One of my favorite thrifty green benefits is that Freddie is learning to cook. Until our lifestyle overhaul, he was mostly learning how to order from the kiddie menu at a restaurant, or worse, at the drive-thru. Those days are over, and now my son loves coming home from nursery school to help me cook.

At four, his activities are somewhat limited, but he enjoys doing what he can. And he’s looking forward to starting a garden this spring, too – so he’ll really understand where food comes from. Since I couldn’t boil water or keep a cactus alive before my 30th birthday, I’m really glad he’ll have these life skills. And I’ll have great memories of Freddie making a tasty mess in the kitchen.

I also wanted to share my birthday invitation for a birthday party we had. Here is the wording…

We’d love to have you here to help us celebrate Luke and Ashley’s Birthdays. Both have been learning how to recycle, reduce and reuse. We are going to try to go Eco-Friendly for this party. Here are some suggestions on how you can help with that:

• Wrap gifts in newspaper so it can be recycled after it is torn to shreds from excitement.
• Instead of toys, gift certificates to Splash Swim Park, Kick City Soccer, Gymnastics Academy…they love these places and it will cut down on packaging and plastics.
• Used clothing/toys/books would be great. It’s always new to them 

This worked really well for us. We have some family who likes to buy the newest thing and they had a hard time with it. But they ended up having their kids pick toys out of their toy box to give to my kids. My kids loved it and they got rid of some of the things that haven’t been played with in a while. We had a 0 waste birthday party by composting plates and food scraps, recycling soda cans, using silverwear, and recycling wrapping paper or reusing gift bags. We also had party favors that each child made. We put together edible necklaces using licorice string, fruit loops, gummy peach rings, chocolate covered pretzels, and other stringable edibles.