Spring is nearly here, and I’m not thinking, “Time to start the spring cleaning.” I’m thinking, “Now’s a great time to inventory my family’s preps.”
The need for such a chore couldn’t have been driven home more clearly than it was this past weekend. After collecting clothing items for the victims of last week’s tornadoes, I went out into my second pantry to collect some food items to donate. I grabbed some condensed soup, some spaghetti sauce, and four pounds of pasta, but I couldn’t donate much more because I didn’t have much to give. My supply of shelf-stable items like canned fruit, veggies, meat, and the like was nearly gone.
“How could you let this happen?”, you might wonder. And to that question, I have a very simple answer. I have three children. More times than I’d realized, my kids were pulling items out of that long-term storage pantry for kitchen use, and I wasn’t keeping close enough track. I’d think to myself, “OK, we need to replace that canned corn next time we go to Aldi,”, but since we don’t go often, sometimes the items wouldn’t make it onto the proper list.
Now, in some ways, it’s a good thing that our supplies have dwindled because some of those items needed rotating. (I had corn on hand, for instance, and the kids went a really long time without wanting corn, so the corn in the pantry wasn’t making its way out into the kitchen for everyday use.)
I realize that some folks out there are extremely organized. And since I can’t see, I try to stay pretty organized myself. When you put other people into the mix though, it’s easy to lose track of what you have going, and that’s just what happened to us. This doesn’t mean that I have no emergency supplies around. It just means that I’m nowhere near as comfortable with our food supply as I used to be, so I’ll need to start building it back up again.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t neglect things like water. Also, don’t forget about your pets. We’re getting baby chicks tonight, and while things are on sale, we picked up extra heat bulbs, and we have plenty of food for them. After all, my dogs, cats, and birds will be very unhappy if there’s no food for them.
Preparing for spring can be exciting. Check your preps though, because there’s nothing worse than discovering that you don’t have what you need in an emergency. Find your weak spots before it’s critical so that you can address them before crunch time!