I’ve been following The Survival Mom for a little while now, as well as a few other ‘prepping’ bloggers.
If you don’t know what prepping is, it’s basically being prepared. You know, like the Boy Scouts, except for major disasters.
Please don’t think I’m crazy. Because I’m not.
See, the time it would have been great for us to be hard-core ‘preppers’ is when Mr. Loper was laid off last year. I’d never wished more to have several months of food already on-hand, since he ended up not finding a job for two months. And unemployment fell through. We had no income at all for two months. That was scary.
Not to mention the two consecutive years (March of 2015 AND March of 2016) when tornadoes have tried to come down on top of our house.
Since Mr. Loper and I married, though, we’ve also lived through the wettest month on record in Oklahoma (May 2015, where we had a year’s worth of rain in a SINGLE MONTH), and a blizzard that shut down the entire city of Tulsa for nearly a week (I think this was the Christmas Eve blizzard of… 2009? Might have been 2010.) (I literally bought the last snow shovel at Walmart that year right before the blizzard hit. Talk about a blessing!)
And that’s not counting the massive ice storm that hit Oklahoma in 2007, a month before we were to get married, and knocked out power across much of the region for several weeks. My parents were lucky – the power company had just finished burying all the power lines in their neighborhood maybe a month before that ice storm. My then-fiance-now-husband’s neighborhood literally two blocks away? They didn’t have power for at least a week. And temperatures didn’t go up enough for the ice to melt for some time, so many people were without power in frigid temperatures for a very long time – some upwards of six weeks.
Just based on natural disasters alone, especially as prone to them as Oklahoma seems to be, it’s unwise to not prep.
But prepping can be daunting. It’s difficult to know where to start, and sometimes it’s difficult to know where to turn with questions because you feel like your questions are going to get those weird looks in response. Questions like “How much toilet paper do I really need to last three months?” (Probably not as much as you think, btw.)
At the beginning of the summer, I was able to take advantage of the Summer Prepping Intensive by Preppers University (Lisa Bedford, The Survival Mom and Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper are the masterminds behind Preppers University.) We finished up last week, and while I wasn’t able to keep up with everything – they weren’t joking about the intensive part, y’all – I definitely have a better idea of where I’m headed with everything.
The personal friendships and connections made were also invaluable – and honestly, probably the best part of it! The other thing I loved the most was being able to talk with people who had more experience than me – what really are the best ways to repackage food (if at all) to store long-term, how they dealt with an obstacle (mainly finances or food intolerances), etc. The weekly check-ins were great for evaluating yourself and any progress made.
