Preparation

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know if it’s having a new addition to our family or some other combination of life events, but I have been thinking a lot as of late about how would we handle a minor disaster and whatnot.

I remember hearing adds from the Red Cross advising people to have two weeks worth of food and water on hand. A quick check confirms that this is still their advice. The Red Cross isn’t exactly doomsday prepper propaganda, so I was starting to think maybe they had a good goal. The problem was I had no idea how to access if we were close to that. We try to keep our pantry, such as it is, more or less stocked, making me think we might be close but I wasn’t sure.

Then, a few weeks ago I saw this article in Popular Mechanics and realized something that should have been obvious a long time ago! Two things actually… One everything in our pantry has the caloric content posted on it, and two thanks to the fitness push we did last year we have a pretty good idea how many calories we consume per day. Fudging the numbers up a little to account for Hannah, and we basically arrive at 4000 calories per day.

A few minutes with a pen and paper digging through the cupboards and then a few more minutes working up an Excel spreadsheet (no project is complete without one!) and I can happily say that we have sufficient stores to  eat for two weeks! Granted, the menu might be a bit bland, but post blizzard or whatever other scenario one could dream up I don’t imagine we would complain much.

What attentive readers may have noticed is that I didn’t address water at all. The Red Cross guidelines call for one gallon per day per person, putting us near 50 gallons if you wanted to round up a little. I have some ideas how one might address that challenge, but really no solution as of yet… its just an overwhelming amount of bulk to store.

I guess we will hope it’s a blizzard and we have snow to melt 😉

-Jordan

 

Baby Notes From March

Posted on by Jordan

Well, there was a time when I worried that having a child would dominate the blog.

As it turns out, having a child dominates my time, making doing anything on the blog kind of hard. I do have plenty of time to reflect on things that might be interesting… and then talk myself out of posting them…

I have a few observations I wanted to remember someday, so I will share here.

  • Hannah, in this phase at least, cries just like people sometimes write it “whaaa whaaa whaaa” I never thought about a baby putting the ‘W’ on there, but she really does. It kind of drives home the infant part of her I suppose
  • Turning down the lights at night may not make Hannah sleepy, but it really knocks me out… so far she has always fallen asleep first though 🙂
  • I realized how soothing music can be for me, and wanted to sing to Hannah as part of our bedtime ritual, and quickly discovered that I cannot remember any “bedtime” songs.
  • She doesn’t seem to mind that we repeat the same three or four songs over and over
  • Those songs are basically all hymns, but they are the only kind of song I can pull off without some music or something to follow
  • My vocal cords really aren’t up to the task of singing as much as Hannah would like. I suppose I will build some endurance, or maybe she will learn to be content with just one pass through dad’s entire repertoire.

I suspect these things may not be as profound a year from now, but it’s something, and I enjoy taking a minute to reflect. We talk to parents with kids nearing two and they can’t seem to remember a single detail from the “not yet crawling” phase, so I guess there is a never ending stream of new experiences awaiting us in the days ahead.

-Jordan