Go Bag Gone

Before I had my son (now five-years-old) my mother-in-law bought me a diaper bag as a gift.   I didn’t have a diaper bag and honestly, I don’t think it’s what I would have picked out for myself, but it became my diaper bag and was ultimately the only diaper bag we ever had.

By not picking it our for myself, I mostly mean I don’t know what I would have picked out.   She selected a nice blue and white pattern and I was sort of excited about it when she gave it to me because I’d never had a Vera Wang item.   She told me it was Vera Bradley, something altogether different.  I am so fashion ignorant.  I liked it though.  It had a big compartment and a lot of side pockets to stick stuff in.  I put all our baby things in it and started toting it around with my newborn son in 2010.

As a quick aside here, my next-door-neighbor coincidentally happened to buy the same diaper bag.   She and I both agreed it was a great bad as we’d go out with our children, matching bags on our shoulders.

I called ours our the, “Go Bag” as opposed to a diaper bag because it would go with us everywhere.   It spent most of its time in the car, restocked and ready for the next outing.   Then, as the children got older it stayed in the back of the car more and more and was called on less and less.   It became the Benadryl and Advil container.   It stored an extra change of clothes for both children, wipes and a few white cloths in case of a mess.   Oh, and the special socks for the trampoline place—can’t forget those.

We’ve been in need of the go bag more infrequently as the children have aged and tonight, after my daughter needed her spare set of clothes after splashing in our friends pool, I decided to have a good look through the Go Bag and see what we really needed.  

It turned out aside from a change of clothes, Benadryl and Advil, we really didn’t need most of the contents so I made the decision to retire our Go Bag after over five years of excellent service.   I put the remaining “necessaries” into a much smaller bag, a “Feed Bag” given to me by my sister-in-law.

I’ll miss the Go Bag.  It served us well.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had another issue with punching today.   He and I made a plan:  we would count to ten before we punched or yelled at anyone.   I was very, very proud of him when he came in later in the afternoon to tell me he had counted to ten because he didn’t want to hurt Madison.    I told him I had had an opportunity to count to ten myself but I hadn’t done so well.   I told him we’d both keep working on it tomorrow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Aunt Rebecca and I ran in a 5K today with my husband, Uncle Jonathan, and our two children (who had a stroller assist).    My daughter and son were enthusiastically running along with us a good bit of the time.   My daughter came up between Aunt Rebecca and me at one point and said, “I know you can do it, Mommy” to which Aunt Rebecca replied, “we know mommy can do it, what about ‘I know you can do it Aunt Rebecca?!’”