The month of December is a time for family and for many people that means traveling. Since that might be on the horizon for you too, I thought I would share some tips for quick packing to help you get your kids on the road. We get the suitcases packed in 15 minutes and then wrap everything else up in about another 30 minutes.
Set the Stage
There are a few things I do with our laundry that make packing when we get ready to go on a trip easier. I don't know that they are rocket science or anything, but perhaps they are things you haven't thought of, so I'll share them in hopes of making your life a little easier too.
First tip: I always organize the kids clothes in sets.
I do all the laundry in our house. I primarily do it all on Mondays. That is laundry day for us. That means I wash the loads, I fold the loads, and I sort everything into the proper person's pile. For anyone under the age of 10, that means I also match their clothing in sets. This is to make it quick and easy to get them dressed in the morning. I just take out whatever outfit is on the top of the pile and I have shorts and a shirt or pants and a sweater ready to go. No looking to find matches, not looking to find what's clean. Everything gets washed and matched and put away at the same time. So, what that means for packing is that everything is already matched up. I simply go to the pile for the twins and count out how many outfits I need to pack in the suitcase and 75% of the works is already done in under 5 minutes.
Second tip: Pack ahead of time.
We plan to head to Alabama on a Thursday, but you know when I started packing, the Monday two weeks before. I needed plenty of time. Since our trip involves going somewhere where the weather is drastically different than here, I needed time to be sure that we had everything we needed. There is nothing quite so bad as sitting down to pack the night before you need to leave, only to discover that you need to make a trip to town to buy something at 10 pm. As an example this trip we had everything packed up in 15 minutes, and then I had a list of items that we needed to pick up at the store to finish off the suitcases.
Third tip: I always pack the same day that I wash clothes.
You know what's worse than packing last minute, trying to pack when you don't have enough clean clothes. We might be leaving on a Thursday, but I start packing on a Monday after laundry is finished. It's simple, I'm going to pack everything we need, and I'm not going to do laundry again. Have you ever stayed up the night before you have to leave waiting for the washing machine to finish running so that you can move everything to the drier, and then hope you can remember what to throw in your bag the next morning, and still hope to get out of the door on time? That's a recipe for forgetting something. When the kids inevitably forget to add something to the wash pile on Monday, I want to run that one last load on Monday night and finish packing Tuesday morning, not while I'm trying to get out the door on Thursday.
Fourth tip: Figure out what you need ahead of time.
The real key to packing the kids up quickly is knowing what they need to bring to you. Figure out what you need to pack... and what you don't need to bring, and stick to it. I told them they had to have tennis shoes, absolutely no flip flops for winter in Alabama. Don't waste time trying to figure out how many of something you need when they are standing there waiting for their marching orders. We are going to be gone for 2 weeks, and I want to do laundry once while we are gone. I also want to have a day or two past a week to get laundry done while we are gone, so that I have some flexiblity, so that means everyone needs 8 regular outfits.
The art of packing
"Come on, packing isn't an art!" While I might agree with you it isn't anything like creating a fine painting or a beautiful piece of music, there is a way to do it well while being less stressed. Trust me I'm the queen of stressing, but I never stress about packing. When I sit down to pack the kids, it takes them each 15 minutes, and since most of them are all being packed up at the same time that's not 15 minutes times 4 but 15 minutes all together. Then I take 15 minute to pack the twins, and another 15 minutes to pack for me and Gary. The bulk of the work is done in under an hour, but hey, this post is about packing for the kids.
Step One: I tell them how many outfits to bring me. For this trip, it was eight. This is fast for the littles, they are counting outfits, the older kids might take ten minutes to settle on eight outfits, but the younger ones bring me eight off the top, and I grab the twins clothes. Those are already folded and immediately go in the bottom of the suitcase.
Step Two: I tell them how many special outfits to bring me. For this trip that meant 2 Church dresses/outfits and anything special they wanted for Christmas. They have to fold these to add to the suitcase or hang them in the hang up bag if we are carrying it. If they had something special for Christmas we quickly swapped this out for one of the outfits they had already brought me.
Step Three: I tell them how many underclothes. The panties, underwear, socks, bras, etc. Sometimes since I've just done the laundry it's all still folded in stacks on my bed, so it doesn't even take a trip to their room.
Step Four: I tell them to grab tennis shoes and church shoes, coats in the winter or swimsuits in the summer time, and belts if needed. All four of these steps take the younger kids less than 10 minutes, the older kids might be pushing 15 minutes here. Even my slowest child, who is indecisive about what she is going to wear doesn't take more than 20 minutes... mostly because she knows if she does then I will pick what she's wearing and she'll be stuck with it.
And that's it. Everything is packed up, zipped up and the suitcases are done. Packing for kids in 15 minutes. Later on that evening I usually go ahead and pack all mine and Gary's clothes as well.
The Finishing Touches
Wait a minute you might be realizing that doesn't cover bathroom supplies, medicine, anything fun for the car ride. Those things I save to pack the last night we are home.
Right before I load up the car, I make a last minute call for bathroom items. This is when the girls have five minutes to make a quick decision on any hair stuff they want to pack. I have a separate bag that we dump all of the hairbrushes, shampoo, styling items, you get the idea. I keep a second set of toothbrushes in an overnight bag that I throw in there as well as my own bathroom things. As soon as everyone takes their medication for the night, I throw that in the overnight bag as well.
Then it's time to load up the car. I always make sure that we have completely cleaned out the car and vacuumed it out earlier in the week, and then no one is allowed to eat in there before we go on our trip. While I load the back of the van up, they have 10 minutes to pack a bag of anything they want to bring in the car to keep themselves busy on the car ride. That has to be in the car before I am done for the night with packing. Nothing goes in the car morning of but snacks and drinks that couldn't go in the night before and the kids themselves.
Packing: Art and Science
It took some time and practice to get it down to an exact science, but following the same step by step plan every time lets the kids know what to expect, and doing the laundry that day means that they have all their clothes to pick from, there is no waiting for something last minute to be clean. Finally, because I have a list most often written down of exactly what we need to pack ahead of time, we don't end up 13 hours from home and missing something. Trips we fail to follow this system items get forgotten, sometimes major items, and packing is a rush not a smooth process. Hopefully, you can learn from our failures and take these ideas and make your own system, and then your next trip prep day can be a quick and painless affair, even if you too have half a dozen kids.
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