About

Here I intend to chronicle my journey with my family from a chaotic lifestyle to, hopefully, a simpler, happier one.  My intention is to Simply Reduce all that is too much...

I think that reduction is the key to simplification for fulfillment.  I tried cutting out things all together, and that just leads to myself or family members feeling deprived of something.  For instance, when my oldest was enrolled at a Waldorf school we opted out of media entirely.  Now I want to say up front it was a very good thing, just not sustainable for our family.  I never knew what was happening in the community or  the world, and lost touch with many people who no longer use the telephone.  So we still have no T.V., but do listen to the radio on long drives to keep from falling asleep, and watch occasional movies on the PC as a treat.  Here reduction worked wonderfully, very little TV time, some radio, and obviously the internet.

Raw food only is another of those experiments that didn't work in entirety. No cooked food limited our families diet too much, and I just gave up and ate half a pizza after 5 mos ( I was a few months pregnant at the time)  Reducing cooked food and increasing raw food worked much better--although we have meandered further and further backed towards cooked.

In trying the reduce the clutter in my house and life I have often looked for inspiration in blogs.  There is a lot out there, and always more, for which I give many thanks for taking the time to share.  However, much of what is out there is people who have already mastered it.  I often find myself thinking that it would be nice to find someone who cataloged their everyday trials, successes and failures.  Not just of an overall project, but of the individual components.

This may be too trivial for many, my apologies.  But I want to work out the specifics.  I am hoping to share the thinking behind decisions make, and hopefully even find a few people 'out there' who will take the time to share their thoughts on the process with me in their comments.

I think that I am just an everyday girl trying to figure things out.  A leaf on the breeze.  I aspire towards minimalism (you will see that i am not there at all), and sometimes feel like maybe a bit of a clutterbug....
sometimes it is 2 steps forward, and effort not to take 3 steps back.

Wish me luck!