What's In Your Backpack?

My boys cart their favorite toys all over the house. Sometimes they use backpacks, other times baskets or cardboard boxes. They carry toy cars, stuffed animals, plastic spy gear, action figures, and bits of found objects like coins and golf tees and broken crayons. These are their most cherished possessions, things they take in the bathtub and while riding in the car. They fall asleep at night surrounded by their stuff.

It makes me wonder what I would put in my backpack or basket or cardboard box. If I had to choose the things I couldn't live without, things I would want if stranded on a desert island or in the middle of a traffic jam, what would they be?

• Laptop (so long as the island/traffic jam has WiFi and electricity)
• Family pictures (on the laptop)
• Notebooks and pencils
• Books
• iPod (same electricity provision applies)
• Claritin and Kleenex (says the eternal allergy sufferer)
• Midnight Milky Way bars
• Bloom lip gloss
• A camera
• Pepsi with ice
• 24-hour access to take-out from Prince of Jaipur (our favorite Indian restaurant)
• A horse
• A piano

All right, some of those are disqualified, darn it. I guess you just can't fit everything in a backpack.