Welcome to Heritage Home Ec! We are so glad that you have found us.
Who I Am
Growing up in Rural America, I was raised by very old-fashioned values. My father is a factory worker (retired) and my mother was a home economics teacher, who also happened to have a degree in elementary education.
My grandparents were blue-collar; with one side being of a factory background and the other being farmers. I was also particularly close to my father’s grandmother, who had lived through the Great Depression and was (putting it nicely) very frugal.
I remember helping most of the women in my family with household chores, cooking and other aspects of the home life. We cooked from scratch, grew a garden, canned our food, hung our clothes out on the line, and just generally made the home function efficiently and economically.
What Home Economics is to Me
Most of you (if you are of a certain age) remember when Home Economics was taught in school. The basis of it was focused mostly on cooking and sewing. But, having my mom teaching me a more practical side of it, it’s so much more than that.
Home Ec is about creating everything within the house that actually makes it a HOME.
It’s cooking for your family, it’s cleaning and organizing in order to keep it running like a well-oiled machine. It’s using things around the home in different, more useful ways. It’s budgeting, planning, prepping and making sure that the family works well no matter what the outside world throws at you.
Why Home Economics is Important
Why do I think learning and teaching home economics is more important than most people think? Because I watched my family suffer through tragedies that required thinking outside of what society teaches us today.
We are taught (most of the time) to work hard, live like the Jones’, and everything will come out smelling like roses.
I call BS.
I watched my father work 7 days a week, coming home tired and unable to spend too much time with his daughters to still not measure up to that ideal life that we are promised.
He was laid off from work, and I watched my mother cry as she had to hand over food stamps to the cashier. Not that she thought it was immoral; but we had all worked so hard for so long for something that we had been promised by society only to have to still ask for help.
I live now knowing that no matter what, life is never secure or promised. Knowing Home Economics and how to use that in our lives, whether during feast or famine, I feel so much more secure in this world.
And I hope to teach you that feeling of security also.