Streamlined Packing for Travel

I love going on vacation. I don't love packing for vacation. I find it extremely stressful. I'm always afraid I'm going to forget something, so I spend a lot of time staring off into space, waiting for the packing fairy to come along and do it for me. In other words, procrastinating. Yep. I'm a midnight, night before I leave packer.

It drives Peanut Head crazy. He's a military veteran and he has some sick and twisted ideas about packing, let me tell you. Like things have to be staged first. What the heckito is that?

Well, you have a check list (which I love, don't dis the list), and you find the thing to pack and then you put it in a pile, that's staging. Basically once you can cross it off the list as found, then move it to the staging area, then it is staged or something like that. Call me crazy, but it seems a little redundant to me, and I'm the kind of person that will write something on my list after I've done it, just so I can cross it off.

All I know really is that the staged stuff is in my way, right in front of the door, because it is staged and ready to go in the car. Then when it goes to the car it is officially packed. Peanut Head is staging things and I'm looking for them, trying to figure out what happened to the things I'm looking for because I don't realize he has staged them. It makes me crazy.

I digress. I'll try to focus here. So, what works for me, what keeps me focused on the task at hand, is these very cool, Hefty One-Zip 2.5 Gallon Jumbo Storage/Freezer bags. They work so well, that I actually started packing three days before vacation this time, not three hours. The week before a trip, as I'm folding laundry, I start slipping clothes, in complete matched sets, into these bags. I put only one day's clothing into a bag. In this picture, you can see I have two sets of clothes in each bag, one for each kid on any given day. I even store matching hair bows with the outfits. This saves me tons of time because I have the sets already matched up and all I have to do is pull a bag out of the suitcase each day. It also keeps the suitcase tidy because I don't have to root around, looking for items that match, because everything is already paired together. Kind of like Garanimals. Am I the only one that remembers these? This is how much progress I made today.

When we get home from vacation, I save the bags to reuse on the next trip. I just store them in the suitcases so they are right there the next time I need them. I think I'll freak Peanut Head out and go and stage my bags right now. He's out of town and won't get home until tomorrow, so he's probably going to trip on them as he comes in the door. Would it be so awful for me to take a picture of that? I can't wait.