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 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.  Prior to my professional career, I believe I set a world record for holding the most part-time jobs during my high school and college years!

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.

Meet my blog designers here.

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.

Chrystalyn Trimble

I’m in my early 30′s and have three beautiful children and a great husband.  I’ve been making bread for about 18 years.  Wow, I had to do the math on that one!  I started making bread from whole grains as a young teen for our family.  My wonderful mother taught me this skill.  She instilled in me a great love for healthy whole grains.  Since starting my own family, my mother, sisters, and I have continued learning about new grains and how we can incorporate them in our families diets without too much fuss from the kids, or hubbies for that matter.  As we learn, we share with each other to cut down on the trial and error phase.  What a big help that is!  You now get to be a part of that sharing.  We’ve already done a lot of the work for you, so just enjoy the info.

I have a deep conviction of the need to be prepared.  This not only means food storage or the extra t.p. or the Sun Oven but also having the knowledge to use all of this!  So, even if you don’t really want to make bread every week for your family or cook in that sun oven daily, I still feel it’s important to have the knowledge of how to do it so you could if or when you need to.  Now’s the time to learn these skills.  I hope I can help you on your personal journey of being prepared.