Pinteresting Summer

Challenge 21-Can you pack a toddler for a trip in an organized manner? (We shall see.)

I pinned this idea a few weeks ago and thought it would be good to try with our yearly sojourn to the motherland (Ohio) coming up. I always pack a lot of clothes for the munchkin (she's 3, she can potentially wear a lot of clothes in a day) and they always end up a crazy mess by the middle of the trip. This pin from http://kimmccrary.blogspot.com/2012/05/traveling-with-young-children-tip-1.html is the idea of packing your child's outfits individually in Ziploc bags so you can easily find everything at once as well as give your child some choice without making it too difficult on either one of you. I happened to have bought a box of Great Value brand slider topped bags and figured these would work great. This is the mess of clothes pre-packed:

The main idea is to include every part of the outfit in the bag so you have to hunt for nothing (so panties, hair accessories, socks, etc.) to make pack and dressing as easy as possible. I put together the outfits, which was fairly simple since my child is definitely not wanting in the clothes department, making sure each outfit had all the pieces it needed (I almost forgot panties on two occasions). My kid isn't much in the hair accessory department, but a few outfits I included coordinating headbands or bows. Stuffing them in the bags wasn't much work, but I was trying my best to put them in flat to prevent wrinkles, but I still felt pretty wasteful using all of those storage bags. I justified it by promising that I would keep them and use them again when we are moving into our rental house at the end of the month.

I packed 9 outfits (for a 7 day trip...you never know). I also made sure to squeeze as much air out as possible so it was almost like having mini vacu-seal bags. I was able to pack all of these outfits, plus PJ's, 2 bathing suits, 1 terry cloth dress, and 3 extra pairs on underwear in a small carry-on size piece of luggage (with room to spare for 2 pair of her shoes and our toiletry bag).

For children I think this is a great packing method (other than the semi-wasteful use of storage bags). I'll probably add an update during the trip to see how well this method works in practice, but in the packing stage it is great. I think it will obviously be very easy to know what clothes are clean and dirty compared to the old packing methods. Well, we are off to Ohio tomorrow but I have a few  Pinterest experiments planned while I'm gone, I'm just not sure if I'll update while I'm there or make separate posts when I get back for them. Have a great holiday week!

***Addition to post on 7/13/12

I have to admit I loved this packing method. It made picking out her outfits so much easier, I knew where her underwear was, and I wasn't having to hunt down socks. I saved all of the bags to use later so I didn't feel as non-ecofriendly. On the way home we ended up using my husband's method of packing and rolling everything up to make more room (which was much more effective than my method of throw in and shove). It worked great and we were able to fit in a few extra things we picked up during our trip. I give a total thumbs up to this method and will definitely use it again.