It's all coming together.

It's been 9 months of thoughts, prayers, conversations, books read, blogs followed and lots of note taking, and I think it's all coming together in the form of a project. The Pearson's are going UNPLUGGED! Between health issues, consumerism issues, financial issues and a goal of working on the spiritual discipline of Simplicity, things are shaping up in a very organic way (hahaha - a little organic joke!). I will have to explain it in stages because my words aren't quite right for it all just yet. Our main goal is to live for 3 months with a very minimal carbon footprint. The project will run from June 1 to September 1 and we will all do our best to live by the rules for the whole time. I'm not going to be super fanatical, but as I said, we will do our best. To get started, we inventoried the house and came up with 55 things that regularly use electricity in our home. For the purpose of the project we want to reduce that number to 10 - we currently have the list down to 13. Our other main goals include: no car, no purchasing of anything new or packaged, to generate only 1 garbage bag of trash over 3 months, and to eliminate all chemicals, toxins, pesticides, preservatives and additives from our diet with the objective being to phase out all meat and dairy products. At the end of it all I want to know what we can really do without and what we really need to have. I want my boys to learn how to live with intention, to be aware of the decisions they make and how they impact themselves, our family, our community and the world. It will be a big undertaking, and I'm sure there will be an abundance of humourous stories along the way. We will blog about our experiences regularly and I'll keep honest about our mistakes and cheats. We will spend the next 2 weeks getting ready, making the rules and doing some practice. Follow along with us as we learn to live by REDUCE. REUSE. RECYCLE.