When you are prepping, you need to know how many people you are prepping for and take into consideration any special needs.  On a daily basis, my family is me, my husband, two sons, and two cats. My mother-in-law (MIL) is often added in as well.  She lives nearby, and I’m her primary caretaker.  At Christmas and Thanksgiving, my parents, brother and his family are added in. For big family get-togethers at my parent’s house, the group size can easily hit 20-30 people with cousins, second cousins, etc. When we got married, family on my side was about sixty people. If you include everyone on my husband’s side, along with all those we invited to the wedding, it’s about seventy people. (Yeah, he was shocked by the sheer size of my family when he met them, and that was just the family-get-together size.)

image by rowland_rick

When we lived in California and the rest of our family was in the mid-west and mid-Atlantic, family consisted of only my nuclear family and my MIL.  At that time we probably would have included in our preps my son’s best friend and his mom, the godmother to my children, because they couldn’t do much on their own. There was no point in considering other family because they were too far away.

Now that we no longer live in California, instead of earthquakes and wildfires, our biggest potential hazards are power outages (exposure to extreme heat/humidity or cold), Washington D.C. being nuked, and of course, potential nation-wide disasters like a currency collapse. In the case of power outages, our family is the four of us plus checking in on my MIL.  In the case of D.C. being nuked, we include my husband’s best man who lives in an apartment closer to D.C.   His family is not nearby and, depending on the situation, he may or may not be able to get to them. We’ll take care of him. In the case of a currency collapse, we include my parents in our preparedness plans.

We have a spare cane for MIL. We have enough sleeping bags for everyone we would include in our preps. We have the cough drops my dad needs in the winter. We have linens and places to sleep for everyone. I am getting spare winter boots in my parent’s sizes because, if something happens and they move here quickly in warm weather, I just know they won’t remember to bring them.  If nothing happens and we have company when it’s snowing, we have spare boots. (You laugh, but they would’ve been handy when other family visited from out of town during one of our many recent storms.)

If you have a lot of family nearby, you might consider making a phone tree for emergencies. When we got married, I gave my husband an organization chart with photos of all my cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. Other family members requested a copy. If you keep a phone tree, organization chart, or something similar with your prep supplies, it can help you find the rest of your family in a true emergency since you can just show the pictures to others.

We are also trying to meet our neighbors and form a better community here so we can take care of each other. When it comes down to it, you need to decide what you’re prepping for (tornado, TEOTWAWKI, hurricane, blizzards), and then figure out for whom you are prepping and what special needs they have.