72 Hour Kit Nastiness and Awesomeness

Nathan has been working on his Family Life and Emergency Preparedness merit badges.  For his required family project we decided it was time to actually update our 72 hour kits.  We've talked about the need to do this for the past ten years or so but you know, they are way up high in the garage and we all have had about 0% motivation to actually follow through with this need.

So...three weeks ago we looked at the calendar and finally found a day that we were all home for three hours at the same time.  Imagine everyone's glee (NOT!!!) as we each dumped out our backpacks to find them filled with little worms, bugs, leaking peanut butter, diapers, outfits that fit us in our skinnier and smaller (toddler days), and cans of food bulging.  Instead of salvaging much of anything we ended up hauling several garbage bags full of nastiness out to the garage can.  I have to say that Birch and I had a moment of silence as we threw away two 72 hour milk carton kits of food that we made TWENTY years ago in our Institute FHE group.

Nate hauling one of the bags of old bug infested 72 hour kits.

So then Nate and I started doing some research online with pricing out individual items and what we all wanted in our kits.  We decided to take a trip together to Costco to see what their options were.

One our later we were home with eight new 5 day Emergency Preparedness kits for $40!!!

Not bad for $40!!!  They are actually twice as expensive on their website.

We decided that since the food in these backpacks are all freeze dried and in foil packs we should be good with the little nasty bugs this time (we sure hope).  We all picked out our backpack and added ziplock bags (yes, we learned) of an outfit of clothes, toilet paper, toothbrush, medicine, small amount of cash, water filter, and a sweatshirt.

Let me say how good it feels to be prepared!!!  We figure when we send them off to college they can take their backpack with them and in twenty years (how long the food should last) they can each be in charge of rotating their stuff themselves!!  Yahoo...oh I guess, we'll still have to rotate clothes every now and then.

Thanks Nate for the motivation to make this happen!!