Chapter Two ā Mama Mouse in the 72 hour kit
When my children were little we were very disciplined about switching out the food and clothing in the 72 hour kits. These kits are for when you need to bug out and just grab and go. Every August our church congregation had a campout at Rocky Mountain National Park where we would gather at the big group campground and spend a night or two together eating and singing. During the day everyone would hike and then we would head home. I used this yearly trip as an opportunity to eat up the contents of the 72 hour kits.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFD03A09A68897F6A&si=1aoqmcev6fVz1now
One of my first video series on You Tube from 16 years ago!
The first year we attended we did not have any equipment. We just took the pillows and blankets off our beds and made a big family bed in the back of our van and slept one night away from home. I had a horrifying altitude headache and was up pretty much all night long. But it was fun to be in the great outdoors with our kids and being away from home gave us the perfect opportunity to discover what the must haves are when on the go with babies and small children. Each year that we camped we added to our equipment and all of the snacks and MRE type meals that we had packed in the kit were taken along to eat on the campout.
Our church congregation was filled with preppers and I had a good time talking to the old timers about situations where they had to abandon their homes to get to safety. Because we lived in the foothills of the rocky mountains the most common situation usually involved flooding, but I also heard stories of fires and a few mentioned being out of work and just needing to be self reliant with their finances.
It was so helpful for me to be around these types of people while we were putting in a store of food and supplies because they really helped me to discover the least expensive resources for prepping and gave so much great advice. Like for example, I always believed that we would need huge 55 gallon drums of water to āsurviveā and at one point we did invest in six of them. But one of my prepper friends said that a freezer dedicated to water was a better choice.
The thinking being that if you had a freezer filled with a couple cases of water bottles, you could easily put one in your fridge to keep the fridge food cold and have cold water to drink, and as the days clicked by, most of the freezer water would stay cold to continually add to the fridge and even with the power out, cold clean bottled water would be available for drinking and cooking.
Water is incredibly heavy to carry and so it would be nearly impossible to bug out with those 55 gallon drums, but a case of water could be thrown in the back of the car and easily transported, or even carried. So for years when our kids were little we kept cases of water stored in the back of our van. We rotated these often and used the bottled water for sports and other outings.
When my children started going to school, quite often I would forget to replace the snacks for their lunches and time after time they dove into the 72 hour kit backpacks to find snacks for school. Once in a while we would also raid the piggy bank and take the cash out to pay bills, or go to the store, or out to eat.
I sometimes felt bad about these ānon-emergencyā uses of the kits, but isnāt that what they were for? To fill in the gaps where poor planning and lack of resources compelled us to approach things differently? Now I look back and wonder that I spent so much time and energy on these things with everything else I had going on. Perhaps the greatest gift to growing up prepper is that you carry certain habits and ways of thinking into your adult life.
My parents taught me to think defensively. Instead of thinking of myself as a victim, I was taught to think proactively and confidently about everything. Instead of sitting around waiting for others to tell me what to do in various situations, I instead was able to confidently think through my problems and approach them logically and outside the box.
Like the time we had let our 72 hour kits lapse and they were just sitting in our front hall closet out of the way.
My daughter went to grab a snack and screamed. A mother mouse had given birth to a large litter of mice next to a cup of noodles. Iām sure from the mouseās perspective this covered hideaway was the perfect place to nest and birth her children. She had a limitless supply of food, water, and comfortable clothing surrounded by packs of aluminum blankets, flashlights, and matches.
During the first year of our marriage I stored ten two and a half gallon water containers in our linen closet.
My husband woke me up one day to tell me that they had collapsed in on each other and leaking had caused some mold. This was our first adventure with water storage. And over 32 years we have had just about every disaster you can imagine. Weevils in the oatmeal, mice in the closet, moths in the pantry, rust in the water, beetles in the spelt, and earwigs in the garden.
It was the pigweed in our garden that was perhaps the most demoralizing. We had worked so hard to put in the garden one year and it was just overrun by this nasty weed.
We had very few vegetables in the garden that year and a few months later moved to the next house, so I never had to deal with it. The house we had been living in was razed to the ground and a parking lot built in its place, so the pig weed is no more. But I did not relish the thought of trying to scrape the soil any more than we did and try to get some vegetables out of that patch of land.
It was very frustrating. That final summer we lived in my husbands ancestral home in Utah, we had a bull break free from its owner and bust into our garden. The police knocked on our door one morning asking for permission to go in our backyard because they believed the runaway bull was in it. He was. He left a few droppings and ate some of my earwig covered vegetables and then took off running where he knocked a second woman who lived behind us over in front of her house before the police shot him dead.
Exciting times in Cedar City Utah!
I have not always had the space to grow a garden, and it was a good experience to have one for a couple years and realize how much work goes into growing those lovely vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs.
Now I am happy to patronize the farmers markets and local food producers as we put in short and long term food supplies. My husband makes home made applesauce, spaghetti sauce, and jam and we bottle some up every year to use. We also spend serious amounts of time working with grains in our kitchen crafting bread, muffins, waffles, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, pizza, and everything that can be made from whole grains and beans.
It has been so gratifying to see my own married children also baking and cooking from scratch. My parents legacy continues on.