I had every intention of weaning my child at one year.  Breastfeeding while working had been burdensome and I dreamed of the days that my body would be fully mine again.  Then my son became very sick and had to be hospitalized for days.  The only thing I could do for him was offer the breast, and it was a huge comfort as he underwent endless tests.  After that I realized that I could feed him just in the morning and before bed, and wouldn’t need to pump ever again.  Since my supply fit perfectly with whatever demand we worked out, it wasn’t such a burden.  I ended up breastfeeding him until he was two.  I’m glad I did it as long as I did, and was also at peace with my decision to stop.

Are you trying to make up your mind about how long to breastfeed?  Are you glad you weaned when you did or wished you would have continued?  Are you successfully breastfeeding your toddler?  Please share your wisdom with our other readers who may be pregnant or in the early stages of motherhood!  (and please be gentle–there can be a lot of judgement either way on this one.)

A while ago I asked, “Why don’t you use cloth diapers?” The responses were so varied and interesting that I decided to make a new series of “Why don’t you” questions. No judgment!

Today’s question is, why don’t you garden organically? Do you find yourself drawn to chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides? Maybe you do it because your parents did it that way. Maybe you get hit by horrible insect infestations or your grass withers up and dies without a regular injection of chemicals. Or . . . what?

Does baby’s nursery smell like a port-a-poddy? Do you hold your breath every time you flip open that diaper pail?  Fear not!

In our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, Rebecca and I recommend the “slacker” method of cloth diaper laundering.  It doesn’t involve intensive prewashing or excessive toilet dunking, and it should keep your nursery smelling fresher than it would with disposables.  (Remember that with cloth the feces is properly disposed of in the toilet rather than smelling up your home.)

So, what happens if your cloth diapers seem to give off a distasteful odor of fermented waste?  Try these handy tips.

1. Baste them with Bac Out.  Every so often, squirt a dose into the diaper pail.  It has a lovely lime scent and it’s live enzyme cultures go to work on odor right away.  You can also use it for stains and odors on any of your other laundry.

1. Blast them with Baking Soda. This odor fighting technique is far less expensive than Bac Out and will also work with the detergent when it comes time to dump diapers into the wash.

1. Beware of Build Up.  If your diapers smell like dirty socks even when your baby just wets them, they are probably coated in oils and fragrances from your detergent.  This prevents them from absorbing as well and makes them particularly smelly.  Diapers made of polyester are especially prone to build up.  To strip them, wash them for one to two loads in hot water (no detergent) and see if it makes a difference.  Also remember that your regular loads of diapers should be washed with half the normal amount of detergent you’d use on a load of clothes.  Check out products like Charlie’s Soap Laundry Powder or Biokleen Laundry Detergent to see if a different soap will help.)

1. Fill it with a filter. Several companies make charcoal filters for compost bins that also work well for diaper pails.  If you’ve tried everything else, it’s worth a few dollars to check out this option.

Any other ideas?  Are you also struggling with smells this summer?

While I’m off on vacation, I thought I’d rerun this old post from the summer of 2008!

Joy’s popsicle post provided me with a burst of inspiration: Could I sneak vegetables into my daughter’s diet by disguising them in a tasty frozen treat?  The answer is yes.  Here’s my groundbreaking recipe:

Strawberry Spinach Popsicles

Pint of very ripe strawberries (overripe is okay)
2-3 cups of carefully washed spinach leaves
1 TBS honey (or more, to taste)

Place the strawberries in the blender and fill the remainder of the blender with spinach leaves.  Add honey and puree until smooth.  Pour into popsicle molds.  (Yields 2 cups liquid)

I invented this recipe and gave the strange-looking brown popsicle to my daughter.  She took one lick and said, “Yum, yum!”  Then she ate the whole thing, making quite a mess in the process.  Of course I sampled this brown concoction myself.  It really does not taste of spinach at all-it’s just pleasantly strawberry-flavored.

Now, I know that disguising vegetables in other foods is controversial.  When Jessica Seinfeld’s book Deceptively Delicious came out, I read reviews from critics who claimed that lying to children about what they were eating would result in bitterness and mistrust in their parents as they grew older and wiser.  This seems a little far-fetched to me.  Besides, I did not lie to Audrey; I just handed her a popsicle and she ate it.  I hope she grows to love normally-prepared vegetables very soon, but in the meantime, I’m glad I found a way to sneak some greens into her summer confections.

Shocking Truth #1:

No matter how many limits you put on the playthings that enter your home, you will find yourself amazed by how the toy paraphernalia builds up.

Shocking truth #2:

Although you may beg people not to shower your tiny infant with a million rattles, shiny singing doodads and plastic xylophones, they will.  Then they will do it again annually.

Shocking truth #3:

Your child will play with just ten to twenty percent of her toys.

Am I wrong?  I hope so, but in our household we have been amazed by the sheer quantity of stuff that entered our lives with our children’s arrival.  I co-wrote The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, a book in which we clearly state that voluntary simplicity is the way to go with baby for a myriad of economic and environmental reasons.  And yet, somehow gifts found their way into our lives and my son’s room was overrun with clutter.

What’s the magic answer for toy purging?  For us it was talking about one (hypothetical) child who doesn’t get playthings because his family can’t afford it.  We talk about what  he might like, and how happy he’ll be to get it.  If my son wants to give this imaginary boy toys but feels that he can’t get rid of them himself, he’ll even let his dad sort through the toys that aren’t being played with so that we can ship them off to Goodwill.

We also do a toy rotation, so that the items he doesn’t want to play with can be shifted out every month or so.  It feels like he’s constantly getting new toys and there’s less to trip over and clean up in his bedroom.

As for the limiting of the gifts, for our baby we specifically asked for no presents at her first birthday party and will probably limit gifts for her until she’s about three and can actually know she’s getting something.  For our son, we do ask family for gift certificates to children’s museums or swimming so that we can have experiences instead of stuff.  It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try!

Any other ideas?  Have any of you had success with actually keeping the wave of shiny new toys at bay in those first few years?

Do you like it?  I’m blushing a bit right now, but we are really proud of our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, and are hoping that many of you find it helpful as you prepare for baby or select a gift for pregnant friends who are looking for eco-friendly, budget friendly solutions.  Please let us know if you’ve read it!  Also, if you have ideas on how to spread the word on our little gem, please let us know.  We loved writing it and editing it hundreds of times, but marketing isn’t our favorite hobby.  Still, we’d like to let expectant parents know how to save thousands of dollars while going green.  Thanks for your creative ideas!

Have you given up on peanut butter? I am so-o-o glad I didn’t read that doctors are recommending pregnant and breastfeeding women to avoid peanuts when I was pregnant five years ago.  As a vegetarian, I live off of peanut butter!

Once my daughter was eating solid foods, I waited patiently until she was two before introducing nuts. (Which was the recommendation at the time.) She was really underweight for a while there, and it was frustrating to withhold peanut butter for so long. I know I gave her almond butter first, but now I can’t remember when I introduced it.

Has anyone tried feeding babies sunflower seed butter? All the peanut butter alternatives out there are so much more expensive, but it seems like a good way to get some protein and calories into a young child’s diet. What do you think?

With my husband being a stay at home dad last year, our income took a dip and we vowed to cut back.  We carefully recorded all our expenses and tried to spend less.  And we did in many ways, but not at the grocery store.  We went to one budget store for dry goods and hit another one for organic produce and healthier foods.

We felt great about our choices until we recently checked our overall grocery spending.  It had skyrocketed to nearly as much as our mortgage payment!  (I must confess that we have a really low mortgage payment, but still!)

Now that I’m the one at home, our income has dipped even further and I’m in charge of trying to cut back expenses.  The grocery bill is our biggest monthly cost, and I’m eager to bring it down, but I don’t want to give up on organics.  So far I’m trying to offset the cost of organics by couponing a bit more and checking out Grocery Outlet for organic deals.  We’ll also be eating a lot from our garden this summer and picking local fruit, but I hope that I can figure it out without feeling like I’m sacrificing my ideals.  We don’t need processed foods now that I have more time to cook, but somehow just produce, dried beans, and basic canned goods add up to quite a lot!

I have to confess that if the choice was between giving up organic foods to allow me to stay home with the kids and working to pay the grocery bill, it would be pretty clear to me that being at home was my priority.  Surely things aren’t this black and white if I continue to pursue gardening and try to pick local produce.  Right?  Please provide inspiration!

My husband thought it would be romantic to get me a steam cleaner for my last birthday. (Okay, okay. I may have planted the idea in his head.) I’d first heard of this miraculous cleaning contraption in Raising Baby Green by Dr. Alan Greene. A woman wrote a testimonial about how great this thing was: It uses no chemicals—just steam—and kills germs and bacteria. It improves the air quality of your home and is essential for sufferers of allergies.

I would have rushed out to buy a steam cleaner right then and there, but she said she paid $400 for it! With a price tag that high, it would really never pay for itself. One of the advantages of the product is that is eliminates the need for cleaning potions.  Although the average family supposedly spends $600 a year on cleaning supplies, I’m sure I don’t spend even $20.

Anyway, years later I discovered that there are many steam cleaners for around $100—much more reasonable! They have nozzles for steam cleaning grout and attachments for mopping the floor, washing windows, and removing wall paper. I just had to have one.

I settled on the Wagner power steamer and cleaner (now on sale for only $75!). The verdict? I do enjoy using the steam cleaner once a week in the bathroom for the grout and floors–it completely removed some mold on the grout I hadn’t been able to get rid of, and it made the fifty +-year-old grout white again. I’ve tried out the various attachments on other cleaning adventures, and I’ve been impressed with the results.

However . . . I guess I feel a little guilty for justifying the steam cleaner as a green purchase! If you are a stickler for germ-killing (and I confess that I am not) or need to sterilize things for health reasons, the steam cleaner has to be better than chlorine bleach. For my cleaning needs, I could have survived using old fashioned ingredients such as vinegar and baking soda. But now that I own the steam cleaner, I will enjoy it and make good use of it.

Does anyone else have a steam cleaner? Do you recommend it—or not?

I see you everywhere, your bellies budging, your skin glowing, and your eyes lingering on my chubby baby.  The secret smile we exchange signifies that we both know that you’re on your way to my new native land: motherhood.

For me, in the beginning, it seemed as though my baby would never arrive. And then, it happened.  Suddenly we were hurtling forward in a free fall towards the biggest transition of our life.  My biggest maternity clothes didn’t fit, but even more immense than my belly was the feeling that I might just not be ready.

Not ready to push this person out of my body, or settle it into the incomplete nursery.  Not ready for the sleep loss, and not ready for giving up everything (and I mean everything)  I once thought was my own.  (That includes sleep, time, personal space, and clothes not covered in kid-generated goo.)

If you’re expecting a baby, you may feel the desperate need to buy more stuff to brace yourself for the shift.  Don’t. Of course, we won’t be offended if you purchase our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, and give it a read, but if you’re short on time, here’s the summary.  You can do this.  You don’t need stuff.  In fact, it will just require you to take care of a whole bunch of objects in addition to your child.  All you really need is a few diapers, a place for baby to rest, a few clothes, the crook of your arm, and the croon of your voice. Welcome!  You’re going to be great at this!