It'a an Emergency!

We usually rotate the food in our 72-hour kits by having a big pigging-out Emergency Dinner on the floor of our living room around the same time as General Conference (April & October). We were late this year, because we kept thinking we would have a full Emergency Campout, but every weekend we wanted to do it, it was too rainy, including this past weekend. So we did the usual Emergency Dinner Friday night with the lights off, and enjoyed some MREs, boxed cereal, granola bars, fruit snacks, cookies, dried fruit, boxed milk, juice boxes, Capri Suns, and Pop Tarts--most of which we don't eat on a regular basis!

This is one of Cat's very favorite things. It will be so funny to see how she reacts if we ever have to use our kits in an actual emergency, since she has so much fun in pretend emergencies. First of all, once she found out that we were having our Emergency Day, she couldn't wait to get started. I told her that we needed to wait for Ben to come home, but she couldn't stand it, and finally we compromised on bringing everything into the living room, but waiting to eat until Ben actually came home, about 30 minutes later.

She immediately put on her emergency clothes (whatever I found at Goodwill that was in her size), colored in the coloring book that we keep in her kit, turned on every flashlight she could find (even before it was dark outside), and found a radio station on the battery-powered radio. She loved eating her cereal out of the little bag it comes in (in the individual-size boxes) with milk poured in the bag, and helped us eat the M&Ms from our MREs. Then, she and I slept on an air mattress in the living room all night. This was surprising for me, since I thought that sleeping with her sleeping bag would be enough to keep her happy, but she insisted on being on the air mattress as well. Ben wasn't too keen on sleeping on the couch, which is too short for him, but he tried it for a while before he gave up and went to the nearest "hotel," our bedroom.

Jack had a lot of fun too, since we gave him a bag of Cheerios and let him just go for it. Before long, they were all around him, and he was picking them up to eat at his leisure. He liked the MRE dinner too, drank his fill of milk and juice, then on Saturday morning helped clean up by putting whatever he could find into the suitcase.