Get to know Lisa

Welcome to TheSurvivalMom blog!

Email:  lisa@thesurvivalmom.com

Deep inside every mom is a Survival Mom whose passion for her family drives her to make the best of the present and prepare for the future.  I share that passion along with a long-standing, slightly crazed fascination with natural disasters, survival stories and preparing for the unknown.  This drives my husband, the Paranoid Dad, crazy.

I write and teach others about the importance of preparedness and being proactive and share ideas I’ve tried, successes as well as failures.

Let’s get acquainted!

I’m a forty-something mother of two homeschooled children and wife to a busy, self-employed husband.  We live in the greater Phoenix area, also known as Hell’s Waiting Room!

I spent nine years as a classroom teacher, four years as a teacher mentor, and have had the same home-based sales business for over 17 years.  When I decided to teach preparedness classes, all those years of training and curriculum development came in handy!

I love Mexican food, a slightly messy house, my big ole white Tahoe, blogging and reading good spy thrillers.

Why read my blog?

Technically, the future has always been uncertain.  I mean, a massive earthquake could take out half of the United States at any moment, I suppose.  What makes right now different is the uncertainty on so many levels: the economy, national security, natural disasters, and a world increasingly filled with threats against our country.

If you’ve been stashing away a few groceries every week or researching how to make a solar powered generator, you’re not alone!  I hope you’ll find reassurance and practical help here on my blog.  Our concerns for the present and future can be channeled into actions that will help provide for and protect our families while still enjoying the heck out of life!

Thanks for visiting my blog in this blogosphere universe!  I hope you’ll bookmark my site, subscribe to it via RSS, and follow me on Twitter.  If you read something you really like, I hope you’ll pass it on to your friends.

I welcome your comments and questions.  Contact me at lisa@thesurvivalmom.com.

Love my artwork?  Get to know my graphic artist, Cheryl.

SurvivalMom Writers:

Liz Long

I’m in the general vicinity of 40 with two little boys and a car-guy husband. We’re pretty stocked for tools. I’ve never met a gadget I didn’t like, so we’re stocked for kitchen gadgets and tools as well, particularly since I’ve always had a preference for hand powered gadgets like whisks and pastry blenders over electric ones. My husband and I have both been reading, researching, making lots of lists, and of course, shopping. At this point, we have most of the basic stuff from our lists and we’re starting to work on learning how to use our supplies and integrating them into our normal life. Of course, we’re still finding more things to add to our wish-list.

We lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and earthquake preparedness is a regular topic there. It seems like city and county sponsored events always include literature and booths about emergency preparedness. Schools, businesses and daycares provide information as well. On top of years of Scouting (“Be Prepared”!), this led me to have a definite preparedness mindset. When the stock market fell in September 2008, we started getting serious about preparing for the possibility of a more long-term catastrophe.

We now live in the Mid-Atlantic. Our area is technically an “ex-urb”. Cities are surrounded by suburbs, and suburbs are surrounded by ex-urbs. Most homes near us have at least one acre of land, and cows and horses are a common sight. It’s not even remotely a Rawlesian retreat in the middle of nowhere, and we definitely aren’t totally self-sufficient, but it’s far better than living in a city like Los Angeles or New York. I saw one tongue in cheek list of ways to prepare that included putting up barbed wire fence around your property. In our area, people would look at it a bit, then ask if it really helped keep out the deer. If the answer was yes, it would start a new trend in landscaping. Rural Idaho? No, but folks here have an aversion to deer eating their vegetable gardens and leaving behind lyme-infested ticks, which leads to lots of deer hunting and lots of people wanting to raise chickens (they eat ticks). It also means our neighbors aren’t anti-gun like they were in LA.