I have an obscure and secret addiction.
I regularly read blogs by homeschooling, homesteading families. I have followed some of these families through the (home) births of several children and through multiple seasons of gardening, canning, spinning, knitting, sewing, and barn building.
I try to imagine life as part of an isolated, self-sustaining family unit where everything needed is made at home and by hand. Not unlike my childhood fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder, it all seems too good to be true. Or too hard to be possible. Or too remote to be my reality.
In fact, such families, although highly self-sufficient, are not 100-percent self-sustaining. No nuclear family in this day and age really is.