Articles Tagged with: pet

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Use a great travel packing list as a key to a low-stress and happy vacation or business travel trip.

With the web there’s no excuse to not use a great travel packing checklist to speed your travel packing and ensure enjoyment. Packing correctly – bringing just what you need, but not one iota extra – can lighten your physical and mental load. By carrying less you’ll move around easier, yet the trick, of course, is being sure you haven’t forgotten anything essential.
Tip #1: Leave home and office in good order. Make sure your home is all buttoned up before you leave and that pets and plants will be taken care off. Leave keys with a neighbor so they can access in case of emergency, empty your refrigerator and stop routine deliveries. In the office, nothing supports a successful trip than a clean desk and empty email in box – schedule a few hours of blocked out time the day before your trip to catch up on all urgent office matters.
Tip #2: Make packing easy by using a great travel packing checklist. There’s no excuse for not using a travel packing list to make sure you don’t forget anything essential. You can use a web search engine to search for ‘travel packing list’, ‘travel packing tips’, or ‘travel packing checklist’ or see the end of this article for a link to my favorite printable travel packing list. Find one you like and print it out. Use it religiously.
Tip #3: Bring the bare minimum. Nothing adds to stress and tiredness on travel like having too much and too heavy of a luggage burden, especially on airline travel. I always recommend that, once you’re all packed, try carrying all your luggage for 5 or 10 minutes – say around a city block. This begins to simulate the short hauls you’ll have on your trip. After your test haul, you’ll be motivated to lighten up. Find items you can do with out.
Tip #4: Learn and improve. As you use your packing list have a system for marking it up. You might cross out any items that you didn’t bring, and check marks next to the ones you did. No, here comes the critical step – bring the marked up printout with you on your trip. During your trip, if you find you need something that you didn’t bring, note it down on the list. And, just as importantly, at the end of your trip take a moment and find those items you brought, but that you can live without next time – and cross them out. As your packing list gets dog eared and marked up, consider typing it into your computer so you have your own custom list (you don’t have to type it in from scratch, just select and copy the original web list you started from and paste it into your word processor – you can then start editing this complete list).

That’s it – travel light but without out missing any essential items. Use your travel packing list religiously and hone it constantly.

Think carrying a backpack is “no big deal”? Think again. The average child’s backpack weighs 12 pounds and gets lifted 10 times a day. That equals 120 pounds lifted each day. That works out to be about 21, 600 pounds lifted in a 180-day school year!!!

How exactly does carrying a backpack affect the spine? Common sense tells us that a heavy load distributed unevenly day after day causes stress to a growing spinal column. More than 50% of youths experience at least one low back pain episode by the end of their teen years. Repetitive activities such as hauling a heavy backpack over one shoulder each and every day can lead to serious postural misalignments and imbalances, creating subluxations of the spinal column. These subluxations may cause nerve interference, which can lead to a variety of symptoms and decrease a child’s immune response.

Carrying a heavy backpack in which weight is improperly distributed can result in poor posture; spinal column distortion; muscle strain; headaches; back, neck and arm pain; and nerve damage.

Proper lifting techniques are extremely important. The following is proper backpack lifting technique and should be demonstrated to your child:

Face the backpack before you lift it

Bend at the knees

Using both hands, check the weight of the pack

Lift with legs, NOT your back

Carefully slip on one shoulder strap at a time

NEVER sling the pack on one shoulder

Packing your child’s backpack properly can decrease strain on the spinal column:

Pack the heaviest objects close to the body

Place bumpy objects on the outside, away from the back

Having your child checked regularly by a chiropractor to remove subluxations and insure proper posture during the growing years is very important. Remember, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.”