Yes, you’re in the right spot!  We have just redone our banner and layout for a fresh new look.  We were searching for something a bit friendlier with some space for product advertising.  (We have been blogging for three years and just now realized that with our sizable monthly traffic, we could benefit from having a few supporters.  Yahoo for edging out even a tiny profit in our writing endeavors!)

Do you like our new image?  Do you miss the old layout?  We’re still trouble shooting and realize that our search bar awkwardly hangs over our text.  It shall be corrected this week!  Are there other glitches that you’ve noticed?  Hopefully we’ll be settled into our new look soon.

Are you in the first trimester or are you raising two year old twins?  We often wonder where our readers are in their parental journeys and how we can best help them.

Where are we?   Rebecca is raising four-year-old Audrey while Joy is enjoying four-year-old Roscoe and sixteen month old Jovi.

Thanks for sharing your current location in this grand green parenting adventure!

We have some sort of Realities of Green Parenting theme going on this week! Check out our earlier posts: Erica Jong’s “Mother Madness”–Is Green Living Imprisoning Mothers and The Truth about Breastfeeding and Survival in Those Early Months.

I don’t write about breastfeeding much on the Green Baby Guide. It’s not that I didn’t breast feed my daughter (I did), or that I don’t think it’s important (I do). It’s just during the early days of motherhood, I felt an enormous pressure to be this perfect breast feeder, and I didn’t want to add to that culture of “breast is best,” which can sometimes translate to “formula is poison.” (A friend of mine was the recipient of that gem.)

The perfect nursing mother

But where does this pressure come from? I’ll admit that for me, it came from my own insecurities. Breast feeding came pretty easily to me; I never had problems with latch or thrush or mastitis. But Audrey was not gaining weight as fast as the pediatrician would like, and she recommended supplementing with formula. This made me feel inadequate and conflicted. Everything I’d read suggested that adding formula might turn my baby off breastfeeding forever! It was all or nothing to me in my mind, and I wanted to be one of those people who could brag about my daughter never having a drop of formula (as annoying as I found that competitive impulse).

The pressure also comes from a certain liberal, eco-minded community. In our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, Joy and I debated about how much pro-breastfeeding content we should include. There are whole books dedicated to breastfeeding, so I didn’t feel we should devote too many pages to the practice. Also, how many times can a pregnant woman read “breast milk is the most perfect food for your baby,” “breastfeeding is the greatest gift you can give your baby” before her eyes begin to glaze over? But Joy pointed out that the message was still important. After all, a large percentage of American women do not breast feed. Some are not physically able to, some may choose to bottle feed, and others may have missed the “breast is best” memo altogether.

Really, I just wish I’d given myself more of a break over breastfeeding. While ideally a new mother will enjoy breastfeeding for the nourishment, comfort, and bonding it can provide, I now realize I have mostly negative associations with nursing. I spent a lot of energy agonizing about it, reading about it, and crying about it. These negative feelings formed a thick gray cloud over the first year of my baby’s life.

What I really wanted during that time was not another article about how great breastfeeding is or how a mother suffered from every breastfeeding problem and triumphantly overcame it, but just honest admissions that while breastfeeding is great, it’s not the barometer by which you or others can gauge your worth as a parent. That there’s more to your baby’s first year than what you feed her or how you feed her. And that, years later, as your baby grows older and experiences so much more of the world, it won’t have the looming importance it did in those early days.

Breastfeeding is an amazingly glorious experience that can take your breath away as you look into your baby’s newborn eyes at 3am.  But let’s be honest.  In the beginning, it can be brutal.  There’s the all-important latch, the endless night feedings, the chapped nipples, and the general loss of sleep.

And it is great, really.  But no one tells you how hard it can be at first!

There is a sudden transformation of something (your breasts) that once seemed sort of like an unnecessary but attractive part of your body into something that drips, leaks, hardens, and chafes.  What a shock!

Luckily I had access to a free weekly baby clinic through the Peacehealth Nurse Midwifery Birth Center where I delivered.  I desperately needed those appointments, both for the time with the midwives and for the discussions in the waiting room.  We, the haggard, un-showered,  spit-up-upon crew of mothers and fathers instantly bonded like a herd of war veterans.  There was hysterical laughter, there were tears, and there was a general sense that no one really knew what they were doing.  And that was the most reassuring of all.

So yes, those early days are magic and breastfeeding is blissful.  But it is also painful.  It will get so much better! In the meantime, get support, laugh, and embrace your own fallibility.  If you’d like more information, we heaps of information for breastfeeding mothers –from a milk-making cookie recipe to solutions for pumping breastmilk at work.   Most importantly, you can read dozens of stories in, “Was Breastfeeding Worth It?” that may give you hope for sticking with it.

Did you have good breastfeeding support?  Were you alone in those early, sleepy months of nursing your baby?  Please share with our readers who may be there now!

Erica Jong’s Mother Madness, published in The Wall Street Journal a couple days ago, enraged a big chunk of the mommy blogosphere by declaring that the last twenty years or so of “motherphilia” has served to both idealize mothers and imprison them in those unrealistic pressures to be perfect parents. And attachment parenting, the wear-your-baby-everywhere-and-breastfeed philosophy touted by Dr. William Sears, is to blame.

A symbol of our oppression: The humble pocket diaper

Now, normally I do not engage in these online mommy wars, but as Jong lambastes the green movement alongside Dr. Sears, I thought I’d step in with a response from the Green Baby Guide. First of all, I’ve got to say that Erica Jong had some good points. Both Joy and I have some upcoming posts about the downsides of breastfeeding—a point of view that often gets swept into a corner for fear of scaring new mothers off from the practice altogether. If you don’t have a story about how beautiful and transcendent nursing is, you may as well just keep it to yourself for fear that the Earth Mother police will confiscate your secret collection of glass bottles and organic formula.

Jong, too, hates this need to elevate and glamorize every act of motherhood.  In addition to the tenets of attachment parenting is the pressure to save the planet at the same time: “homemade baby food, cloth diapers, a cocoon of clockless, unscheduled time—and you have our new ideal,” she says. “Anything else is bad for baby. Parents be damned.” Okay, so I had some negative thoughts about breastfeeding. But I did enjoy making baby food and I was downright obsessed with cloth diapers. (Enough to co-write the Eco-nomical Baby Guide in their honor!)

Was I blind to my own imprisonment, shackled to the washing machine? Jong thinks so:

Attachment parenting, especially when combined with environmental correctness, has encouraged female victimization. Women feel not only that they must be ever-present for their children but also that they must breast-feed, make their own baby food and eschew disposable diapers. It’s a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women’s freedom as the right-to-life movement.

So if breastfeeding, homemade baby food, and cloth diapers are a “prison for mothers,” is bottle feeding, jarred food, and disposable diapers the path to freedom? Here on the Green Baby Guide, we’ve tried not to be judgmental about other parents’ choices. No need to martyr yourself on the altar of holy greenness for us! But the thing is, for us and many of our readers, cloth diapers and homemade baby food aren’t much of a hardship. Where Jong sees us slaving over a pot of slimy gruel or slapping diapers on rocks down at the river, we’re having fun experimenting with a new type of cooking and oohing and aahing over the latest all-in-one pocket diaper styles.

Homemade baby food enslaves us!

And really—how prevalent is attachment parenting or green parenting? Jong makes it sound like a scourge overtaking the nation instead of the fringe movement it really is. Not even ten percent of the U.S. population uses cloth diapers; when I talk about this website or our book, many are surprised to hear that cloth diapers still exist, as if they were artifacts of past generations. While Jong mocks the parents who fill their kids’ lunchboxes with organic produce, the true problem is that the vast majority of kids are eating junk food—or worse—not eating enough at all.

Jong concludes her article by saying, “We need to be released from guilt about our children, not further bound by it. We need someone to say: Do the best you can. There are no rules.” I couldn’t agree more. We, the eco-conscious mothers, will proceed without guilt, unbound—waving our cloth diapers in the air. Or a gDiaper. Or a chlorine-free disposable diaper. There are no rules, only our good intentions.

What do you think? Has attachment parenting got you down? Green living cramping your style? Let us know!

Most of us would swoon with delight if a new, eco-friendly crib mattress showed up on our doorstep. It could happen to you!  Kolcraft (Sealy’s partner in this product) is sponsoring this month’s fantastic giveaway. If you’d like to read more about the product, check out our review of the Sealy Naturalis crib mattress with organic cotton.

You can also head over to Kolcraft’s blog to read more about our journey as green moms and also win their giveaway of a signed copy of our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide.

Since this is such a huge prize, and we want to include listeners who are finding out about our site from the interview on Preg-tastic, we’ll be keeping this going for a full month.  (Preg-tastic is also sponsoring a giveaway of The Economical Baby Guide, so stop by and check it out!)

If your due date is sooner or you don’t win, you can rest assured that this is still a very affordable product.  The Sealy Naturalis crib mattress with organic cotton is currently available for less than a hundred bucks.

Our favorite part of this giveaway is all the ways you can enter:

1. Simply leave us a comment on this post.

2.     Email friends or family and tell them about the giveaway (and comment)

3.     Like us on Facebook and/or like Kolcraft on Facebook (and comment)

4.     Link to this giveaway post on Facebook or Twitter–tell all your friends to stop by (and comment each time)

5.     Link to this post on your blog (and don’t forget to comment!)

***The contest ends on Monday, December 6^th, 2010***

Winner will be randomly selected from the list of comments so don’t forget to note your multiple entries with one comment each!

We will notify the winner via email. Please Note: This contest is open only to U.S. readers.   Enjoy!

Up until recently, the main hybrid diaper on the market was gDiapers, a nifty little product that used a flushable or cloth insert with a waterproof fabric cover. GroVia now offers a similar product line with some adorable prints available for December of this year!

Interestingly both gDiapers and GroVia now offer cloth liners, making them a very flexible product that can either be used as cloth diaper, a disposable diaper, or both!  Why not use cloth most of the time but buy the disposable liners for travel or daycare?

In the Eco-nomical Baby Guide we offer a full cost breakdown for every type of eco-friendly diapering system available, and at that time hybrids came out as the most expensive.  Now that cloth inserts are available for hybrids, their overall cost will drop dramatically.

Has anyone tried GroVia diapers?  One of our most popular posts is packed with comments and customer reviews for gDiapers.  We’d like to know how GroVia stacks up!

On Tuesday we revealed our top picks for eco-friendly holiday cards. But buying a box of recycled cards and sending them far and wide isn’t the only way—or even the best way—to green your greetings. Here are some other ideas:

Don’t send a paper card at all! Electronic greeting cards save on paper and shipping. Check out Bluemountain.com, hallmark.com, and 123greetings.com.

Go for greener photo cards. Photo cards and foil-lined envelopes cannot be recycled. Check out Peartreegreetings.com for photo cards that are recycled and recyclable.

This homemade Christmas card was easy to mass produce. I simply cut out the snowy house scene, glued it on thick blue paper, and wrote “Merry Christmas” coming out of the chimney with a silver pen.

Make your own cards. Do an online search for “DIY holiday cards” or “DIY Christmas cards” and you’ll find hundreds of cute, easy ideas—many of which require materials you have around the house. DIY Life has a great round-up of DIY holiday card crafts. I’ve made cards using my paper cutting skills for several consecutive years. Cut a simple tree out of an interesting page in a magazine, glue on a piece of thick paper, and voila!

One of my simplest DIY holiday card creations–cut out a dove, glue it on the card, and scribble on “Peace” with a green pen.

Forgo the card-giving tradition altogether. I know, I know—this tip is no fun at all. But if you don’t enjoy sending out cards, don’t force yourself to do it out of obligation. After all, it’s the green thing to do!

I love cloth diapers, and have used them since my four year old’s infancy.  Unfortunately, we had problems early on with nighttime leaking and yeast infections with cloth diapers. Finally, we reluctantly switched from cloth to disposables diapers for bedtime.

It made me so sad that I frequently revived my nocturnal cloth diapering efforts—with the same results.  Now my son is four, he is nowhere near potty training at night even though he was day trained at a little over two years old.  When we try to wake him to go to the bathroom, he begins to scream and flail and doesn’t seem to be able to rouse enough to use the toilet. After the whole ordeal he wails and flails for fifteen minutes before falling asleep.  We quickly decided that this isn’t going to work.

Most tips I’ve found on the Internet suggest that some children don’t night train until six years of age.  Ugh!  That’s a long time!  Plus Roscoe has started wetting out of his huge diapers and we’ve had to switch to pull-ups.  Has anyone had success with cloth pull ups? We’re worried about the yeast infections becoming an issue again.  Any tips?  I don’t want to be buying disposable pull ups for the next two years!

These eco-friendly holiday cards meet the following criteria: cute, made from recycled paper, and cheap (as in, all packs that averaged a dollar—or more—a card were nixed).

Heaven and Nature Holiday Cards (14 ct., $9.95)

Winter Log Cabin Holiday Cards (14 ct., $9.95)

Penguins Assorted Boxed Holiday Christmas Cards (20 ct., $14.95) A portion of the proceeds goes to the Sierra Club.

Backyard Birds in Winter Assorted Boxed Holiday Christmas Cards (20 ct., $14.95) A portion of the proceeds goes to the Sierra Club

Check out all of the Sierra Club Holiday cards. They’re a bargain!

On Thursday we’ll discuss some alternatives to traditional holiday cards, so stay tuned! (I normally don’t like to start writing holiday-themed posts so soon after Halloween, but if you’re sending out cards, you do need to think ahead!)