My Feeble Attempt At Packing Tips

I wanted to post this while it was still fresh enough in my mind to be of use to anyone. Take it with a grain of salt but this is what worked for us...

1. Make sure that you bring toilet paper/kleenex and have them accessible the moment you touch ground in China. I wasn't prepared for the airports to be in the shape they were and had packed my toilet paper away thinking I wouldn't need it before we started touring Nanchang. The "4 star toilet" in the Forbidden City is a squatty potty and you will need it, trust me.

2. I way overpacked in the clothing dept. People say to pack light, do it. We could have easily gotten away with 5 outfits each. Laundry is available and affordable everywhere.

3. Two pair of shoes. I packed a pair of sandals and a pair of Keen's. Both worked out extremely well.

4. Bring two blankets for your baby. A small one to travel with and a larger one for the crib.

5. Make sure you bring extra batteries, battery chargers, converters for your laptop/digital camera/video camera.

6. Try to remember to bring food for your baby on Metcha Day. Our daughter had been traveling all day and was pretty hungry when we received her, I was glad I had food to offer her right then rather than having to wait until we got back to the hotel.

7. If you travel in the summer, don't leave the hotel without a bottle of water. There were times when water wasn't readily available right away and it is HOT!

8. We didn't bring a thermos and honestly never wished that we had one.

9. I went way overboard on the ziplocks. We didn't use 1/3 of the ziplocks that I packed.

10. Scented trash bags for smelly diapers. These were invaluable.

11. Snacks. We lived off of ours.

12. At least one toy that makes noise. Plastic keys were the ticket for getting Dreamsicle to open up. All of the soft lovey types of things I brought never got touched.

13. A container to put your formula in once it is open. The formula you will receive with your baby is in a bag, you really need something airtight to hold it once it has been opened.

14. Leave the duct tape at home. McGyver would probably faint if he read that.

15. We brought wayyyyyyyy to many meds with us. I brought medication for children and adults to combat every illness known to man and ended up being able to help alot of other families out but spent way too much money and used up wayyyyy to much space transporting everything. I would strongly suggest that you bring antibiotics but the scabies medicine, lice medicine, etc wasn't worth packing. No one in our large travel group had the need to use these medicines either.

16. Your sense of humor and patience. We had the good fortune to have a great guide who took awesome care of us. She kept telling our group how much she loved us because we all joked with her, expected delays and knew mistakes would happen. Going in with a good attitude helped tremendously. We watched other travel groups have meltdowns over little things and I think they all just allowed themselves to get wound too tight. Laugh. It's one of the happiest trips you will ever take.