"We can do no great things, only small things with great love." - Mother Teresa

Monday, February 4, 2008

Emergency Preparedness

I have been working hard to hold regular Family Home Evenings every Monday, and for about two months now, I have been successful. I think one of the things that makes it happen is that I don't stress about it. One of the advantages of having such little kids is that you can't really have a lesson that lasts longer than five minutes or you loose their attention. (Okay, really, if it is longer than 30 seconds you loose them!) When the lesson is that short, it is easy enough to come up with spur-of-the-moment lessons. Tonight, we started preparing our 72-hour kits. After a rousing "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" and then a more reverent "Reverently, Quietly" we started our discussion on emergency prep. Brigham is now quite profficient at saying "emergency." We talked about what we would most need if we had to leave the house in five minutes, and Joy came up with food, water and clothes. Paul signed blanket, so I think he may have had a bit of an idea about what we were doing. We pulled out some extra backpacks and each of the kids loaded up a bottle of water, an MRE (the military training meals) and then went to their room to hunt for a pair of clothes that could go in the packs. Those were added to the boys along with three diapers fairly successfully. After discussing at length with Joy what clothes she needed, we finally pared the list down to shirt, pants, panties, socks and she insisted on shoes. She came down with the bulkiest pants, sweatshirt and boots she could have possibly come up with. When she tried to fit it all into her bag, it was a tight fit. When I asked what she would do for food the other two days (MREs are only good for one day of food) she decided that everyone else should share their food with her since her clothes took up all her room. After a little disucssion, she got rid of the bulk, put in a pair of stretch pants and a long sleeve t-shirt, and we compromised on the shoes by deciding to leave a pair in the shelf by the front door so she could get them on her way out. While all this was going on, Brigham and Paul ran around wearing their full backpacks. The packs were put in the closet by the front door with plans for me to finish packing them to their 72-hour need at a later date. All in all, I think it was one of our more successful FHEs. And, should there be an emergency in the next 24 hours, the kids can share their food and water with me!

1 comment:

Crystal said...

Impressive! What a great idea for a simple emergency prep FHE for little ones.