National Preparedness Month and the SEVEN DAY CHALLENGE

Welcome to September! In case you didn’t know, September is National Preparedness Month, so you will probably be hearing lots about it on all of your favorite food storage and emergency preparedness blogs. Today we wanted to introduce you to a little fun activity that we do each September and invite you to join us and participate.

Back in 2009 Julie and I got this crazy idea that we should do a little “fire drill” and one day just email all of our readers and tell them a big “emergency” happened that we would all work through together. As we thought about how we could do this, we eventually came up with the idea to do a 7 Day Challenge in conjunction with National Preparedness Month. The Challenge became a week long series of mock emergencies with daily limitations and tasks to help assess your level of preparedness. We decided to start it on a surprise day in September, but we give you lots of hints to know it’s coming up soon!

We are getting ready to start our FIFTH challenge and we have learned so much every single year that we have done this with all of you. We wanted to do a little trip down memory lane to help get you excited about this year’s challenge. We hope you enjoy this and sign up to join in THIS YEAR!

We did one of our podcast episodes featuring some of our favorite things about the challenge as well as some hints and tips if you are going to participate this year. You can listen by clicking the banner below:

Seven Day Challenge Highlights

Here is an introduction to the first challenge we did 4 years ago

2009: Jodi’s kids LOVED evacuating and eating out of 72 hour kits

2009: Julie made bread from scratch to practice a dietary limitation

2010: Jodi and her family making shadow puppets at night (great electricity-free entertainment)

2010: Julie practiced changing a tire (no husbands allowed to help!)

2011: Jodi’s Sun Oven dinner failed (rainy day, boo)

2011: Julie’s little guy had fun testing out the “porta-potty” on sanitation practice day

2012: Jodi and her kids tested out a 3600 calorie bar (one of them loved it, the other HATED it)

2012: Julie’s Sun Oven cookies and quinoa were a success

Tips for the 2013 Challenge

Follow our Facebook page:
Go to http://facebook.com/foodstoragemadeeasy and make sure to “like” our page. Sometimes facebook doesn’t show all of the posts in your newsfeed so during the challenge days, make sure you bookmark that link directly and check back frequently. We love to have readers post pictures of THEIR adventures, but they are hard to see on the page. We’ll do our best to repost fun things so everyone can see them. Each day we’ll post a status where you can share your experiences that day. You don’t have to be a member of Facebook to read through these.

Follow us on Instagram
If you have an iPhone or iPad you can follow us on Instagram, our username is “foodstoragemadeeasy”. We will be posting LOTS of pictures there throughout the challenge week, and we would love if everyone could post their pics and use the hashtag #7daychallenge and tag us too. That way we can see your pics and all our readers can see what everyone else is doing there. It will be FUN! We will cover Instagram and how we will be using it in a little more detail later 🙂

Fill your gas tanks and stock your fridges
The challenge rules are no spending money, no eating out, no grocery shopping, etc. for the WHOLE WEEK. You do not want to get the email stating that the challenge is about to start on a day when your tank is EMPTY or you have zero milk in the house.

Print out recipes and other important information
Many of the days require you to do hard things and we don’t let you use a computer. Make sure you have some resources to help you if you can’t hop online to check a recipe or figure out how to use your Volcano Grill. Now would be a great time to put together your own recipe binder.

Get your family and friends involved!
We have SOOO much fun doing this together and getting our friends and family to join in too. We encourage you to have your friends/family sign up to participate, but at least post about what you are doing on your social media, blogs, etc. We all want our loved ones to be more prepared and this is a great way for them to see some of the reasons WHY you do what you do and it might teach them a little something too.

Review past challenges
Take a look at our “Why Food Storage” series to get an idea of the concepts that we will be practicing. We try to test ourselves on each of these five concepts of why you might be storing food. Then review some of the activities from the last four years. You can see what things you might want to brush up on before THIS year gets underway!
2012 7 DAY CHALLENGE Overview
2011 7 DAY CHALLENGE Overview
2010 7 DAY CHALLENGE Overview
2009 7 DAY CHALLENGE Overview