Who is Karen Morris? She’s a . . .

Christian.  Wife.  Homeschooling Mom.  Prepper.  Author.  Blogger.  Trekkie.  Aspiring Gardener.  Reluctant Kitchen Engineer.

How did our family get into preparedness?

Preparedness isn’t just a stockpile.  It isn’t just “beans, bullets, and band-aids.”  Preparedness is a lifestyle.  Sometimes we live it better than others.  But if we are always learning and applying, preparedness becomes part of the air that we breathe.  So let me tell you a little about my family and me – Karen – and our journey toward a lifestyle of preparedness.

Growing Our Stockpile

We accidentally started our journey toward self-sufficiency about seventeen years ago.  I got into couponing.  There was a fairly new website out there called, Money Saving Mom, and I started reading it.  I saw that people were buying canned vegetables for twenty cents a can and getting shampoo or razors for only change.  This really intrigued me!  So I started slow and started to grow a stockpile.  At the time, I didn’t equate couponing with preparedness, but in reality, that’s where our journey started.

I got six months’ worth of toilet paper for $5.  I purchased 20 boxes of cereal and paid $2 total.  There were even a handful of times when I would get home with my purchases and my husband would look at me and laughingly ask how much I paid, and I responded with, “They paid me.”  Now, in reality, they hadn’t paid me, but I earned more coupons at that specific store than I spent.

So what does all this have to do with preparedness?  Uhuh, I’m getting there.  I bet you can imagine with getting all those amazing deals that I started to garner quite a stash of shelf-stable items, personal care items, paper products, and toiletries.  And yep!  You’d be right.  Our stash grew so large (and we had no basement) that we even consolidated children so we could use a bedroom to house our ‘pantry.’  We didn’t even know that we were working toward preparedness at that point.

From Growing a Stockpile to  Building a Preparedness Mindset

Not long after we started couponing and amassing our stockpile, we started wondering what we would do if something “bad” happened.  Yes, we could eat from our reserves IF we could cook them, but how were we going to cook our reserves, and what about water?  What about when our stockpile ran out?  What if something happened to my husband’s job and we didn’t have a way to pay the bills.  These questions started weighing on my heart and mind.

So we did what all good beginning preppers do.  We purchased a Berkey Water System and a pressure canner and hid them away in a closet and didn’t use them for five or six years.  Yep.  We were brilliant in that way! 

Now, we aren’t Mormons, but we learned about LDS (Latter Day Saints) canneries.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that paying $12 (at that time) for a twenty-five-pound bag of wheat was an amazing deal, so we would place an order through our local cannery once or twice a year.  Now as brilliant as we had been about the Berkey and pressure canner, we did learn how to repackage the food that we purchased into five-gallon buckets and Mylar bags.  We even learned how to get buckets for FREE!  Yea, score for me!

The Ferguson Tornado

We’d been couponing, starting to build our long-term food storage, and learning more of a preparedness mindset for six or so years when our house was struck by a tornado.  

A couple of things that I learned from the situation were:

1.)  Having a stockpile of food and a way to cook it if you are ever displaced from your house is a MUST.

2.) Always have an emergency kit in your car that contains at least one change of undergarments per person in your family and the necessary toiletries for an overnight.

3.) Do not own only ‘virtual’ copies of movies.   If the internet is out, you won’t be able to play any movies.  Instead, make sure you have a way to way to play DVDs if you are not at your house or if the internet is out.  A laptop computer with an internal DVD player or a USB DVD player or a portable battery-powered DVD player along with an adequate DVD collection of your family’s favorite movies is a must.

4.)  You need a robust collection of games that your WHOLE family likes to play together.  I would even suggest keeping one or two card games or easily transported games in your car for emergencies.

Ferguson Riots

Ferguson. . . .there’s that name again.  Are you noticing a pattern?  While I enjoyed the majority of our thirteen years in Ferguson, we had our share of troubles there too.  

I want to share a little bit about the whole situation with you.  No matter where people live, no matter how people live, no matter what situation people live in, most people believe that life will continue on normally.  There’s actually a phrase for that – can you believe it?  It’s called “Normalcy Bias.”

According to Wikipedia (which I’ve been told never to quote), normalcy bias is: “A belief people hold when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the likelihood of a disaster and its possible effects because people believe that things will always function the way things normally have functioned.”

Ya know what, you most likely have that, even if you’re a prepper!  By the time the Ferguson Riots hit, I was a prepper – maybe not a very good one – but a prepper nonetheless.  Yea, I was prepping for some unnamed event out in the future that MIGHT happen to me, but when it did happen to me in many ways, it still doesn’t seem real.

Don’t be that person.  Don’t be the person who lives in denial of a terrible event that they are going through.  It can happen to you and it might happen to you.  If you face it, it makes the living through it easier.

Ferguson made us a little more streetwise.  Ferguson taught me a lot more about situational awareness . . .

Knife-Wielding Attacker

. . . but apparently not enough.  We lived in central Illinois for about ten months.  My children are very physically capable and love to be outside, but they have chosen chess as their sport of choice.  Another family in our church had told us about a chess club that they attended.  That seemed right up our alley.  So we attended our first day.  The kids loved it.  On our second day, we had our lesson, the kids were paired off, and play had begun.  Just after that, a young man about nineteen years old, ran into our room screaming and brandishing two knives.  He was literally about three feet away from my thirteen-year-old boy and my nine-year-old boy!

And get this, my first thought was, “okay, this silly kid is playing a trick on us to scare us.”

Remember that ‘normalcy bias’ that I talked about with the riots?  Yea….by this time I would have classified myself as a serious prepper.  I really thought he was a kid playing a prank…..um, no.  It later came out in the course of events that his intention was to kill everyone in the entire room!

Fortunately for us, our chess coach, retired veteran James Vernon (now deceased), stepped between my boys and the young man.  Once the young man’s attention was engaged by the coach, he motioned behind his back to get out.  I had FIVE – can I say that again, I had FIVE children ages 3-13 in that room!   Two of them were within three feet of this troubled teenager.  We got out of the room quickly and the coach sustained an injury defending himself against the young man.

Normalcy Bias

I was a PREPPER!! I had a phone and a pocket knife in my purse!  What did I do before the coach motioned us out? NOTHING!  Really, I did NOTHING.  I was paralyzed.  Normalcy bias played a HUGE part in this!  I didn’t even think to slip my pocket knife into the coach’s hand before I left the room.

Once I was out of the room, my brain kicked into gear.  With my five children around me and out of harm’s way, I hurried to the library’s service desk and told them to call 911.  We ended up leaving quickly after that.  This time it wasn’t just my children that were traumatized.  The whole ordeal caught me so off-guard.  My sense of security was again shattered as it had been during the Ferguson riots.

Do you live in a safe community?

Are you tempted to say that you live in a safe community so you don’t have to worry about ever being accosted?  Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but before this according to Wikipedia in 2013 Morton was recognized by Family Circle magazine as one of America’s 10 best towns in America for families to live.  It wasn’t exactly the type of town that would cause someone to say, “Ya know, I really don’t feel safe here.  Maybe I should carry pepper spray.”  Really?  I think not.  So don’t count on living in a perceived “safe community” to keep you safe.

Living through this situation taught me about the importance of being mentally prepared.  Walk yourself through difficult situations mentally.  There’s even a game called Worst Case Scenario.  Now some of the scenarios in the game are rather unlikely, but so is being caught in civil unrest (at least it’s not that likely at this moment) or being confronted by a knife-wielding teenager.  It is a wonderful way to work through mental preparedness as a family.

Unlike with the riots, my youngest son was oblivious to what was going on around him, but my other four children really felt what happened.  The kids don’t talk about it much anymore, but if someone brings it up, they will jump in with their rendition of what happened.

The Present

In the Business

At this moment, we’ve rebranded “A Year Without The Grocery Store” to “Are You Prepared, Mama?” if you’re here – you’re on our new website. We have launched a new YouTube Channel, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  I have authored A Year Without the Grocery Store, A Year Without the Grocery Store’s Companion Workbook, Mom on the Run, and The 2024 Prepper Planner.

On the Homestead

So what’s going on with us now?  We recently left a five-acre mini-homestead.  The cost of living in the country – at least here in central Illinois, was exhorbitant.  During the time that we had on the homestead, we went from a total of three incomes to two incomes believing that it was our best option, but money got tight.  

We sold the homestead and are now living (debt-free/mortgage free) outside the city – though it takes almost no time (about five minutes) to get into town.  We’re tucked away at the back of a small subdivision where we can have animals (our property came with a chicken coop)! 

This year we’re planning on putting in some raised beds and a few fruit trees.

The Future

New Content!

My newest book – Adaptive Prepping – coming 2024

Wow! So much is coming down the pike!  Just for the rest of 2024, I have another book – Adaptive Prepping.  What’s it about?  Despite our limitations (and we all have them) we can all get more out of our preparedness efforts if we just know how.  I help you with the ‘how.’   It’s like a Prepper Coach coming alongside you, giving you suggestions, tweaking things that aren’t working as well as they could, and cheering you on.

The Prepper Binder

Every important piece of information that you need will be at your fingertips with this binder at your side.  **Important phone numbers and contact information at your fingertips.  **Children’s Safety Sheets.  **Teaching sheets for instructing children and grandchildren about fire safety.  This section includes  a simple house diagram you create with escape routes, several exercises to walk through with your spouse, children, or grandchildren, and instructions on running an effective firedrill. **Checklists for emergency kits, bug-out-bags, water filtering and planning for an adequate emergency water supply.  **I teach you have (and give you the space) to get your personal info down and give you a simple way to inventory of several areas of your life and property.  **I give you a list of important legal documents that you want to get into one place so that if there is ever a tragedy, you have everything you need – marriage license, home owners documents, college transcripts and so much more.

What I’ve Learned

I’ve learned that there’s little that I can do to control what’s going on around me.  But I do know that by taking small actionable steps every day, I can reasonably ensure that my children’s future is more secure tomorrow than it is today.

And so can you!  Here at “Are You Prepared, Mama?” You’ll find information to help you get your family ready for life’s emergencies.  We provide you with resources to quickly move your preparedness efforts forward.  We equip you with actionable steps that you can take today to get your family ready for whatever life throws at you.

Dive into the blog.  Check out our print publications.  Visit us on YouTube.  We’re always here to help.

You’ve got this, Mama!