Real Food...Really?

As the first two months of 2012 have flown by, I've been slowly trying to work on the items from my New Year's To-Do List.  Some things have been accomplished.  For example, we haven't used any paper towels in about a month.  (Well, Jonathan used some to wipe the grout from a tiling project, but none has been employed in the kitchen at all!)  Some are in progress, like organizing the house.  (Notice, "organizing the closets" turned into the whole house.  And I wonder why things don't get done.)

But one item on my list is shaping up to be quite the project.  It is focusing our family's diet more on "real foods."  Although I've read a couple of books, many of my ideas about this have come from some helpful websites, like this one and this one.  A basic definition of real food, as I see it, is to limit processed foods and eat more natural stuff.  One way to think about it is, if your great-grandma would have eaten it, then it's a real food.  Great-grandma didn't have all those ingredients that you can't pronounce and sound like they were created by scientists.  (Although I was searching through my own grandma's spice cabinet about a year ago and found an honest-to-goodness jar of MSG in there.  It said on the label "makes everything taste better!")

After much discussion - like the last two months - Jonathan and I decided to take the plunge into more healthful eating.  We already eat most of our meals at home.  We pack our own lunches, and eat out for supper twice a week: once at church , and once at a restaurant.  Our fast food intake is limited to three or four times a year, when we are making a road trip.  So the biggest changes we are faced with making are simply choosing different ingredients from the grocery store. We decided that to keep our budget in mind, we wouldn't do an all-out purge of all the "not-real" food, but replace things like crackers and chips as we ran out.  We made a commitment to eat more vegetables, and decided that eating organic meat and dairy would be a good idea.  Since great-grandma used white sugar, but for mostly special, home-baked treats, we decided to still have a small amount of sweets, like our regular ration of chocolate chip cookies.  (With the exception of the very occasional Oreo, we haven't had store-bought cookies in probably two years.)

Today I went to the grocery store, ready to come home with my reusable grocery bags full of wholesome goodness.  But our grocery budget is quite limited.  For our family of four (and would you believe it, but Lydia is eating table food now!), we spend between $75 and $100 a week on groceries.  So I breezed through the first part of the grocery store, carefully read labels to find a kind of sausage without high fructose corn syrup in it, and purchased some wild caught shrimp. 

Then I got to the meat case.  There were the whole roasting chickens, sitting in a row.  The "regular" chickens, the kind I usually get, were $.99 a pound.  The organic chickens were $1.98 a pound.  I picked up an organic chicken.  I admired the nice green color of its label.  I put it in the cart. 

My eyes strayed to the conventional chicken.  Its label was red and blue.  The entire chicken cost $4.11.  I looked back to the organic chicken in my cart, which was over $9.00.  I put the new chicken in the cart, and replaced the organic chicken in the meat case.  I just couldn't do it. 

The same thing happened in the dairy aisle, when I deliberated, and then put a gallon of regular milk and a dozen non-organic eggs in my cart.  I just couldn't pay double. 

And the bread?  I have a hard time paying $3 for a loaf of bread in the first place, so the organic, whole wheat bread in the "health" section of the store just about gave me an anxiety attack.  I decided that I would bake my own bread this week.

To make up for all of this, I went back to the produce section and bought twice as many veggies and five extra pounds of apples.  At least we can be healthier by having less of our conventional meat and an extra serving of greens on the side.

I guess the bottom line is this: I am just not convinced that the organic food is worth the price.  Anyone care to convince me?  I'm open to persuasion (and maybe some grocery store scholarships), but for now, I guess I'm going to have to do some more research and start reworking the family budget a little...

Not Your Mama's Cloth Diapers

When Hannah was born, my mother proudly unpacked all of the things she had saved from my own baby-hood, and presented me with all kinds of treasures. One of these was a pair of silver diaper pins that had been mine. Mom says that she even used these pins...because I wore cloth diapers. She also gave me some regular plastic-tipped pins, which I imagine were meant for everyday use, leaving the silver pins for special occasions.

But to me, these pins are simply nostalgia, not something I needed to set up my nursery. Many mamas my age would say this because like the pins, cloth diapers are obsolete. However, we used cloth diapers for Hannah's entire diaper-wearing years (and even now, use cloth training pants). And those same diapers are now folded and waiting for the arrival of Little Sister. But these diapers have very little in common with the diapers I wore when I was a baby.

There are many wonderful places on the web where you can study the pros and cons of all the cloth diapering options available, and I'm not going to replicate those articles. But I do want to share why I LOVE cloth diapers. Yes, LOVE, with capital letters, and I really do mean that. The original reason to buy cloth diapers was that we wanted to add less trash to the landfill.

Soon, however, I found myself a stay-at-home mama, rather than a working mama, and boy were we happy that we didn't have to buy diapers! The routine of washing and folding the diapers was an easy one to fall into, and took surprisingly little time (as per my usual time-keeping methods, folding diapers takes less than a 30 minute sitcom, 3 or 4 times a week).

Hanging the diapers on a clothesline outside adds a little to the time, but leaves the diapers snowy white and fresher smelling...turns out the sun works better to bleach baby's little presents than bleach does. Plus, I get to feel doubly green by drying my reusable diapers using the renewable energy source provided by the sun.

Of course, occasionally the piles of diapers would pile up. Because of the odor factor, this pile up usually occurs at the folding end of the process, not the washing end. Here's a priceless picture of Jonathan, just finishing the task of folding dozens of diapers.

All this talk of folding reminds me that those of you unfamiliar with the new generation of cloth diapers probably don't know what I'm talking about. We use BumGenius diapers, which are size adjustable (meaning Hannah wore the same diapers for two years), and fasten with Velcro (meaning my mom's pretty diaper pins sit unused in my jewelry box). The outside of the diaper is made of waterproof fabric, the inside has a soft, water-wicking lining, and in between sits a removable insert, which comes in thin for infants, thick for bigger babies, and when Hannah was a toddler, we stuffed with both a thin and thick insert. So when I say "fold," I really mean "stuff" the pocket of the diaper with one or more of these inserts, which serve to hold the liquid.

I just can't say how happy I am to be moving on to the second round of using our diapers. It certainly makes the high initial investment into cloth worth it when I look forward to another two years without buying boxes of diapers...and not putting them into the landfill, either!

Like I said before, one of my neurotic pregnant-lady worries was that the baby would come home to a house with piles of unfolded diapers on the floor.

So the first project I tackled in the nursery was folding the diapers and putting them away. Adjusting them to the smallest size and stuffing them with the thinnest insert made them seem very puny and inadequate after the recent months of super-sizing them for toddler use, but they are now just right for a newborn's tiny bottom.

So Long St. Pat, Hello Springtime

Well, I started March with the best of "theme" intentions, but look what happened... Instead of a month's worth of amazing green-ness, the computer sat and collected dust while our family went on vacation, and this Mama felt the reality of the third trimester of pregnancy. (By this I mean tired and moody, and when I have some relief from these, I'm busy doing crazy pregnant lady stuff like scrubbing behind the toilet in the bathroom or making 24 servings of manicotti to put in the freezer.)

But we did make some progress toward having a back yard garden. I've always been a little enamored with the idea of a garden, part Secret Garden and part Little House on the Prairie. For years, I've toyed with the idea of having a tomato plant, but I found lots of excuses not to, like the three square foot balcony of our apartment didn't get any sun, so I didn't think the plant would live. Last spring, in spite of the fact that we were living in a rental house, I bit the bullet and planted four tomato plants in the yard. Because didn't think the landlord would look kindly on my digging up the grass, I put them in the flower bed, right next to a couple of really sad rose bushes. Guess what? They actually produced tomatoes! I was so excited, and vowed to do even better this year.



So now it's next year, and we have our own house, where we're allowed to dig up the grass. A generous person from our church who has a serious garden in his own yard agreed to help us get started. He came over with his rototiller and he and Jonathan dug up a nice plot in the yard. Our friend even brought some old leaves and some nutrient-type stuff to put in the soil.



My friend Anne who blogs at FlourSackMama is keeping an organic garden, but my goal is to grow something, rather than plant stuff only to kill it. So I'll take all the help I can get, even if I'm not exactly sure what's in those bottles...



But I did take Anne's advice about worms. Hannah and I found one in the sandbox yesterday, which we put into the garden bed. Then Jonathan and Hannah went on a real worm hunting expedition, where they dug a whole bunch out from under the decorative rocks around the flower beds. This was a little nerve-wracking for this Arizona girl, who was taught to always kick over a rock before you picked up it, in case there was a scorpion or rattlesnake living under it. All they found were worms, and it made for a fun afternoon.



Our church friend has started some tomato plants for us from seed (I told you he was generous!), and when they make it in the ground, I'll let you know about their progress. Please keep your fingers crossed for me that these don't go the way of our poor, dead houseplants...

Crayon Redo - Crafting Green (and Red and Blue and Yellow)

We're moderately green at our house. Our weekly recycling bin is about equally full as our trash bin. We try not to use disposable plastic materials; for example, Jonathan and I have used washable lunchboxes for years in order to avoid putting our PB&J sandwiches into plastic baggies. We use cloth diapers...and even cloth training pants. We keep many of our appliances unplugged when not in use, and we have low-flow shower heads. I'll be the first to say that many of these green decisions were more influenced by economics than environment. But even while I'm not spending money on baggies and disposable diapers, I feel pretty good about reducing our environmental impact.

So choosing to have a "green" theme for the month of March is a little bit of a stretch for me. I don't usually think in terms of green. I thought about doing something green with Hannah, maybe taking some of the stuff out of our recycling bin and making something really cool out of it. Instead, during a long morning, we ended up making some re-molded crayons.

I know...not the most original thing in the world, but we did have a lot of fun. Hannah really enjoys coloring with the crayons that she helped to make. There are lots of really good instructions for how to do this out there, so I won't repeat them, but here are some colorful pictures of our project.



While many households have buckets of broken crayons, we don't. Maybe in a few years... Meanwhile, we gathered our few broken ones, and some off-brand crayons we gathered at restaurants, and got started. First, we peeled off he paper. This was surprisingly hard!



We broke the crayons (also harder than expected) and separated them by color.

These went into a mini muffin tin, where they were cooked in the oven...



...then cooled...



...then unmolded.



All in all, a lot of fun!

5 Fun Ways for Kids to Go Green

In the spirit of being green, I turned to the greenest person I know, my friend Anne who blogs at FlourSackMama.blogspot.com. This incredible woman recycles everything, makes her own soap, cooks her own potting soil for her organic garden, and so much more. She was kind enough to give me some lettuce seeds (which sprouted today!), introduce Hannah to the joy of playing with worms, and to share these tips for making life with kids a little greener.

I hope you enjoy Anne's writing as much as I do, and check out some of the interesting posts on her blog. Here's Anne:



1. Grow your veggies, eat your veggies: It was no small matter at our house last summer when my girls helped plant foods like snap peas and lettuce. They participated in the simple process of harvesting our little bit of greens, followed by a special time at the dinner table. It’s no accident that they appreciate fresh vegetables more than the average kid these days. This year, we’re trying to expand our garden to include lots more lettuce, plus broccoli and melons. Kids don’t have to understand why fresh, local, organic and sustainable foods are better for them. Making the process fun is a good start.



2. Play with earthworms: One of my children’s favorite pastimes is holding wriggling earthworms in their hands before returning them to their little homes in our compost pile or garden. They know earthworms are a priceless source of healthy, fertile soil. They also appreciate ladybugs, which we welcome for their natural ability to eat other pests that might disturb our plants. Since we take time to look at these little things, we’re less likely to reach for synthetic pesticides and herbicides that endanger us all.

3. Dig the outdoors: You can’t beat a family nature hike for combining the best of what kids need on a Saturday morning. Everyone gets some exercise plus a connection to the natural world around them. Wasn’t it our mothers or grandmothers who said that a little dirt is good for kids? I think they were right.



4. Go barefoot indoors: It’s scientifically proven that our shoes can track some pretty nasty stuff into the house. Think of your neighbor’s lawn chemicals and bacteria from the last public restroom you visited. Kids love to go barefoot anyway, so this is one of the easiest ways to have fun while going green.

5. Less is more…money in the college fund: As all of you smart parents and grandparents know, it’s never too early to start the college fund. If you do nothing more than replace one gift purchase per year with a deposit to a child’s college fund, you’ve made a significant step toward conscious consumerism. You’ve reduced whatever energy would have been involved in manufacturing, packaging and transporting an item that might have ended up at the bottom of the toy pile anyway. Most banks or credit unions offer token incentives for kids to deposit their money. At a young age, even a sticker is enough to make depositing a check from Grandpa really fun.

For more about these and other green living topics, visit Anne at http://FlourSackMama.blogspot.com.