What to Grab in an Emergency Evacuation. Autism Edition.

Luckily my family has never had to immediately respond to any type of natural disaster situation. I say “luckily” because like, could you even imagine? Recently in our area (area being a very loose term, because we were never in any kind of emergent danger,) there were a few wild fires. One in particular looming a little too close for my comfort. Upon further investigation, I decided it was an appropriate time to spiral with thoughts and comments of imminent doom... and Jason told me I was being a crazy person, which isn’t really anything new. He’s the fire guy, he’d know, right? So, what did I do?

Spiraled SILENTLY, to myself, where I could be as crazy as I wanted to be.

I should take a moment to point out that at this point in my blogging journey, I would assume that most of my readers view my entries as those train wreck TLC shows, where you can’t even wrap your mind around why anyone would ever choose such a lifestyle. You know, the shows that are like a slow-motion nightmare that you just can’t look away from.

Most of the time you get stuck watching such shows because they always leave you wondering- what will they do next? Which brings me back to my reader’s motives for visiting my little blog. What will they do next? Stay on your toes, readers, because…. We have literally no idea. And that might be the most interesting part of our story.

In case of an emergency, as a parent, I want to think that I would have MOST of my ducks in a row. With some SERIOUS help from the people in my village. But let me use a real-life example to show you what my doomsday prepping situation looks like.

For my husband and I’s wedding my dad got us one of those hardcore emergency bags- the ones that you’ll never open to check out what’s inside because you know FOR SURE you’ll never be able to get it all back in there. What my dad also did, was put two hundred dollars in twenties in the front pocket and told us to use it if ever we were in an emergency situation where we needed cash. Totally reasonable! Here’s the problem with such a gift for a newlywed couple right out of college: we were SO POOR. Like most young couples we had to be pretty careful with throwing money around. Extra careful because Jason was a youth pastor for a pretty small church. If you want to better understand our situation, google how much a youth pastor makes yearly working for a church of maybe 150 attendees.

Did our lack of income mean that we should have been depriving ourselves of our basic human rights of movie theaters and mini golf dates? Definitely not.

You know how sometimes you come up with an awesome plan, but you have to wait until the other person figures it out and proposes it first, so you don’t seem like you’re the worst human ever? That’s what I had to do here. It only took us like, four weeks of owning our bright shiny emergency bag before Jason (wink wink) came up with the idea of just taking ONE twenty dollar bill out so we could afford a date night. I mean, what’s twenty bucks when you’ve got two hundred burning a hole in your emergency kit pocket?

Do that nine more times over the course of a few years and what have you got? A very healthy marriage with mini golf professionals and a very unprepared emergency bag. Sorry dad.

So there’s my level of preparedness. And an emergency kit is great and all, HOWEVER, besides two hundred dollars, wanna know what that kit doesn’t have? Floppy Dutch Bros straws, a set of Catboy figures, Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, OUR WIFI BOX?!

Did you see the common trend there? Yeah- autism is probably going to one day ruin my emergency preparedness plan.

Honestly most of my spiraling from the encroaching wild fire was coming from the idea that I would need to make sure to remember all of the things that make Avery have a successful day…. But like, also having the basic necessities for the rest of the family.

It’s probably a good time to practice that, “If your house was burning down what would you grab on the way out” question that has always been a hypothetical. Plans change. And mine changed significantly with the addition of a cute little girl with big blue eyes and a whole lotta autism.

Camping for the first time this summer with Avery is really the only thing I can compare to an emergency situation (I’m a super wimpy camper, can you tell?) You want to pack light for camping, with only the things you need. And I still gave myself like two weeks to prepare for that weekend! My eye is twitching while I type this, by the way.

What I ultimately wanted to do here was to give you a little glimpse into my brain from a few weeks ago when I internally spiraled about the POTENTIAL for catastrophe. What started as a small mental list of necessities that would need to be packed turned into a snowball realization of the level of ridiculousness it takes for our family to function on a “normal” level. So without further ado- What to grab in an emergency evacuation. Autism edition.

1. Bright red emergency bag

2. Basic clothing for each family member

3. Food and water

4. Items from safe

5. Meds for each family member

a. Avery’s daily meds

b. Avery’s daily Mirolax

c. Avery’s “meltdown” meds

d. Avery’s powder Tylenol because she’s too smart and knows when I hide the liquid in her cup.

e. Chocolate meal shake mix to sneak her daily meds into

f. Milk to make chocolate milk

g. At least two of the only cups I’ve ever gotten Avery to drink out of

h. And don’t forget the stupid little rubber thing that goes in the cup’s top so it doesn’t leak and make Avery mad!

6. Avery’s diapers

a. Wipes

b. Baby powder

c. Desatin

7. Avery’s daily “necessities”

a. Catboy

b. Ipad

c. Wifi Jetpack

d. Straws

e. Electric blanket

f. “nice and warm” unicorn to heat up at night

g. Zebra Cakes

h. Chocolate pop tarts

i. Otter Pops

j. Apple Juice

k. Dino Nuggets

l. Avery’s “Friends” AKA- Shopkins

8. Oliver’s favorite blanket

9. Dogs

10. Wagon for when Avery refuses to move her legs

11. Noise cancelling headphones for when Avery decides it’s too overwhelming.

I’m sure you get the point. At what point did my brain go from snowballing to just full on avalanche? Probably somewhere around number five, sub letter d on my list. Because that’s about where a typical family’s emergency grab list would end.

What I also noticed about my list is that it’s really only the skeleton version of what it takes in a day for Avery to be successful. Yikes.

I don’t really notice all of the extra interventions that Jason and I have to incorporate into our days until I have to verbalize it to someone. Then all of a sudden, I realize that our lives are like those “If You Give a Pig a Pancake” books, except for ours would be called, “If You Want Avery to Function on a Relatively Normal Human Level.”

Of course, we would survive an emergency if we were only able to grab a fraction of the list from above- but it would be hard. Maybe I need to look into starting a program for getting funding for special needs/ disability families to build their own bunkers. It would give me peace of mind to know that there is a safe place out there for our family to escape to that’s filled with all of the weird things that keep Avery functioning. You want to talk about a train wreck of a tv show- Autism Bunkers. I would watch the HECK out of that! It would probably make me feel better about having thirteen sets of PJ Mask figurines on backup when I see what other autistic kids out there are hoarding…. A girl can dream.