Prepared?

Hurricane Irene is headed our way, and while we are inland, our area is prone to flooding. Not sure what to expect, we have moved some of the things stored in our basement onto pallets and charged our cell phones.

We are unlikely to have to evacuate, though many parts of our state have been evacuated, but I wonder whether many of our readers do keep “go” bag with 3 days worth of supplies ready to go if you need to evacuate on short notice?

My children were listening to the storm coverage on the radio and my daughter mentioned that it would be good to include something “to cheer you up” like a deck of cards or a stuffed animal.

With eight people in our house, food is always a concern for me, and especially now. We try not to eat much prepared food, but “ingredients” don’t feed you in a power outage, so we have stocked up a bit on crackers and similar items. We also have plenty of bottled water on hand.

In an emergency, children’s temperaments also make a difference. One of my children is energized and excited, one is completely oblivious, and one is scared. The scared one would like as much information as possible, but since the information can be unnecessarily scary, and doesn’t always apply to our area, it is important to find a good balance.

We have put on some PBS Kids this morning while we tidied up, and promised the kids lots of board games once the rain comes, which is helping this feel cozy, and I have told them several times that we are safe and what I have done to make sure that we stay safe.

Hopefully we will not have it as bad as our friends in Houston a few years ago, but there may be unexpected troubles — none of us will forget when Hurricane Floyd knocked out the water system in Princeton and we students had to go without showers for days!