Green and Natural Parenting

Climbing Trees – It Isn’t Just for Boys!

Tiffany — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:00:57 +0000

Yesterday my daughter pulled me out of photo taking doldrums. I have sorely missed using my dear camera and when I discovered my daughter camped out in her favorite tree again, I had a reason to grab it. There just isn't much to inspire me in winter and that is rough on someone who feels like taking pictures is as vital as oxygen. But spring is returning and I am getting a second wind.

Check out my Squidoo lens on Taking Great Pictures of Your Children and my review of the Nikon D60.

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Climbing Trees – It Isn’t Just for Boys!

How to Have a Green Easter Holiday

Tiffany — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:06:07 +0000

I don't know about you but this time of year when I go to the store and see lots of plastic Easter grass, plastic eggs, and huge chocolate bunnies… it makes the environmentalist in me cringe? This is the big green mom conundrum… how to make holidays fun for our kids without leaving a large mark on our planet. Lucky for us though there are numerous ways to make Easter green without festooning our lovely planet with fake grass!

1. Give your children a decorative cloth bag with a set of child's garden tools, seeds, or other gardening supplies instead of an Easter basket. You can put a few eggs in it with seeds and it can even contain "instructions" from the easter bunny asking your child to help plant spring flowers for bunnies and children everywhere to enjoy. Kids will LOVE getting a special assignment.

2. If you still want to go with a traditional basket, choose eco-friendly materials such as cotton, hemp, or jute. Or purchase hand-made, fair trade certified baskets that you can find other uses for after Easter (how about toy storage?). Thrift stores usually have baskets this time of year too (I know mine does)… used is better than new! Also, you can make your own Easter basket from materials around the house, such as hand-decorated bags, totes, wastebaskets, laundry baskets, etc.

3. Fill the Easter baskets with biodegradable, sustainable materials that can be composted, such as natural straw, hay, moss, or simply grass from outside. It is really easy to grow your wheat grass in the house, so start now to have some ready by Easter. You can also shred up the Sunday funnies or colorful scrap paper or shred some of those colorful catalogues and magazines that come in the mail. Kids won't mind.

4. Make your own treats for the basket instead of buying the processed junk – make some raw cookies or brownie balls or dehydrate some fruit.

5. Re-use what you have. This is our secret weapon. We bought Easter stuff a few years ago from yard sales and thrift stores mostly and we keep it all in a box in the garage. This includes everything from plastic and ceramic eggs, baskets, and Easter decor. We even have an Easter egg wreath made using leftover Easter eggs from years past and a Christmas wreath we got at a yard sale. We made it about 4 years ago now and it is still one of my kids favorite Easter decorations. If you already have plastic grass, use it as a base for a centerpiece or a creative springtime scene.

6. Decorate using scrap paper and junk mail – cut out bunny shapes and string them onto colorful yarn, or cut out Easter shapes into a chain. You can also use leftover felt or fabric scraps to make cloth eggs or to make stuffed bunnies. Cloth scraps can be used to make a decorative banner with felt letters thats says "Happy Easter".

7. For your Easter feast eat bunny food. Serve cut vegetables, fruit, and maybe some dandelion greens in a green smoothie.

8. Dye eggs using natural easter egg dyes -mix a tablespoon of white vinegar per cup of boiling water and add onion skins (yellow), red cabbage (light purple), shredded raw beets (deep red), spinach (light green), coffee grounds or tea (brown), etc.

9. Get your eggs from a local farmer or urban chicken-keeper. If the eggs are brown, you can use eco-friendly paints on them instead of dyes. Also try blowing the eggs first so they can be kept for future years. Wooden eggs or knitted eggs are another good option.

10. Fill your children's Easter baskets with enduring sustainable toys (puzzles, cute games), a deck of cards, dominoes, these cute Easter mugs, bunny books, etc. Take your child's personality into consideration rather than just giving the "usual" stuffed bunny and plastic trinkets. Then you can build a basket theme around your child's interests.

All of these ideas will help reduce waste this Easter season while preserving the "fun". What is your best green easter tip?

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

How to Have a Green Easter Holiday

Things That Make Happy – Shampoo Bars

Tiffany — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:57:33 +0000

Guess I am easy… the little things make me happy. Little things like this tablecloth with teeny strawberries, and Tea Tree/Lemongrass shampoo bars, and cucumber melon lip balm in a cute metal tin.

All these things remind me that spring is around the corner…

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Things That Make Happy – Shampoo Bars

Potato Leek Soup with Cheddar Cheese and Carrots

Tiffany — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:34:34 +0000

This was dinner tonight and it was YUM! Veggies, herbs, no meat, and the kids asked for seconds. A++

Recipe from Epicurious with some added yellow and green onions that were not in the original.

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Potato Leek Soup with Cheddar Cheese and Carrots

Cancer – Can You Get it From Your Environment?

Tiffany — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:00:32 +0000

Cancer to me was mostly an obscure disease… something people get when they get old or perhaps when they are unlucky enough to have genes that carry a predisposition to cancer. It was something mysterious and I felt it was the luck of the draw if you faced it down or not… it was not, in my mind, something I could prevent if I wanted to and it was not something I could get from my environment or my poor choices, save perhaps cancer from tobacco products.

But then cancer hit home for me all within the span of a few years. My Aunt died in her early forties after years of working in a factory and the man who exterminated our house died suddenly. It made me think about our choices, our environment, and the exposure to deadly chemicals that was all around us. The link to cancer wasn't so mysterious. I was seeing direct links between environment and this deadly disease. These events and the fact that I had almost lost my youngest child to vaccines made be start looking at things with new eyes. Our environment and our choices were making us sick.

This point was of course driven home all the more when I got sick soon after. I thought my third pregnancy was just the gestation period from hell but I would soon be diagnosed with cancer myself. Genetics were ruled out officially by my doctors but I already knew why a 28 year old woman got a type of cancer common to people in their 60s… poor life choices.

Sure I knew that my diet could have adverse effects… like increasing chances for heart disease later, bad skin, diabetes, weight gain, etc. Cancer was never on my radar though. From about age of 19 to age 26 I lay all the groundwork for my own illness. My diet all through those years was deplorable. I worked at a movie theater while I was in college as a projectionist and manager so I had all the free junk food I could want. It was not uncommon for me to go weeks with my meals only consisting of hot dogs, popcorn, and soda. After college I worked 40-60 hours a week in an office and who had time to cook or prepare meals, so my son and I ate exclusively at fast food places.. breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ironically I turned this around by the time I was diagnosed a couple years later but the damage had been done.

In many ways getting cancer was a blessing because it is a great teacher. I came to see fully just how closely linked our lifestyle and our product and food choices are to bad health and disease. It helped me to see what kind of risks I am taking with my kids when they eat the processed crap that permeates the grocery store. It helped me see everything with new eyes and I wouldn't say I live in fear… I just have a realistic view of the exposure around us. Our environment matters! Our choices matter!

By calling it a blessing I don't want to make cancer sound glam either. It wasn't easy to spend two weeks in the hospital after being cut from groin to belly button. It wasn't easy to have to stop breastfeeding my son at six months old or worry that my kids wouldn't have a mother. It wasn't fun to come home strung out after becoming addicted to the IV pain medicine. It wasn't fun to have a port-a-cath put in my chest or to have it taken back out. It wasn't fun to throw in up my purse. It wasn't fun to get Pancreatitis and need another hospitalization and surgery. And it wasn't easy to tell my doctor I quit Chemo and that I would rather take my chances with cancer than go through one more minute of torture in his office. You know what would have been easy though? Avoiding it in the first place.

There is risk involved in hiring that exterminator, lawn care expert, or pool guy… for us and for them. There is risk involved when selecting shampoo, mattresses, food, and food storage dishes. The risks may seem to be minimal when you look at the products individually but when you add up all the cumulative exposure the risks aren't so small anymore. When natural substances are outweighed by initials… BPA, PVC, PET, PFOA, PFOS… you are doubling down on risk.

We cannot rely on industry to make the necessary changes on their own because money is more important than product safety. We see this clearly with the plastic industry, the tobacco industry, and the pharmaceutical companies. The ultimate battle against cancer can be fought in large part by becoming aware of what constitutes risk and educating yourself about where the dangers are coming from. We can choose to vote with our dollars on products that are safe and for companies that take environmental responsibility seriously. By doing so we reduce our own risk and we send a message loud and clear.

We may not be scientists capable of finding a cure for cancer but we are savvy people capable of reducing our risk and protecting our families when industry will not. Follow along as some other green moms expose the environmental links to cancer via the Green Moms Carnival. Enjoy!

Environmental Links to Cancer

Lisa at Retro Housewife Goes Green examines the link between a local cement plant and cancer.

Marie at Project Earth examines the link to cancer that can be found in our personal care products in Phthalates: It's not Just a Fragrance. It's a Birth Control!

Deanna at The Crunchy Chicken writes about her husband getting leukemia after working in biotechnology for many years.

Jennifer the Smart Mama highlights many common links to cancer found in the home and two books that motivated her to make changes.

Karen at Best of Mother Earth discusses the term carcinogenic and where we can start in making changes.

Kellie at The Green Phone Booth has some good advice to help us avoid becoming overwhelmed about the C-word.

Amber at Strocel.com examines Environmental Toxins, Breast Milk and Cancer.

Sommer at Green and Clean Mom shares her thoughts on empowering ourselves to beat cancer.

Diane at Big Green Purse talks about how we can take precautions with We Don't Wait for Our Child to Get Hit By a Car Before We Tell Her to Look Both Ways When Crossing the Street.

Linda at Citizen Green writes about cancer and sunscreens which is timely since warmer weather is around the corner.

Anna at Green Talk discusses toxic chemicals in furniture and building products.

Jennae at Green and Gorgeous, has a child battling cancer, and she asks the question When it Comes to Cancer, I Say Why Take the Chance?

Micaela at Mindful Mama speaks out about her own cancer wake up call.

Lynn at Organic Mania talks about the Hypocrisy of Cancer.

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Cancer – Can You Get it From Your Environment?

Things That Make Me Happy

Tiffany — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:49:32 +0000

Oh yeeesss… vintage Pyrex. These babies are mine all mine.

It is official. I am my mother.

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Things That Make Me Happy

Addicted to Plastic

Tiffany — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:25:52 +0000

Another evening, another great movie. Two nights ago I was flipping through channels and saw that the movie Addicted to Plastic was airing on the Sundance Channel so hubby and I sat down to watch it together. We both loved it.

It is basically a documentary style film that exposes how the average American is "addicted" to plastic. It also spans 12 countries and 5 continents to find out where plastic comes from, what is made with it, where it goes after its useful life, why it may be poisoning us and our oceans, and what we can do about it. I have to give BullFrog Films big props because it was a VERY interesting film.

Everyone should watch this film to get an idea of how much plastic is in our oceans… it was mind boggling. There were so many scenes that made me so angry about how people are trashing something so beautiful and let me tell you.. this movie might make you reconsider ever eating fish again.

My husband loved the industrial aspects of the show and the innovations in plant based plastics and ways to upcycle plastics. I liked how he got see other people (besides me) talk about the toxic effects of plastic and the leaching of chemicals. It was nice that they specifically mentioned two of the ones I am always telling him about… BPA and Phthalates. There was a really annoying scientist on there talking about how the risks were so tiny that people are blowing things about of proportion and I started arguing with the TV screen, which my husband thought was hilarious of course.

At one point in the movie the narrator wakes up on the floor with only a sheet for a bed, he gets up and walks through an empty house and brushes his teeth with baking soda and a stick. It was quite funny and meant to demonstrate that getting rid of our favorite products is not a good option but I actually liked the house with next to nothing in it… I kept thinking how lovely and easy it would be to maintain. I would want a bed though, LOL.

It was a great movie and impressed upon me even more that we need to do more to reduce the plastic in our life. It also motivated me to buy some of the aluminum garbage grabbers and pair them with resusable bags so that we can collect garbage whenever we visit our local waterways, lakes, rivers, and creeks. If everyone had some clean up gear when they went out for a day at the lake we could do a lot to clean things up. My kids will think it is great fun to spend a portion of the day looking for garbage… heck they already walk around picking up garbage in the gutters of our neighborhood streets. Its hard to tell how much garbage we generate when we have everyone else's garbage in there too!

When you have the time check out Addicted to Plastic. It is airing again on March 7 on Sundance. Hubby has already set it to record because he wants to watch again.

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Addicted to Plastic

Food Inc. Movie

Tiffany — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:55:51 +0000

Am I the last green blogger to see this? Probably. But thanks to Netflix… yeah I must be the last person to try Netflix too… I am catching up on all those green documentaries I have been wanting to see and for dirt cheap I might add. Netflix rocks!

Anyway, Food Inc is a documentary about our food, where it comes from, the true cost, why junk foods seems to cost less than the good stuff, and why looking at our food chain can be a terrifying experience. Factory farms and Monsanto are the stuff of nightmares I tell you.. I was agitated for days after watching it. Here were some of the main things I got out of it:

Monsanto is dark side of the force all the way. In the documentary we follow an elderly gentleman who runs a seed cleaning business that is being sued by Monsanto. He has to PROVE his innocence rather than them prove his guilt. Whereas he used to be one of 3 cleaners that existed in every county in his state, Monsanto has now sued and run every single one out if business in the entire state, save 3. Monsanto also regularly sues other companies that sell seeds, even though they have no basis for a lawsuit.. they bankrupt the companies with legal fees before a verdict can even be reached. At this rate Monsanto will be the one and only company you will ever be able to get seeds from in the future and since they have been allowed to patent seeds you will be sued for millions if you save any of their seeds. It was seriously scary enough for me to immediately start Googling places to get heirloom seeds and this year I WILL be saving seeds. My grandkids might need them!!

A mother whose child died from ecoli from a hamburger meat at a factory farm cannot tell the name of the company who sold the tainted meat or she will be convicted of a felony. The story of her son's death had me bawling… bring the tissues. He died a painful, horrific death as a result of an irresponsible industry and yet every year the the government makes it harder for us to to grow/raise our own food.

Veggie Libel laws exist in several states.. aka if you speak badly about food products you can be sued. In Colorado it is a felony even. If your apples made you sick or you were sold tainted beef you are not allowed to talk about it because that can cause "harm" to the producer. Remember Oprah was sued in a 6 year court battle because she said on TV that she could not stomach eating hamburgers due to mad cow disease. Talking bad about hamburgers is a "crime". How can the free market be free if you can't speak out (good or bad) about the products you buy?

Instead of changing their products to meet consumer demands when certain ingredients fall out of favor… these corporations opt to use their politician friends to pass laws so that the companies are not required to label those ingredients anymore.

Junk foods are subsidized by our government so that the costs can stay cheap. This is why you see a family buy two hamburgers at McDonalds for their kids instead of buying some veggies. If you add health and environmental impact though, those foods are not so cheap.

If you decide to boycott an unethical company you may be out of luck because that one company likely owns 10 other companies that make the same product under a different brand name so that you never know it is the exact same company. Those same companies are also buying up organic food and natural products companies left and right. Tom's of Maine is now owned by Colgate and Burt's Bess is owned by Clorox. The company you love to hate may now be the owner of some of your favorite products and if you continue to buy you are funding their bad behavior.

Food Inc. movie gets a big A+ for me for being interesting, thought provoking, and incredibly important. I highly recommend it!

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Food Inc. Movie

The Goodbyn Lunchbox Review

Tiffany — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:42:43 +0000

I have been meaning to write up a review of this lunchbox… which I bought many moons ago when they first hit the market. But I rarely have time to pack lunches AND snap pictures in the wee hours of the morning. Some days I cannot even believe I used to have a bento lunchbox blog where I blogged daily pictures of my son's lunches. The addition of a second child to the mix is throwing me off my game. But Mondays are much more nice now that my husband is home for them (at least for now) so I actually had time to throw a quick lunch together and take some pictures!

The lunchbox we used this morning is the Goodbyn. I grabbed it because I had personalized it with an "I love you" message that I felt my daughter needed to see. Yes, mommy was feeling major guilty this morning over her own bad behavior. So I grabbed the "I love you" box and already that is a major plus for Goodbyn. The stickers may not be eco friendly, they are probably plastic based, but the idea that you can personalize the lunchbox is a big hit in this house.

On the menu: Banana, baby carrots with hummus dip, green smoothie in a bottlle, PB&J Lara Bar, Strawberries, dried blueberries, and goji berries chilling with two fruity cubes to keep them cold, Brazil nuts, and two fair trade chocolate earth balls. Everything is raw vegan except the chocolate. The container with the Hummus is not from Goodbyn… I borrowed it from one of our Laptop Lunchboxes.

The whole concept of this lunchbox is awesome… BPA free (safe) plastics, compartments to eliminate the need for plastic baggies and single serving packaging, and it is a pretty hip looking bento. You know me.. I LOVE bento. I also like the carrying handle and the ability to use the stickers that come with it to make it completely unique to your child. There are even stickers for kids with allergies. It is dishwasher safe if you happen to have one (I don't) and you can recycle it if need be later on down the road.

The Goodbyn does have a pretty big drawback though. You have to instruct your child on the proper way to open and close the lunchbox to avoid spilling the contents everywhere and even when adults do it I am not so confident it will stay closed. I have yet to buy some rubber bands because I have a fear of them after an "incident" with my toddler but ideally I hope to get a rubberband to wrap around the box so my daughter can actually use the carrying handle to carry it. Every time she takes this lunchbox I worry that I will find out she had to eat her lunch out of the bottom of her backpack. The closure mechanism just isn't very secure… a rubber band would fix it though and I hope Goodbyn addresses this issue some day. Another drawback is that the box is heavier than her other lunchboxes, like the afore mentioned Laptop Lunchbox and her Yubo. I also find the side compartments a bit too small. This morning I wanted to add a few more greens but the side compartments are just teeny.

All in all, we like the Goodbyn and think it has some awesome features. The execution is a bit flawed but it is also workable. While it isn't my personal favorite it does make my daughter happy and that counts for a lot.

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

The Goodbyn Lunchbox Review

Can Your First Grader Name any Fruits and Veggies?

Tiffany — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:14:55 +0000

I was REALLY shocked by this video from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. It is a new show that will premiere in March 26th and I guess the theme is real food. Now if you had asked me what "most" kids today would say is their favorite food I would guess things like pizza, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, etc. BUT I would never have guessed that kids wouldn't at least know what the major fruits and veggies were named if asked.

The kids in this video cannot identify tomatoes, cauliflower, potatoes, and mushrooms. WTH are these kids eating?! If our kids are eating so much stuff out of boxes that they cannot even identify, non-processed, real food than we have a huge problem as a society.

I decided to have my daughter (Kindergarten) watch it with me and she identified every food Oliver held up except the beet and I take ownership of that cause I hate beets and rarely buy them. She would recognize them cut and cooked from grandma's house though. I also paused it at the beginning when he uncovers the food and she identified mushrooms, onions, carrots, artichokes, pumpkin, squash, asparagus, and bell peppers. She mentioned that she had snacked on bell peppers and carrots all throughout the day today (we like to keep cut veggies at eye level in the frig for the kids to grab). Whew… I am doing something right.

This looks like a promising show. Can't wait to tune in!

Hi there! What are you doing reading this in your feed reader?? Stop being anti-social and come visit me and leave a comment or two!

Post from: Natural Family Living Blog

Can Your First Grader Name any Fruits and Veggies?