I love bags. By bags I don’t mean purses, I mean bags, tote bags. Sometimes I love the free ones, sometimes I love the ones I force myself to buy at the grocery store when I forget mine at home (it’s a way of both punishing myself for forgetting and rewarding myself for shopping in the first place.) In short, I have many.
M does not love my bags. He especially does not like traveling with them. I have lost count of the number of times the entire contents of some adorable little open-top tote have spilled out on the floor of an airport, or under seat of the passenger in front of us on the airplane, causing him to holler: NO MORE OPEN BAGS ARE ALLOWED ON OUR TRIPS.
I always manage to sneak one or two in. And now Frances is in on it too. At eight, she now brings along her own adorable but impractical open-top bags.
But this week the open top bags rose to utility. This week we are moving to a new house here in NY. This is our fifth move with kids and each time the move grows in scope and difficulty. I wanted to move as much over to the new house as I could before the movers came and threw things into boxes with things with which they do not belong (oven gloves and toothbrushes anyone?). So I made bags: bags of toothbrushes (Stanford bookstore), bags of underwear (Goats on the Roof, British Columbia), bags of things required by children to sleep (JCrew tote, circa 2004), bags of face soap (Whole Foods, circa last week). You get the idea.
Here are the bags at work:

(Yes those shelves are completely wonky. You can’t always get what you want.)
I told M these bags brought to mind the plucky little fishing boats that helped evacuate the beaches at Dunkirk. He did not roll his eyes. I believe he has come to appreciate my flair for the dramatic and my constant WWII references.
The bags may not have saved the day, but I was proud of them nonetheless, and because they are all currently in use, I think I have to buy some more.