It’s not just high gas prices. We all know that it’s time to put the planet first and conserve its resources by driving less. As a WAHM, I’ve pretty much figured out how to do all my errands in one day, including shopping, two libraries, the natural foods store, the post office and thrift stores. True, it means packing a lot into one day, but it’s worth it.
If you’ve managed to pare your trips down to one or two a week, you may be wondering how to fill the other five or six days. What do you do with the kids? How do you get together with friends? What happens when all this togetherness drives you batty and your brain atrophies from lack of contact with other grownups?
Never fear, humans lived without cars for millions of years and managed to survive. One way to stay in contact with friends is to initiate Friday night pizza parties or cookouts or card games and alternate hosting. One week, you go there. The next week, they come to your house. It saves on gas and food costs and sitters.
Here are some other ideas for ways to keep life interesting and full while not emptying your gas tank. First of all, don’t think of it as being forced to stay home. Think of it as being allowed to be on permanent vacation. If you’re not running the roads everyday, you have lots of time to do the things you always said you wanted to do but couldn’t do because you were too busy.
Have a chair you’d like to refinish? A book you’d like to read? A hobby that you’ve neglected? A season of a popular show on video that you’d like to watch? Well, now you have time to do all those things. But first you have to find something for the kids to do, now that you’re not hauling them to friends’ houses, lessons and games.
Do they have friends close by? Close enough so that they can walk or bike to each other’s houses if they’re old enough? That’s how kids used to meet up, before parents started taking them everywhere by car. Do you have a yard they can play in?
Send them outside with an unbreakable jar, a small net and a bug identification book. Get them some sidewalk chalk and let them draw on the driveway or sidewalk. (Just move your car to the end of the driveway, so that no one can pull in while they’re doing it.)
Teach them how to play hopscotch or play jump rope games or put some water in a small wading pool and let them sit in it and cool off with small buckets, bowls and bathtub toys. If they’re too young to be left alone, sit near them and read your book or cross stitch your pillowcase or just relax with a cool drink and daydream.
It’s ironic that we spend so much money on making our homes into cozy nests, then drive away from them to “have fun” in other places. Why not enjoy them instead? Here are some alternatives to going out for a good time. All of them are online and most of them are free:
- ibiblio Public Library and Digital Archive, a collection of collections:videos,music,etc
- Project Gutenberg, a collection of books you can read online
- WorldWinner, free online games with prizes
- Game Colony, ditto
- Instructables, the world’s biggest Show and Tell
- wikiHow, my favorite place to learn how to do things I never knew I wanted to do
I’m going there right now, to learn how to make a garden in a bottle – as soon as I finish this game of Bookworm and bookmark a book on organic gardening at Gutenburg.org.
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by Victoria Everman :: Sustainable, Creative, Enlightened Living :: San Francisco » Blog Archive » Carnival of the Green #132, on June 16 2008 @ 7:06 am
[...] tells us How to Drive Less and Still Have a Life – it is [...]
by Cindee, on June 19 2008 @ 12:42 am
This is how I raised my kids. We only had one car and my husband drove it to work. I quit my job and stayed home everyday. We would go to the grocery store on weekends and that was the big outting. We lived and everyone was fine. Now days young people are always going somewhere. They never want to stay home. Kids to daycare parents off to do the night clubs or the gym. I agree the world would be a whole different place if everyone just stayed home and did things together.