I started packing New Years Day, January 1. As soon as Christmas was over and my holiday decorations were put away, I started laying out our stuff. I actually had to move a chair out of the twins room and put up a folding table to have a staging ground. Needed to have somewhere to lay stuff out that Sam and Alice couldn’t destroy or get into, so twins room has been off-limits for the past two weeks. Man, it’s easier when kids can’t move.
I had to go through each child’s off-season wardrobe and find clothing that would work in a different climate than the great NW in January. Thankfully I have been given so many baby hand-me-downs (praise Jesus!) that I have the opposite seasonal clothing for each kid. I didn’t need a lot. Just a couple pairs or shorts, a pair of sandals, swimsuits, and dust off a few of their t-shirts and we’re good to go. We have laundry there (a must) so I tried to keep it as light as possible. I did of course have to try some stuff on the kids to make sure it still fit since its last wearing in August. I’d wash things then lay them out. Sam kept finding his clothes he hasn’t seen in awhile and wanting to strut them around the house, then I would have to refind them and rehide them. Been a bit of a battle zone on home front since the clock struck 2012 gearing up for this trip.
Friday, at T minus 24 hours, my mom was in town. She’d packed herself and was there to help me. Having raised four of us kids, she knows how hard it is to take a family vacation. She may not remember exactly how she accomplished it, but she remembers it was not easy. So here to help. Sally, Jon’s mom offered to take the two big kids for the day so I had a little quiet time to think. So I only had the babies to juggle while packing, which while not a walk in the park, is SO MUCH EASIER than when all four are in tow. They don’t talk or move yet, hence much simpler. I take what I can get.
My on-deck day was spent folding and stuffing and loading TV shows on iPads and iPods and packing snacks and video-cameras and still-cameras and chargers for everything under the sun and picking up toys and cleaning bottles and thinking about how to do breast milk in the airport, and so on and so on. You get the idea. The kids went to Google’s (that’s grandma’s house…they call her “Google”) at about 9am. I didn’t start packing for myself until about 5pm. Now I will say I did take a lunch break to visit with my uncle midday to let me brain breathe a bit, but still… After thinking most of the day about the kids, I dusted off my summer clothes, most of which are so old and haven’t been worn in the past five years because I have been pregnant or nursing every summer for the past five years (pregnant three of those summers, the most recent in a hospital all summer so I wore pajamas everyday, and the two summers in between I was nursing which still kinda messes with your clothes). So these clothes have not been properly worn since the summer of 2006. They are ancient. But they’ll work. It’s just Florida.
