Browsing Tag: backpacks

Many years ago when my oldest children were young, I put together 72 hour emergency kits for our family.  It took me many hours to figure out what we needed and to do the shopping for the items.  My kids were little so I wanted to make sure I had things like coats, mittens and woolen hats in the kits as well as water, food and survival equipment. Since we didn’t have a lot of money it took hours of looking through second-hand stores to find what I wanted at reasonable prices. I was fortunate to find everything on my list including very used wool blankets which I had read had the ability to keep people warm even while they were wet.  I was quite thrilled with the things I had found and I organized everything into individual backpacks (something else bought at second-hand stores) so that, if need be, each person could carry something.  Then I put everything into a garden cart so that, if I needed, I could pull the cart by myself with my kids, if my husband was out-of-town on business.  I stored the cart in an outdoor storage space so I had easy access to it, and I was feeling pretty good about the results of my hard work and diligence.  At some point I realized I needed to update the items in the kits and pulled out the cart only to find that mice had gotten into everything.  As I sorted through the kits I found they had eaten all of the food, chewed holes in the clothes and blankets and left their nasty droppings everywhere.  It was disgusting and I was heartbroken.  I had worked so hard putting it all together and the only things salvageable were things like flashlights and canteens and other survival equipment. I picked up all of the other items and threw them all away-backpacks, clothes, empty food packs, everything, and I told myself I couldn’t do it again.  I didn’t have the money, energy, time or strength to make new kits, and so I didn’t.  In the back of my mind I knew I needed to make new kits but it was just so overwhelming, especially for something to be destroyed by mice again.  And so I didn’t.  Several years went by and one day, when I was feeling guilty about not having emergency kits, the thought came to me that it was a matter of obedience. That, if for no other reason, I needed to make new kits to be obedient to the directions given by the leaders of the Lord’s church. With that new thought I bought mice proof containers, simplified my wants, researched the best foods to store and spent many hours putting the kits together, and since by now we had all 8 of our kids it took even longer to do than the first kits. But, I did it!  Everything is still piled into a garden cart and I go through it every 4 years to replace the old with new, and the mice proof containers have worked great. I needed to be obedient and it wasn’t easy to do the kits again, but of course it was easier than I had imagined.