This is day 3 of my 30-day blog challenge. Read day two, “Tips on starting a free blog”

My family doesn’t own a microwave

And that’s okay. When we first married, my husband and I consolidated the contents of his 3-bedroom house and my stuff (that didn’t exactly fit neatly into a backpack either). We sold off duplicate CDs (remember those) and parted with most of the sharp swords and battle axes that we knew we wouldn’t be needing as we started a family.

Then, after our daughter was born, I made the decision to stay home. In fact, I also decided to return to school for a second degree! The difference between barely making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, and spending all the money I brought in working on daycare left me no doubt as to what I wanted to do.

I’ve never for a minute regretted trading extra income for time with my toddlers (and, again, it would have been a wash to work while they’re so young. I didn’t want to pay someone else to raise them). But, in 2011, we had to move in with my mom to save money. At that time, we pretty much sold off everything from the kitchen table to the microwave–because my mom had furniture. We didn’t want to pay for storage and we just figured we could start all over one day.

We moved into an apartment in August, and we quickly realized we’d literally given away or sold all our appliances including the toaster! I recalled the first time on my own, when I moved into a townhouse and had to use a butter knife to screw together my first yardsale table.  I remembered how we used the oven to warm food, and even make toast.

Desperately desiring to stick to a budget and save money where we could, we used the oven’s broil setting for toast and recognized (like the fox with the sour grapes) that microwaving food isn’t actually healthy. It likely zaps the nutrients out of vegetables, and frozen processed food isn’t high on our list of things to feed the children.

So, we got used to it. It’s been more than six months and I don’t think I’ll go back. Of course we have a coffee maker, but we live without a toaster and without a microwave. One day I would like a home with a yard that we can turn into a garden. I’m all about those lawns that use available space not for landscaping but for food growing. If more people took the time to think about how easy it is to make pancakes from scratch instead of from Bisquick, and that the microwave will degrade food, we’d all be a bit healthier. Our grandparents didn’t have these “luxuries.”

We should all learn to remember what the world was like just a few decades ago. Many of the innovations we feel we cannot live without also act as excuses to get lazier. I’ll leave that thought here to linger.