Fast forward to 2020, and like so many others, it was a bit of a wake up call. We had thankfully just gone to Costco and stocked up on paper goods, but we ended up giving away almost half the package away to neighbors who couldn’t find the ever elusive toilet paper. On the flip side, we had just had a baby, and finding things like diapers, wipes, and formula were challenging. My husband and I started evaluating how prepared we were for different situations, because I realized I didn’t want to not only be prepared to help my family, but to be able to help my friends as well.

I was a public school teacher for the last seven years. And in the last seven years, I have lived through several “once in your career”, “unprecedented”, events.

My second year teaching, there was a giant freeze, where temperatures dropped suddenly, and created a permafrost over a foot deep. Then, it snowed for several days, to the point that my car was COVERED. This was immediately followed by 50 degree weather, in FEBRUARY. Frozen solid ground, with several feet of snow caused… flooding. All of these events ended up causing almost a month out of school, because either buses couldn’t run, the roads were closed, or there wasn’t power/heat in the buildings. The whole time, I had veteran teachers telling me, ‘This is a once in a career event.’ ‘You’ll never miss this much school again.’

But then at the beginning of 2020, I found myself in yet another crazy year of school closures, where from Spring Break on, we taught virtually. This was followed by another year of masks, sanitizing, and social distancing.