Staging

We’ve been preparing for our upcoming sailing trip for a while now.   I have a packing list that continues to grow as we think of things we need that we wouldn’t consider on a typical trip.   I’ve been building a pile of things off in a corner and as of yesterday, we moved everything up to what’s known as “the craft room” in the house, using it as a staging location for everything we’ll be packing for the trip.

The craft room works well because it’s an end point in the house and no traffic flows through it.   The children aren’t allowed in there without an adult because they need permission to use most of what’s in the room and that permission comes with limits on amounts.   The room is large and there are a lot of flat surfaces like desks on which we can spread out the contents we’ll be packing up.

My husband and I prefer to pack light.   I like to take the smallest amount of an item necessary for the given trip.   This trip is different because we have to plan for things that may or may not happen.   We’ll be out to sea, outside the continental U.S. and if someone gets an infection, we need antibiotics.   If someone comes down with a ferocious case of sea sickness, we need multiple ways to knock it back so the person can be comfortable.

We’ll be snorkeling so there’s all the gear entailed with that.  My children will be wearing life vests any and all times they’re on deck, which will be most of the day, so we needed vests that were comfortable for long days in hot weather.

Clothing is different than normal though because most of the time we’ll be in bathing suits—more suits, less clothes.  And then there’s the entertainment issue.  Issue meaning no wifi, no cellular, off the grid, back to card games and board games.   Reading real books (or electronic books they can read via text or braille.)

There’s more in the way of entertainment I’ve been working on, which I’ll likely post when I get finished with the compaction and packing.   I got some excellent ideas from my daughter’s braillest and VI teachers the other day at school using library hanging book bags.   I’m revamping a closet, saving lots of space in the process and making many things easily available to my daughter.   I’m side tracked here, but imagine you knew there were all these things in your house, only you had no idea where they were.   We go and look in the games closet as sighted people and see all the games available.   She can’t do that, she can’t even feel them to find out what the games are because all the game boxes are just that—boxes.

Talking to her teachers gave me some very exciting ideas and thanks to Amazon Prime and Lowes, in only two days I’m implementing a new organizational scheme for my daughter so she can be more independent.   Sometimes it makes me almost cry, thinking of all the things she doesn’t “see” or know, simply because she can’t see great swaths of information like we do as sighted people.   Her input devices are her fingertips.   And while her fingertips are excellent at discerning things, they can only “see” what we make available in a tactile format she can understand.

Oh my word, I seriously got myself sidetracked.   Let me see if I can reel this back in.   To sum up, I’m very excited about an organizational project that will benefit my daughter well beyond our sailing trip, but will be useful while we’re on the trip as well.   Okay, enough said until I have pictures so I can explain more easily.

Back to the craft room and the four huge suitcases.   My husband and I travel with one medium-large suitcase and one carry-on suitcase for the four of us typically—even in winter months with bulkier clothing.   For this trip we’ve borrowed three similar medium-large suitcases and will be traveling with more luggage than I have ever travelled with before.

I made huge progress today.   Things have been bought, like extra bathing suits for the children, snorkel gear, life vests and water socks.   I got carried away with bathing suits for my daughter, but they had so many cute ones at Target I couldn’t control myself.   She will be the fashion diva of the trip, I am most certain.

Our travel packing list is longer than it’s ever been before too.  It’s so large I had to divide it into sections and then I shared it via Google Drive so my husband and I could both make edits.   I thought I had a pretty good handle on the lists but just like every other trip, once I started the packing process I discovered many, many things (little things) I hadn’t thought of.

I’m about half-ish done.  Half done by volume, over half done by planning, but less than half done by time.   There are several time sucking project that will keep me busy until we leave a week from now.   The largest one I think is finishing the folding Monopoly board.   Today was a good start though.

The Big Boy Update:  My husband let my son watch Thor this morning and then he decided he could watch Thor: Ragnarok.  They decided to skip the second movie.   It’ snot bad, but not as good as the other two.   My son loved them both.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter took Chutes and Ladders to school yesterday for “bring a game to school” day.   This is the game my husband worked diligently on making it tactile and then gave it to my daughter for Christmas.   Apparently they played multiple games with several friends yesterday.   We’re taking it on our trip with us.