[Links and prices are based on either Drugstore.com or Amazon.com because that's where I buy them. But most are widely available, and you might be able to find them cheaper somewhere else.]

Dr. Bronner’s Castille Soap, in Almond ($9.50). We definitely aren’t alone in our love for Dr. Bronner’s mild, natural, vegan liquid soaps. We use it as hand soap (with a little water mixed in to make it easier to rinse and to keep soap from clogging the dispenser), baby soap and shampoo (pumped out of the hand-soap dispenser), and sometimes grown-up shower soap. I have also heard of people using it for household cleaner (I tried it, but don’t like the residue it leaves if you don’t rinse), dog wash, and laundry stain treatment. The peppermint is popular, but it stings my sensitive skin; we prefer the gentle almond scent.

"I object to the inclusion of dog shampoo. Down with dog baths!"

EarthBath All-Natural Dog Shampoo ($12). The Oatmeal and Aloe version smells great (clean but not overpowering) and leaves our Sheltie’s coat super-soft. Wish I could find something this good for my own hair!

BioKleen Concentrated Produce Wash ($4.50). Removes chemicals and dirt from fruits and vegetables. Simply rub some on (you can use a produce brush, but I just use bare hands) and rinse. For berries, I soak them in a bowl of BioKleen and water for 5 or 10 minutes. I am hyper-sensitive to soap flavors and have never tasted any soapy residue from the BioKleen, plus the fruit itself tastes fresher. Not a fan of BioKleen’s other products, but I can’t live without this produce wash!

Earth Friendly Products Wave Dishwashing Gel ($7). Eco-friendly dishwasher soaps rarely clean as well as their chemical-laden counterparts. We tried several brands and found that Earth Friendly Products left dishes noticeably cleaner than the others.

Charlie’s Soap Laundry Powder ($12). Found this through Amazon reviews (I buy it at a discount through Subscribe & Save on Amazon) while looking for an effective “green” laundry option to tackle stained baby clothes. I haven’t found that it works any better (or any worse) on stains than other laundry detergents, but it cleans well without harsh chemicals or fragrances.

Better Life “I Can See Clearly, Wow!” Window Cleaner ($7). Window cleaners are another category where the green options often fall short. This one works quite well. The company makes several other cleaners that seem well-reviewed; looking forward to trying more.

What are your favorite eco-friendly cleaning options? Always looking for suggestions!

I fear the same thing is happening with the infestation of demon cats in our home. They are shifty and hard to photograph, but here’s a blurry, low-light cell phone shot that I managed to snap around Halloween:

What do you think? Should we be worried?**

(** To be honest, I’m worried ANY time I see more than three cats together. Three cats could be coincidence. All four, and they’re definitely plotting something!)

This year? This year I told myself multiple times that I should figure out something for Halloween. Repeatedly visited an Etsy costume that was 80% perfect but couldn’t get over the other 20%. Made a panicked last-minute trip to Target to peruse their selection but couldn’t get over the slim choices (princess? or “sassy” princess?) and icky-cheap fabrics. Finally dug the bee out of storage, crammed it painfully onto our giant child a few days before Halloween, and we went out for sandwiches. She talked excitedly about the bee in coming days, but come Halloween it wasn’t happening.

Red lollipop, comfy sweater. Blurry cell-phone pic.

We tried Plan B, a set of fairy wings I once purchased at H&M on the theory that any well-stocked home should have fairy wings. No go. I couldn’t find the camera, I had nothing as to use as a treat bag. Time was ticking, and we were lucky to even make it out of the house — costume, camera, and treat bag or no.

We headed to a street party thrown by neighborhood merchants. Between parking spot and party, we passed a house where a lady was holding a giant bowl of candy. Walked up, Vera managed a version of “trick or treat”, and she was given a red lollipop for her efforts. Vera loves lollipops more than anything, and red is her favorite color. We went to the street party, and though Vera was too young for most of the activities, she stood patiently in line for an agonizingly long time and came away with a red balloon. Her second favorite thing in the world, after red lollipops. At that point, her evening was complete. We gave up on Halloween and went out to dinner.

Parents put so much time, money and effort into making sure kids have “perfect” — and perfectly photogenic — holidays. Certain traditions must be observed, certain photo opportunities created. Tradition is a beautiful thing to pass on to our children, but how often do parents force things out of some adult idea of a perfect childhood holiday rather than celebrate whatever the child actually enjoys? (How many toddler-with-Santa pictures involve smiles, and how many just show a terrified toddler?) I totally fell into that trap this Halloween, literally trying to force a costume that didn’t fit onto my poor child as she cried. And it turns out Vera didn’t need the costume, the door-to-door, or the huge bag of candy to have a perfect Halloween. For Vera, a perfect Halloween was a red lollipop and a red balloon.

Our daughter went as herself this Halloween. And it was glorious.

[While] we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we actually had to sit down and write. — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Hello, my darlings. It’s been five months. And now I’m back.

Here’s how things work around here: Between my daily battle with fatigue and pain and my daily battle with a headstrong two-year-old, there’s little time and energy to live a life of my own. Things rarely get done without a deadline or other extremely pressing motivation. Like everything else that counts as optional, the blog falls by the wayside. Then I worry about the constant nagging stress of the unwritten post, and I wonder repeatedly whether it’s time to just quit.

But the combination of illness and baby has also reduced my real-world life to nearly nothing. Where I used to have a profession, and better yet one I was good at, now I just sit at home and try to fill the hours till Vera’s bedtime. Whenever I stop blogging, I feel like I’ve lost my voice in the world. Disappeared.

And so it goes: Slack off. Pick up. Quit altogether. Restart. Back and forth, ad nauseum.

Right now, at least, we’re forth. November is NaBloPoMo, the month wherein many bloggers make a commitment to posting every day. I still haven’t figured out the ultimate destiny for Two Wishes, but it seems an ideal time to burn through some of the 100+ compelling (to me, anyway!) topics in my “things to blog about” list. Hope you’ll stick around!

For that matter, between breaking my feed last fall and then my very long absence, I’m not even sure anyone is out there anymore…. If you’re there, please do leave a note in the comments and say hi.

(image from the glorious Despair, Inc.)

I grew up a perfectionist. And then, in my 20s, I got very, very sick.

If there’s one thing a person learns from serious or extended illness, it’s that sometimes you have to let perfection slide and go with whatever works. Illness reduces available time, energy, money, and just about anything else you can name. Once, I could create perfection by ignoring my natural limits and overextending till my goal was reached. Now, that’s really not an option. The only choice is to live within my new limits. Can’t clean your house often? Learn to live with dirt. Can’t post on the blog as much as you want? Learn to live with a light posting schedule. Have to cancel a big event that you’re not feeling up to? If you can’t force yourself, what can you do?

In the decade since my original illness, I’ve seen many other perfectionistic, Type-A women fall prey to disease. It happens so often that I’ve developed a theory: illness happens to Type As to force them to slow down and stop sweating the details. Maybe it happens because stressful lifestyles leave women prone to physical exhaustion that becomes illness. Or maybe it happens in a more touchy-feely, “life sending you a lesson you need to learn” sense. But one way or another, illness is often the teacher that sets perfectionists on the path toward a healthier approach.

As a newly minted “good enough”ist, my biggest comfort is the 80/20 Rule. According to this theory, 80% of the benefit in most fields comes from only 20% of the work you put in. After that, you receive smaller and smaller rewards as you put more and more effort into perfecting the details. Of course, 80% is only a “B.” There was a time in my life when Bs were not okay. But if you’re dealing with very limited resources, the 80/20 rule is pretty darn comforting. Who needs to waste so much more time on that last little margin? It’s not my own limitations, it’s economic efficiency!

Why bring this up now? My next couple of posts will be about a book called Good Enough is the New Perfect. The authors say that the title is a bit of a touchstone for dividing the perfectionists from the, uh, recovering perfectionists. Real perfectionists recoil at the idea of “good enough,” saying it’s the same as settling for mediocrity. But for me? These days, it’s basically my credo.

How do you feel about perfectionism versus “good enough”ism?

But wait, you say … doesn’t this “Vera” look an awful lot like your existing child? The one who is definitely not named Vera?

Yeah, about that….

When I first started to blog about the baby, I worried for one nanosecond about the privacy issues of using her real name on this blog. I don’t generally get worked up about slight First World dangers, and it’s not like this blog has a zillion readers. But as time passes, I’m discovering more and more that online content lives forever. Luckily it’s tremendously hard to Google anyone with an Asian last name, but I don’t want to doom our girl to future embarrassment based on Mama’s blog.

I kind of hate it when blogs use nicknames instead of names (“Mr. T” is entirely a Weddingbee-based habit), so a pseudonym it is. Of course my immediate thought was to re-name her something that I considered but couldn’t use in real life. And that means “Vera.”

Vera has the old-time-but-modern vibe that’s popular these days, is easy to spell and pronounce, is an in-joke for Firefly fans, and calls to mind one of my favorite 30-something actresses, Vera Farmiga. Better still, the reason we couldn’t use it in real life makes it perfect for the Internet — hey future stalkers, good luck Googling “Vera Wang.”

(Plus, the word nerd in me loves choosing a fake name that means “truth” in Latin.)

In theory I’ll go back and change her name in older posts, but in practice I rarely finish non-essentials like that. Sorry if the changeover is extra-confusing for a while!

Other bloggers, do you use real names on your blog? If you have children, or might someday, would you use your child’s real name?

As a child, I was the stereotypical athletically-challenged nerd. The one picked last for teams, who dropped every ball thrown my way and “ran” a 15-minute mile. My parents encouraged me to play Little League softball when I was ten, and it was a failure of epic proportions. I’m not sure I ever got a hit.

Luckily, our daughter shows early signs of inheriting her father’s athletic gifts. She is bold and strong and energetic and throws and kicks and jumps and runs and dances with the best of them. She falls down often — she’s 2, it happens — and pops back up to hit the ground running once again. But even if she turns out a klutz like Mama, and despite my own traumatic history with team sports, I will do everything in my power to encourage her in athletics.

Why? I want our girl to know her own power. Not the “power” young, beautiful women sometimes hold in swaying the desires of men, but actual physical and mental I-can-do-it-myself power. I hope the knowledge of her strength will help her withstand bullies and not fall for any boy who pays her a little attention. I want her to have a relationship with her body separate from whatever society tells her is attractive. I want her to have the experience of practicing something until she improves, and also the experience of losing with grace.

And of course I plan to live vicariously by seeing her succeed where I have failed. And then, when she’s famous, benefit from her millions of dollars in endorsement deals. Why else does anyone force activities on their children?

Have you pre-selected any activities to push on your children?