When the lovely people at Procter and Gamble told us that they are celebrating their 80th birthday this year and challenged us to live a day in the life of a 1930’s family, we decided to give it a go – if only to show the kids what life was like without all the modern technology and home comforts that we have these days. We set aside last Sunday as our 1930’s day but when we woke up, Master Frugal wasn’t well so we decided to let him off the hook and just me and Miss Frugal worked our way through the list of tasks 😉
We started the day off with the 1930’s beauty regime, of which I will not be showing a photo lol. Miss Frugal had a bath and washed her hair with plain soap but she said this made her head feel itchy so we re-washed it with our usual shampoo. While she was drying off, I used the cold cream to moisturise my face (or whatever it’s supposed to do) and although it felt horrible and thick on my skin, the smell took me back to my childhool as my nana used to use it when I was little. I then attempted the 1930’s make up style but I very rarely wear much make up and the pink rouge and heavy powder foundation were not a good look for me so I ended up taking it off again….
Miss Frugal then brushed her teeth with the lovely pink looking toothpaste, which she was excited about at first (anything pink is good), as soon as she got it in her mouth she looked like she was going to be sick:
After the beauty ordeal, I was definitely ready for a cuppa. My first problem was that I had no idea how to turn the loose tea leaves into a nice cup of tea. Cue Twitter plea for help and the realisation that I really needed a teapot. Never mind, I struggled through with a glass jug and we managed to make two cups of tea with minimal fishing out of floaty bits.
We had porridge for breakfast and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never made porridge from porridge oats before so it was back to the laptop for instructions on how to make porridge. I’m sure 1930’s housewives had Google, right?
After our porridge, we read together and did some drawing before making butternut squash and nutmeg soup which although it looked awful, actually tasted delicious.
Washing the pots was another ordeal and involved grating flakes of carbolic soap into warm water before washing them with some sort of scourer thing. The pots were clean when we finished but they didn’t feel clean if you see what I mean. I left them on the drainer to dry but I did end up washing them again later in the day to be honest.
Miss Frugal prepared scotch hotpot for tea which was actually really nice but took a lot more effort to prepare than most of the recipes in my cooking reportoire lol.
While we were waiting to cook, we tried to do our washing the old fashioned way with a wash board and ending up managing to wash all of one towel before we gave up and decided that a housewife in the 1930’s would clearly not have done her washing on a Sunday so it was OK if we didn’t do ours on a Sunday either.
We had a go at cleaning as well although we do already use vinegar and water to wash our windows and I have tried using bicarbonate of soda in the past aswell. After all our hard work, we settled down for a play with the building blocks that were sent in our challenge pack…. We built a castle (that’s a rocket by the way) and a house before getting bored with actually building with the building blocks. As we’d only been playing with them for about three minutes at that point, we decided to play building block bowling, building block towers and my personal favourite who can throw the most building blocks into a bucket!
We had a great day and whilst it’s lovely to turn off the TV and our mobiles and laptops, we did miss a lot of things that we take for granted on a daily basis – things like teabags, washing up liquid, the washing machine, shampoo…. I could go on 😉
Thank you to all at Procter and Gamble for inviting us to be part of the challenge and for supplying us with everything we needed to join in – It’s been a great learning experience for Miss Frugal and I’ve donated all the 1930’s things to her class who are going to use it to learn as well.
