One side effect of going green is an enlarged sense of moral superiority.  I have to admit that I fall prey to this every time I pull out my fabric grocery bags at the supermarket.  The other shoppers stare with envy at my grungy canvas sacks, wishing that they had the wherewithal to save the planet while buying cottage cheese, breakfast cereal, and a few dozen eggs.  O.K.—the truth is, they don’t even notice, but I’m so busy basking in the glory of a fulfilled Earth Day resolution that I like to imagine the admiration of my shopping peers.

In reality the only person who is impressed by my canvas bags is me and that’s how resolutions really should work.  If we can find solutions to our green dilemmas the shift will end up ultimately making us happier than anyone else.  In the year to come, I’m going to pick just a few goals and then go from there.  I want to actually set reasonable expectations for myself so that I can accomplish them in the midst of parenting, working, writing and enjoying this very full life.

#1 Potty Train Roscoe Using Cloth Pull-Ups:  Of course, Roscoe may or may not approve of this one, but I’m looking forward to experimenting with all the great washable potty-training products on the market.  Although cloth diapers are decidedly better than disposables, all diapers have a huge planetary impact so I’m looking forward to a diaper-free future.  Did I mention how excited I am about avoiding all those extra loads of laundry?

#2  Find a good grocery solution:  Do I shop at the employee-owned big-box grocery store with rock bottom prices or the elite supermarket with fancy lighting and seventeen brands of goat cheese?  One has more organic options but they come with extreme expense. Perhaps I should rotate between the two or supplement by going to farmer’s markets or picking my own produce. I may end up joining a community farm and getting organic fruits and veggies delivered to my door each week.  This year I vow to find a system that works for my green conscience and my budget!

#3 Switch almost all the bulbs in my home to compact fluorescents:  The research I’ve done on compact fluorescents shows that the cost and energy savings are quite substantial.  Some of the fixtures in my home use small decorative bulbs, but I did find some smaller bulbs that come as compact fluorescents for sale on the Web.  Also, check out Ikea’s selection of economical compact fluorescents. 

#4 Find a creative solution for fuel efficiency:  We are planning on replacing a truck with another vehicle this year.  I have considered a vintage diesel car that runs on vegetable oil or a small fuel-efficient vehicle, but we do lots of remodeling/landscaping and need something that can be loaded with stuff.  Is there any such thing as a turbo, Biodiesel van that’s safe, dependable and economical?  If so, I shall find it!

Although my list is short, I seem to find that small changes always cause momentum that spills over into other areas of my life.  I’ll start small and keep you posted on my successes (and failures!).  

I credit a long-ago Earth Day television special to introducing me to the fast-paced world of reusing and recycling.  Now I try hard to do what’s best for our environment, but I don’t always live up to my ideals.  Here are my top five eco-sins, confessed.

1. I take long, hot showers.  I know, I know.  I should get a solar heater and bathe in harvested rainwater from our rooftop.  This is an especially heinous sin considering how often I’ve bragged about limiting my daughter’s bath time fun.
2. I don’t always buy organic produce.  I’m cheap.  I’m trying to get over it.
3. I don’t always buy local produce.  Buying local produce as a “green” action was something I hadn’t even considered until a couple years ago.  But even after educating myself a bit on the subject and reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I’m still not a locavore.
4. I have not fully converted to greener cleaners.  Don’t get me wrong–I have very few toxic cleansers sitting under my kitchen sink and use plenty of baking soda and vinegar.  But somehow I still have a hard time getting worked up about the awfulness of conventional brands.  I have read a lot about the toxins in cleaners and the havoc they wreak on our bodies and our planet.  I’ve devoured whole books on the subject.  Apparently years of indoctrination by commercial advertising is hard to overcome.
5. I travel.

The act of confessing my sins has cleansed my conscience, and the Earth.  I sentence myself to quicker showers, a larger budget for organic produce, a disdain for imported fruits and veggies, a deeper understanding of and appreciation for greener cleaners, and several carbon off-set coupons.

What are your eco-sins?  Confess!

“Get out of the bath–you’re wasting water!”

We’ve really tried to limit the toys littering our home.  Why then does it seem that clean-up time takes longer and longer each day?  There are blocks spilling onto the carpet, books stacked precariously around Roscoe’s room and wheeled vehicles strewn about our house at the end of every single day. 

That’s why we LOVE bubbles.  They disappear just as quickly as they appear.  And, they’re so very cheap!  You can mix up your own batch with water, dishwashing soap, and a few drops of glycerin. (Available for a few bucks at your local pharmacy). You probably know that just water and soap will work, but the glycerin will help create better bubbles that last a bit longer.  Look here for several bubble recipes and here for suggestions on what to do with the bubbles, including using a hula hoop and a kiddie-pool to make huge ones and a fly swatter to create a blizzard of tiny bubbles.  You can also use pipe cleaners to make simple bubble wands for little environmental and economic cost.  Have fun!

Roscoe Prefers Mouth Frothing Over Bubble Wands

For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, go to Rocks in My Dryer.

Green Babies, Sage Moms will appeal to eco-curious types living on the Upper East Side in their Jimmy Choos rather than the canning-mung beans-in-their-Birks set.  Author Lynda Fassa takes readers through pregnancy, the baby’s arrival, and the subsequent years with baby, identifying harmful toxins and replacing them with organic products.  So while there isn’t much on reducing your baby’s carbon footprint, there are many great product recommendations for getting started on your household detox mission.

Fassa looks at pregnancy and early motherhood as times when we have a heightened awareness about our bodies and the world around us.  We all know we should watch what we eat when pregnant.  But what about the toxins lurking everywhere, ready to taint the very world we live in?  Page after page we learn about the toxins in everything around us.  Toxins in cigarettes, soft cheeses, sushi.  Nail polish, nail polish remover, hair products, pesticides, milk, fruit, vegetables, grains, wine, blush, mascara, foundation, lipstick, hair dye, perfume, drain cleaners, air fresheners, antibacterial soap, oven cleaners, furniture polish, rubber duckies, plastic toys, teethers, baby wipes, lotions, creams, crib mattresses, disposable diapers, conventional cotton, fertilizers, ground water, fish, deodorant, vaccines, drawer pulls, paint, floors, school buses, park benches, and playground equipment.

Despite this rather daunting and exhaustive list of no-nos, Fassa maintains a cheerful tone, somehow avoiding fear-mongering or paranoia.  Perhaps it’s the liberal use of exclamation marks or the disclaimers she adds before some of the more terrifying discussions: “Warning! Scary Information to Follow.”

At times I longed for less reminiscing on Fassa’s career as a model or her husband’s childhood Alpine ski trips and more advice relevant to my life as a mother trying to make greener choices.  Case in point: She includes just six pages discussing diapers but devotes thirty-six pages to organic beauty treatments we can enjoy during pregnancy without harming ourselves or our “beautiful baby bump.”

Still, Green Babies, Sage Moms is an excellent resource for eco-friendly products.  As the founder of Green Babies, an organic cotton clothing company, Fassa has years of experience with organic baby gear.  The end of each chapter contains “Evergreen,” “Pea Green,” and “Spring Green” options for greening your life in baby steps.  There is a small list of “Green Goods” at the end of the book, but no index, which makes using this book as a resource guide difficult.

Writing a green blog is a great deal like being a minister.  Why?  Because when I inform acquaintances about our website’s mission, they invariably launch into their own eco-failings. I listen and nod, acting as though I have the power to pardon their sordid eco-sins. Of course, I have no such ability—partly because I’m not an eco-evangelist and partly because I too am a work in progress

The truth is, my family has a list of transgressions against the planet just like everyone else.   Today I shall confess them to you:

#1 We use disposable diapers for Roscoe at night.  I actually wrote a whole post about my green mom guilt on this issue.  It’s difficult, but we’re just so desperate for sleep that we’re willing to use seven disposables per week.  We buy the chlorine-free Seventh Generation diapers but they don’t break down in landfills any better than standard disposables.

#2 There is a plastic exersaucer in my attic.  It’s true!  We were never planning on buying one of this large landfill-occupying contraptions, but when we were given a used one for free, we didn’t turn it down.  When Roscoe was little we occasionally used it just so that he could see the world a bit more and I could get dinner in the oven.  Part of my dark confession is that I know exersaucers can actually can delay walking in children and aren’t developmentally helpful in any way.  So please know that I would never endorse the exersaucer as a necessary piece of baby gear!

#3 We love take-out.  On a Friday evening after a long work week, there is nothing we enjoy more than watching a movie while eating Phad King and Lad Nah out of take-out boxes. I’m having a happy Thai food flashback just thinking about it!  Lately I ask restaurants if they use Styrofoam before ordering and opt to go elsewhere if they do.  Someday I aspire to ask that they spoon my meals into the tupperware I bring, but I haven’t reached that green goal yet.  For now we go for the recyclable plastic containers. 

#4  We are remodeling nuts.  Our house is a work in progress, and while we aren’t the granite countertop type, we have replaced doors and windows for aesthetic reasons and will most likely reconfigure the kitchen someday.  Remodeling isn’t the greenest thing to undertake and I feel a little guilty replacing perfectly functional (although hideously ugly) items in our home.  On the upside, we do try to recycle all our used materials by taking them to a fabulous used warehouse called Bring.  It assuages a bit of my green guilt.

#5  I grocery shop at a big-box store.  It’s employee owned, but doesn’t have as many eco-friendly options as other stores do.  As a result, I end up buying groceries at a few different stops to get all the items on our list—which uses up gas and time.  Also, doing the bulk of my shopping at the cheapest store forces me to buy more mainstream items than I really want.  This is why one of my resolutions is to come up with a better solution for thrifty, green grocery shopping in the year to come.

Roscoe Shows his Green Disappointment In Us 

#5  We drive a Toyota Forerunner.  This is my darkest confession of all.  We’ve been using the truck (dare I say, SUV?) for years since my sister-in-law first generously lent it to us.  It sits in our garage for about eight months of the year when my husband bikes to work, but I still feel guilty every time we use it.  This year it shall be replaced with an eco-friendly alternative, but still!     

So, there you have it.  You now have no reason whatsoever to imagine that I’m eco-perfect. Please be convinced that I have no judgments against anyone’s green shortcomings–I have my own eco-sins to overcome!  

Do you have hundreds of miniature socks, pants, and pajamas oozing from your closets?  Before my baby was even born, I found myself with more baby clothes than I knew what to do with.  My daughter never even wore half of the adorable little outfits I’d folded and stored in her dresser.  Many of the clothes never fit (short-and-wide onesies didn’t work on her tall-and-skinny frame, for example) or weren’t appropriate for the season.

The clothes my daughter wears fit into two drawers on her dresser.  (The third drawer is reserved for cloth diapers and diapering paraphernalia.)  Everything else gets relegated to the dreaded basement.  Although I’ve written about the ersatz landfill that my basement has become, I’ve managed to keep the baby clothing archives relatively organized.

Limiting my daughter’s garments to just two drawers helps me weed out the old and make room for the new.  I can usually find what I need because I don’t keep all of her clothes–outgrown, unsightly, off-season, or impractical–in a closet.  If the clothes aren’t in the two drawers in my daughter’s nursery, they’re in one of the following labeled boxes:

Outgrown (keep).  Once she’s outgrown something I want to hang on to, it goes here.  If I were super-organized, I could subdivide this category by size, so if I had another child, I could easily find what I needed.  Too bad I’m not super-organized!

Too Big.  At my baby shower I received clothing in sizes ranging from newborn to twenty-four months.  Anything that doesn’t fit her right now goes in the “too big” box.  Now that my daughter is over two years old, she has fewer items in this stash.  When she was smaller, I kept her too-big clothes organized by size.  It gets a little confusing because you’ll find that your kid will fit in all sorts of sizes at one time.  My daughter can fit in everything from three to twenty-four months!  (Don’t the pants in this photo fit like a dream?  No?  Okay, into the “Too Big” box they go.)

Giveaway.  Clothes that my daughter outgrew or never wore for some reason might go in this box or the next box.

Sell.  I live next to a bustling consignment shop, so I try to store the nice clothing I don’t want to keep in a “clothes to sell” box.  Once I have forty items (the limit at my shop), I take it over and get credit to spend on secondhand clothes and toys.  If I were super-organized, I’d subdivide this category by season–no consignment shop wants a heavy winter coat in June or a Halloween costume in December.

As a part of my spring cleaning efforts, I’m going to rifle through my daughter’s wardrobe, arrange everything in the correct boxes, and make a trip to the consignment shop.  With my store credit I’ll fill in any holes that may exist in Audrey’s wardrobe.  I think she needs a summer-weight power suit for casual play dates and some understated accessories to herald the spring.

For more green spring cleaning tips, check out Nature Mom’s Green Spring Cleaning extravaganza.  If you have any clever ways to organize your baby’s clothes, post a comment and tell us about it!

Last weekend, a reporter interviewed Joy about the Green Baby Guide.  ”Are You a Green Mama” aired on two different nights in both Eugene and Portland, turning Joy into a regional celebrity.

 Check out the segment here!

If you want to view Roscoe running around in a cow-print diaper again and again for weeks to come, just click on “The Green Baby Guide is on T.V.” on the left-hand column of our homepage.

I remember the day we made our first eco-friendly Trader Joe’s detergent purchase. We loved the smell of our fresh laundry and basked in the green glow of our new standby.  While the large plastic container was an environmental downside, the price was reasonable and the lavender essential oils gave it a crisp, clean scent.

 Roscoe helps with the laundry

We wanted to switch to a greener detergent for our family’s health and the environment. Green brands don’t contain optical brighteners, chemicals which bond to the skin with traditional detergents. We also liked the fact that scents are often plant-based rather than petroleum-based, which tends to cause less skin irritation. As if that weren’t enough to convince us, natural detergents biodegrade easily in water and don’t contain phosphates, which are very harmful to aquatic wildlife.

Overall, we were utterly thrilled with ourselves for our ethical and thrifty laundry detergent decision.  But that was until we noticed the smell. Even when Roscoe had wet diapers, they reeked of rotten garbage.  At first we thought he had been sneaking asparagus in at snack-time, but then our daycare provider noticed as well.  She recommended stripping our diapers by washing them in several loads of hot water without laundry soap to remove the residue causing the foul odor.

After further research, I found that eco-friendly detergents with essential oils or mainstream brands with petroleum-based scents can coat cloth diapers, making them non-absorbent and causing them to smell, even when wet.  There are several suggested remedies for this stinky conundrum, including using vinegar in the rinse cycle, adding baking soda to the laundry soap, and doing an additional hot rinse after each load.

The problem with all of these options is that they require more time and/or effort from our already busy family.  Instead, we’ve looked into switching to a diaper-friendly detergent and saving the rest of our Trader Joe’s stuff for our non-diaper laundry.  The list below includes some recommended choices. 

I’ve heard that Charlie’s Soap is the ideal diaper laundering product. According to the company, each load of laundry requires just one tablespoon of soap and leaves no deposits on clothes.  Many cloth diaper aficionados have informed me that there is no stripping required with Charlie’s Soap and you can buy it at some natural baby stores, such as Mother Nature’s in Portland, Oregon. 

Since Portland is two vast hours away and I’m too swamped to order Charlie’s Soap online, I opted for Biokleen’s Free and Clear Laundry Powder.  There’s no plastic container, it’s safe for high efficiency washers, it’s fragrance-free, and it’s available at my local grocery store, a mere five minutes from home. 

It’s amazing how something as simple as laundry soap can be such a challenge for a busy family trying to go green.  Then again, solving that dilemma has been a huge triumph and relief.  We’ll keep you posted as we set our eyes on future eco-friendly hurdles.  They may not be overcome with grace, but we’ll keep stumbling greenward!  For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, go to the blog carnival at rocksinmydryer.com. 

Last week we asked you to reveal your deepest, darkest, most toxic secrets as a part of our first giveaway.  Your candid “toxic confessions” were indeed shocking.  We’ve randomly chosen from our list of commenters, and the winner is . . . Mimi!  Congratulations, Mimi.  You will soon be the proud owner of Shaklee’s disinfectant wipes and oven cleaner, thanks to Green and Clean Mom.  Now get rid of that carpet cleaner you’ve admitted to keeping hidden in your carpet-free house! 

Well, that’s great for Mimi, but what about the rest of you?  You confessed to harboring everything from bleach to scrubbing bubbles under your kitchen sinks.  It’s time to head on over to a hazardous waste facility and drop the offenders off where they can be quietly and safely dispatched.  But now you’re left with no household cleaners and your oven’s a mess.  You could do what I do, which is nothing.  Or you could whip up a little homemade oven cleaner for just a few cents.  I got this recipe from the Mrs. Clean website. 

Chemical-Free Natural Oven Cleaner

5 T Baking Soda

3 drops Liquid Dish Soap

4 T White vinegar

Mix the above ingredients into a thick paste. Use a sponge to apply the oven cleaner to the inside of the oven and then scrub with a scouring pad.  Rinse thoroughly and wipe the oven clean.

Happy green cleaning, everyone.