Great Water Storage Solution

Water is the number one concern in an emergency situation. If you don't have water, you are severely handicapped as to how long you and your family can survive. You can NEVER have too much water stored. This has long been a concern for many families, especially those that don't have a basement. I just discovered this solution and wanted to share it with everyone. It's a product called Surewater. It is a water storage system that is set up similar to your hot water heater in your house. It holds 275 gallons of water and only takes up 7 sq. ft. of space. It has two spigots on the tank--one to fill and one to drain. This makes for easy rotation of the water. The price is reasonable, too. Please check out this ingenious product and see if it isn't a solution for your water storage needs.

Printables for home storage & organization

To find printable calendars and organizers for home notebooks, check here. Notice they have printables for pantry inventory, and favorite recipes. This will help you on your way to organizing your 3 month food supply.

VERY IMPORTANT: A Reason To Be Prepared

Even though this isn't my calling anymore, I decided that this was important enough to make it to the blog. This isn't meant to scare anyone, but to bring an awareness to a potentially dangerous, but plausibly diffusible situation. I'm talking about Avian Influenza, also known as the Bird Flu.

According to Wikipedia, there have been approximately 3 pandemics each century for the the last 300 years. The most virulent pandemic flu was in 1918, killing over 50 million people worldwide. The flu affected all ages and came in three waves between the late Summer of 1918 and the Spring of 1919. It left thousands of children orphaned and millions of families torn apart. My husband's great-grandparents and great-great grandparents lived in New York City at the time and died in the pandemic leaving his grandfather orphaned. The following is an excerpt, taken from Pandemicflu.gov, of what life was like:

As the disease spread, schools and businesses emptied. Telegraph and
telephone services collapsed as operators took to their beds. Garbage went
uncollected as garbage men reported sick. The mail piled up as postal carriers
failed to come to work. State and local departments of health also suffered
from high absentee rates. No one was left to record the pandemic’s spread and
the Public Health Service’s requests for information went unanswered.
As the bodies accumulated, funeral parlors ran out of caskets and bodies went
uncollected in morgues... In many communities, quarantines were imposed to prevent the spread of the disease. Schools, theaters, saloons, pool halls and even churches were all closed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the world is long overdue for another such episode.

On Thursday, March 20th, the Newnan Times-Herald published an article about a presentation done by Coweta County Environmental Health Director Duane Fields to the Coweta Board of Health on the bird flu and preparations that Coweta County is making to get ready for an outbreak. According to the article, "the key to containing the deadly disease will lie in parents' willingness to contain their children in their homes for weeks or even months at a time...[If] parents can manage to keep their children at home, it will reduce the number of flu attacks by 93 percent...That's because children are natural incubators for diseases like the flu, which rely on close personal contact to spread effectively. "

If the key to containing this disease is staying home for weeks and possibly months at a time, it is all the more important that we begin and continue to build our 3-month's supply of food that the First Presidency has encouraged us to have. Granted, this is a dire reason to be prepared. It is more likely that you will need to use your food supply because of a financial hardship than because of something like this. However, this is definitely something to think and ponder about. Having just had the regular flu myself for the last 5 days, I wish we would have been a bit more prepared ourselves by way of food stuffs. We had food in the house, it just wasn't organized in a way that made it easy for my son or husband to make a meal. I also realized that I did not have enough disinfectant wipes or Klennex in the house. It was definitely a lesson in preparedness for our family.

There are definitely reasons why the Lord, through the First Presidency, has asked us to be prepared. The possibility of another pandemic flu is definitely a good one; but we should be prepared because we realize that this is a commandment with a promise..."but if ye are prepared ye shall not fear" (D&C 38:20). If we follow the counsels of our Heavenly Father, we will have nothing to fear--not illness, job loss, financial recession, food shortage, nothing.

Starting Your Three-Month's Supply

Now that we have our 72-hour kits together, we are going to concentrate on the next step--Your 3-month supply of food. By definition, this should be "a small supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet. One way to do this is to purchase a few extra items each week to build a one-week supply of food. Then you can gradually increase your supply until it is sufficient for three months. These items should be rotated regularly to avoid spoilage (Provident Living website)."

There are several ways to go about doing this, but two of the easiest tools are:

1. Buy two, use one--If you need a jar of spaghetti sauce for dinner this week, buy two and keep one on hand. Always have at least on jar unopened in the pantry.


2. Choose 15 meals and multiply the ingredients needed by 6--For example, Spaghetti, veggies, & croissants is your meal. If, in one meal, you go through 1 box of spaghetti, 1 jar of sauce, 2 cans of veggies, and 2 cans of croissants, this is what your 3-month supply of this meal would look like:

• 6 boxes of spaghetti noodles


• 6 jars of spaghetti sauce


• 6 pounds of hamburger meat (can be stored cooked in the freezer for 3 months)


• 12 cans of veggies or 6 bags of frozen veggies


• 12 cans of refrigerated croissants

You would just repeat this process for 14 other meals. Having 15 meals will ensure that you only have to eat the same meal twice in a month. If you don't mind having the same meals every week, you can use less recipes. Gradually build up your supply of each ingredient with the "Buy two, use one" principle.

Remember to make a few things from scratch to be able to use your staple, or long term, storage items, too. Here are some websites to look at to get some ideas for easy meals:

• Kraft Foods


• Campbell's


• Betty Crocker: Dinner Made Easy


• Pillsbury

Also, here are a couple cookbooks and recipe search websites that have GREAT recipes that don't have a lot of ingredients:

• All Recipes


• Recipe Zaar


• A Man, A Can, A Plan: 50 Great Guy Meals Even You Can Make


• Eating For Life--Recipe book based on the Body For Life diet & exercise plan (Great tasting, healthy recipes even if you don't follow the plan itself)


• New Cookbook (Better Homes & Gardens)

Challenge: For Family Home Evening, discuss with your family what their favorite meals are. Come up with 15 and gather the recipes to determine how much of each ingredient in that recipe you will need to build up to a 3-month's supply.

The Sharpsburg Ward has put together a 3-month supply booklet with recipes, budgets, and ideas for planning for your 3-month supply. I would like to do this for our ward also. Please send your 3-month supply recipes to Sis. Schaefer at justjen@stsweb.com. The deadline for getting recipes in will be March 29.