a few easy prepared foods for Chris’ middle of the night lunch break. Once I got everything where I thought we were ok, I panicked and added a big box of corn dogs, just in case. I think it is important not to expect perfection, and leave wiggle room for a bad day. If I don’t, I’ll probably end up running, screaming to the nearest fast food place, which defeats the money saving aspect of all thisplanning.

Also, as I do this, I am trying to try to at least one new recipe and one old recipe that I don’t make often in the meal planning to help mix things up. I get in food ruts.

Overall, I wasn’t too worried about not having enough on hand. I have learned to keep my pantry pretty well stocked with the basics, so in a pinch I am more than able to create meals from what we already have on hand. I might not be able to make the lemon meringue pie I’m craving today, but I have options and no pressing reason to run to the store.

Now, my shopping frequently gets broken up into three different store. Most purchases are made at our commissary, some things are purchased in bulk at Costco, and when Larry’s produce is open for the season, we take a trip that way as well. I am trying to do Costco only once a per month, and will probably do a similar “rule” with Larry’s when it re-opens.

Things of note:

I only have one refrigerator, and my freezer space is limited to the box on top of the fridge. I find that my freezer is very full, my pantry shelves are loaded, and my fridge has lots of extra space, with the exception of the crisper. I would love to have a large freezer to store extra bread and milk in, as well as frozen meals. I freeze a lot of meals, usually preparing an extra casserole or soup while making a night’s meal so I have something home made on hand for later. I have done a few weeks worth of meals at a time before, but when I do, there is no room in my freezer for anything else.

In addition to grocery shopping less, I am also trying to cut all major errands into one day of running per two week period. If I can accomplish this, than for all but 2-3 days per 2 weeks period, I should be free from most errands (I wish I could free myself from the preschool drop off and pick up), earning myself more time to kick back.

I will be updating you guys on my progress here over the next few months, as well as going into further detail about having a well stocked pantry, and sharing some great resources for doing so. I’ve done my allotted shopping for the next two weeks already. So far, the only thing I’ve realized I’m out of is postage stamps, and that’s a pretty unusual one for me.

Christmas, which I neglected to blog, was wonderful. It was all on our own, and we had a wonderful candle lit dinner Christmas Eve, and then read the Christmas Story out of Luke (I think these verses may be my favorite bit of scripture ever. There is so much joy in those verses, I could cry!) After that lovely evening, we sent the children off to bed and conjured Santa Clause.

I had been stuffing gifts into an upstairs closet for weeks, but even I was surprised to see just how many packages came out of there. I went slightly overboard. Not that I really spent that much money per kid (any child who got a video game system had much more spent on them than my children) but when your kids want items that are $5-$25, a it doesn’t take much to make a lot of packages! Follow that with generous grandparents spoiling grandbabies and yowsa! Also, this is the first year that Chris and I have really bought each other gifts.

One of the things I was really excited for in growing a larger family was the accompanying level of Christmas craziness. With one child, she opens her gifts and you’re done. With three- the fun just goes on and on and on.

Gabriel stood for the first time, holding on to his Christmas gifts for support.

Christmas Eve, he stayed up with Santa and made a very cute little elf. As gifts were brought down stairs, he decided it was time to try them out for himself, and the next thing we knew, we had a tiny boy following us up and down the steps!

We spent a lazy Christmas Day, helping the children free their new toys from the 500 bits of plastic and wire holding them to their packaging. We also invited the sister missionaries to come over and call their families and share lunch. I kept it simple and we had tacos and a lot of cookies and candy.

I only took a few photos, and they were nothing special- just finding the memories.

It was Merry.

I’m trying to do a few things with more intent and order this year. Oddly enough, I didn’t start these processes planning to have them coincide with the New Year, but they did, so I suppose we can call them resolutions.

1) I want to grocery shop twice monthly. For us, this works out to once per paycheck. Doing this makes creating a menu and planning that menu accordingly a necessity. It means less trips away from home, and hopefully, less money spent and less food forgotten in the fridge. More on this later.

2) I need to be on top of how I upload and store photos. Confession: there are over 20,000 files in my My Pictures folder. I would bet that 5,000 of them are worth keeping and that’s being generous. I had several labeled folders, with the month and best shots - but I also had all the photos outside of the folders since I had usually just copied and pasted them in. However- I didn’t do that EVERY time I uploaded, so there were a ton of irreplaceable favorites just floating in the mess of the 20,000+ files.

I spent quite awhile last night just doing the basic sorting of these photos. I made a folder from each year, and did my best to get all folders into their proper year. I deleted several thousand photos- ones I was certain were duplicates or just bad pics (you know, when you shoot 100 frames to get that one cute shot- yup- they were ALL there in their blurry, grainy, overexposed, ugly faces glory).

Now I have year folders and month folders of just this current year- and I am determined to keep this year neat and reform my photo uploading habits. I will need to spend at least an hour and a half in each of these new year folders to reduce the number of files and duplicates, but it is a start.

In the same vein, I am also going to stay on top of sending favorite photos over to Shutterfly to make a yearly photo book. I want to do this at least monthly. This year’s will have to include the tail end of last year- but hey- I’m setting a goal to be able to hit Print one year from now and be totally done. No searching and hoping I have all my best pics in there- and no looking back a few months later and finding some that were left out.

3) I want to develop meekness. I want to have the characteristic of being both gentle and firm, of being slow to anger and quick to faithfulness. It’s common sister, equanimity, isn’t a naturally inherited gift for me, but I would like to develop it. I have thought about many people I admire lately and the qualities they have, and this is one that seems to be a common thread for all. The world frequently equates meekness with weakness, which is incorrect. It is gentle, humble, temperate, modest and powerful in conviction. Christ was meek. It is a divine quality, and one that would serve families and the world in great ways if people developed it.

So that is where we start this year.

Shortly after nine o’clock on Christmas Eve, as Chris and I were filling stockings as our final touch on Santa’s visit, the phone rang. We looked at each other wondering who in the world was calling our house so late. The caller was a friend of mine who happens to be our bishop’s wife. With no introduction whatsoever and clearly flustered she asked, “Can you drive to the Sacramento airport and back with me tonight?”

I was totally confused and finally managed to sputter, “Who is this?” We cleared that up and she explained that a woman and her son had been trying to take a military hop flight to get home for Christmas, and had gotten stranded at Travis Air Force Base. They needed to get all the way to Sacramento so they could get a ride to Southern California. In desperation they had called our local church, hoping to find some kind soul who could help them out. They got our bishop’s wife, my friend. It should be noted that our Bishop is deployed to Afghanistan right now. My friend has her hands full with three children, but this late night need somehow landed in her lap. Because these were strangers and it was going to be a very late drive, she needed someone to go with her for safety.

It was late, it was cold, my husband was home for once, and I have children who wake up at 4am Christmas morning. I was tired and headed to bed.

But as I stood there, trying to decide how to respond, I was hit with a very strong impression, almost as though I was being spoken to. The words that came were: “I am answering your prayer.”

My mind was immediately brought back to a long, frustrating trip my family took about four years ago where we too, ended up stranded because of a hop flight gone very wrong. We had been helped by strangers at a time when we simply didn’t know what else to do, and in an instant, I distinctly recalled a moment down on my knees where in gratitude, I asked that I someday be in a position to help someone else. This was my opportunity.

I am not anyone important at church. I sit in the back, preoccupied with my children and then slip off to nursery. I am easily missed, and probably the last person anyone would call in a situation like this, but for some reason, my dear friend had my name pop in to her head as the person she ought to call. This was not coincidence, it was the Spirit gently, quietly, almost imperceptibly working in our lives, bringing a very small miracle to us on the eve of the Savior’s birth. Of course I said yes.

The ride was uneventful and simple. We helped a stranger and her son get home for Christmas. Shortly before midnight, I was back at home. My children did, indeed wake up at 4am the following morning.

I am so blessed.

I am always very shocked by the way baby’s first haircut takes them from sweet, innocent baby to instant toddler. Gabe was no different. Although I did trim his front up about three months ago (assuming he might like to see), this was his first honest to goodness haircut. What a way to start a new year!

Here he is before. He has haystack hair.

He is adorable. And quite mobile. On Christmas morning he added his own Christmas surprise when he stood up for the first time, right in the middle of the presents, as though presenting his own special gift to us. He has been working hard to get into things ever since.

The haircut had to happen.

And I love it. I love seeing his teeny, sweet neck again. I love how expressive his suddenly visible eyebrows are.

Goodness that’s serious.

He is a sweetie.

However, being a sweetheart doesn’t stop him from instantly embracing his soon to be toddler. He came home from the haircut, threw a few solid fits and then when he finally quieted down it was because he found something very interesting to occupy his time.

Peanut butter. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Maggie didn’t do a very good job replacing the lid when she made herself a sandwich this afternoon. This is Gabe’s official first mess.

He has such a sweet, sweet exterior, but I know the truth. I’m in for it.

I loved this year. This year was the year of perpetual good for our family. I know I am in the minority, as this year has been the year of soaring unemployment and increase in personal stress everywhere due to the economy and depressing political issues. But for me, ahhh, for me this year has been lovely and peaceful and filled with good.

I really needed a year filled with goodness.

A few months ago, around September, it hit me: I have been happy for a year.

Repeat that: I HAVE BEEN HAPPY FOR A YEAR.

Perhaps, to many of you, this is silly. I know there are always reasons to be happy, most of them based in gratitude and in the things that have true value. There is always peace in God, and He is always good. However, sometimes, it takes everything we have to go forward in faith when everything seems to be falling apart around us. There are days of despair where you can’t even think about hoping for a brighter future, because the painful contrast of hope with your current situation is too much to bear. I went for many years being very unhappy, and filled with concerns and stresses that took a significant toll on my ability to feel peace.

The past decade has held my greatest joys, most cherished loves and my deepest sorrows and fears. It has also seen more sheer exhaustion than I was capable of understanding back in the year 2000. But this year, this lovely 2009? Was so good.

January: A husband returns home early and safe from a deployment to the Middle East.

February: He is in time to help welcome our third child, Gabriel Brian.

March: I got new couches! And more importantly, we blessed that perfect baby boy in our home, surrounded by family and dear friends.

April: We got into the groove of the Sabbath routine, and finally began to feel like maybe we’d figured something out.

May: I got a new washer and dryer. Free.

June: I felt like the most blessed woman in the whole world to be mothering my children.

July: A fun trip to Manti, Utah to see family and spend a lovely week at the cabin

August: I went home to Fargo, North Dakota for the first time in four years. I got to see my parents for three weeks this year. That is more than the past three years combined.

September: My children started school, and they were happy and did well. For the first time in six years, I didn’t have to fight to advocate for my child, deal with special needs services, or be humbled to my knees in dealing with the challenges my children face. Instead, I was humbled in gratitude for His help, and the fact that things were finally coming together.

October: Maggie got over having a baby brother, and started being pleasant again. We applied for BOP, and were eventually denied, but it came with the answer that we simply had more to do here, and it was ok.

November: I hosted Thanksgiving, and I quit almost all of my scrapbook related work. I found a balance I could thrive in, and many peaceful answers regarding my work, my family, and my well being.

December: We had Christmas, for the very first time with all of us together in our home. It was wonderful.

I have been happy for over a year. I have felt more peace and fulfillment and more pieces clicking into place than I thought possible. Some blessings have been huge, and some have been simple, but the biggest blessing is that I have seen my Father in Heaven’s hand in so many of them. That awareness is priceless.

I hope to live worthy of that divine help in 2010. May we all.

Give a moment to check out our newest sponsor, Nature’s Peak Frozen Foods! They are a brand new company dedicated to creating perfect frozen fruit, perfect in pies, smoothies, topping your ice cream and more!

They have developed line of premium frozen fruit that is just as nutritious as fresh fruit – no sugar added. Nature’s Peak™ frozen fruit is individually quick frozen at the peak of ripeness to preserve its vibrant color, aroma, and delicious flavor – ideal for whipping up delicious, healthy smoothies and desserts at home, any time of the year.

Please note that Nature’s Peak frozen fruit is currently only available in the following locations:
Florida (All Regions)
New England (All Regions)
New Jersey (All Regions)
Maryland (All Regions)
Virginia (All Regions)
Washington (Seattle Area)
Oregon (Portland Area)
California (Los Angeles, San Jose Areas)
Arizona (Phoenix Area)
North Carolina (South West Area)
South Carolina (North West Area)
Georgia (South East and North East Areas)
Missouri (Northern Area)
Louisiana (New Orleans Area)
Arkansas (Little Rock Area)

I tried their mangos and blueberries and was very pleased. Nothing like a smoothie in the dead of winter- YUM! If you can find some in your region, definitely try it out!

I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour campaign by Mom Central on behalf of Nature’s Peak and received a sample to facilitate my candid review as well as two coupons to giveaway. In addition, Mom Central sent me a gift card to thank me for taking the time to participate.