True Love!?!

I love my skillet. It is cast iron, heavy, black and so very useful.

*Yesterday I used it to make:
Bacon and pancakes for breakfast
Grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch
Skillet potatoes for dinner

*When seasoned properly, it is naturally non-stick, and unlike Toxic Teflon, there is nothing toxic about it.

*It adds iron to my diet

*It's so heavy that I have to keep it on my stove. Therefore I don't have to drag it out all the time to use.

But here is my real true love, shown slicing bread. I love him, even more than my skillet.

It's so easy being green!

Household cleaning products scare me. CAUTION! KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN! Don't inhale! Don't ingest! Don't look at product with eyes open! They come with fancy colors, nice smells, and promises to make my life Easier! Cleaner! Healthier! And Spotless!! But those warnings... what do do?

For a long time I had known that some people (years ago I would have called them environmental weirdos) who made their own cleaning products. But would my house actually get clean? Would it smell like vinegar? How would I sanitize? I was addicted to the promises of commercial cleaners, and seriously doubted that I would ever make the move over to the other side, a side where I make my own cleaning products.

Then along comes my friend. I'll call her X. (You like that Xan? X? Get it??) X amassed all of the ingredients needed to make cleaning products and offered to help get me started. She shared her essential oils (necessary for scents and disinfecting), good quality castile soap, and her recipes. X is the homemade cleaning products queen. I've used them for well over a month now, and you know what? They work! I use an all-purpose spray, a disinfectant spray, glass cleaner, disinfectant, and even a toilet bowl cleaner. They're made out of things such as washing soda, baking soda, castile soap, tree tea oil, borax, water and vinegar.


My all-purpose cleaner cleaned the walls so well that one of my stepsons suggested I sell it as competition for those Magic Eraser things. Now that's a complement!

Making your own cleaning products is fairly easy. Lots of the stuff you need you probably already have, and the other things you can find easily at a grocery store or natural foods store. There's books on how to do it, and websites with recipes. This website is where I got started: http://www.organizedhome.com/pantry-recipes-homemade-cleaning-products

Another household cleaning product that concerns me is automatic dishwasher detergent. When you run your dishwasher with those powerful powders, liquids, or tablets, chemicals actually cling to the dishes. Automatic dishwashing degergetnt contains chlorine and phosphates, which are not things I want around what I'm eating. Today, I put one tablespoon of baking soda and one tablespoon of borax in my dishwasher, and filled the rinse aid compartment with vinegar. Much to my surprise, it got the dishes very clean. The dishwasher itself was cleaner than ever before, so much so that my husband even commented on it.

There's so much to love about natural cleaning. I know that if my daughter is in the room, she won't be breathing toxic particles into her lungs. I don't worry about the boys when the clean the bathrooms (yes, they clean bathrooms, and clean them very well). My products don't harm the environment when I rinse them down the sink. And best of all, they clean as well, if not better, that the commercial products out there. And they cost so much less!

It's so easy being green! I like that I can ask the boys to decide on a scent for their bathroom cleaner. Cleaning bathrooms is so much more fun when you get to decide what scent to use. They're begging me now for more chores that involve cleaning products. I had to say, "no, dear, you just cleaned the toilet two hours ago. You can't do it again". Well, maybe not. Or maybe I just haven't found the right scents. I wonder if chocolate comes as an essential oil...

From the garden

This is my first true harvest - one sad tomato, peas, and a bit of early broccoli.





Seen here in a more creative form (with jam eyes)



What I truly wish grew in my garden.

If I didn't have a dog

If I didn't have a dog...

* I wouldn't step dog poop in the early morning when it is mushy and covered with a glaze of dew. Or doo.

* There would be no dog hair in my daughter's mouth, in her diaper, in her nose (gets hair on finger, fingers go up nose).

* I could go on vacation without having to find a dog sitter

* I wouldn't have to trim those thick doggy nails

* There would be no barking because of dropped tennis balls in my garden

* No dog vomit to clean up, no muddy paw prints on my clean kitchen floor, no "accidents" in the hallway

* I would still have the chocolates my husband bought me (and there would not be any poop with pieces of foil in it to clean up)

* I could leave a loaf of fresh baked bread on the table and not come back to crumbs

If I didn't have a dog...

* I would have no excuse for taking walks on a lovely summer morning
* I would have no sweet puppy to hug, with her tail thumping me

* There would be no one to greet me when I come home every day

* My kids would not have a beloved friend who is always ready to play

* What would my daughter's first word have been? It was doggy.

* I would have no soft ears to stroke

* I would have to clean up food from the floor by myself

* There would be no one to guard us as we sleep

* There would be a shortage of unconditional love in our house

* I'd be lonely

Good thing I have a dog!

Diapers - it's a wonderful world of cloth out there!

Long, long ago, before the creation of polypropylene plastic, bleached paper pulp, long before petrolatum and cellulose tissue were artificially created and turned into disposable diapers, mamas and papas covered their baby's soft little bottoms in pieces of cloth. This cloth was a diaper. Wool, which naturally repels liquids and has a natural antibacterial property, was often used as a cover for the cloth.

Over the years and years, cloth diapers were refined. Diaper pins were created, which made the sharp implements safer. Better cloth was used. Plastic covers came out, and were soon improved upon by newer materials and fasteners.

Now there are so many choices out there for those of us who have made the commitment to cloth. There are pocket diapers (which are my personal favorite). Pocket diapers have a waterproof shell with velcro or snap fasteners. There is a pocket formed by material (usually polyester) which allows liquid to go through it but stays dry. Into the pocket goes any absorbing material - cloth diapers, hemp or microfiber inserts. One time, in desperation, I used paper towels from the women's restroom. It worked fine for the 20 minute drive home. Right now we're using Happy Heiny pockets, and in the past used Fuzzi Bunz, and my own sorry attempt at a homemade pocket.

You can also go the prefold route.

Prefolds are what most people think of when they think of cloth diapers.

There are still choices- Chinese? Indian? Bleached? Unbleached? Premium? Tie Dyed? We had Maryam in prefolds for almost a year, and sometimes still use them. What about covers? Covers are what keeps baby's wet off your lap and in the diaper. You can go with wool (knit yourself, or sewn). Wool is a great, natural choice. We used it quite a bit. We had great success with Bumis Super Whisper Wraps, which are cute covers that are waterproof polyester with velcro fasteners. And no need for pins when there are Snappis! Snappis are little contraptions that hold your cloth in place by tiny grippy things. Google them if you're confused.

Diapers became somewhat of an obsession for me. Some moms buy clothes, some carriers, others toys. I researched, obsessed about, tried to sew, and purchased diapers. Many I sold as Maryam outgrew them. Quality diapers are easily resold on sites such as diaperswappers.com. When is the last time you heard of someone selling a used disposable? Someone sane, that is.

I also don't use disposable wipes. I simply take the edge of my shirt, get it wet in the sink, and.... I hope you realize I'm kidding. I don't use disposable wipes. But I don't use my shirt. That's what my husband does. He doesn't read this anyway, so the secret is out! Actually, before Maryam was born I sewed some cloth wipes. I keep them dry in a container near my diapers. When I need one or two, I get them wet with warm water, wipe, then toss them in my Fancy Smancy diaper pail (see picture). They get washed and dried with the diapers. How easy is that? Some people use solutions for their cloth wipes, but I've found that water works best. I love cloth!

Now whenever I have to use a disposable (mainly when we travel), it disgusts me how much waste I'm throwing away each day. I realize that I am using more water than I would if I simply bought disposables, and when I don't hang them out I'm using energy dry them. But to me the benefits of cloth are obvious. Less waste, less money, no chemicals touching my baby's skin, and very cute colors and prints, plus more padding. Yes, cloth diapered baby's bottoms are so much more squishable. Cloth also needs to be changed more than disposables, so there is less time for a baby to sit in a wet diaper. Did I mention how cute they are? Take a moment to rub your favorite diaper (preferably clean) on your cheek. How does it make you feel? Cozy warm? Soft and squishy? Rough and crinkly and hard and chemically?

Just one more thought - how in the heck can disposables hold so much liquid? Does that bother anyone else? I know enough about the contents of disposables to make me leery of using them, but have you ever seen how heavy and urine-soaked those diapers can get? It seems so unnatural and creepy. Yes, I think disposables are creepy. Spiders are cute and disposable diapers are creepy. I'm going to go rub a diaper now.

Pretzels and Popsicles

Having kids has allowed me to discover a variety of things about myself: I hate the smell of a dirty bathroom, I can only answer the question "what's for dinner" 5 times before screaming "THERE WILL BE NO DINNER FOR FORGETFUL CHILDREN!", and I love to cook for people who will happily eat what I make.

As a single graduate student, I lived off of oatmeal and PB&J. Sometimes I'd eat Ramen noodles, uncooked with the seasoning sprinkled on, sort of like very salty popcorn, but that was a special treat.

When I was dating my husband, he would cook for me. I should put cook in parenthesis. He thought he could cook. He tried his best to cook. And it was very sweet of him to make dinner for me, being that I was a graduate student who subsisted on oatmeal, PB&J, and uncooked noodles topped with MSG and sodium.

The first meal he made me was pork chops cooked on the grill, with a side of green veggies. I don't remember what type of green veggies because when anything is boiled for 30 minutes it basically all looks like boiled overcooked green stuff. Yummy. The pork didn't have any sauce or marinade on it. It was just a cut of meat slapped on the grill until it was too overcooked to cut properly and tasted like cardboard. Although I think cardboard would have had a better texture. And more flavor.

But I was falling in love, and so I oohed and aahhhed over his meal. I choked it down the best I could and pretended I just naturally was a light eater. The next week when he invited me over to dinner, I accepted. On the way there, I stopped at a very convenient Taco Bell drive through. For his dinner of overcooked chicken with boiled green things, I simply ate like a bird. A small, delicate bird trying not to gag in front of my host. Thus Taco Bell became a sort of pre-dinner ritual, a form of surviving my beloved's poor cooking without the stress of having to tell him that his dinners were pretty hard to digest. I was blinded by love, but love doesn't do much for a person's sense of edibility.

When we were married, I knew that there was no question of who would be doing the cooking. If I was to survive, I had to learn how to cook for myself, my husband, and my two new stepsons. Thus began my love of cooking and baking. It started as a method of sheer survival and has turned into a thing of joy.

Where was I? Oh yes, pretzels and Popsicles. Today I made my first batch of homemade pretzels, and they turned out ridiculously good if I do say so myself. There are none left. The neighbor kids ate two, Aidan ate three, Wayne ate two, Jim ate three, and Maryam and I each had one. This makes me very happy because it means I can make more tomorrow. I think they'll be great in the boys' lunches in the fall. I wish I liked pretzels. If they were dipped in chocolate or smothered in cream cheese (rather dipped in chocolate and smothered in cream cheese) I might nibble on them. Or they'd be good cut up and put in ice cream, or dipped in ketchup. Everything tastes better in ketchup.



Okay, Popsicles. I hate buying them because they're so horrible for you. The kids love them because they're cold and messy and sweet. In the past I've made them with fruit juice (root beer if the kids are lucky). This time the boys and I made them with leftover strawberry juice from my jam making.

Here are a couple of pictures of my lovely children eating my lovely strawberry Popsicles.Kids are never sad when they consume Popsicles. Maryam looked like she had slaughtered a cat afterwards, but a bath cleaned that up and now there can be no more accusations that I allow my daughter to play with dead and bleeding felines.

What? No papertowels??

I hate paper towels. We used to buy the nice, expensive ones. You know, the ones that they show on commercials rinsing out and reusing? And did my family ever reuse even one? No, and neither did I. Paper towels are for throwing away. We went through paper towels like a thirsty mama in a desert goes through water. For a job that would take one, my kids would use three. My husband would use five. And those things are expensive! Even with coupons, the cost began adding up.

So one day at Sam's Club, I spotted automotive towels. 100% unbleached cotton rectangles. They came in a package of 100, for something like $10. I bought them, and at that moment, Kitchen Cloths were born.

Kitchen Cloths are different than dish towels or dish rags. They live in a wicker basket on our counter where the paper towels used to live. We use them for nearly everything we used to use paper towels for. Got a messy baby? Get a damp cloth for her face. Spill grape juice? Grab a kitchen cloth. Did the dog have an accident? Ok, for that one we use toilet paper. But you get my drift. I just love love love my kitchen cloths.

The one dilemma I had for months was where to put the dirty ones. I didn't want to put them with the rest of our laundry since often they were wet and would mildew. I didn't want to put them with our cleaning cloths because I don't like to mix chemically things with kitcheny things. For a while we hung them on hooks in the laundry room to dry, but we go through them so fast that we quickly ran out of hooks.

One day in Home Depot I found a solution - my handy husband hung a wire basket in our laundry room, and that's where we put all the dirty Kitchen Cloths, dish rags, and dish towels. No mildew, no chemically contamination, no hooks. When I'm ready to wash them, I just scoop them out. Lovely. Cheap. Earth-friendly. Just don't ask me where my husband hides the paper towels. I'd rather not know.

Making Jam

Last week, the kids and I went strawberry picking. My plan was to make enough jam to last our family a year, until the next picking. I'm pretty frugal (okay, I'm cheap). I have always bought the crappy generic grape jelly, thinking it really didn't matter, and it was lots cheaper than the generic jam. I mean, it's peanut butter and jelly we're talking about here - not escargot. Ummm, fish eggs. But I digress.

I've wanted to go strawberry picking with the kids as a fun activity, but also to get some fresh berries at a good price. There was no way we could do organic, at least not this year. But we did get a TON of berries. Aidan and Wayne each picked some, and Maryam did too. Being only 20 months meant that all the unripe ones went into our basket and the ripe ones into her mouth.


The next day I made my first batch of strawberry jam, just using the recipe on the pectin box. That was a week ago, and the first jar is almost gone already. Yesterday, the boys and I made another batch. I took their picture with the jars we made. I don't think there is any going back to generic jelly. Even my husband (who told me that he hates all the homemade jams he has ever tried), loves it. Of course, he didn't tell me this until after I had made two batches.





Last night I had fresh-baked bread with homemade jam and real butter while playing games with the family. It made me feel so...domestic. Which isn't an entirely bad thing, especially where jam is concerned.

Gardening

Two years ago, we moved into the house we're living in now. It's a typical suburban house, on a typical boring squarish lot. It has good schools nearby, sidewalks, and pretty low traffic, making it nice for the kids. It has very dull landscaping, and due to the fact that I have no desire to research plants, and no extra money to pay someone else to do it, it's going to stay dull. Our backyard has a cool play set, a hand-me-down little house, a small slide, and one sad looking tree. But it has my big huge beautiful garden in the middle of it.

My garden makes me very happy (except for weeding - that makes no one happy). This year I'm growing peas, yellow peppers, red peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, basil, various lettuces, cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, and some flowers. Green beans did not grow. My tomatoes have come down with mildew, so I'm currently attempting to use an organic spray to control it. I've never had to deal with that before. We've been eating lettuce for the past few weeks, and the peas are just starting to be ready to harvest.

I like the idea that my kids are learning where their food comes from. They can identify lots of the vegetables growing, and know a thistle from a carrot. The kids help with the weeding and watering and harvesting. I also like how cost-effective it is to grow organic food versus purchasing it. And it tastes so much better than the waxed, not quite ripe veggies at the store.

Clotheslines

2 years ago, I didn't care much about the environment. I didn't litter, I recycled when convienent, and I didn't deliberatly waste water, electricity, or food. I knew people in college who were environmentalists, and they were a bit kooky to me. Fanatical. Obsessive. I was more laid back than these people, I figured. More normal. Then I had a baby.Actually, things changed when I got pregnant.

All of a sudden, I had a little life inside me that was directly impacted by what I breathed, ate, and drank. This person had no choice in the matter. I became a bit paranoid. If someone dare smoke next to me at an outdoor eating establishment, I would coolly glare at them, then say something loudly to my husband about the baby being hurt by their tobacco usage, their insensitive tobacco usage around a pregnant woman. Then I would move, holding my belly (even when just a few weeks pregnant, I would hold it for emphasis) and go to another table, or inside. Pity the person who made a cheese dip at the church potluck. Did it have soft cheese in it? Dangerous for the baby. Lunch meat? Nope. Hot dogs? Nitrates! I think I was pretty scary, and definitely very nervous.

Once my beautiful daughter Maryam was born, my world turned upside down, as did my lifestyle. We started out using cloth diapers, and when it was warm enough I began to hang them up outside to dry. Soon I was hanging all my family's clothing outside (except my underwear - their underwear was out flapping for the neighbors to comment on, but mine went into the dryer). My clothesline was an act of rebellion. My cranky neighborhood association doesn't allow it. But I was president at the time (a very cranky president), and the neighbors have an illegal pool, so I felt strangely justified. It felt good to not run the dryer on a 89 degree day. There is something soothing about hanging up clothes, and seeing your husband's boxer shorts flapping in the wind.My poor clothesline is just a line strung up across the corner of my fence. The dog has taken to pooping under it, which I try not to take personally. But it is my little piece of earthiness which I really do enjoy, even when a storm comes up and soaks everything. I pretend it's God's final rinse, making them softer. That way I don't curse.

I think the amount of money that I save with using the clothesline is pretty small. I do it because it seems so wasteful to run the dryer when the sun does such a great job of it. It also encourages my family to wear their jeans more than one day. Jeans off a clothesline are crunchy, and soften out with wearing. More wearing means less washing, which is good for a somewhat lazy earth mama like me. Luckily underware does not get better the more you wear it without washing. It took a lot of discussion to convince my stepsons that underware should be changed on a daily basis. There are so many things I need to teach these youngons.We never hung out clothes when I was growing up. I actually had to do research on how to hang up clothes on a line (most importantly, hang shirts up side down and inside out). This summer, the boys are helping me with hanging out and taking down laundry, and I hope that they're learning some stuff, like how much laundry they go through in a week. I also hope they learn that it's not that much more difficult to hang clothes out, and that they smell wonderful, and not to hang them out before dad mows the lawn. And to watch where they step, because the dog likes to poop in the shade of their boxers.