THIS is why fundies scare me

[Koala]

Found it. http://www.generationcedar.com/main/2011/07/simplicity-how-to-balance-it-with-stewardship.html

We are given so many wonderful clothes that we rarely need to buy any. But, what if you simply have too many? Honestly, I really struggle to get rid of perfectly good clothing.

Key word here? GIVEN.

I have a plan…

As I wait in our temporary home and plan how to keep our lives simple now that we are starting with a fresh slate, I have a plan. Perhaps it will inspire you to do something similar.

I’ve heard suggestions of the large family clothing dilemma go something like: “Save each child a play outfit, a couple of dress outfits and a few things in between, and get rid of the restâ€. Sounds good at first, but I can’t do it. What happens when those few things get stained or torn? What happens when they grow out of them? Back to the store to BUY new ones when we just gave away perfectly good clothes.

So…I’m planning the “Crawford Thrift Storeâ€. We have an extra room in our basement. Once our home is rebuilt, I plan to outfit this room with clothing racks, shelves and places for shoes. I will THEN give each child only a few outfits and shoes to keep up with. I will put any surplus in the “storeâ€, keeping it locked and only accessing it as needed. Anticipating the same “disposable mindset†I mentioned in the last post from knowing there is an abundance of clothes behind the door, it has crossed my mind to require a child to buy new shoes or clothing from our “store†if he lost them due to carelessness. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Rooms with lower maintenance, good stewardship of what is given, and the chance to teach our children the value of money.

This concept could be applied to most items that seem to multiply in your home.

Now here's the ironic thing. *If* I recall correctly, Kelly and Aaron didn't have a dimes worth of insurance on that house that they were renting from her parents.

"Disposable mindset": Check

"Good stewardship" I don't think so

As a result of their carelessness and their aversion to gov. assistance they had to rely on the kindness of others to rebuild their home and replace their possessions. Now you tell me how Kelly has the gall to resell those donated items to her children? You tell me how she has the gall to lock those items behind closed doors and make her children grovel for them. You tell me how she expected others to donate to her, but when she had an overabundance of clothing she didn't pass those on to other tornado victims.

I live close to Kelly and a tornado hit out community less than a year after the one that hit her community. I never saw her mention one word about it on her blog. Maybe she did and I missed it, but I watched for it, and to my knowledge it never came.

[TXDuck]

That's called stock, and is the basis for every good soup or sauce ever made. I have a ziplock of celery, onion and carrot peelings, limp parsley and chicken bones in my freezer all the time. When it's full I add a bay leaf, boil for 3-4 hours, strain and freeze it.

What you have is the basis of stock. What was originally descried was...well, garbage soup is an apt name. I have turned many, many fowl carcasses into stock. I have never used plate scrapings or random leftovers.

[dawbs]

Does this sound repulsive to anyone else or is it just me? Also, a refridgerator that empty in a house of 11 people is just scary. Her poor kids.

If you've ever lived in a house where it's done, it is incredibly vile.

My one grandfather (uh...I don't remember how much of those stories I've shared. Not the guy I refer to as 'my gramps', the other grandpa-- the fundie-preacher-turned-alcholic-turned-now-disgraced-televangelist follower-turned to just odd and slightly fundie" one) never got over his urge to do that.

He'd invite extra people to dinner and there would be 1/2 a gallon of skim, 1/2 a gallon of whole, 1/3 of a gallon of butter milk and a little bit of chocolate milk left...dump it all into one jug, shake it up...add some water and powdered milk if you have to. Serve. ew. just...*shudder*

(my cousins and siblings and I all learned to tattle to my step-grandma really early. "grandpa is up to his old tricks again" would get her out into the kitchen shaking a spoon at him and we could at least have non-mixed'milk)

It was beyond gross.

and he never 'got' that people who said 'it's fine' were being polite/good guests.

I've also had 'garbage soup' type stock.

It's vile. My mom (yes, that above mentioned grandpa's daughter ;) ) has not yet figured out that adding water to leftovers =/= soup. It's...it's just disgusting. It's inedible.

(Although, I will say, I was lucky. It was at least served w/ bread and butter and if we picked out the veggies and ate bread and butter, we wouldn't go to bed hungry)

[Mice]

First Kelly posts about how little she feeds her family and brags about giving them a horrible meal with not enough nutritional or caloric value. When people confront her on this Kelly says the typical family eats only prepackaged and take out food so she is still way better than them. Oh and her family likes to eat like this.

This has everything to do with Kelly getting her control freak on and nothing to do with the welfare of her family. It astounds me that these fundies say the entire focus of their lives is to take care of their families and then they completely fuck up said families as much as humanly possible.

[Kitchen Princess]

This sort of fundie upsets the shit out of me on a very personal level (as opposed to the more academic level like most of them) because I am LIVING that. I am mad poor right now. I feed my house of three - two growing boylings and myself - on a budget that's more safety pin than shoestring most days. When the kids are with their dad I survive on black beans and rice, cheap pasta dishes, or the like. But when the kids are with me? I will totally make it a point to buy veggies and fruits on sale, make sure they have enough protein, and keep enough vaguely healthy snacks like whole wheat crackers or string cheese or raisins or whatever around to keep them from being hungry if a meal isn't enough for them.

This means that *I* go without. *I* cut back my cell phone plan, *I* don't buy new clothes, *I* don't replace the sunglasses I lost, etc. Because I had these two kids and I owe it to them to do the best I can for them at all points. If these fundies would get their heads out of their uteri for a few seconds they might realize that nowhere in the damned Bible does it say "And then Jesus said 'Starve the little children, that your wife might not work and you might have MORE little children, in order to best serve Me.'"

At least, I'm pretty sure that isn't in there. It's been a bit since I read it. :P

I think they just upset me so bad because there's no way that this situation that we share is serving any higher power, there's no way that choosing this on purpose is noble, there's no way that anyone should be yammering on the internet about how awesome they are for being in a position where their kids can (and apparently in this case DO) go hungry. Making the best of a bad situation is one thing, but making the bad situation and then patting themselves on the back for handling it in the most mediocre manner possible makes me crazy!

I've been in your shoes with the two little boylings, and I wish there was something I could do to help you. It gets better; it does.

[1tiredmama]

She is pregnant again? If so, how far along?

[Sunnichick31]

My one grandfather (uh...I don't remember how much of those stories I've shared. Not the guy I refer to as 'my gramps', the other grandpa-- the fundie-preacher-turned-alcholic-turned-now-disgraced-televangelist follower-turned to just odd and slightly fundie" one) never got over his urge to do that.

He'd invite extra people to dinner and there would be 1/2 a gallon of skim, 1/2 a gallon of whole, 1/3 of a gallon of butter milk and a little bit of chocolate milk left...dump it all into one jug, shake it up...add some water and powdered milk if you have to. Serve. ew. just...*shudder*

(my cousins and siblings and I all learned to tattle to my step-grandma really early. "grandpa is up to his old tricks again" would get her out into the kitchen shaking a spoon at him and we could at least have non-mixed'milk)

The bolded makes for a funny mental picture. :lol:

How can any decent mother let her kids go hungry? There are so many programs that could prevent it. Do they live in a rural area? If so, even a book on identifying edible plants could help out (maybe not much, but every calorie counts, right?) And like other posters mentioned already, a garden would be cheap to start and it could produce so many veggies. Or a couple of apple trees.

[sewingmom2]

RE the food available. She said they had 2 deer and a steer in the freezer. That's probably 150 pounds of venison (or more) and 600 pounds of beef (or more). No way is that facing inadequate food She had rice, pasta, and homecanned vegetables. And oatmeal, eggs, and milk. It seems to me that she was making a point of cleaning out the refrigerator--and that she did.

I'm a farm girl who also cleans out the refrigerator periodically, seeing how frugal I can be and how I can avoid wasting food dollars. I think the latest stats show that Americans waste 30% or more of every food dollar spent. It's good to try to plug that leak.

Two chicken breasts, unless they are the huge ones that come frozen in those 3# bags, are slim pickings for 11 people. However, most of the rest of the world, especially 3rd world peoples, surely don't get more animal protein a day than 2 chicken breasts for 11 people. If you factor in the milk and eggs consumed by this family during the day, it was probably enough.

Most of the world eats meat as a condiment, not as a main course. The main course is a grain (rice or wheat) or potatoes. The protein is usually a legume. Spices are used liberally. A very small amount of meat adds flavor. It's amazingly good and filling. One of my favorites is a roti filled with a spicy legume mixture and a side of cucumbers and yogurt. There might just be a sliver of goat meat hiding among the peas!!!!

So, I don't think she's lying. She's trying to make a point that it is possible to be somewhat frugal and still eat adequately. For several years, I worked as a direct care provider for disabled men. I ran the budget and kitchen and spent $100 a week to feed 4 men three meals per day. I had no trouble keeping to the budget and providing plenty of meat--chicken, pork, and beef. Two of the men had to have foods ground and drinks thickened, so things like pizza or bread were no-go's. That made things a little harder, but it was certainly doable. I last worked there 6 months ago, for budget comparisons.

[Arete]

What you have is the basis of stock. What was originally descried was...well, garbage soup is an apt name. I have turned many, many fowl carcasses into stock. I have never used plate scrapings or random leftovers.

Exactly. No roast chicken leaves its mortal plane in my house until I have turned its carcass into stock, and I have certainly used marrow and neck bones for beef stock. Veggies peelings and herbs? Sure. Random cooked leftovers? That is not stock, soup, or a meal, it's a disgrace.

[hapamama]

I get what you all are saying in general about her food budget, and the tragic comments about starving kids. However, this particular meal may well have been balanced nutritionally and enough to fill everyone up. Milk is also a source of protein, so with the addition of milk there may have been enough protein per person for this to pass as adequate. Also, if the meal was served with salad, they got their veggies in.

To add enough milk to be enough protein for 11 people, her casserole would have ended up being soup...

[Jiraffe Jirl]

I work at a restaurant and tonight for dinner I had 2 small chicken breasts, a side of cooked spinach, a light mushroom sauce, and a garden salad. It was about 486 calories. I cannot fathom how 11 people would split even double that amount. I also can't fathom not letting my children eat as much healthy foods, especially vegetables, as they desire. My family had trouble paying the bills sometimes when I was a kid, but food was always a number one priority.

This woman makes children who's parents are on welfare seem fortunate.

[BravaAmica]

Found it. http://www.generationcedar.com/main/201 ... dship.html

Key word here? GIVEN.

Now here's the ironic thing. *If* I recall correctly, Kelly and Aaron didn't have a dimes worth of insurance on that house that they were renting from her parents.

"Disposable mindset": Check

"Good stewardship" I don't think so

As a result of their carelessness and their aversion to gov. assistance they had to rely on the kindness of others to rebuild their home and replace their possessions. Now you tell me how Kelly has the gall to resell those donated items to her children? You tell me how she has the gall to lock those items behind closed doors and make her children grovel for them. You tell me how she expected others to donate to her, but when she had an overabundance of clothing she didn't pass those on to other tornado victims.

I live close to Kelly and a tornado hit out community less than a year after the one that hit her community. I never saw her mention one word about it on her blog. Maybe she did and I missed it, but I watched for it, and to my knowledge it never came.

She's quite the control freak, isn't she?! OMFG.

[CheeseDeprived]

I just looked at her blog for the first time today (I wish I hadn't, she makes me sick).

On the chicken breast entry, there's this comment, which I thought I'd share before she removes it (which I assume she will):

amy says:

January 20, 2013 at 10:52 pm

For goodness sake,quit having children you can not provide enough food for.

Go sign up for WIC and quit being so damn prideful. You are a NUT job. You are not godly or a wonderful mom. You are abusing your children by withholding enough food for a growing body.

Expect a visit from child protection services.. I am calling today.

[adidas]

I've only read the first page. I'm having flashbacks to Under$1000Emily :( .

[Inanna]

I've been in your shoes with the two little boylings, and I wish there was something I could do to help you. It gets better; it does.

Thank you so much. I actually am not too miserable in the day-to-day despite the limitations (better than the life I left behind) but I would never try to spin it like it's somehow "godly" or "serving Jesus" or anything. Kelly just makes me nuts.

I just looked at her blog for the first time today (I wish I hadn't, she makes me sick).

On the chicken breast entry, there's this comment, which I thought I'd share before she removes it (which I assume she will):

amy says:

January 20, 2013 at 10:52 pm

For goodness sake,quit having children you can not provide enough food for.

Go sign up for WIC and quit being so damn prideful. You are a NUT job. You are not godly or a wonderful mom. You are abusing your children by withholding enough food for a growing body.

Expect a visit from child protection services.. I am calling today.

The only thing I could think when I read this was "Shit just got real!" :shock: I don't know a lot about child protection laws, tbh... can they get involved based on something like this?

[MyName]

I hope cps was called and does get involved. proudly posting that your family of eleven ate two chicken breasts....I have no words.

[formergothardite]

Two chicken breasts for 11 people. I can't even imagine. We were hardly rich and there were nine kids in my family, but my parents had a huge garden and we canned, froze, and dried fruits and veggies all summer and never, ever ate like this.

[chaotic life]

Sufficient food is indeed on th CPS checklist. However, she has two deer and a cow in her freezer, so it is NOT insufficient food that is her problem, but a lack of brain cells. She HAS food......she is simply not FEEDING her family adequately. Since the kids are accustomed to having their food controlled and told they may not/do not feel hunger, they are certainly NOT going to tell a CPS worker they are hungry. She can show her freezer full of food, and I suspect she has staples in her pantry to show them as well. Her children are undoutably taught to fear the EVIL government at all costs and with no experience of anything other than her controlling the food, they have no framework nor trust to speak out that there is a problem. If she took the children to a doctor who was concerned, that would trip flags but IF she takes her children to ANY doctor, she most certainly does NOT go to a doctor who doesn't consider her a terrific mother and her children simply "small boned."

[2xx1xy1JD]

It might not be true that more siblings = less food. Since she's just doing this for control reasons, not because she can't financially/physically get more food (unless it's actually because of abusive headship control and not her own, but it sure doesn't seem like it from the outside.) Hopefully the kids realize that it's not God and it's not them, it's Mom and Dad deciding they should be hungry.

Unfortunately in a group of kids that big there are always a few who side with the authority figures. Sometimes when there are only a few kids they band together and work around the parents as much as they can.

There have been horrific cases in the news over the last few years where some but not all kids in a household are denied food. I know some have been posted here, especially when they were adopted kids. But it's a pretty common form of parental control/abuse and it's spread out over all kinds of bad parents, not just religious ones.

It's not a natural law that in the US more kids makes each get less food. It's that Kelly prefers her kids to be hungry. We've all mentioned ways to get more food into the house - WIC, SNAP, asking the church/neighbors, growing your own. Hell, I've dumpster dived a lot just because so much good food gets wasted in our society - I've been in groups of 3 or 4 cooks who routinely fed 30-40 people with just dumpstered and donated food. If her kids are routinely hungry AND she's as capable/blessed as she claimed, then their hunger is purely her choice. (Not all parents have the resources Kelly has. There really are places/situations where kids go temporarily hungry without their parents being at fault. I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about Kelly and her own claims about her life.)

You have a point.

I know a number of large families, and they feed their children. In fact, many would overfeed their children. For these children to ever be fed an inadequate amount of food, the family would truly need to be in dire straits. In those situations, once the moment of extreme crisis (often brought on by things like wars) had passed, they would be so traumatized that they'd start force-feeding the kids.

So yes, Kelly is making a CHOICE to live life in a way that her kids are deprived of food.

At the same time, her kids don't necessarily see it that way. They may see a certain amount of food, they know that there will be no seconds, and they know that dinner has to be divided 11 ways. So, they may some to resent the other siblings.

I also wonder why she seems to prepare food devoid of taste. Even with adequate portions, that casserole sounds disgusting. Boiling chicken and then sticking it in a blender? Unless you have no teeth, why would you do that? My equivalent would be to take leftover chicken (eg. meat on the chicken bones after they have been boiled for chicken soup broth) and add it to sauteed onions with some garlic and either shawarma or curry spice, and serve it over rice and/or hummus. Similar cheap ingredients (leftover chicken,onions, rice, chick peas), but it actually tastes good.

[JesusFightClub]

My mum does that! She cooks a roast chicken one day then takes the leftovers the next. She puts them with lentils, onions, garlic, chickpeas and rice. Also she sometimes gets a few naan or poppadoms.

When me and bros were young our family was not the richest, put it that way. My mum was SAHM until she went back to work when I was 7 and my dad got promoted. She made "Sausage pie" which is as its name suggests, a pie made of sausages. Rabbit stew, which again was stew wi' rabbits in. They were both cheap meat in the day. And what my childhood workbooks (if you don't have them in the US, you filled those out like "What I did last night" in primary school) describe as "kesh". :oops: Um, quiche, which she made in a huge dish and we had two days running. It was a special treat.

I reckon my mum would have run a mile from blending a fucking chicken breast in a blender. In fact, any sane person ought to.

[Wolfie]

Boiling chicken and then sticking it in a blender? Unless you have no teeth, why would you do that?

My only thought on why it was blended was because that was the only way that she could say that all 11 kids got some meat with two chicken breasts.

but, ugh! Even if she had a meat grinder it would be better.

[sarahbrownie]

Sufficient food is indeed on th CPS checklist. However, she has two deer and a cow in her freezer, so it is NOT insufficient food that is her problem, but a lack of brain cells. She HAS food......she is simply not FEEDING her family adequately. Since the kids are accustomed to having their food controlled and told they may not/do not feel hunger, they are certainly NOT going to tell a CPS worker they are hungry. She can show her freezer full of food, and I suspect she has staples in her pantry to show them as well. Her children are undoutably taught to fear the EVIL government at all costs and with no experience of anything other than her controlling the food, they have no framework nor trust to speak out that there is a problem. If she took the children to a doctor who was concerned, that would trip flags but IF she takes her children to ANY doctor, she most certainly does NOT go to a doctor who doesn't consider her a terrific mother and her children simply "small boned."

It's just a start. A visit might scare Kelly enough to make sure this doesn't happen again. Also, this incident gets recorded, so it's beneficiary if something were to happen again (god forbid) that the authorities already have a previous history of abuse.

Unfortunately, the opposite could happen and she'll even dig her heel in deeper with rationing food to have more in her quiver.

[ILoveJellybeans]

I was in the supermarket today, and there are loads of cheap foods that would be a better option than that. Fruit and vegetables arent that expensive, and surely she could have afforded way more meat than that.......surely she cant be that poor, and if she is, why is she having another kid?

[JMarie]

Someone has now addressed the chicken casserole debacle:

Of course Kelly replied with her typical nonsense:

Notice she only addressed to protein issue. She didn't make a peep about the fact that it's simply NOT enough food.

If store-bought chicken is hardly nutritious, why serve it at all?

[2xx1xy1JD]

Canned diced tomatoes and either chick peas or beans were my staples when we were starving students. I still get excited and start stockpiling when I see big cans on sale for $0.88. Adjust the spices and add-ins, and you get curry, chili, black bean soup, stew, etc.

Oh, and she could have added some scrambled egg to diced chicken breast and celery and onion with a bit of garlic and soy sauce and call it a Chinese dish. It would have increased the protein and taste content.

Pancakes are really cheap if you buy ingredients in bulk, and they can be healthy if you use whole wheat flour and oats.

Canned salmon, a package of frozen spinach, some onion and garlic and oil and a can of evaporated milk can make a surprisingly tasty and hearty sauce over pasta.

You can cook inexpensively without starving your kids or serving puke-in-a-pot.