We’re celebrating the arrival of our brand new baby, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, by showering one lucky winner with ALL of the gifts listed below!

• 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.
  
• 1 organic chili pepper onesie and hat set ($46) from Baby Bunz & Co. Baby Bunz & Co. have been selling cloth diapers and other eco-friendly baby products since the 1980s!
  
• 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 girl 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.
  
• 1 twin pack of thinkbaby 9oz PES bottles($16.99) ThinkBaby makes “safer products for healthier babies.” These bottles are BPA-free–of course!
  
• One adorable teething toy from Speesees, a company specializing in eco-friendly, kid-friendly clothes, bedding, and more.
  
• One container of Green Dragon Pest Solutions, an eco-friendly product that will hurt household bugs such as roaches and silverflies without harming baby.

Eight 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 7^th of March to win. (And if you don’t win, don’t worry–we’re giving away gift baskets ALL MONTH LONG!)

Remember, LEAVE A SEPARATE COMMENT ON THIS POST FOR EVERY EACH ENTRY.  If applicable, please leave the link to your Facebook/Twitter/Blog in the comment you leave here.

1. Email a friend about our book, our blog, or this month’s giveaways. (And then don’t forget to comment about it below!)

2. Subscribe to our blog (look right under the search bar)

3. Join our Facebook fan club

4. Link to us on Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking site.

5. Link to this post on your blog!

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

7. Add our blog to your blogroll

8. 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’re willing 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 6, 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!

Eco-friendly baby gear works for us! This post is a part of Works for Me Wednesday, hosted by Rocks in My Dryer!

Today is the day. For three years, hundreds of days and thousands of hours, Rebecca and I have written, rewritten, and polished our manuscript for The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down to Earth for Parents to Save Money and the Planet. Today is its official birthday because it is now on bookstore shelves!

We packed our book full of earth-friendly, budget-friendly tips learned from our time in the trenches as new moms. It’s the perfect stand-alone guide to cloth diapering, buying green for baby, and enjoying baby’s arrival without extra economic stress.

In honor of its birth, we’re going to be giving away HUNDREDS of dollars of green baby gear in our weekly gift baskets this month. Please email friends and family, post on your Facebook page, and inform fellow bloggers that your readers won’t want to miss this month’s giveaway extravaganza.

What could you win?

How about. . .
Adorable eco-friendly baby shoes
Some top quality cloth diapers and accessories
A working cardboard cradle for baby
Organic baby food
Sweet little organic baby garments
A COPY OF OUR BOOK!

There’s much, much more in our baskets so stop by each week to see what you could win.

Also, we’re hosting two upcoming book signings. On Saturday, March 6th from noon to two, we’ll be at Mother Nature’s in Portland, Oregon, at 2627 Southeast Clinton Street. If you miss that one, come see us on Sunday, March 21st from ten to noon when we’ll be at Bambini in Eugene, Oregon, at 205 West 5th Street. If you know someone who may be interested in our book, feel free to email them about the events. Thank you for spreading the word about our giveaways and our new book!

Here at Green Baby Guide, it makes us giddy to fling free products into cyberspace, receive dozens of comments and then randomly pick our lucky winners.  If you love giveaways too, brace yourself for the month of March, when we shall be launching our biggest set of eco-friendly giveaways ever in honor of our book’s first month on store shelves.

Very soon we expect Angela will be whipping up batches of pureed yams, kale, and brown rice thanks to her copy of Super Baby Food. Congratulations and may you fill many dozen ice-cube trays with home blended delights for your babe!

While we wished we could send each of our forty-seven entries a box, Carol was the final winner of the Abe’s Natural Market vegan truffles.  Please savor their chocolate glory and think of the rest of us!

And about a dozen bloggers will soon have a free copy of our book delivered to their doorstep simply because they agreed to review it online.  Is this giveaway still going?  Absolutely!  Simply comment if you’re interested.  We’ll be sure to email you for your mailing address and then forward it onto our publicist so that you get a copy for review and maybe even a giveaway on your site.

Thanks to everyone for participating in our giveaways and brace yourself for more free goodies in the weeks to come!

We’re so proud of our new book that we’d like to get it in everyone’s hands.  The information stuffed between the bindings saved us about six thousand dollars in our babies’ first year alone so it’s worth shelling out a few bucks for a copy—but card carrying tightwads might want to know how to get the book for FREE.

• Check it out! What?! Your library doesn’t have it? Most libraries have online forms where you can recommend books for purchase.  Once your library gets it make sure you put it on hold for yourself!
• Enter our March giveaways. We’ll be hosting several giveaways in the month of March, all of which will involve wonderful green gear and a copy of our book.
• Put it on your baby shower registry. Several sites such as Mygiftlist.com allow you to create an online gift registry that includes cloth diapers, eco-friendly baby soaps and a copy of our book. Hey, it’s free for you!
• Review it on your blog. We’re looking for bloggers who post at least a few times a week and have some connection to the content of our book.  If it looks like your blog will be a good fit, we’ll email you back for your mailing address and get a review copy to you as soon as possible. You can even use it as a giveaway on your site after you read it!
• Share a copy with friends. O.K. This isn’t quite free but if you have pregnant pals a group of you can purchase one book and share it amongst yourselves.  Then maybe you can stick together to problem solve the challenges of green parenting when your babies arrive.

If you don’t have a blog, a library, pregnant friends, or anyone willing to throw you a baby shower we should tell you that the book is available for pre-order in the next few weeks at 25% off. It would be nice if all of you were so inspired by that temporary sale that you bought several thousand copies of our books I suppose, but as thrifty souls ourselves, it brings us even more happiness to find ways for you to score a copy of our little gem for free.  Thanks for all your support!

Today’s the day! Forty-nine people entered our HappyBaby book giveaway. Using this random number generator, I found two winners: Kim and Ingrid. Congratulations! You will be hearing from us shortly. Please do report back once you get a chance to read it; we’d be interested to hear what you think.

For those of you who didn’t win a copy, don’t despair. HappyBaby appears to be on sale on Amazon right now—a used copy is just $7.31! And if you like the sound of HappyBaby, you just may be interested in another book that’s going to hit the store shelves very soon: our own Eco-nomical Baby Guide! There will be plenty of chances to win free copies of that in the upcoming months, so stay tuned.

Sure, your parents have changed a diaper, but it’s been a few years. Now they’re going to be grandparents. Perhaps they’re left wondering what, exactly, they will do when the baby cries or how they’ll spend a rainy afternoon with their darlings. In comes The Grandparents Handbook by Elizabeth LaBan.

The handbook includes intriguing-sounding recipes to try with kids (overnight pickles and chocolate-covered pretzels, for example) and activities grandparents can enjoy with young children (why not create a family newspaper or hold a mock election?).The book is packed with ideas, tips, and advice for new or seasoned grandparents. It’s a cute little hardcover book, complete with adorable retro illustrations.

So here are the only two gripes I have about the book: 1. Why is there no apostrophe in the title? As an English teacher, this bothers me. 2. Let’s go back to the diapers. Right in the beginning of the book, the rookie grandparent will find instructions for changing a diaper. LaBan assures her readers that diapers have improved in the last twenty or thirty years—now they’re disposable! But if the parents want to help out the environment “with cloth diapers, safety pins, and endless trips to the washing machine”? Just ask them to switch to disposables while the grandparents come over. “If they protest , tell them you’re out of practice and afraid of accidentally sticking the baby with a safety pin.”

Now, we don’t have to tell our Green Baby Guide readers how misguided this advice is. First of all, almost no cloth diaper enthusiasts use diaper pins anymore—newfangled cloth diapers come with Velcro closures, just like disposables! Also, I didn’t like the idea of the grandparents undermining the parents’ decisions about how to care for the child.

Despite the diaper blunder, it’s a great little book, and I will admit that most people would not get so worked up over the diaper chapter. I plan to give my own copy to my mom (who, by the way, had no problem changing my daughter’s cloth diapers!).  With The Grandparents Handbook, she’ll have a grand time building gingerbread houses, going clover hunting, and making scones for an afternoon tea with Audrey.

We have one copy of the Grandparents Handbook to give away! Just post a comment before next Tuesday (the 22nd) and you’ll be entered to win!

Lately it seems like every other mom totes her tot around town in an Ergo Baby Carrier. Seeing all these other mamas with their Ergos made me wonder, what’s the big deal? My curiosity was also piqued by several comments on our baby carrier post. Ergo owners enthusiastically declared their loyalty to this comfy contraption.

But we loved our Kangaroo Korner pouch sling and even came to enjoy our preowned Baby Bjorn carrier after some technical difficulties. Why on earth would we buy another carrier?

We didn’t, but we probably would have if we would have known with our first.  A friend urged us to borrow hers, but we were still hesitant.  It seemed difficult to strap on and like just another carrier to pack into our tiny house.  But when we used it, we were surprised by how much better it worked for our bodies.  When Jovi has been snoozing in it for over an hour, we aren’t struggling with aching shoulders or necks.  Plus, she can ride in the front or the back when she gets older.  Since her weight is centralized and the device has padded straps, we found it to be much more “ergonomically correct” –which may just be how this carrier got its name.

It’s amazingly easy to breastfeed your little one when she’s strapped into the Ergo. (I did it while waiting in line to get swine flu vaccine and none of the hundreds of other people around had any idea.) Other features we enjoyed are the little fabric flap that you can flip over babies head when she’s sleeping and the front pocket that you can use to store keys or pacifiers.

The strapping on is still a bit trickier than dropping baby into the pouch sling, but it’s worth it to me to have a happier body hours later.  If I would have known what I know now, we definitely would have purchased an Ergo for our first baby. They are expensive, but it’s a good investment in a piece of quality gear. And, you can always search Ebay if you have the time to hunt down a used one.

What is your favorite baby carrier?  Would you recommend the Ergo as a gift for an expectant mother?

We chose a winner for our Shaklee dish soap giveaway and review: Congratulations, Katie! You’ll have to report back with your thoughts on this wonder product. I still can’t believe a sixteen-ounce bottle lasted over a half a year, especially considering how ineffective some of the other green dish soaps I tried were. Thanks to Green and Clean Mom for hosting this giveaway.

Also, I finally added a “Washing Dishes” category so that it is easy to find all of my dish washing posts. I plan to get a dish washer for the first time in my adult life, so I will probably have a few more posts to add to this exciting category very soon!

Jennifer Leaphart founded Baby Blend Tees after creating a few adorable shirts for her own children and being stopped by strangers who wanted some themselves.  Her designs are simple, clever, kid-friendly and printed on sweat-shop free, 100% organic cotton. 

Baby Blends Tees has gathered national attention after being featured in Pregnancy and Newborn magazine, E-The Environmental Magazine, The Chicago Sun Times and The Chicago Tribune.  Fabulous press for a small company started by a multitasking mother!

It’s nice to know that Leaphart has made business decisions that include the planet in her long range planning.  Beyond the fact that the company uses organic cotton, Baby Blend Tees also belongs to 1% for the Planet, a group of businesses that donate 1% of their annual sales to environmental programs. 

Now for the best news of all… the giveaway!  Comment to win an authentic Baby Blend Tee in the design and size of your choice.   Visit Baby Blend Tee’s T-Shirt Café to see all of the adorable options available.  Remember to get your comment in before December 16^th to be eligible to win.  Great luck!