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Photo by Walter Lim

It’s Wednesday again, and we’re approaching the big summer travel season. In honor of my own upcoming vacation, I’m going to share some advice from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel.

Okay, I am unlikely to encounter this specific danger in Orlando, but you never know what’s coming.

Contents of a Toddler’s Backpack, Photo by Cathy Stanley-Erickson

Memorial Day is coming up soon, so the ceremonial beginning to summer is upon us. More importantly, for anyone under 18, it means that school is almost over!

If I remember correctly, that also means that the shiny new backpack you got last fall, and the promise you made to yourself not to be disorganized this year, are both destroyed. In these last few weeks of school, we deal with a very prevalent issue from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting.

Photo by Ryan Harvey

Every Wednesday, we offer advice and strategies to survive all of the most dire and urgent circumstances, as well as some of the more common scenarios we all deal with.

This week we’ve got an excerpt from the original Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. If someone had shown me this before I went skydiving, I am not sure I would have done it at all! But it’s better to be prepared if you’re going to do something as insane as jumping out of a plane.

One of my employees has a hilarious poster in her office that reads “NOW PANIC AND FREAK OUT.” (From the Philadelphia-based design studio, Print Liberation.) I thought of the poster last week when I did just that, and for not a very good reason-I freaked out because my kids and I were late for school. It was a bad parenting moment. But we all have those.

You see, my daughter has discovered the joys of “doing her hair,” something she had no interest in last year. It was time for us to head out the door, but her hair “just isn’t right,” she informed me as she tromped back upstairs to the bathroom to fix it.

“We’re going to be late,” I told her. She just stopped and glared, then headed upstairs nevertheless. “Soph,” I said, “watch it.” This, of course, made matters worse, as it sent her not to the bathroom to fix her hair, but to her room, crying.

Charles Dickens’ enduring line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” could apply to the best-selling Worst-Case Scenario® series, which has advised millions of people how to survive life’s sudden turns for the worse.

For more than ten years, readers have been entertained and informed by these well-researched solutions to the worst-case scenarios of life—from how to escape from quicksand to how to fend off a shark, and from how to deal with a nightmare boss to how to escape from a bad date. With over 10 million books sold worldwide, it’s clear that the desire to be prepared is universal.

Welcome to the Worst-Case Scenario community! Author Dave Borgenicht and the Worst-Case team are here to help prepare you, and you, and you(!) out there in webland for anything. Need to land a plane? Fending off a shark attack? Graduating and facing “what next?!”? We’re here, for you.