72 Hour Kits!

So Trina's experience with her severe weather inspired me to share what we have been doing just incase we need a 72 hour kit.

Last summer there was a story in "The Friend Magazine" that told about a family that tested out their emergency preparedness. I'm not sure how to link that story to my blog, but you can find it on LDS.org in the July 2007 Friend Magazine. The title is "Ready to Go!" (To understand what we did you need to read this story)

Anyway, we read this story and decided that we were going to try it out. We did the same thing for family night. Jim and I's time was cut in half because we had to get Lexie's stuff ready. When our time was up we loaded in the car and drove to the local grade school. We looked over our stuff and noticed that Karissa had no shoes on.... Brindley did grab a box of crackers that was sitting on the kitchen counter..... and when we got out of the car we started getting eaten by mosquitos. Needless to say, we did't have the items we needed. This was a good wake up for all of us. One little side effect though, for the next couple weeks Karissa was a little freaked that something was going to happen to us. We have reassured her that if we are prepared we will be ok. So here is what we have done and are still doing to build our 72 hour kits.

We found $60 backpacks on clearance at Shopko last fall for $6. We got each of us one. We wrote everyone's name on it, then came the time to fill them. This seemed very overwhelming and maybe expensive in buying what we needed for everybag. So we are building our bags one item at a time. Every family night we add one item to our bag. We first started out with a change of clothes, then the next week we did bathroom toiletries. We just saved our old toothbrushes and used the sample toothpastes from the dentist. I also had plenty of trial baby wash for each kid. Jim has been on enough business trips that he had trial shampoos for us. Some weeks we may only add a bottle of water, or a roll of lifesavers, but our bags are getting quite full. It's a relief to know we have them and yes we still have items we need to add, but we have a start...... that is better than nothing.

Here's Lexie sporting her bag before we started putting stuff in it. She was so excited to have her own backpack!

So I know many of you already have your bags put together, but for those of you that needed an idea of how to start, I hope this helps. When we first got the backpacks, I thought, "How the heck are we going to do this?" Now it is all coming together. We are going to do our little practice thing again and this time hopefully we will be better prepared and then we can also decide what else would be good to add to the bags.