Packing for Kids Simplified

Our summer has been packed with travel, camps, conferences, and more! Youth ministry is in full swing each summer and we love it, even the traveling 5 weeks in a row and being crazy busy for 7 weeks straight. I haven’t had a chance to sit and blog in too long, but now I am back. We are settling in to our school year and getting back into a normal schedule again (insert happy dance here 🙂 ). So, I have several posts to catch up on from the summer. The first I want to share is one about how I pack my kids for all of this traveling.

First I use plain labels and write each child a set for the week (or however long we will be gone). I make sure there is an outfit a day, extra outfits, and bathing suit labels. Each child is written in a different color which helps to quickly identify who a bag belongs to, and pre-readers like my 3 year old son can just look for his color bag.

I use gallon size plastic zipper bags and as I mentioned before that I used a colored pencil in different colors for each kid. I could have printed the labels, but I was out of colored ink and it is so much faster for me to write them really quick than design the labels.

Once I put all of the labels on the bags, I have them in piles for each child.

I pack each day with a shirt, shorts/pants, underwear and socks. That way I can hand my kids their bag and they can dress themselves. I don’t have to try and make an outfit or search for matching socks while traveling. It’s done. This also works great when they go visit grandma. She doesn’t know their clothes as well as I do and it just simplifies the whole clothing process. I don’t do this with PJs though I just stack them and they grab a set each night. I put all of this in their own laundry basket for ease also. Wherever we are I unpack their bags, (like into a hotel dresser) and then as they wear their clothes the dirty ones go back into the laundry basket and travel home in the same basket they came in. When we get home all of the baskets head straight to the laundry room for washing.

I reuse the gallon bags all year long and one set I used lasted two years of travel and as I mentioned we travel A LOT. I got my bags from the dollar store so two boxes only cost me two dollars. It is a simple and cheap way to stay organized while traveling with kids. Thanks for stopping by!
Johanna