Don’t forget to enter our huge giveaway of eco-baby gear!

Books are the perfect green baby shower gift. Unlike some plastic gizmo that winds up broken in a landfill after a couple months’ use, books can be passed from child to child and cherished for years. Here are Amazon’s top-selling board books:

1. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
   
2. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
   
3. The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton
   
4. My Big Animal Book by Roger Priddy
   
5. pat the bunny (Touch-and-Feel) by Dorothy Kunhardt
   
6. Big Board First 100 Words (Bright Baby) by Roger Priddy
   
7. The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don Wood and Audrey Wood
   
8. Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram
   
9. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle
   
10. Peek-A Who? by Nina Laden
    

Out of this list, my daughter has enjoyed Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar since she was about three months old.  Two other board book favorites around here are Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathman and Owl Babies by Martin Waddell. What are your children’s favorite board books?

If you’d like to see my daughter working her potty training magic you can visualize one adorably plump six month old perched precariously on her potty seat with chubby thighs spilling over the padded rim.  She’s happily performing zerberts while pooping and grinning broadly.  When she’s done, she again zerberts in celebration.

Or you can go to our facebook page by folllowing this link: Infant Potty Training–Jovi shows her stuff!

If you’re wondering why I even plopped her on the potty at this tender age, read Monday’s post about my accidental adventures in infant potty training. Enjoy!

In celebration of our newly-published book, we’re showering one lucky reader with all the wonderful, eco-friendly baby gear below! Here’s what you could win this week:

• 1 copy of our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide. We may be a bit biased, but in our opinion this is the best gift of all!
  

• 1 organic cotton romper from hessnatur. This company makes adorable organic garments for baby (and adults!) that are just as fashionable as they are functional. The romper has a gnome applique on the front.
  
• 1 Fuzzibunz one-size diaper. Fuzzibunz makes the popular pocket diapers with snap closures. You could win their one-size diaper, which adjusts to fit babies from 7 to 35 pounds. They’re sturdily made to withstand 3+ years of use. (Color may vary.)
  
• 1 Speesees crawl turtle teether–organic and BPA-free! From their website: “We believe in being fun, fair, and organic in the products we make, the way we conduct business, and the baby steps we take towards creating a more sustainable future for the animal, plant, and human speesees on our children’s planet.”
  

• 1 pair of boy baby shoes from Pedoodles, in the style and size of your choice. We used Pedoodles for our own children. Read our old review of them here!
  
• 1 organic teething toy from Momma’s Baby. This organic teething toy can even be dipped in water and stored in the freezer to soothe baby’s sore gums. Visit Momma’s Baby for a wide selection of wonderful organic baby, maternity, and home products.
  
• 1 sample pack (diapers, 1cover, one diaper liner plus an infant size hemp/organic cotton fitted diaper) from Diaperaps. Diaperaps are one of our personal favorite diaper covers; we used them over Chinese prefolds.
  

• A HappyBaby gift pack, including organic baby food samples, an Eric Carle growth chart from YoBaby, an Infant & Toddler Nutrition guide co-authored by Dr. Sears, and a set of HappyFamily recipes. HappyBaby is the company behind this fabulous organic baby guide, and their organic foods are available in supermarkets everywhere.
  
• 1 Snugglebottoms w/Velcro diaper (unbleached ‘green’ cotton flannel) in the size of your choice from Baby Bunz & Co. Baby Bunz & Co. is a great online source for cloth diapers–they’ve been selling them since the ’80s!
  
• 1 Green Dragon Pest Solutions, an eco-friendly product that will hurt household bugs such as roaches and silverflies without harming baby.  It comes in a gel so that you can avoid toxic sprays with baby nearby.
  

Nine Ways to Enter the Giveaway

How do you enter?  Guess what?  You can enter more than once! Each way listed below gets you one entry.  All comments have to be posted BEFORE Monday the 22nd of March to win.

Remember, leave a separate comment on this post for each entry you want.  If applicable, please leave the link to your Facebook/Twitter/Blog in the comment you leave here.

1. Leave us a comment on this post.

2. Email a friend about our book, our blog, or this month’s giveaways.

3. Subscribe to our blog (look right under the search bar) Again, be sure to comment about it below!

4. Join our Facebook fan club.

5. Link to this post on Facebook or Twitter to let everyone else know about our giveaway.

6. Link to this post on your blog!

7. Add The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to your “to read” shelf on Goodreads.

8. Add our blog to your blogroll.

9. Go read our post on Five Ways to Score a Free Copy of  The Eco-nomical Baby Guide and leave a comment there if you’d like to review our book on your blog.  (Make sure to read the post for more details!) Leave a comment here as well to make sure we can keep track of your entries.

***The contest ends on Sunday, March 21, 2010***

Winner will be randomly selected.

We will notify the winner via email and will get you in touch with these companies who will ship your products directly to you. Please Note: This contest is open only to U.S. readers.

Have fun everyone!

It sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?  Asking a tiny baby to be able to control her bodily functions?  I thought so too. These days I’m firmly aboard the early potty training bandwagon now that my eight month old baby regularly poops on the potty.

I wouldn’t have remotely thought about perching my first child on the toilet simply because I had no friends or family who had ever attempted it. But when we wrote our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-To-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet, I learned more about infant potty training and found it fascinating.

My daughter’s first poop on the potty was a total accident. She was perched on our wood floor, bare bottomed due to a slight diaper rash.  When she started to strain a bit, my husband and I scooped her up and set her on the potty. It worked!

Motivated by the opportunity to avoid toilet-dunking poopy diapers, we started paying attention to her schedule and found that she needed to sit on the potty once in the morning, and then again after each meal.  Sure enough, we found ourselves having only one poopy diaper a day, if that, in the days and weeks that followed.  Sometimes she’s hesitant to sit, but if we distract her with a toy she’s happy to oblige.  Here she is looking quite proud of her efforts!

If this sounds totally bizarre, remember that in most of the world, people don’t use diapers.  Infants potty train in China, India, and much of Latin America.  In the U.S. people used to toilet train children much younger when cloth diapers were used.

The only down side to our new potty training lifestyle, is that we have a one bathroom house.  Now there are four people trying to share one toilet, which means sometimes we can’t get her to the bathroom on time.  Also, we don’t even remotely try to toilet train her while we’re traveling because it seems far too complicated.  Still, we celebrate every avoided diaper dunk and the drastic cut it has made in our pile of dirty prefolds!  Check back with us on Wednesday to watch the video of Jovi having one of her poops with plenty of slobbery zerberts throughout!  (I think she may really resent this video in the years to come!)

Have you tried perching your babe on the potty?  Any luck?

Speaking of luck, we have to congratulate Rose for winning last Friday’s giveaway of peppermint shower infusers.  We hope she uses them to get revitalized for the tough job of motherhood.  Stay tuned this month for our next few fabulous green baby giveaways!

Surrender.  That’s the word that most quickly comes to mind when I ponder what the sleepless nights and soggy diapers have taught me.

Before this, I had my own food, my own music, my own space and now my offspring have moved in to claim all of those territories and more.  And yet, surrender isn’t such a bad thing.  What was so great about the rigidity of having things “just so?”  My kids teach me to be flexible on a daily basis and not get so caught up in expectations.  When I forget, they’re happy to remind me with a temper tantrum, a flung spoonful of pureed pears, or an unexpected grin.

What have you learned from your child on this parenting journey?  Remember that many of our readers are pregnant and will benefit from your experience!

Don’t forget to enter our fantastic giveaway! Win a copy of our book, cloth diapers, organic food, and MORE!

We met back in the early 1990s—Rebecca an impressionable freshman in college, Joy the older and wiser resident assistant. Little did we know that several years, boyfriends, and trips around the world later, we’d be emailing each other back and forth about . . . diapers.

Us in 2007

“What’s the difference between a prefold and a pocket diaper?” “How do you wash your diapers?” “Have you tried making your own baby food?” After months of stimulating conversation on these and other life-and-death topics, Joy had the inspired idea to put our new-found knowledge into a book. Early in 2007, we drafted our first book proposal. Convinced of its brilliance, we immediately sent it off to a few major publishing houses.

Nothing happened. We heard a few encouraging responses, and a few not-so-encouraging responses. One publisher suggested we write up our ideas in a magazine article—they didn’t think we had enough to say on the topic of eco-babies to write an entire book. (This is the number one reason most non-fiction book proposals are rejected.) Finally we stumbled upon Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write: How to Get a Contract and Advance Before Writing Your Book by Elizabeth Lyon. Parts of it are now a bit dated, but the information on its pages are invaluable! She clued us in to the idea that we needed to get an agent rather than submit directly to publishers.

Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write led us to publication!

I’ll skip the boring stuff about us writing, writing, writing, revising, revising, revising that proposal and sending it off to agent after agent. We found a wonderful agent in 2008, and she gave us the advice we wish we’d gotten much earlier: Build a platform! We needed to find ourselves an audience for our book before she could sell the idea to publishers. And thus, greenbabyguide.com was born!

She sold the book to Stewart, Tabori, & Chang in the summer of 2008, and they planned to publish it in March of 2010. “2010!” we exclaimed. It seemed like a date in the far and distant future, light years from the days we used to sit in our dorm rooms, dreaming of being writers.

But that day is finally here. We have a blog. We have a book. We are writers!

Perhaps you’ve already read our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.   Maybe you’ve discovered the homemade baby food recipes included in the book and have spend hours whirling up delicious concoctions.  With minimal effort you’ve saved money, packaging, and carbon emissions by preparing healthy purees for your little one.  Now you deserve some brownies!

Steal a few frozen cubes of whirled up nutrition and slip them into this yummy recipe!  I’ve tried this on family and friends always with great results.  No one realizes that these are healthier than your standard brownie because the coffee and cocoa make them just as decadent.

Baby Food Brownies

Ingredients

• 1/4 Cup melted butter or margarine
• 2/3  Cup baking cocoa
• 1/2  Cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2  Cup sugar
• 1/4 Cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup baby food puree (pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, or yam)
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp instant coffee powder

Directions

Melt butter and cool. Then simply mix all ingredients together thoroughly. Spread mixture into a greased eight inch square pan.  Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes or until brownies are slightly firm.  Enjoy!

Kiwi magazine wants to hear from you! Post your answer to this question in the comments, and you just may appear in their magazine.

“What little thing did you do to green the way you cared for your baby?”

Thanks for your help! We may email you for more information if your comment works for Kiwi‘s article on raising a green baby.

One lucky reader is going to get ALL of the following loot from today’s post!   These fantastic green prizes were generously provided by eco-friendly companies we love. The best news about this generous giveaway is that you can enter multiple times!  We’ll pick one winner who will get all of these green goods delivered to her doorstep just for entering.  Read the end of this post carefully for directions and thanks for visiting today!

• A copy of our book! Of course, we think the best prize is The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down to Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet. It’s packed with hundreds of ways to save money while going green with baby.
• A HappyBaby gift pack, including organic baby food samples, an Eric Carle growth chart from YoBaby, an Infant & Toddler Nutrition guide co-authored by Dr. Sears, and a set of HappyFamily recipes. HappyBaby is the company behind this fabulous organic baby guide, and their organic foods are available in supermarkets everywhere.
• A Snugglebottoms Velcro diaper (unbleached ‘green’ cotton flannel) in the newborn size from Baby Bunz & Co. Baby Bunz & Co. has been selling cloth diapers since the ‘80s—before they made their comeback!
• A Diaperaps sample pack, including a cover, liner, and an infant size hemp/organic cotton fitted diaper. Diaperaps are adorable, waterproof, Velcro closing diaper covers that can be used with cotton prefolds.  They’re easy to use and very affordable.
• One pair of baby boy shoes from Pedoodles, in the style and size of your choice. You’ll love the style and durability of Pedoodles shoes!  Made from recycled leather, they are eco-friendly and adorable.
• An Under the Nile Veggie Crate. Under the Nile is known for their high quality organic Egyptian cotton, and this veggie crate will inspire hours of creative play as your baby grows. This cute organic baby toy is provided by The Clean Bedroom, which sells organic mattresses and other products “because you deserve a healthy night’s sleep.”
• One organic boiled wool coverall ($88) from hessnatur.  This company makes adorable organic garments for baby that are just as fashionable as they are functional.

• One Crawl Turtle Teether is being provided by Speesees, a fun organic clothing company for young ones that we also featured in our book.  
• One container of Green Dragon Pest Solutions, an eco-friendly product that will hurt household bugs such as roaches and silverflies without harming baby.  It comes in a gel so that you can avoid icky sprays with baby nearby.                                                                        

Nine Ways to Enter the Giveaway

How do you enter?  Guess what?  You can enter more than once! Each way listed below gets you one entry.  All comments have to be posted BEFORE Sunday the 14^th Tuesday the 16th of March to win.

Remember, leave a separate comment on this post for each entry you want.  If applicable, please leave the link to your Facebook/Twitter/Blog in the comment you leave here.

1. Leave us a comment on this post.

2. Email a friend about our book, our blog, or this month’s giveaways. (and don’t forget to leave us a comment telling us what you did.)

3. Subscribe to our blog (look right under the search bar) Again, be sure to comment about it below!

4. Join our Facebook fan club

5. Link to us on Facebook or Twitter.

6. Link to this post on your blog!

7. Add The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to your “to read” shelf on Goodreads

8. Add our blog to your blogroll

9. Go read our post on Five Ways to Score a Free Copy of  The Eco-nomical Baby Guide and leave a comment there if you’d like to review our book on your blog.  (Make sure to read the post for more details!) Leave a comment here as well to make sure we can keep track of your entries.

***The contest ends on Saturday, March 13 Monday, March 15, 2010***

Winner will be randomly selected.

We will notify the winner via email and will get you in touch with these companies who will ship your products directly to you. Please Note: This contest is open only to U.S. readers.

Congratulations to Rose, winner of last week’s gift basket!

Have fun everyone!

Diaper launderer, baby food chef, milk producer, house cleaner, nose wiper, and bath giver.  As parents, our work is never done and it often seems as though there is no time to refresh our energy reserves.  Still, I notice that when I do take time to soak in a bubble bath or journal in silence, I am so much more effective as a mom.  How do you take care of yourself?  Do you have trouble finding a moment to relax?  You’re in luck!

Bath by Bettijo is offering one of our readers a jar of Sweet Peppermint Aromatherapy Shower Infusers.   Simply comment below on your tricks for relaxing and let us know that you’d like to win!  Also, please join our Facebook fan club or email your friends about our website, this month’s fabulous giveaways, and our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.  This contest ends on Thursday, March 11th.  Also, there’s still time to enter our HUGE baby basket giveaway. Thanks for spreading the word and we hope you are our lucky winner!