I'm as great as I want to be....

I love saving money. My husband fondly calls me the "Tightwad Swede."
I'm telling you something...I can squeeze water from a rock if properly motivated.
I guess that desire to save money and be frugal comes from growing up with little and being forced to scrimp and save to get by.
My family had a farm and while we never went hungry, I did wear a lot of yard sale clothing and hand me downs.
So...out of necessity, I learned how to sew and make due with almost anything I could find. I learned how to cook everything from scratch. I helped on the farm and I helped in the barn and potato cellar. I picked apples, strawberries and harvested the garden. Picked clover for clover honey...
I even helped with butchering...

Some people would consider that to be strange. It was an invention of necessity though.

I learned to cook when I was 13. My great grandmother has cataracts and couldn't see very well (because it was still 1979 and they hadn't invented the laser technology yet) so I was elected to help her and stay with her to cook, clean and do laundry.
It was in the fall of the year and time for harvest(we had a potato farm) so my responsibility would be to cook for her, my uncle and the other men who worked the harvest. This meant that I had to get up at 4:30am and make breakfast. The breakfast consisted of bacon or ham,eggs, homemade cinnamon rolls that had been mixed up the night before and placed in the refrigerator to rise so they could be baked fresh, coffee, juice, fruit and cheese.
No skimping on breakfast at harvest time....
After making breakfast, it was time to wash the dishes up and begin preparing for the morning coffee break, (which would be brought out into the field.)
Coffee was made on the stove in a glass percolator. Grammie had two of them and they were always full of brewing coffee on the stove. That's one of the best memories I have of walking into her house. The smell of coffee brewing. Anyway, I would make coffee and homemade hot chocolate, with sugar, cocoa and milk. Then both hot liquids would go into four thermos' and would be packed into a box with several different pastries of one kind or another. It varied from day to day, basically because everything had to be baked the day before so it might be sweet rolls or homemade donuts or muffins. Rusks and jam filled cookies were two of the normal morning coffee items. I don't ever remember there not being rusks or jam filled cookies in the huge glass cookie jars at grammie's house. Then of course there was cheese, because sliced homemade cheese went with every meal of the day. I'm not kidding either. We were some cheese eating fools.
So, I would take care of morning coffee and then wash up those dishes, only to begin making lunch.
Lunch during harvest wasn't really lunch. It was more like the first supper of the day. There was mashed potatoes every day for lunch and supper, meat with homemade gravy, vegetables from the garden (fresh or canned at home),homemade bread with side dishes of canned at home pickles and homemade cheese.Oh yeah...plus dessert if you can believe it. Homemade pies or cakes or puddings.As if the morning and afternoon coffees weren't enough...LOL.
Then there was afternoon coffee which was basically a repeat of the morning coffee except with a larger variety of cookies,(chocolate chip, oatmeal, molasses, peanut butter, fudgie no bakes, etc)...squares,(like brownies, apple pie squares,graham cracker squares, rice krispie treats, etc)...and a cake. There was always some kind of cake and it was completely made from scratch and had fudge frosting. If it was a spice cake, it had a butterscotch flavored fudge frosting on it. I believe it's made from brown sugar, cream and butter. Unfortunately, that's one of the few recipes NOT in grammie's "Tried Out" recipe book I inherited when she passed away. It's really just a notebook with her handwritten recipes in it, but it's the more treasured cook book I own.
And then there was the evening supper to consider. Because there was more time in the afternoon, laundry could be washed and hung out. Normally the combination of the breezes and the sun dried things exceptionally quick so this worked out well during harvest.
Then it was time to make dinner, which was a repeat of lunch. Lots of work and lots of cooking.
All of this, food except for possibly the pickled items and cheese and bread, was prepared daily. First in the morning and then again that afternoon. If you can only imagine the constant work involved you can understand what a thorough experience it was for someone just learning how to cook.
Let's just say that my 13 year old experience that year laid a solid foundation for my love of cooking.
So...I cook almost every single say of the week. We very seldom eat out.
Plus it's less expensive and I enjoy trying new recipes that challenge my thriftiness.

I also learned how to sew from my great grandmother too. When I was roughly the same age, I complained that my cousin's hand me downs didn't fit me well. So grammie sat down at her treadle sewing machine and I watched as she threaded the needle and bobbin. Then she had me sit down, use the treadle and take in the side of my pants. She looked at me and said if I didn't like how the clothes fit, then I needed to learn how to fix them. Then she handed me a seam ripper and said it was the only way to learn how to do it.
Trial and error.

She taught me about knitting, crocheting, rug making, quilting, gardening, flowers, canning...basically everything she had learned when she was a young woman back in the early 1900's.

So needless to say, I'm pretty handy with a few things because of my experiences.

I know how to make things and make due. If you have an old flannel shirt, it can be used to make a braided rug, along with old work pants and ripped bed spreads.
I suppose you could say that while I remember it being a lot of work, I am happy I had that experience.
I learned how to do a lot.
I learned how to be self sufficient.
I learned hot to use things up and not waste.
And I learned work ethics. How to take pride in the things you do and feel satisfaction at a job well done.

I sometimes wonder if I'm teaching my children the same values or not.
There are plenty of times that I don't push things, like making them wash dishes or run the vacuum cleaner.
I think I'm helping them to have a childhood, but really, is it helping or is it making them into less than what they could be?

This has been a LONG post but you know, it's been on my mind. I've been thinking a lot about the differences between me and my two younger daughters.
It bothers me that they don't seem to have the fire to work.
I worry about it....

I want them to be a great as they want to be....but they can't be as great as they want to be, if they don't have any work ethic propelling them in the direction the desire to go.

I hope I'm not being too lenient...