No Impact man

I just watched this documentary last night and it was wonderful!  A family in NY city decides to try to make no environmental impact for one year.  They give up cars and take to biking.  They give up elevators and take to the stairs.  They give up toilet paper, premade cleaning products, and washing machines.  They start composting and eating only local foods.  I never heard of it at the time, but I guess it was a big deal in New York, they were in the Times and on Good Morning America.  It was all new to me, though, and I loved watching it.

They got a lot of negative comments about what they were doing and it just amazes me how people think doing little things like using cloth instead of disposable anything, or making your own cleaning products, or buying local food, is so crazy.  To me it has become so common to use cloth wipes, rags instead of paper towels, and although I haven't done it in awhile, I used to make my own laundry detergent and cleaning products out of cheapness :)  And it's not hard!

The wife of this family was into reality tv, shopping, and eating meat.  By the end of the year, though, she was definitely turned on to the positives of the changes they'd made.  She no longer spent $950 dollars at one clothing store (??!!) and she gave up her coffee addiction (no coffee was grown in New York, therefore had to be nixed.)  There were wonderful scenes of the family stomping their laundry in the bath tub, and playing with their daughter, and eating by candlelight.  I was just so excited to see someone that had a ton of reservations about the project totally turn around and embrace things. 

Obviously not all was good.  They gave up electricity for six months and instead of a refrigerator used a pot in pot contraption that was supposed to work but didn't.  They were basically camping in their NY city apartment, as the wife said.  I'm sure there were times it sucked beyond belief and they probably wanted to go out and get fast food and not have to cook their root vegetables.  But like they said, they were going to the extreme to see what worked, what was possible, and what wasn't feasible.  They realized that it wasn't about giving things up but doing the things they wanted to do in a more sustainable way. 

It was really interesting to me because a lot of what they were doing reminded me of "olden times" for lack of a better term.  Before everything was processed and marketed, people used what they had to do what they needed.  When I was looking at making my own cleaning products everything I read was recipes from someone's grandma.  That's just how it was done.  You took some things you had in your pantry and you cleaned with them.  You drank water from the tap, you didn't buy plastic bottles of it.  You bought your food from local farms or markets, and didn't depend on having blueberries shipped in from Chile in the middle of the winter. 

I know that convenience is really nice sometimes.  I have been known to go for the easy way out many times.  But is it really worth it?  (The stupid thing about this is that I just bought a pack of disposable diapers for Ingrid yesterday after her cloth ones leaked through three nights in a row!  I guess some things are convenient, aren't they?  Sigh...)  For me the movie just drummed up ideas of what I was comfortable with and what I wasn't.  But it got me thinking, and that's the good thing.  I think more people need to think about what they are doing and see what they could maybe do better.

One thing I think I need to work on is the local eating.  Every year I want to do a CSA but every year it seems too expensive.  Every week I say I should go to the farmer's market and then realize I missed it the next day.  When I shop I should look for more locally grown things, and things with less packaging.  What do you think you could change about your habits? 

More TMI, Beware: Family Cloth

As I've said before, I've kinda gone a little crunchy.  Cloth diapers, cloth pads, cloth napkins, etc etc.  The only thing I was still waiting on was using family cloth.  If you're unaware of this, it's using cloth wipes instead of TP.  From what I've been able to find online, people are pretty grossed out by this.  I believe I read someone's comment calling whoever did this an environazi.  However, when I heard about it, I was open to the idea.  But for whatever reason, it's been months and months and I still was using TP. 

Cut to last week when we ran out.  I hate running out of TP!  Sitting there searching the nearby area for anything to use, wondering if your two year old will understand if you tell her to get mommy some TP from the other bathroom.  And I did what I had to do, I used a washcloth.  I survived.  And it got me thinking about family cloth again and how much TP we go through, and how it's really the last of the paper products we still use in our house. 

So, yesterday I rummaged through my scrap box, found some flannel, and went to work.  I came up with 35 5"x5" squares, pinked the edges, and sewed two pieces together.  I have to say, they were pretty cute and inviting right away.  Ingrid wanted to go potty three times in an hour just to be able to use a new wipe.  Hmmm, maybe these would catch on as potty learning tools? 

We put the wipes in a little box on the counter, moved the diaper bin into the bathroom, and viola!  We are the proud new users of family cloth.  My husband came home and saw me making more, and I was just gushing about how proud I was of myself for doing this.  He kind of gave me a look and shrugged.  Whatever, my wife is going crazy again...But he used them when he took Ingrid to the bathroom, that's all I care about. 

So there you go, more personal information about our household practices that you probably never wanted to know.  I did warn you, though.

I've Gone All Hippy

Thanks to all the wonderful blogs I've been following the past year or so, I have gone all hippy.  Cloth diapering, cloth mama pads, thinking of homeschooling, using slings, breastfeeding baby #2 if I can (and for longer than six months, thank you very much.)  It has been so gradual that I hadn't noticed it much.  And then I talked to old friends and realized how much I've gone over to the crunchy side!

Number One:  Slings.  A friend of mine is very pro stroller, and I respect that.  I was trying to tell her how awesome slings are and how babywearing is so great for the baby.  She just isn't into it.  And then she found the warning about bag slings and said for sure no.  Not for them.  I thought back to when I was pregnant for Ingrid and I'd never even heard of a sling.  I spent hours and hours researching strollers, it was an obsession!  And then we got a front pack and I never used our stroller anyway...And then we got slings and carriers and I just loved them so much.  I loved the feeling of having Ingrid right there, she'd lean back and look at me and smile, I'd kiss her every five steps. 

Number Two:  Cloth Diapers.  I have tried to convince so many people that it's really not that big of a deal!  Again, when I was pregnant I thought about using cloth but the upfront costs really made it seem impossible.  It wasn't until I started really looking at things that I realized that you can do it pretty cheaply, and you can do it part time, and you can get a stash little by little, you don't have to have all 20 diapers at once.  And washing and poop, they are not a big deal.  You get used to it.  And after spending $600 on disposables, I cringe thinking of how many awesome organic diapers I coulda bought with that money!!

Number Three:  Paper products in General.  I use cloth pads now.  It's just a given that with using cloth diapers I suddenly saw how silly it was to use disposable pads.  We also don't use paper napkins--I have cheap washcloths we use, and I just started thrifting some cool old cloth napkins.  I used to think they were for fancy dinners, I don't know why it never occured to me to use them every day!  We also don't use paper towels, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.  We haven't used them in years.  But a maintenance man came to fix our dishwasher and asked for a paper towel.  I said we don't use them and he gave me such an incredulous look!  But I thought about it and duh, why would you use papaer to soak up a spill?  We don't dry ourselves off with paper bath towels do we?? 

Number Four:  Breastfeeding.  I did not breastfeed Ingrid.  I don't regret it one bit.  She grew and grew and she's smart as hell, and she hasn't had a lot of sickness at all.  But...for baby #2 I am going to do everything in my power to breastfeed him/her.  For one, it's so much better than shelling out $20 for a can of formula that smells and stains everything!  And it's easier to stick a boob in the mouth than fumble around for a bottle and measuring the formula at 2 in the morning.  And one thing I got defensive about with my friends was extended breastfeeding.  I have to admit that when I first saw people nursing their toddlers and tandem nursing, I was freaked out.  I just never saw it before.  It was weird to me, it was different, and I just didn't get it.  But after seeing it around it seems normal to me.  Like why not nurse past six months?  Why stop it at one year exactly?  What's wrong with nursing past what someone deems normal?  This was something not one single friend of mine agreed with me on!  They all thought it was gross, and the mother being selfish not wanting to give it up.  And unneccesary, why not just give the kid "real" milk?  I was really quite surprised, as my friends around here in MI nursed their kids as long as they wanted, they never seemed in a hurry to stop, and were actually sad when it did stop.  It seems strange to me to just stop it and give a kid cow's milk instead of human breast milk...

So there you go, I'm a crunchy hippy and I am proud of it!!  Thank you so much to Sarah and Gina and Sunnymama for showing me a different way of being a parent.  It has helped me be the kind of parent I want to be!

How I Chose my Cloth

I'm participating in a blog hop over at The Cloth Diaper Report about how to build a cloth diaper stash and this week's topic is how did you choose what kinds/brands.

I started out by researching for days on the internet, which just made me overwhelmed and unsure. First I had to learn all the lingo, like what an AIO was, or a prefold, or what OS meant. After that I had to think of how much money I could spend. I had this idea that I needed to get a whole stash right away and go from disposable to cloth overnight. You can do this, but you certainly don't have to. I'm realizing that now.

Anyway, so I researched and saw how much things cost and got a little worried I wouldn't be able to do it. Then I looked on craigslist and found some people in the Ann Arbor area selling their diapers. I was really into the idea of buying used, especially for just starting out. I had read all about how you just don't know what will work for you, and I didn't want to spend a ton of money on something that may not be our favorite. Plus, my daughter was a year old and she's the only one we're having, so these diapers would be used for a year and then we wouldn't need them anymore. I think that made a difference to me, if we were going to have another baby I would feel better about spending more money since they could be reused.

I had two women I was supposed to meet with about their diapers. One had 10 Bum Genius diapers, which would've been $100. The other lady had a box full of "old style" diapers (she said) for $50. I went to her first. She had the motherload of fitted diapers! They are all one size, some aplix closure, some snaps. All have snap in doublers. And there were close to 50 diapers in the box! Plus she had some prefolds and covers, although they were old Gerber plastic pants and not really what I wanted to use...So, I never did make it to the other lady's house, I just bought the huge stash and went home all excited!

We used those exclusively for about a month, and I never had a problem with them. I really liked the big diaper butt look, and the crisp white cotton just looked so--healthy? So much better than paper disposables! And to me, the fact they didn't have pins just made them SO much better than what I thought cloth would be!!

Then, we won two brand spankin' new Fuzzi Bunz diapers from a blog giveaway, and my life changed. They were so amazing, so absorbent, so cute in green and blue. Suddenly my fitteds looked old and bulky. So, back to craigslist and I found a woman selling her old Medium FuzziBunz diapers. I got ten and we were set. And since then I've swapped some of the fitteds for Bum Genius, DryBees, wahms, other covers, and now we have a really diverse stash. Not at all what I'd planned on, either!

I think that's the important thing to realize--you cannot imagine what you're going to like, what is going to work for you, and how those things are going to change as your child gets older. Be flexible, go with the flow, like most other things with being a parent!

Diapers

Today I'm going to go look at some more diapers I found on craigslist. They are FuzziBunz sized diapers in assorted colors, apparently. Why am I so excited about this? Why was last night like Christmas Eve? I can't wait to go to this lady's house and look at her used cloth diapers and see if they're ratty or pretty and worth the $10 a piece she wants! How ridiculous. The diapers we got originally are fine, they work, we have covers for them, so it's hard to spend money on other diapers when we don't really *need* to. But the lure of pretty colored pocket diapers is just too hard to resist. I never ever thought this would become as addictive as it has! Why is that? Does anyone ever get addicted to disposable diapers?? Absolutely not! They bitch about how much they cost, how they had to run to the store at 7pm because they didn't realize they were out, they complain about leakage and rashes. And here I am thinking "I should get some diapers in colors that match Ingrid's BabyLegs." INSANE! But I suppose I could be addicted to much worse things, huh?

Should There Be Another...

These are the things I will remember if we have another baby:

1. The first six weeks are hard and I will let the baby sleep wherever, whenever and not worry I'm forming bad habits.

2. I will wear the baby more than I wore Ingrid. I didn't know about wraps with Ingrid, we had a front pack and I used that instead of a stroller and when I wanted to get things done and she was fussy, but I will use a wrap and really WEAR baby #2. If we have one, this is all hypothetical :)

3. I will try to nurse. I have meds I'm on and I don't want to NOT be on them, but I never really tried to find out if there were similar meds that I could've nursed on. Formula sucks, I don't think it's evil, but BF would be so much easier I think.

4. I will try to cosleep. We had Ingrid in our room but I was so crazy about every single noise she made that I would jump up and check on her. We both slept better in separate rooms. Until just a few months ago when she started getting up every hour for a couple weeks--I would've loved to be cosleeping then so I could stay in bed and try to comfort her instead of getting up, walking to her room, rocking her, putting her down, walking back to my room, getting in bed, and then hearing her cry again.

5. I will for sure cloth diaper from day one. Now that I understand how much money those stupid disposables cost when you can get super cute cushy cloth ones, I can't believe I went a whole year using them!! I am such a convert!

I just read a blog carnival about cloth diapering and what you know now that you wish you'd known then and it just got me thinking of having a kid in general. There are so many things I wish I would've known when Ingrid was born. But that's a dumb reason to have another kid, right?

Possible TMI

Sorry, everyone, this may be too much information. BUT--I have to share. After using cloth diapers I see how it's really not as gross as I thought it would be. Or else I'm just desensitized to poo and wee. But it got me thinking about other paper products that I use and could get rid of. I already stopped buying paper napkins and paper towels, we just have a big stash of cheap-o washcloths from Target we use. I got rid of disposable diapers, I would LOVE to get rid of toilet paper and use family cloths (but fat chance of that with Brendan, I don't think he'd go for it!) And then I said wait, pads! I use pads! I throw them away! They must go!

So, off to etsy I went, and after a little browsing, I found these cloth pads. I ordered a starter pack of 5, got them in the mail, washed them with Ingrid's diapers a couple times, and then waited (and waited) to use them. When it was time, I was so excited! A) because I thought I might be pregnant and DID NOT want to be, and B) because I had these really cute flannel pads sitting in my drawer waiting to be snapped into my underwear!

It's been a couple days now and the verdict is in: I LOVE THESE THINGS! They work so much better than even my best name brand pads, I haven't had a single leak even at night, and let's face it, they are so much cuter than looking at white plastic that has god knows what chemicals in them...After using them you just rinse them out in cold water, keep them wet until you wash them, and then I just threw them in with the diapers. Easy peasy and they're ready to use again today.

At first I was grossed out because it's...blood. But then really, I deal with so much poo from Ingrid, is it really that much worse?? To be honest, dealing with raw chicken grosses me out way more than either of those bodily functions. So if you're squeamish, it may not be for you, but if you already cloth diaper or have a strong constitution, try them!! I just ordered more from this lady and now I'll have a complete set for around $60. I'm so pleased!