Back in 2017 I was on St. Thomas for Hurricane Irma. It was horrible. Total devastation. Thankfully I was able to get back stateside right before Hurricane Maria made landfall in the US Virgin Islands. That was my first Hurricane experience although I had spent the 2 prior years leading a general science course that covered the basics of Hurricane dynamics. I learned so much from that experience.

When I took a job in Louisiana during Hurricane season in 2018, EVERYONE thought I was crazy. BUT my response was always “it’s different this time because I can jump in the car and drive away from Louisiana but you’re STUCK on an island!” Well, fast forward to 2021 to test that idea… As Hurricane Ida was approaching, I got so many calls/texts about evacuating, etc. BUT we couldn’t just “get in the car and drive away.” I was 8 days postpartum from a c-section. The swelling posed a risk for blood clots to develop during long car rides and my baby was still brand new. Oh and we’re STILL in the midst of a panny!

To prepare, we got extra bottled water and a few nonperishable food options for the adults. But my most important concern was for my baby, of course. Our baby is mostly formula fed as I’ve been having problems with my breast milk supply, so we grabbed an extra 3 gallons of nursery water and an extra large canister of formula. We also still have other formula samples at home, so if for some reason we run out of the big one we still have options.

The other main concern was diapering of course! We still have a decent amount of disposable newborn diapers – definitely enough for at least 3 days. However, we also have size 1 diapers, which are probably WAY TOO BIG for my little sonshine but will work if we get in a crunch. Our plan is to cloth diaper our little one once we’ve ran out of disposables anyway, so we do have cloth options on hand (although that’s not something I want to do if we’re without power.

As you can see our supply list was pretty short as the focus was on baby boy. We also had battery powered lamps and one external charging block for our phones. I also downloaded quite a few Netflix movies to my iPad just in case I needed entertainment for a couple of days.

*update: thankfully we were only without power for about 12 hours with the majority of that time being overnight.

Mama Stassi