Packing Light, How I Miss Thee

My days of packing light are definitely behind me. I once traveled to Colorado and Nevada for three weeks with an overnight bag and a bookbag and still had room for an oversized box of wind chimes and other host gifts. And then, of course, there was the 9-week trip to Europe last summer, when I took a single bookbag and lived out of it completely: clothes, books, toiletries, spare shoes, laundry detergent, and everything packed snugly in my little Jansport.

Now we take up the whole back seat of the pickup truck, plus some space in the back, just to go to my parents' for the weekend. My parents! Where they'll have everything! Everything, that is, except: a baby seat, a bassinet, a half-dozen burp cloths, diapers, a stack of onesies, twice as many pajamas and outfits as days we'll be traveling, a pump and bottles, a diaper bag for outings, Maya sling, a stroller, and so on. We could have done without any one of those things, but it would have made life much less pleasant. Like, it's easy to think, why bring the bouncy seat? But then you have to hold the baby all day, every day.

We go to Sam's parents' this weekend, which I'm excited about because I really love my in-laws and they haven't seen the baby yet. But oh, the packing!