Packing for 28 Hours

Last weekend, we traveled from Seattle to Portland for my sister-in-law's baby shower. We were staying only one night - Saturday - and from the time we walked out our door on Saturday morning until the time we got home on Sunday afternoon, we were gone approximately 28 hours.

A few nights before the trip, I informed Mark that I was making a packing list. Without breaking stride or pausing for breath, I also told him that we should probably pack some of the stuff the night before. Because, you know, we were going to have a lot of crap. 

Mark's response: "but we're only going for one night!"

Oh, silly rabbit. Overnight bags are for bachelors.


While I appreciate that Mark's lack of a vagina means he can throw an extra t-shirt, socks, a pair of underwear, and some deodorant into a grocery bag and call it good, there are three important factors that he was failing to take into account.

(1) I am a woman who has never been good at packing lightly (and we were going to a family event, and I was having one of those weeks where I hated all of my clothes). My friend Hitha over at Hitha On The Go has some great ideas for packing lighter. She also just had a baby so we'll see how that goes :-)

(2) We were going to a family event for which we'd been asked to contribute a number of items.

(3) We have a baby. And babies require a lot of shit.

All things considered, I think we actually did pretty well on this particular trip. I managed to only pack three shirts, two cardigans, two pairs of pants, and a single pair of shoes - a minor miracle and largely the result of my desire to avoid having Mark accuse me of being ridiculous. Of course, I also packed a flat iron, makeup, various toiletries, a hairbrush, etc., but I consider those things obvious and not optional.

There there was the stuff for the baby shower:

• Three (3) 13-gallon trash bags of hand-me-down baby clothes for the mother-to-be.
• Three (3) tupperware containers in varying shapes and sizes containing roughly 8 dozen cookies (in lemon ricotta, almond Florentine, and chocolate chip varieties)
• A tiered cookie tray on which to display the cookies
• Eight (8) white ceramic dinner plates, hauled down at the request of my in-laws who are wonderful and also rather finicky about the quality of dinnerware off of which they (and their guests) eat.
• Eight (8) white ceramic dessert plates -- see explanation above.
• A full set of flatware -- explanation above also applies to instruments used in the transference of food from plate to mouth.
• Oh yeah... and the actual gift for the expectant parents.

It is still up for debate whether it was my mother-in-law or father-in-law that decided that the hauling of white plates 200 miles was necessary. Either way, watching Mark progress through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief over the course of about 60 seconds (they can't be asking us to do this (denial); fuck that, we're not doing it (anger); can't we get someone else to do it? (bargaining); I can't believe they are making us do this (depression); okay fine, I guess we're just going to do it (acceptance)) made the entire thing totally worth it.

Side note: Yes, I am taking a bit of a dig at my in-laws over this particular idiosyncrasy, but it should be noted that I totally won the in-law jackpot. 

And then there was the stuff for the baby:

• Travel outfit (departing)
• Travel outfit (returning)
• Back-up outfit in case the car induces a diaper blow-out (it turns out that cars vibrate at exactly the right frequency to get A's bowels going)
• Outfit for the baby shower
• Sleeper
• Back-up sleeper in case the first sleeper is wrecked by poop, vomit, pee, or some combination thereof
• Sleep sack (here's a link for my non-parent friends)
• ~15 diapers, approximately one for every two hours we were going to be gone
• Wipes
• The Pack'n'Play
• The Ergo Carrier (which I prefer)
• The Beco Carrier (which Avery prefers)
• BPA-free plastic baby bowls
• BPA-free plastic baby spoons 
• BPA-free sippy cup (now called a "transitional cup" because of-fucking-course it is)
• A rattle that our nanny-share family got in Mexico for their youngest son to keep him entertained on a trip a while back, that Avery has now appropriated. I am sure it contains lots of BPA.
• Two WubbaNubs
• Banana Mum-Mums (the most effective silencing device for babies over the age of 6 months)
• Cheerios (it was on this trip that I realized that my car is going to be a Cheerio wasteland for the next decade)
• Socks
• More socks
• A hat
• A jacket
• A blanket
• An extra blanket it case the first blanket is wrecked by poop, vomit, or pee, or some combination thereof
• The car lovey
• The sleep lovey

There are also probably a variety of items that we packed that I've forgotten to list here. The amount of crap you carry when you have a small baby is astonishing.

But I think I've proved my point. Even for 28 hours total travel time, you need a list.