The last few days have been a whirlwind of events that was kicked off with a bonus work-free day on Good Friday. Some of the events worth mentioning as I will spare you the boring ones, were my birthday, my Mom's birthday, Easter Sunday and the many egg hunts, buying a house and a dinner out with one of my very best friends and THAT does not happen often.
I suppose I did sort of gloss over the buying a house part...more on that one later.
Those other events, happy and great fun but today I am here solely to talk about the art or fart if you hate it as much as I, of packing. For some reason this time around, the packing for our Disney trip that we will be embarking on tomorrow morning, early...was not at all pleasant.
Being a working Mom and spending so many hours out of the house does not allow me the luxury of packing without massive amounts of pressure. When we go on a vacation that involves packing and preparing multiple pieces of luggage with our belongings in it, I start with my Master List.
This Master List is created about one and a half weeks prior to the actual travel day. Off-shoots off this Master List range in the ten to twenties and I sometimes feel as if I will seriously lose my freaking mind with all of the details that I am forcing it to remember in addition to trying to hold down a job. I also seem to accumulate hundreds of post it notes in every conceivable place that spell out further instructions and amendments to the Master List.
What I learned most this time around is that in addition to my Master List, I also need a great deal of quiet when I am packing for a seven day jaunt. I need to think and not have lots of jump roping children running all around me.
This trip proved to be more of a challenge than our normal trips because we are traveling first for a one night stay in Tampa at my parents new condo and will then travel on to Disney,Thursday morning. So I tried and we will have to see if it actually pans out, to pack all of the pertinent things for that one night stay into one bag of which I plan to carry with me on board.
SO if we were to lose our luggage, we would still be able to go about our merry way, minus all of our toiletries that we were not allowed to bring on the plane of course. I did find a small bit of peace in knowing that those things could be easily replaced should we find ourselves in that most unfortunate position.
I also learned that successful packing requires a strict strategy. The pressure of, have I forgotten something?, will we have everything we need?, and undoubtedly as it happens every time, the ONE thing that I will forget will be the ONE thing that we needed most and the entire family when we figure out that Mommy indeed has forgotten that ONE thing, will all look at me in complete disbelief and knowingly glance at one another as if I am just the biggest moron on the planet.
And these knowing glances will then require me to enact my cardinal rule of, if you didn't help me plan, pack or prepare for any part of this vacation than you better just shut you mouth before I shut it for you. Mostly that rule just applies to Drew who likes to be the Johnny come lately with the helpful comments and for those of you that don't know what I mean by Johnny come lately, I mean the one who makes the helpful, insightful comments AFTER the bad thing has already happened and it is apparent to everyone involved that there could have been a better way.
Anyway, I am extremely excited to be done packing and look forward to walking around the Magic Kingdom in 85 degree weather, standing in lines, carrying backpacks, having sweat roll down the side of my face as I listen to the chorus of how tired we are until that brief moment that we get to thrill on that one ride that we have just waited in line for the last hour to experience. I love Disney, it is truly magical.
No, contrary to the tiny bitch fest in that last paragraph, I really am excited to once again see the magic of Disney through the eyes of my little angels. There exists nothing better....I am quite sure of it.
