Two summers ago, our family took a staycation instead of a vacation.  We stayed in our home, went to the neighborhood water park a few times, enjoyed leisurely picnics for our dinners, and had a few later nights watching movies and popping popcorn.

Staycations are super popular now because of the economy; more and more families are opting to save money and tour their own hometown. It’s a great alternative when you don’t have the finances allotted for a traditional vacation, yet you’re in need of some quality family time.

June’s theme for Simple Living Media is travel and family time, so today’s question is perfect for this topic.
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I have about six weeks left of this pregnancy, more or less, so I’m going to lighten up my writing schedule a bit in order to focus on birth preparation and nesting, while still running Simple Living Media. With this in mind, I’m bringing back Q&A, a popular series here on Simple Mom, where you provide the majority of the post’s content in the comments section.

Share your thoughts, ask more questions, and discuss the weekly topic amongst each other — and if you have a post on your own blog that’s relevant to the topic, then please share your link, too.

Note: I don’t mind a rousing conversation, but as always, ad hominem will not be tolerated — if you resort to attacking a commenter and not responding to the comment itself, your comment will be deleted.

Your neighbors as a community

A few months ago, our family quite suddenly moved back to the U.S. from living abroad as foreigners. We lived in a city of four million people, perched on the fifth floor of a concrete high-rise. If I ran out of eggs, I could take the elevator downstairs, walk across the street, and have a stash of eggs in about five minutes, tops.

Now we live on three acres in a farmhouse-style home, with a horse next door for a neighbor and a scenic 20-minute drive to the closest grocery store.

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This week, the dishwasher at our new home bit the dust. It was an awful machine to begin with, so we weren’t really surprised, but it has thrown us back to the good ol’ days of hand washing all our dishes. It’s not so bad, actually — especially when you do them in tandem with good conversation.

Right after the dishwasher died, Kyle and I boxed up about half of our dishes. We knew this would make hand washing easier because it would keep us from lazily using more dishes than we really needed.

So far, it’s true. We have far fewer dishes to wash than if we still used the dishwasher as our default. We’ve kept the extra stored within easy reach, so that when we have company, we can easily pull out the extra plates we need.

It’s silly, of course, because we could do the same thing with the same results with our dishwasher — but because the machine is doing all the work, it doesn’t hurt as much to just let the dishes pile up throughout the day.

This exercise was a good precursor for Spring Cleaning Week, starting this Monday here at Simple Mom. It all comes down to one of my favorite all-time quotes, from 19th century architect William Morris:

“Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Is everything in your home useful or beautiful? Really?

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