72 hour kits

Today was the Area Day of Service at church. It was such a neat thing to know that on this exact day, church members and other community members in 11 southern states were working together to help and support the local community. I’ll post more about what we did in our small town a little later.

My assignment for the day was to work a 4 hour shift entertaining the kids, while their parents did the service work. For part of that time, I thought it would be fun for the kids to take a look inside a 72 hour kit and see what all should be in there. So in preparation for that, I thought it might just be a good idea for me to take a look at our 72 hour kits so that I knew what was in there myself. I pulled them out of the closet and just had to laugh at what I found. It quickly became apparent to me that I hadn’t updated our packs in almost 5 years. There was this little outfit that I had put in there for DALLIN which was a size 12 months. Which means that Layton would have been covered, but that if we did have an emergency and could only grab our packs then both Dallin and Mandy would either just have to stay in their same dirty clothes for 3 days or be NAKED. And the protein bars? They were Snickers Marathon bars. I decided to try one just to see how it was (it was only 5 years old) and YUCK! It tasted like sawdust. Or at least like I would imagine sawdust tastes like because I don’t think that I have ever eaten it. I’m not 100% sure about that, but I don’t think so.

Anyway, I decided that this was as good a time as any to update the packs and even make up a couple of smaller ones for Dallin and Mandy so that they could have there own. After looking over a couple of checklists, one that I found here and another that I found at the Department of Homeland Security website, I put together this pile of stuff to go into our packs. What do you think, will it all fit?

Luckily it did. Mine and Nathan’s pack are SO heavy. But, they have to be to be able to contain so much food and water. I don’t want to starve! Just think of all those people at the Superdome in Louisiana after the hurricane. If they had carried this much food and water with them, their situation would have been much, much better.

I also put a coloring book into the kid’s packs and a deck of cards in ours. I would hate to be lost out in the middle of woods and be bored :). Anyway, since I have them all ready now, I am going to have to try to remember to update them more often than every 5 years because I don’t really relish the thought of eating sawdust or the idea of my children running around naked in the middle of a national disaster. But do you know what I am really hoping? That I NEVER have to use them!