For the last six days, I, Joy Hatch, co-author of The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, swaddled my babe in plastic and petroleum instead of cotton.

What can possibly be my defense for this environmental atrocity?  Honestly, it’s a little flimsy.  We’re in the middle of a kitchen remodel so I fled to my mom’s house with the kids.  Since she was having several groups of company during our stay including a whole flock of grandchildren, it seemed more helpful to just bring disposables.

The weird thing was that there was a microscopically thin slice of me that was excited about not having to wash cloth diapers—like that inner glutton that occasionally thinks it might be fun to eat an entire bag of Cheetos rather than virtuously dining on sautéed kale.

But the disposable diaper experience left me a bit sick and guilty—much like those junk food moments.  And the bad feelings weren’t nearly as shocking as the fact that I think cloth diapering is actually easier!  With cloth I would  have had to dunk a couple of diapers and do a load or two of laundry.  I resented disposables from the moment that I had to shlep my baby to the store to buy them. After that, I had to constantly deal with the trash they generated.  Plus the expense of the diapers was an utter waste! At the end of all that money and garbage, Jovi and I had nothing to show for it except a bright red diaper rash.

In short, my environmental slip led to a renewed belief that cloth is such a better option—not just for the planet but for you and your child!  Still, cloth diapering can seem really formidable at first in the same way that disposables seem convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if every parent got the chance to cloth diaper just for six days to see how it works?  After we achieve that, we’ll get right to work on world peace.

Have you had a chance to try cloth?  Did it work for you?  Do you use cloth while traveling?  If you’re  going on an extended visit to a friends’ house that may not be enthusiastic about laundering dirty cloth diapers, what do you do?   Do you buy a special stash of G-diapers, or opt to go to the Laundromat just to stick to your diapering ethics?

We’re ending our series of giveaways with a bang!  You could win a Naturepedic No-Compromise Organic Cotton crib mattress in this week’s giveaway.  That’s a $359 value!  You’ll also get a copy of our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.  (Although it’s far less expensive, we think you’ll find it just as helpful.)

Since most mainstream crib mattresses contain vinyl and polyurethane foam which off-gas some nasty chemicals, buying organic is a comforting option.  Naturepedic’s No Compromise Organic Cotton crib mattress has a waterproof surface and is certified to meet GREENGUARD’s high standards for child safety.  The mattress also happens to be hypoallergenic and  is covered with a non-toxic fire protection system. How reassuring to lay your sleeping babe down on this gem and know that she’s safe and comfortable!

This is our very last in the series of large giveaways, and we hope that you are our winner.  See below to find out all the ways you can enter!

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 Tuesday the 18th of April 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. Visit Naturepedic’s web site and then post a comment telling us what caught your eye!
3. Email a friend about this giveaway.
4. Join our Facebook fan club
5. Link to this giveaway post on Facebook or Twitter–tell all your friends to stop by!
6. Link to this post on your blog!
7. Add The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to your “to read” shelf on Goodreads
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’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.
9. Does your library have copies of the Eco-nomical Baby Guide? If not, request a purchase! (Then come back and post your comment to let us know!)

***The contest ends on Monday, April 19th, 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!

If you’re looking for a way to green your celebration this year, you’re in the right place.  We have an archive packed with tips on how to make your Easter holiday eco-friendly and budget friendly as well!

An electric egg cooker will boil up those Easter beauties in minutes using only a few tablespoons of water.  It certainly isn’t worth investing in one just for the holiday, but if you have boiled eggs on a regular basis, this inexpensive gadget quickly pays off.

Do you want to color those perfectly boiled eggs using plant dyes?  We have spent far, far too much time at Greenbabyguide.com researching natural egg dyes—and failing miserably.  Check here for a better listing of which natural dyes really work and maybe you’ll have more success.  

If you’d like to get creative with your egg coloring efforts, try your hand at making natural silloutte eggs.  They’re simple stunners and if you take the time to blow the egg out from the shell, you can even keep them as centerpiece decorations year after year.

What about the basket that will hold all the Easter loot?  Try buying one used from a thrift shop and growing your own Easter grass in the bottom as an alternative to that plastic grass that gets strewn all over your home!

May your eggs be delicious, vividly colored, and easy to find.  May your day be sunny and may your children keep the chocolate off of their pastel clothing.   Also, today (Monday) is the last day to enter our massive green baby giveaway!

Were you worried about environmental toxins lurking in the Lysol, baby’s dirty diapers filing local landfills, or blinking plastic toys threatening to take over your household?  Were you motivated by family and friends or did they challenge your attempts to be an eco-conscious parent?

We’re very interested in what makes expectant families go green because the lure of mainstream baby rearing with its hoards of innovative gadgets and convenient products can be hard to evade when you’re nervous about the transition to parenthood.  When did you decide that you’d like to be a conscientious consumer or even less of a consumer?

When we were both pregnant at the same time, Rebecca and I typed flurries of frantic emails to each other trying to figure out how to use cloth diapers and make our own baby food.  Everyone else thought our cutting edge environmental parenting was a bit kooky, but with the support of each other (a two person green parenting community that has now been joined by all of you!) we took the plunge.  It was far less adventurous and much more fun that we ever expected to be eco-friendly parents.

What is your motivation? Do you face resistance or enjoy support? Please share so that other new parents can be a part of the online green community! (And remember that our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet, is packed with everything we have learned in our journey as green moms!)

All-in-one diapers? Pocket diapers? Chinese prefolds?  Even if  you desperately want to cloth diaper your child, the vocabulary challenges our earnest efforts.  How do all these “diapering systems” work?  Is it worth choosing just one?  How do you launder them and what about the smell?

Fear not!  Our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet, features detailed, easy-to-read information on cloth diapering your child that even slackers like ourselves can manage.  We’ll highlight what you’ll find inside by sharing our favorite tips today:

1. Money saving tip: Don’t stock up on every size you think you’ll need before your baby arrives in this world.  Some extra chunky tots (like both of Joy’s nine pound newborns) never need the extra small sizes.  Others are preemies that stay in newborn sizes for months.  Get a few diapers and designate a family member or friend to run out and get more when baby arrives.   What else will you find in the book? Tips on buying secondhand cloth diapers for up to eighty percent less than new, tips on which diapers transition for babies between 7 and 35 pounds, and which diapers offer the best overall value.

2. Laundering tip: Though you may be tempted, do not use bleach!  People are shocked when we share this advice, but bleach will eat through your diaper fabric quickly, isn’t environmentally friendly, and can irritate baby’s skin.  Instead use baking soda, vinegar, non-chlorine bleach, or enzyme based stain fighters like Bac-out.  Other tips in the book include the all-time easiest method of diaper washing, tips for storing dirty diapers, ideas on how many loads per week you might have, and natural stain fighting tips that are free and eco-friendly.

3. Diapering tip: This may be obvious, but there are NO PINS REQUIRED!  It’s amazing how many people are still shocked when we share that fact.  We also found that neither of us needed Snappis or any other product to hold our chinese prefold diapers in their covers.  In our book you’ll find charts that help you understand what each type of diaper looks like, a cost comparison of different diapers, and options for eco-friendlier disposable diapers.

We remember how totally overwhelmed we felt entering the world of cloth diapers as new moms.  Now we have an outlet for our obsession in The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, where we ooh and ah over all the options!  Once you start cloth diapering, you may find that you fall in love with the whole adventure yourself.

Are you using cloth?  How did you find out what to use and how to diaper baby?  Do you have lots of support for your cloth diapering efforts in your local area?

To happily welcome our newly published book and reward those of you who are in the trenches of green parenting, we have yet another green giveaway this week.  One reader will win ALL of the quality eco-friendly baby gear listed below! Here’s what you could win this week:

• 1 copy of our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet. Using the tips we offer in the book, we each saved thousands of dollars in our first year with baby–and we did it by going green!
  

• An Eco Cradle from Green Lullaby.  A $69 value! This ingenious product can be assembled in minutes without tools, is completely fire retardant while remaining non-toxic, and is designed for a real human baby!
  
• 1 pair of organic cotton tights from hessnatur. This company makes adorable organic garments for baby (and adults!) that are just as fashionable as they are functional.
  
• 1 Speesees crawl turtle teether. We love the spunk and style Speesees and recommend this organic baby and kids clothing  in our book.
  

• 1 pair of girl 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. Dip it in water and freeze it to soothe your baby’s sore gums. Unlike plastic teethers, this cute little mouse doesn’t contain BPA or other harmful chemicals.
  
• 1 Fuzzibunz one-size pocket diaper. These fabulous diapers contain a moisture wicking layer between baby’s bottom and an absorbent insert.  Plus this one diaper adjusts to fit babies between 7-35 pounds!
  

• 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 diapers (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 Tuesday the 30th 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 giveaway post on Facebook or Twitter–tell all your friends to stop by!

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 Monday, March 29, 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!

Out of all those colorful booties, soft blankets, and various contraptions, what baby gift was the most thoughtful or useful?  What gifts do you now give expectant families?

Among our favorite presents was a bag full of carefully selected, gently used baby garments.  Many people may shirk at receiving or giving hand-me-downs, but my sister-in-law knew that I ardently love recycled goods and bought me a huge bunch of clothes for the same price that she would have paid for one new outfit.   Another favorite gift was a copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree that was presented along with an young apple tree.  (It died later, but it’s the thought that counts!)  We were also gifted with items to borrow which included two slings and an Ergo carrier.  Being able to just use these items temporarily worked out perfectly!

My husband and I are still especially appreciative for the gifts of support we received.  Friends volunteered to baby sit for our eldest son, prepared meals and refinished our table for us. Those acts of service were incredibly helpful and low cost.

What gifts do I give?  While I truly believe that our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet is a great shower gift, it’s pretty presumptuous for me to foist it upon others without giving them some other goodies.  Baby baskets are always good bets and the one in the picture features tools for making homemade baby food.  I also love buying practical stuff that will be used many times like cloth diapers, crib sheets or eco-friendly baby toiletries.

Please share your gift ideas with the rest of us!

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!

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!