Little House in the Suburbs....

This year has been an unusual fall.  The second week of October we had temperatures in the 80's and people were water skiing on Columbus Day weekend.  A few weeks later we were hit with a very large snowstorm where local areas got hit with up to 2 feet of snow and this week once again it is warming up and we will be close to 70 degrees!   Throughout this season I have been feeling a lot like a chipmunk preparing for the cold dark winter, even better Ma Ingalls :)  Yes I know that I have so many conveniences that Ma Ingalls (and the Chipmunk for that matter) don't have.  I can run to the supermarket for food, shop online for winter outerwear, turn on the heat with the push of a button and have a much better built home......but despite all this I still have the nesting instinct that the fall brings on.

This fall I have spent many hours canning and dehydrating the beautiful tastes of summer.  I made big vats of homemade tomato and carrot soups to freeze for those cold winter days.  And S and I have been working hard to prepare our home for the cold and critters that are to come.

The pellet stove was a large investment for our family this winter but I am happy to say that we have yet to turn on the heat in our home!  It works very well at heating the entire house, some rooms are much toastier than others (we call them the Island Rooms), and we are so glad that we made this investment.  We were paying about $800 a month in oil during the winter months last year and this year we hope to pay much less.

I have so much respect for the women of yesterday who had to work morning, noon and night to prepare their homes for the harsh winters.  The little I have done has been very hard work and I can't imagine working in the kinds of conditions they had.  I lost a lot of what I had prepared when our generator broke.  I couldn't bring all of the stuff in our freezer so I lost some purees, soups, rolls, muffins and my homemade applesauce.  This was heart breaking for me, all that hard work wasted.  Yet I can go to the store to buy more...those women did not have that option...they were simply amazing.