On October 6th it snowed in Idaho Falls. TONS of snow the first week of October! That just baffles me! If you know me at all, you know that I have grown tired of Idaho Falls winters. We’ve lived here for 5 years and I’m ready to have a normal winter. What do I mean by normal? I mean I would like to be able to enjoy Fall before we get a ton of snow and freezing cold weather. Well, that is never the case in Idaho Falls. That’s really the biggest complaint I have about living hear. It snows even into June sometimes!! How ridiculous is that! I like snow, well, I used to. Now I dread it.

Anyway, on to the subject of my post… Being Prepared. I have been into food storage and preparedness stuff on and off. I’ve never had a years worth of food, let alone a 3 months supply, but I have had a good amount saved up. Well, I kind of still do, but it’s not very organized. I don’t keep track of when I use something so I think I have something, like yesterday we need oil for dinner and we didn’t have enough in the one we had in the pantry. I knew I had one downstairs… except I didn’t. UGH!!! I hate it when I realize how unorganized I am!

Remember my goal to organize the laundry room this month? Yeah, well, I have about 10 days left and I’ve done one thing and it wasn’t really that great of an organizing thing either. I cut a huggies box in two and decorated it with scrapbook paper to keep some supplies in. Woohoo. It took forever so I only did one box and now I’m kind of bummed that I’m not happier with the result. Oh, well, life goes on.

Since we had that mishap about the oil the other night (we also had another mishap of not having any refried beans! SERIOUSLY??!!) I have decided I need to get back in the food storage game. I get this daily newsletter from my favorite Preparedness website Safely Gathered In and tonight I decided to sit down and read some of them. Since I get them daily I skim through them, but don’t always have time to read it all. I saw that they were doing some guest posts on “Real Life” Emergency stories from their readers. That interested me so I read the three that they have up so far:

Ice Storm-2009

Joplin, MO

Miami, FL

These stories have all made me think about how prepared/unprepared we are to go through this winter. Hopefully we won’t have to endure an ice storm or hurricane or tornado, but it’s always good to be prepared for anything. So, with that in mind I am going to do a Preparedness post every Friday. I will give you some ideas to help you prepare for any kind of situation, whether it be you run out of oil or whatever. I want to help you be prepared.

To start us off, this coming week I want you to pick up an extra can of your staple meal item. Ours is definitely refried beans. We have at least one can a week so if I’m preparing for 3 months I need to have 12 cans. We are actually stocking up on them this weekend since we are completely out, but if you don’t have that in your budget just pick up one extra can.

When I used to do the shopping before I had my baby (who is  now 15 months old!!!) I would always pick up one extra can for each meal. That helped us build our food storage, but we have mostly gone through all of that. We have been stretching our penny as far as it will go lately and Mark isn’t as food storage conscious as I am. Buying those extra couple of cans each week has gone to the weigh side and I am going to have him start it back up.

Also, I want you to purchase one nonfood item that you could use in an emergency. Toilet paper, paper towels, blankets, sleeping bags, flash lights, batteries, you name it. Pick one thing that you think would be most important for where you live and buy one of them.

One thing that reading the ice storm story did for me was it made me realize that having activities for the kids to do is VERY important!! Our 72 hour kits are stocked, BUT I haven’t looked at them in about 2 years so I’m sure the kids have outgrown the clothes I have in them. That’s one thing I will be working on over the next couple months trying to get everything organized again.

I heard from somewhere, I think it was Hannah and Abby, from Safely Gathered In, that they redo their 72 hour kits every 6 months at General Conference time. The kids get to eat the snacks if they weren’t used and they’re restocked. I think that’s a great idea!! So I am going to adopt that plan:)

I don’t have a kit for my baby or our dog so I also need to work them into the plan. To think that we’ve had both of them around for more than a year and I’m not prepared for them in any way if we have a disaster. That’s kind of scary!! I’m not really sure how to prepare for a dog for a disaster. Can you store dog food and not get ant? lol I guess I will be looking into that some more.

Ok, I think I’ve gone on way too much now. I hope you will follow along and do this with me. I’m doing it mainly for myself so I can get organized again, but I also worry about friends and relatives too so that is another big reason I want to do this. That is the reason I started this blog in the first place.

Your tasks this week are:

1. Buy an extra can of your favorite food.

2. Buy a nonfood item that would be important during a disaster.

I already told you I will be stocking up on refried beans. I think the nonfood item we will buy is toilet paper. We’re almost all out and we can’t live without TP!:)

I hope you have a good weekend!! Thanks for stopping by!