Yesterday Eli was reading CNN Money.com over my shoulder and saw this article about moms making their own detergent (with Washing Soda and Borax--just like me!) and growing their own food and doing other things to cope with the tremendous rise in prices lately. So he and I talked some more about this rise in prices for basics like food and gas, and how some people are losing their homes because they couldn't afford to pay their mortgages, etc.
He has been pretty aware of the terrible state of the economy. We make it a game to see how much gas prices have risen each time we have to drive somewhere. I'm not sure if I should be sheltering the kids more or not, but I know by this point they know plenty and we just need to talk about it and help them to understand.
It wasn't many minutes after this latest discussion that he came back to me and started talking non-stop about how he and Dad could build some traps and go hunting, how we could make our own teepees out of trees and "tan some deer hides, Mom", and how we should just find some place in the woods to live. He was very excited about this!
But, I thought I should let him know that Dad's job as a teacher was very safe for now and we could afford our house so we weren't going to be losing it. I felt it important that he shouldn't be afraid of things, that we would make it and be just fine. But he was quite disappointed in this!
He said, "but I want to live that way, Mom!" And doesn't any boy? At some time or other?
I assured him that he could still do those things, like hunt and trap and build his own teepee. I just said he might have to wait until he was 18 and could move out of the house, since I didn't see Dad and I doing that unless we had to which I don't foresee any time soon. I mentioned that when we go camping we can live simply like that, and that Daddy would be very willing to do even more primitive camping with him someday soon.
I also told him how part of me really wants to be a farmer, but that we also love our neighbors and like where we live in the city so I'm just doing what I can where I am to live the life I want. I pointed out how I'm expanding the garden and hoping to get chickens someday and trying to raise as much of our food as possible. And how we are getting to know farmers at the farmer's market and by going out to their farms to pick up some of our food, and that's getting closer to farming. I hoped that he would see that a person could live their dreams even in a "normal" life.
I don't know what he thought of all that, but next thing I found him in the treehouse, reading My Side of the Mountain (the first of Jean Craighead George's wonderful trilogy about a boy living in the wilderness) for the second time. Dreaming big!
Comments