Personal Preparedness...

This is something The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints teaches us, and how important it is for all of us to be self sufficient (as much as possible), and personally prepared.

 The Red Cross also talks about being prepared...mostly for disasters. I don't want to be a dooms dayer, but there are all kinds of things that can happen in our community, and we should all be prepared for them. I actually blogged about this before. The 72 hour emergency kit is something we should all have...whether you live in a hurricane area, a place that is struck by tornadoes or floods, what whatever, all of us should have one of these.

I've decided to do another blog about it since it is time to go through and pull out all the stuff that is getting ready to expire and restock my bags. 

Since I sell Thirty One products (mythirtyone.com/terryjeanettecarter), I decided to try out of their bags, and the Super Organizing Utility Tote works great! Thirty One actually has several bags that would work for this, but since these were on special a few months ago, I decided to save some money and purchase these...one for me and one for my husband. 

For the next three days, I am actually eating my 72 hour preparedness food. I wanted to make sure I could survive on it. Usually, I don't like to eat like this, and I did try to be as healthy as possible, but I still got a lot of processed stuff. 

As you can see, I have a lot of protein bars and drinks, but I also got fruit cups and juices. Today was the first day I actually ate from it, and it wasn't too bad. To be honest, I have a lot of food, but hey, figured I might have to share a little, and you never know who might be with you if you have to evacuate.

So besides natural disasters, you might wonder why anyone would need to evacuate. Well, let me share a true story with you...

A few years ago, my parents were sound asleep in their home. Shortly after midnight, there was a loud banging on their front door..."POLICE! You need to evacuate NOW!!!"  My parents stumbled to the front door to see cops and swat team running all over the neighborhood, (yes, really), and the police told them they had to leave, "NOW!" They did not have time to change, just get their shoes on, and their keys and go. If they had had their 72 hour emergency kid, with food and clothes, they could grab that too. They were lucky in this incident that they were able to come back in a couple of hours. But how many times have you heard a stand off lasting for days?  Don't know about you, but I really don't want to go shopping for something to eat and clothes in my pj's.

So, what do you put into one of these things? Well, you can go to the Red Cross website for more info. One thing that is important is that you put things your family will eat into it; every six months, you go through it and make sure nothing is expired or about to expire. I have heard of all kinds of ways people do this. One family I heard had a mock emergency every six months. They would out of the blue, get the kids up and head out with their emergency kits and go camping. That sounded pretty fun to me.

Our church has a world wide general conference every six months, and I've heard of people eating their stuff and replacing it that weekend. I think that's what I plan to do. This time, since we are in such limbo with the move, not sure where we will be during that time, and since it is so close to that time, I just decided to switch it out now. Besides, it was September that I put mine together, and that was six months ago.

Well, hope you all get your 72 hour emergency kit together soon. You never know when you will need it....hopefully never...but...it's always good to be prepared.