Since I had my first child life has been based around getting everything we needed ready to leave our house in enough time to get anywhere we needed to go. With my first child, I struggled with the timing of everything right up until after he was one and didn't need nearly as much to go outside, with my second the juggling act began and when we had our third two years later the need to be organised became very real. It was around this time that we started to make use of a Grab & Go bag.
What is a grab and go bag?
It's exactly what it sounds like, this is a bag that you keep pretty much always stocked up with everything you might to grab in a hurry on the way out the door. Many people use Grab & Go bags for different reasons, you can use them with children, hobbies and many other things. I will be focusing on our bag based around our 3 children's needs, they are 9, 4 and 3 years old.
What is in our Grab and Go bag?
Our Grab & Go bag has been packed in the mind set that if we plan a short notice day out somewhere I can simply grab the bag along with our usual items like coats, shoes, my hand bag and any food items we need that day. The idea is that by having this bag always ready we can leave without me needing to go around collecting up these bits and cut our preparing to leave time in half! This means our Grab & Go bag won't contain changes of clothes or wipes etc since these are needed every time we go out. You of course could have these in your bag if you needed them.
Items inside our Grab & Go bag:
- Kind bag (or any reusable folding bag)
- Metal Straws
- Bamboo cutlery
- Cheeky Panda bamboo anti-bac wipes
- Bamboo biodegradable Plasters
- Bug Spray
- Sun cream
- Pen
- Colouring pages and pencils
- Games in canvas bags
- First aid items like sting relief and anti-septic wipes
All the items above are what I class as year round essentials. All of these things can have a use throughout the year and have come in handy for the last 2 years when we have needed our bag. These items will not be all that is in our bag.
How do I make the Grab & Go bag change with the seasons?
While everything I've mentioned will work all year, there are items we need during the colder months that would be irrelevant in summer and vice versa. To combat this I make a diary note for sometime in march and again in September to go through the Grab & Go bag to swap out the seasonal items. I tend to either do it that day or I will note down another day if it's not yet time, weather wise. I have found this works best for us in our climate and I will use this opportunity to give everything in the bag a check over too.
What are the seasonal items we use in our Grab & Go bag?
Spring/ Summer:
- Sunglasses
- Thin rain coats - fold away ones for each child and 2 plastic ones for me and Simon (we reuse these)
- Cooling Mist Spray
- Sun screen chap stick
- 2x foldable water bottles
Autumn/ Winter:
- An extra hat (1 child and 1 adult size)
- Gloves (1 child and 1 adult size)
- Hand cream
- Lip balm
- Emergency umbrella
- Thin hoodies
- Tissues
You will have noticed that I included thin rain coats during spring/ summer and hoodies during autumn/ winter. We do take these items with us but I am sure you can see only the small plastic ones for adults would fit in our bag, instead we keep these items in a small waterproof swim bag under our pram. This means we never forget them as all our longer trips require the pram. A slightly bigger bag would accommodate these items.
What bag do we use and why?
Our Grab & Go bag is actually one of the PacaPods from our big PacaPod changing bag. We use the insulated black feeder pod as our Grab & Go bag. We chose this for a multitude of reason, the bag is small and is actually designed to be use on it's own or inside the main backpack, so it has a strap with a clip for attaching to your pram or even to a bike if needed.
The fact the bag is insulated also means the items we put inside are slightly protected from the elements, nothing inside gets too warm or too cold, great for stopping your lip balms melting in summer or everything drying up in winter. Another reason we went with this bag is that it is small, everything we need will fit inside (with the exception of hoodies/ raincoats) and storing it near our door in a convenient place to grab is easy. The small size is also handy when your headed on long days out because we tend to bring lots of other items, sometimes including 3 scooters! So a small bag that we can just add onto our pram without too much room and weight is ideal for us. Finally being able to add the pod back into the back pack has been really handy in the past, especially when I travel alone anywhere with the three children as I can quickly collapse the pram and add the pod into the bag or hang it from one of the many carbineer hook ports on the PacaPod Backpack.
Do you have a Grab & Go Bag?
I'd love to know if you have other items inside your Grab & Go bag that I haven't thought of, let me know below.
The Giveaway
Some of the most used items in our Grab & Go bag are our colouring pages pack with pencils and our games in canvas bags. These are items I found in a card shop over summer and they seem to be stock that is regularly brought back so this year I bought another set for one of our readers.
These little items are the perfect addition to any grab & go bag as they add entertainment for children. We have used ours at restaurants while waiting for food, entertaining in the shade after a picnic, doing on the train or bus and even at an event when we needed to sit down for a while, they'd be great for everything from weddings, birthdays and christenings to long traveling in cars or on planes. You can see our games all opened to show you what is included with each in the image above.
You can enter to win a brand new set which includes a Space themed colouring pack which has some coloured pencils inside too, a fidget popper toy, Snakes and ladders travel game, X's and O's travel game and a matching travel game.
Now for the entering! You can enter the giveaway by simply filling in your details on the Gleam entry form below. Please read the terms and conditions before entering, these are also listed below.
Terms and conditions:
- Entrants must be aged 18 years or over.
- Competition is open to UK residents only.
- The giveaway is open from 24/05/2022 and will run to 24/06/2022 at 11.59pm GMT.
- Entry into this competition confirms your acceptance of these Terms and Conditions.
- The winners will be selected at random from all the correct entries received before the closing date and time.
- All prizes must be accepted as offered. There can be no alternative awards, cash or otherwise.
- There will be one winner.
- The winner will have 30 days to respond to claim the prize. Failure to claim will result in a redraw.
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