How to Organize and Pack for the Kids for Vacation

By: Annie Malone of Home of Malones

How you pack on a family vacation or road trip can make or break the memories you have. Digging through bags to find your toothbrush or your child’s swimsuit can cause stress and arguments.

I have never been this organized when I pack kids for a trip before, but we were headed to the beach for a week this Summer, and I wanted to make sure our family vacation clothes were so organized that anyone dressing my kids would know exactly where things were.

This particular trip, I had the two big kids (ages 5 & 3) on the first floor with grandma and Matt and I were going to be on the third floor with Molly (9 months). This meant that I wouldn’t always be there to get each kid dressed plus I also think that kids do best when the clothes are pre-selected and are less likely to complain about what they have to wear!

I decided to look at my vacation packing essentials and find a way to have a smooth vacation no matter who was getting the kids ready for the day. Here are my best vacation packing ideas to use for packing family vacation clothes:

I started with the Zip-Lock System. I made a zip lock for every day of the week that we would be on the trip and made a set for each kid.

I posted this photo on my Insta-stories and I couldn’t believe how many of you commented that you use the same system! Especially for Disney World! You guys sent me a few tips also, so I will share those too.

Organized vacation packing for kids

Add the name of each kid to the bag so they don’t get mixed up.
Save your bags and you can also use them for wet clothes, dirty clothes, etc during your trip.
Tons of you said that clothes can easily get wrinkled in these ziplocks. I chose to only put swim suits/coverups and pajamas in the bags for each day.You could also roll the clothes which will prevent a lot of wrinkles.
I kept their clothes on hangers and used a “days of the week” hang-up system for those that I will show below!
After all of the ziplocks were packed for each day of the week, I put the set in a packing cube. So each kid had their own packing cube filled with their daily outfit.
You guys also recommended to still pack a few “extras outfits.” Everyone knows kids get dirty in a second, so you may pack a few extra outfits.

Here is a look at the hang-up bags for each kid. We love our hang up bags from Little English. Each kid has their own set of a hang up bag and duffel bag.

The duffel bags are my favorite because they are soft (which makes for really easy storage at home) and they have long straps, so they are easy to carry around. They are great for an overnight trip or a long weekend! You might notice that for this week-long family summer vacation, I needed our PBKids Roller suitcase too.

Family Vacation Clothes Packing Checklist

For the hang-up clothes, I went to Pinterest and found these weekday hanger printables and used them! I wish I had taken the time to laminate them, but I didn’t. I just printed them on card stock and they really worked great. I thought it would be fun to make a free printable for all of you, which you can find below! These are great for packing, but people also love to use them for school days with the kids! Now that Brody is going into Kindergarten, I think this might be something I would like to do for him.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THEM ALL FOR FREE

So after all that…..I was a little worried that all of my hard work packing the kids still might not work out the way I had planned. But guess what? It really worked great! We had a little flexibility but for the most part, we stuck to the packing plan! Now I am pretty excited to pack for the next family vacation or road trip with kids.