Remember our All We Want for Christmas Post? Our families must have been spying on our blog because we received several items from the list!

Julie STRUCK GOLD this year! She got a WONDERMILL GRAIN MILL! Her mom got her and 2 of her sisters the best present ever. Needless to say she’s been going to town (remember her all about wheat post). She loves it so much, we became Authorized Dealers for WonderMill to help people buy them at the Minimum Advertised Price allowed (click here for details). By the way, aren’t Julie’s sisters cute?

Jodi received a few books that will definitely help her with her food storage goals this year, Cookin’ with Dried Eggs and the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. She also got some food from The Ready Project which she’s excited to try out!

So now for our “NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS”:

• I want to save up enough money to buy a wheat grinder so I don’t have to borrow Julie’s any more
• I want to plan my summer garden specifically with canning in mind
• I want to create a recipe binder full of meals that use my long term food storage items and cook from it frequently

• I want to cook more with dry beans and quit being so afraid of the soaking concept
• I want to plan dinners ahead of time to use more of my long term foods
• I want to find a way to help people who hate excel do an effective 3 month food supply plan even though the current excel file ROCKS! But I know, I know you don’t all love excel

Here’s our little Christmas update since we haven’t blogged for the past few days (been a little busy with Christmas and what not). Both of us received some of the items on our Christmas Wish List:

• Julie – Received a Wondermill Wheat Grinder for Christmas, YAY! Her mom is so sweet and bought one for all three of the daughters.
• Jodi – Got a great Peggy Layton book called “Cooking with Dried Eggs“. But her favorite gift was an autoshipment of The Ready Project foods that will come every month! Her mom took advantage of our referral program to get 5% off the initial order (you just enter code 61838, it’s so easy).

And as a reminder, in case you missed any of our gifts to you this holiday season, here is a summary of what we have done for you:

• Gift #1 – Babystep Checklists: We’re starting a fantastic email reminder system that will help you build your food storage in one year. We break it down into assignments for every two weeks and provide you with simple instructions and free checklists to help you along the way.
• Gift #2 – A Big Surprise!: We are going to be teaming up with some other food storage bloggers to provide a fantastic overall system to help with your food storage. Check back January 1 as we will be announcing some more details about our January 5th launch party!
• Gift #3 – Revamped BabySteps: We rewrote our babysteps to include more information, better outside resources, and a great summary of each of our personal approaches to food storage. Not to mention we added cute new icons to represent each step

If you haven’t already subscribed to our RSS feed make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the exciting stuff we have planned coming up in the new year!

Here are a few highlights of things we have updated:

• Updated icons for each step
• Simple navigation tool at the bottom of each step to help you easily move from one step to the next
• More info about us and how we are approaching our personal food storage
• Updated some of the resources
• More clarity in some of the steps
• Last but not least, a CUTE new setup on the main BabySteps page

We are so excited to give you this gift right before Christmas. Hopefully it will help you be more motivated to get going on the BabySteps in the new year. And if you haven’t signed up for our checklists yet you better get on it asap!

Let us know what you think of the new icons We LOVE them!

While we can’t give away too much right now, we wanted to give you a sneak preview of something exciting coming up soon. To make food storage even more EASY and FUN for you we are going to be joining up with some fabulous ladies to provide you with all of the tools and resources you will need to help you plan, buy, and actually use your food storage all in one place. We want to help you make this the year you really get it done. This is one New Years resolution you will not fail!

Make sure to come celebrate with us on January 5, 2009 with prizes, giveaways, and fun activities all week long. This is one event that you will NOT want to miss. Tell your friends and family, spread the word, and be a part of sharing this wonderful gift of food storage with everyone you know.

Although you will not be able to officially “open” gift #2 until January 5th, we wanted to give you a heads up so you can make sure to catch some of the fun the week we launch. We will be working VERY hard between now and then to make this an incredibly useful (and fun) gift to our readers.

(Did you miss Gift #1? Check it out It’s another one you definitely don’t want to miss)

With the new year approaching we have been hearing our readers talk a lot about getting their food storage put together this year. What a FABULOUS time to get a fresh start and really DO IT! We wanted to find a way to really help people be able to achieve this goal so our first gift to you this season is a series of BabyStep Checklists. These are email reminders that will be sent to you every two weeks with information and specific to-do lists that you can print and check-off as you complete each item. After a year of receiving our reminders you should have your 72 hour kits, water storage, 3 months normal food supply, and one year of long-term food storage all accomplished.

As you plan your New Year’s resolutions we hope that you will accept this gift from us and make food storage a top priority this year. To start getting the reminders as soon as they are available you can pre-register for our reminders by filling out your information below.

We wanted to share with you the top 10 things on our Christmas lists this year! Leave us a comment below and tell us what YOU are hoping to get for Christmas.

#10 Food Storage Books

Julie needs a new copy of Food Storage 101 as it appears that her son Tyler has mysteriously misplaced her book (he has been really into throwing stuff in the garbage lately. Yikes!)

Jodi loves cooking with recipes so she really wants to get some good food storage recipe books. One she’s been eyeballing is Simple Recipes Using Food Storage. It starts out with recipes that only use SIX food storage ingredients!

#9 Food Storage Shelves

Jodi LOVES to have things organized for her easily and has been dying to get one of the amazing Shelf Reliance food rotation systems. Her husband keeps promising to build her some shelves but she has yet to see it happen *hint hint*.

Julie has all of her shelves purchased and loves the flexibility of being able to store different sizes of foods on them. However she would love some of the “cansolidator” products to organize her 3 months supply canned goods.

#8 Kitchen Gadgets

Julie had a little bit of apple corer peeler envy when she saw the pictures from Jodi’s applesauce adventures post. She would love to have her own one of these little guys.

Jodi has had fun experimenting with desserts using her food storage. She found this cute cookie press and decorating kit and thought it would make the job even more fun. It would have been perfect for the Cookie Clay Dough cookies!

#7 Herb Growing Kit

We are researching and gearing up for some fun gardening stuff in the spring and thought that an herb growing kit would be good practice and give us something we can start using in our cooking and food storage right away!

#6 Bread Machine

Jodi was very smart and gave away her bread machine because she hadn’t used it in 4 years. Now she has bread machine envy of Julie and so she’s hoping that she can obtain a new one somehow.

Since Julie already has a bread machine, all she needs is this nifty slicer tool to make the bread into nice little sandwich slices. One of the main problems with bread machine bread is getting the slices to work for good sandwiches.

#5 Portable Power Backup System

One question we’ve been asked a lot is what do you do with all this food if you can’t cook it? We have found a solution that seems a little more feasible than getting a generator. This product made by Xantrex is a power source that charges using a solar panel and then stores the electricity so you can grind wheat or run an oven/stove for a period of time. Very useful!

#4 Ready Project Food

We have found a way to make food storage REALLY easy! This company called The Ready Project sells packs of food that you just add water to. It’s an interesting idea and we think it could be very useful for a component of your food storage plan. If you decide to buy from The Ready Project make sure to enter our referral code 61838 and you can get 5% off your first order!

#3 Traditional Food Storage Foods

A few of our favorite food items are powdered milk and powdered eggs. These are so important to store so that you can cook normal foods. And it’s a great idea to start using them in everyday cooking to get used to them. Neither of us have our full supply of these items yet so they would be GREAT gift items.

#2 Wheat Grinders

Jodi and Julie both REALLY want the Wondermill Grain Mill as shown in our wheat grinder video. Jodi was lucky enough to inherit a nice Back to the Basics Hand Grinder from her mom, but it’s not great for doing everyday cooking with your wheat. So she’d like an electric grinder and Julie would like ANY grinder but would prefer the electric one as she has been using her wheat a LOT lately.

#1 New Macbooks!

So we promise this is food storage-related Both of our husbands have confinscated the “family” macintosh computers and we love using them to make our videos and graphics for our blog. So in our dream world we would each have our own brand new sparkling macbook (maybe even a macbook pro if we were REALLY lucky!)

What’s on YOUR wishlist this year?