Everybody Needs A Job

One thing that never fails to amaze me is how hard working children are.  Another thing that never fails to amaze me is how much easier it is to parent when we allow them to be hard working.

When a child wants to help, they are asking to be involved in making the home functional, in being with the adults in the family.  They want to know that they add a valuable contribution to the family, and that they are capable and that we have faith in their inherent ability to "do".  And when our children know that we find them to be capable, contributing, and that we want them with us, they feel good about themselves!  Amazingly, when children feel good - especially about their relationships with us - they are more cooperative in general.

With so many littles around our house, I completely understand the urge to simply say, "Let Mommy do it so we can just get it done faster."  But the reality is that when we do this, we are setting ourselves up for more struggles later.  Also, finding ways to include children in our work teaches them how the work is done, and they are able to take on more of the responsibility as they grow - which makes life much easier on the adults in the house!

If you can't imagine jobs for your children, let me give some examples of ways our kids help out.

Elliott - 2 Years Old:
Elliott is a fantastic helper!  One of his many jobs is to carry the key to the locker room at swim class every week.  He also helps me to dump the soap in the washing machine and to put the clothes in.  Later, he helps me to put the clothes in the dryer or on the drying rack.  He loves to get things from the fridge when we are preparing food.  He loves to sit on the counter and dump things into the crockpot.  He sets his own spot at the table most days.  He loves to help feed the dog!  Walter scoops the food for him and he dumps it into the dish at breakfast and dinner.  He can take things to the garbage and the recycling.  He is, by personality, very orderly, and likes to put things just as they are supposed to be - doors closed, gates closed, shoes where they belong, and so on.

Walter - 5 Years Old:
Walter is my official kitchen helper!  He gathers the correct cookware, utensils, and ingredients for whatever I am cooking.  He helps to add ingredients to dishes, shake spices, stir pots, and carry things to me.  He LOVES his job.  And at the same time, he is learning a valuable skill, as being able to cook for himself will be doubly important because of his food allergies and intolerances.  He also is in charge of making sure the dog is fed twice daily - whether Elliott wants to help or not.  He clears his spot at the table after meals.  He can wipe down a surface with vinegar spray and a washcloth.  He is learning to use a dust pan to help clean up the floor.  I sort his laundry and he sometimes helps to put it on hangers or fold it, and puts it in his drawers and closets.  He puts his dirty laundry in his basket.  He helps me or Sofi to haul heavy loads, whenever we need help.  He loves to help Daddy build or repair things.

Sofiya - 7 Years Old:
Sofi has reached an age where her years of helping me and slowly learning skills has actually yielded her the ability to work on her own at several household tasks - which she thoroughly enjoys and is proud of.  Sofi loves to cook!  She makes her own pancakes at breakfast many mornings, and oatmeal for breakfast when it is cold.  She can cook pasta.  She can put leftovers in the oven for lunch and turn the oven on.  She can make almost anything that we would typically make in the toaster oven, and take it out when it is finished.  She can pour drinks and help the boys to get snacks.  She can cut veggies for a salad.  And I'm sure there are several other things that she helps Daddy with in the kitchen that I am completely unaware of.  She also clears her spot at the table, and can scrape dishes into the compost.  She can help Elliott to prepare his morning pancakes and cut them up for him (she often does this while I stand at the griddle and cook more pancakes for us).  She helps Elliott to wipe up if Micah or I are busy.  In fact, she happily helps Elliott with many things.  She once came trooping through the room with Elliott's potty bowl - she had wiped his bottom and was on her way to empty the contents, without ever telling me that she was doing so!  She loves to help him dress, and to attend to his clothes when he needs to go potty.  She even helps him with his shoes, when he will let her.  She sweeps floors and porches.  She is a pro with a brush and a dustpan.  She can wash dishes, though we have a dishwasher.  She can do her own laundry with minimal assistance.  She helps me to hang laundry on the drying rack.  She can sort and put away her own laundry.  She often helps me to put away the boys' laundry.  She can wipe down a bathroom - though I draw the line at her cleaning the toilet.  She can water the plants.  Sofi also loves to help Daddy to build or repair anything.  She puts away groceries very proficiently - and the boys both help at the level they are capable, but she generally directs.

As you can see, our children are genuinely a help to us.  And knowing that they are is such a boost to their self-confidence and their behavior!

What do your kids do to help out around the house?

Mom Hacks Monday: How I Keep Laundry Sorting to a Minimum

There are currently 5 members of our family - soon to be 6.  We use cloth diapers, cloth napkins, cloth wipes, cloth "paper" towels, dish cloths, and hankies.

We do a lot of laundry.

It used to be that I spent hours sorting laundry.  The actual washing and drying aren't so bad, because they are hours largely spent with me doing something else.  But the sorting, sorting, sorting!  The diapers and wipes were fairly easy, because they were always washed together and came out together.  Clothes for 5 people is a totally different story.

This year, I have hit on a lovely system, though!  I got every bedroom its own laundry basket.  Then there is a hamper downstairs.  About 95% of the time that the kids or I change our clothes, it happens in our own rooms.  So, they take off their clothes and put them in the basket.  Daddy keeps his clothes in his office downstairs and he usually changes in the downstairs bathroom, so there is a hamper downstairs for his things and for the clothing that anyone takes off in the bathroom.  Random towels and other laundry also goes in the hamper.

The hamper is the only laundry that I sort, all week.  When it is laundry day, I wash one laundry basket at a time.  When it is done, if it goes in the dryer, it comes right back out and into the basket it came down in.  If I hang the clothes out on the line or drying racks, I keep each basket together on the line and sort them right back into the correct baskets as they dry.  Anything from the hamper that isn't Daddy's gets sorted into the correct basket - which takes very little time.  And the baskets are each delivered back to their bedrooms where they are (hopefully) put away!

And, voila!  I no longer spend hours sorting laundry each week!

Do you use a "laundry system" in your home?  If so, how does it work?

Mom Hacks Monday: How I Make Laundry Detergent

We've all seen the different homemade laundry detergents floating around the internet.  Some people make liquid.  Some people make powder.  Some make a little.  Some make a lot.  We've been making our own laundry detergent for quite a while now - so long, that I don't remember but I know it's been well over a year.  I've looked at various recipes, and liked and disliked things about many of them.  I've tweaked and adjusted here and there and these days I am quite happy with the recipe we use.  So, I thought I'd share my own edition of homemade laundry detergent with all of my readers!

I started off with the basic soap, washing soda and borax recipe.  I found that it worked well, but that it didn't leave the clothes quite as bright and shiny as I would have liked.  Also, it was a pain in the butt for us to make small batches of laundry detergent all of the time.  We are a family of 5, going on 6, with one still in cloth diapers.  Also, we don't use very much in the line of paper products, so we have about a load a week of extra laundry from hankies, cloth napkins, not paper towels, and cleaning cloths.  So when I saw this large batch recipe, I was excited.  It also contained oxygen cleaner, which I was excited about, because I thought it might help to brighten up the laundry.  However, there were some things that I wasn't over the moon about.

For starters, I don't use toiletries or cleaning products that won't tell me what they contain.  No ingredients list?  Not coming in my house.  So, Zote Soap is out for me.  At a minimum, I don't think I've ever seen an ingredient list.  Also, I don't use Ivory, which is the general replacement, because it contains "fragrance" which is basically a nice way to say, "really nasty chemical ingredient that you actually don't want to know what we make it from, but it makes you smell yummy!"  Our choices are also limited by our allergies, as we can't use soap with dairy, soy, corn or gluten in it.  Yes, all of these things are regularly used in toiletries.  Our pick for soap is Kiss My Face brand Olive Oil and Aloe soap.

Another ingredient that bothered me was the fabric softener crystals.  Fabric softener is just nasty stuff all around.  There are many ways to achieve the same results with less toxic materials.  We'll talk about that a different day.  For today, suffice it to say that I didn't want this in my laundry detergent.

So, I used recipe from How Does She? and omitted the fabric softener and used Kiss My Face soap instead of Zote.  So my recipe looks like this:

1 (4 lb 12 oz) box of Borax Laundry Booster
1 (3 lb 7 oz) box of Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
1 (3.6 lb) container of Oxygen Cleaner
3 Kiss My Face Pure Olive Oil Bar Soap, 8-Ounce Bars
4 lbs Baking Soda

The first thing I do is to grate my soap.  I use my good old fashioned crank operated food processor.  You can also use a hand grater like one would use to grate cheese, or a food processor.  Our hand crank processor has an attachment that really powders the soap, which makes it dissolve well in the washer.  I grate one bar, add it and one third of each of the other ingredients to a large tin (the type people gift popcorn in at the holidays), and let the kids stir it well.  Then I do this again for the other two bars.  Then I take a turn mixing and make sure it is all mixed well.  Sometimes I add some essential oils to scent the detergent, but usually not in such a big batch.

My fancy popcorn tin to hold it all.

This laundry soap is what we use for everything - including the cloth diapers.  My mom gave me the handy dandy 1 tablespoon scoop from something she purchases, and it is just perfect to store in the tin.  We use 2 scoops for a large load of regular laundry and 4 scoops for the diapers.  We wash the diapers on warm, but pretty much everything else on cold.  The detergent does really well on all of our laundry.  I'm actually surprised sometimes at the things that easily come out of the kids clothes (and the diapers).  The one difference is that she claims that hers lasts a year to 18 months, while ours lasts closer to 2 - 3 months!  But, our family is nearly three times as big as hers and we wash a load of diapers every other day or so.  Either way, we are saving pretty significantly over the commercial brand we used to buy and not using sls or any other ingredients that we don't like.

Do you make your own detergent?  What recipe do you like?

Baby Steps

Welcome to the April edition of the Simply Living Blog Carnival - Going Green cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. This month, we write about going green and environmentally friendly living. Please check out the links to posts by our other participants at the end of this post.

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When people come to our home, or talk to us about our lifestyle choices, they are often surprised by the amount of sustainability built into our lives.  What isn't sustainable in our home, we have goals of changing.  To be honest, we live at a level of sustainability that most people find intimidating, at least.  But what many people miss about our lifestyle is this:

We didn't always live this way.

Once upon a time, we were standard issue Americans, with a house full of plastic stuff we didn't use or need, trading up for "better", eating processed foods, using coupons to get cheap paper products, getting horrible gas mileage, and on, and on.  So, how did we get from standard issue to where we are now?

We made one baby step at a time.

Because that is the only way to make lasting changes.  We started out, once upon a time, eating salad with dinner every night.  We increased our vegetable consumption.  We didn't buy organic, we didn't worry about GMOs.  We didn't do microgreens.  We bought raw veggies at the regular grocery store, and we made a salad every night.  And it was a big step for us, at the time!  Slowly, from there, we made one change at a time, until we reached the place in our lives where we are now.

At various times, we have made many changes.  Some of them were:

trading in our gas guzzlers for cars with better mileage
trading in houses with lots of extra room for snug little houses
trading in disposable diapers and wipes for cloth diapers and wipes
trading in paper towels and tissues for cloth wipes and hankies
trading in plastic wrap, plastic baggies, aluminum foil and other disposable kitchen products for reusable containers
trading in plastic toys for cloth, wood and metal toys
trading in plastic in our clothing (polyester, nylon, rayon, acrylic, acetate) for natural (biodegradable) fibers
trading in plastic in our home for glass, metal and wood
trading in conventional foods for organic
trading in processed foods for mostly made from scratch foods
trading in commercial cleaners for plant based soaps and water, baking soda and vinegar
trading in commercial laundry soap for soap we make ourselves, using environmentally friendly products
trading in fabric softener for drier balls
trading in 100% heated drier use for using the clothesline as often as possible
trading in traditional light bulbs for CFLs
trading in a lot of our toilet paper use for cloth wipes
trading in disposable feminine care items for reusable cloth products
trading in battery operated items for non-battery operated items whenever possible
trading in standard batteries for reusable batteries in the battery operated items we kept
trading in the big trash can for a small trash can and a recycle bin (our family of 5 uses about 1 standard kitchen bag of trash per week)
trading in throwing food scraps in the garbage for a compost heap
trading in buying new for buying used whenever possible
trading in one time use products for reusable products whenever possible
trading in traditional toiletries for plant based and less toxic toiletries
trading in gardening and household chemicals for non-chemical options
trading in the formula option for breastfeeding

And I'm sure there are many more trades we made along the way.  These changes were made over the course of about a decade, by the way.  Some changes were made in tandem, but the majority were made one at a time.  We made a change until we were comfortable that it was a habit, and we could do it without concentrating on it anymore.  Then we worked on a new change.  And this is how we continue to become more green, every day.  Because the only way to make lasting, meaningful changes, is to make them one baby step at a time.

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  Thank you for visiting the Simply Living Blog Carnival cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. Read about how others are incorporating eco-friendly living solutions into their everyday lives. We hope you will join us next month, as the Simply Living Blog Carnival focuses on Daily Lives!

 

 

• Green Renovating: A Lot, A Little, Not So Much - Laura at Authentic Parenting ponders about the many things that have an impact on eco-friendly renovating
• Growing Native in My Flower Beds - Destany at They Are All of Me takes the guilt out of her flower habit by switching from high maintenance flowers to native plants which not only lessens her gardening load, but also benefits the local wild life.
• Baby Steps - Kellie at Our Mindful Life shares how her family became more sustainable, one step at a time.
• A Greener Holiday - Sara from Family Organic discusses the overwhelming amount of "stuff" that comes with every holiday and talks about how to simplify instead.
• Forcibly Green--Obligatory Organic - Survivor at Surviving Mexico talks about her family's evolution from passive to active green and sustainable living.
• Giving It Away - Juliet Kemp of Twisting Vines writes about the role of Freecycle, the giant karmic lending library, in her simple and green living.
• Simply Sustainable - Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses her family's attempts to live in harmony with the earth by living simply and more sustainably.
• How Does Your Yarden Grow - Alisha at Cinnamon&Sassafras writes about an ongoing permaculture project, converting her grass lawn into a mower-free paradise.
• Green? - Is it about ticking the boxes? sustainablemum shares her thoughts on what being green means in her life.
• Using Cloth Products To Reduce Household Waste - Angela from Earth Mama's World shares how her family replaced many disposable household products with cloth to reduce their household waste.
• Going Green in Baby Steps - Joella of Fine and Fair shares some small, easy steps to gradually reduce your environmental impact.
• Are You Ready To Play Outside?! - Alex from AN Portraits writes about gardening, and playing in the dirt, and how it's O.K. to get dirty, play in the dirt, play with worms, for both adults and kids.
• Lavender and Tea Tree Oil Laundry Booster - At Natural Parents Network, Megan from The Boho Mama shares an all-natural way to freshen laundry.

For the Polar Bears

Sofi got a book, The Last Polar Bear (Laura Geringer Books), for Christmas.  It is about the effects of global warming on the environment of the polar bears, but written for the level of young children.  It is a really good book, and has opened up a lot of discussion at our house about what causes global warming, and how we can help the polar bears.

We've talked a lot about the three r's - reduce, reuse, recycle.  We talked about only using what we need, and being careful with our energy use.  We talked about lowering our gas usage and getting better mileage.  There have been many, many conversations following the reading of the book.  It has made the concept of global warming a really tangible thing for my kids.  Now they understand the WHY in our quest to be good to the Earth.

Clothespin Clean Up

One thing that we have long struggled with at our house is that Sofi is, by nature, a helpful, domestic personality.   Walter, on the other hand, has little to no desire to clean up after himself.  He will happily stand and watch while Sofi cleans up an entire room (or three) on her own.  We've tried several different systems to help them become equal partners in cleaning up, but our latest seems to be the one that is TRULY effective in helping them BOTH to organize their thoughts, themselves, and to get the messes cleaned up with equal input!  And, it is easy for both the 4 year old and the 6 year old to use, which is a great bonus.

I'm going to start by saying that many families prefer the system where one toy is allowed to be out at a time. I was raised in this system, and I found it to be constrictive for a creative personality.  Also, when I watch the way my children play, there is no "ending" of one game and "beginning" of another.  They all sort of flow into one another.  So stopping to put away the train tracks before getting out farm animals doesn't make sense to them.  After all, they stopped driving the trains on the train tracks and began to drive the tractors on them.  Then they needed the barn and the animals to go with the tractors.  Then they didn't need the tractors anymore because they got out the buckets to haul the animal feed over.  Stopping to pick up the train tracks completely ruins the flow of the game, but that means that by the afternoon, almost every toy in our play room can be spread around the floor.

And I can be ok with that, so long as we can get those toys picked back up.

This is where the clothespin clean up system comes in.

I got out my trusty bag of wooden clothespins that I use for a million and twelve things, and got out several of the shinier, newer ones.  Then, using Sharpie marker, I wrote the name of one type of toy that needed to be cleaned up on one side of a clothespin.  On the other side of the pin, I drew a picture symbol for the toy.  This way an adult or older child helping to clean up can read the name, while non-readers can look at the symbols.  I repeated this step for each type of toy we have in our playroom.

Next, I labelled the appropriate receptacles in our play room for each type of toy, with the matching name and symbol.  We have a cubby system, and baskets, so I just used masking tape and marker to do this, but if you've got the fancy equipment, you could make pretty labels.

To put the system into action, I divide the clothespins evenly between the kids.  They clip the pins to their shirt tails.  Then they go clean up all of the toys that correspond to one of their clothespins.  When they have gotten all of that type of toy up, they return the clothespin to me or the bag that we keep the pins in.

There are a few things that we've learned along the way.  Four of the pins are harder than all the others - kitchen, tool bench, dress up and dollhouse all have many things to be picked up and put away in different areas.  So, we make sure that these are divided equally between the kids instead of one child getting all or most of them.  Also, both of our kids love to do the dollhouse and get it all set up and cute, so we have to take turns having that pin.

The system allows each child to focus on his or her own tasks.  My "bossy" six year old doesn't feel like she has to keep her brother on task.  Nor does she feel like she is going to have to clean everything up if he isn't working.  She can see her definite, fair, to do list, and she can know that her work will be finished when the list is done.  Little brother is learning that the mess doesn't have to be as overwhelming as it may seem, if he just focuses on one item at a time.  He's also learning that if he plays around instead of cleaning, his chores will still be there, and Sofi may not be hanging out while he finishes.

And even one year old baby Elliott is learning that things get put away.  He will sometimes help to put something back where it goes while the kids are cleaning - although more often, he is digging cars back out of the basket.

What type of systems do you have in place to help your kids learn to pick up after themselves?

Mom Hacks Monday - My Happy Book

I'd love to introduce you to my house organization binder!  This isn't a new concept.  Search Pinterest and you will find several such binders.  I am sharing my incarnation because it is what I have tweaked to work for me and my family, and I've incorporated some easy things into it that make our days much easier.

This is my happy book!

My happy book usually lives on the kitchen counter, opened to one of the following pages.

This is our daily chores page.  We've got the same list of daily chores that we need to go through day after day, and keeping track of what everyone has or hasn't done at any given point in a day can get a little overwhelming sometimes.  So, I wrote down each of our daily chores, side by side, and popped the sheet into a page protector.  Instant daily to-do list!  I can use a dry erase marker or crayon and mark off what has been done, and erase the entire thing in the morning and start over again.  Bonus, the kids love marking off their own chores and I've slipped in a little sight reading for Sofi.

Our weekly page comes next.  Each day has it's own section marked on the page, with a spot for what we are having for dinner, and a blog post idea.  I also wrote down the weekly chores on this page.  I do laundry daily, but I've sorted the type of laundry I do to specific days of the week so that I can stay on top of it and no one runs out of underwear.  The type of laundry to wash each day is written on the page as well.  I slipped that page into a page protector as well, and I can write in my weekly plans in dry erase marker as well.  Some people would have printed this out in all manner of fancy fonts and made a free download of it so that you could have your own.  But I haven't unpacked my printer yet, so I wrote it by hand on this cute paper (that I've been saving for like 8 years now for the perfect project).

Next, a sheet of lined paper slipped into a page protector, to write my random to-dos on.  I can write and erase easily again.  Just think how much paper we are saving here, folks!

Then I added these awesome hand made tabs!  I have sections in my book for a homeschool calendar and time record, notes, homeschool planning, meal planning, hospitality, finances, garden planning, gift and birthday planning, Christmas planning, contacts, a price book, and animal records.

My homeschool record currently looks like this, although I think I may tweak it a bit when I run out of the weeks I have already printed.  In Ohio, we have to cover 900 hours and several core subjects each year.  So, I use this space to simply jot down what we have worked on throughout the day, and how much time we spent on it.  I don't have to detail it, but I can simply jot down different conversations we've had, etc.  At the end of each day, after the kids are in bed, I add up our minutes for the day and write it at the bottom of the column.  We have a goal of 148 minutes per day, and we typically blow that away.  At the end of the week, I add up our daily totals for a weekly total, and jot it in the corner.  I keep track under that of our year to date minutes, so I add this week's to the week before and jot it down.  Easy peasy record keeping, and easily lets me look back over past lessons and activities to see progress etc, as well.

These are the pages I use most.  My notes section simply houses loose leaf notebook paper for lists, quick notes, etc.  Under homeschool planning, I have my copy of the laws for the state of Ohio, along with all of my correspondence with the school district and our letter excusing us from compulsory attendance.  Meal planning houses calendars where I write what I've planned or made for dinner.  I keep the past months for future ideas!  Under hospitality, I keep track of whom we have invited over for dinner, when they came, what foods they may be allergic to, like or dislike, and what we served them.  Finances houses the budget, gardening is my planning space for what the garden will grow in a year, and theoretically a map of what grew where last year.  Gift and birthday planning has records of who I need to buy gifts for, and what I have bought or made for them.  Christmas planning has a list of who I send holiday cards to, plans for crafting or buying gifts, stocking stuffers, what has and hasn't been bought yet.  My contacts are pretty self explanatory.  My price book compares prices on the same product at different stores or co-ops so that I can tell when a sale is a good sale and if it is worth driving across town to get a different price on a product.  Animal records has a separate sheet for each animal in the house (and eventually on the farm) detailing their personal and medical history, where they came from, etc.

And in the front lives my three ring pencil bag with my dry erase markers, pens, sharpies and a highlighter so they are always easy to find.

So, this is how I keep track of what needs to be done in my life, and where I'm at!  I love my happy little book.

Do you have a happy book?  What do you use it for?

Small Space Storage and Organization

Papa and I are no strangers to small spaces.  In fact, we kind of have a thing for them.    One of the things we have learned about small spaces is that you really need to think outside the box with them.  You really have to search out the nooks and crannies with them, unlike larger spaces.  Our current small space, the camper, is a work in progress, but I wanted to share some of the tricks we've employed to make three and a half months of five people living in about 300 square feet possible.

Let's start with this little corner!

This is our menu board, fruit basket, and the kids' art supplies.  The menu board was inspired by the one here.  The idea was great, but I needed it to go a step further.  One of my downfalls in life is that I have a ridiculously difficult time coming up with ideas for side dishes - or even remembering to think of them in a timely manner.  So, I set up the menu board to help me with this.  Each color of clothespin is one day.  There is a color for each day of the week.  The top row is for the main dish.  The middle row is for a veggie or fruit side.  The bottom row is for a starch based side.  I made the little strips of construction paper and wrote down all of our options on them. Red is beef, orange is pork, yellow is chicken, and green is main dishes with fish or veggies.  Blue is sides.  I store all of the strips in zip top baggies for now, but I would like to find some type of little cups I can hang on the wall for them.  At the beginning of the week, the kids and I plan out our menu for the week.

Next up is our fruit basket.  Don't mind that it seems to be a bit sideways.  We started out with a long, narrow basket at the back of the table, along the wall.  But with Elliott's reach getting longer and longer, we were growing short on tabletop space.  Then I saw this basket on pinterest, and my wheels got to spinning!  But I felt that the rigid metal in that basket might bruise delicate fruit.  So we found this basket with the wire frame wrapped in raffia, and it seemed to be just the thing.

Last is the under cabinet basket of art supplies.  I originally saw the idea here, and it was the perfect solution for the conundrum of where to put the kids' things that we didn't want the baby to get in to.  This one holds the coloring books, crayons, dry erase boards and dry erase crayons and markers.

The one on this side holds paper page books.  And just beyond it is our spice storage.  The top basket came from the bathroom section of Walmart.  It came with suction cups which we removed and then screwed it to the wall.  The lower one came from a thrift store and has two levels.  Honestly, though, we have more spices than we can fit in this set up.  We would prefer to have 3 of the larger ones.  We just haven't sprung for them yet.

This is some of our storage and organization in the dining area.  I'll share more from the kitchen and bath next week!

Things We Love

I am a declutterer.  When the tension is high, I start moving things out.  I really try to keep my life and my home filled with things that are useful, beautiful and that I love

Now that we are in the midst of a cross country move (again), I've gone through every item in our home again and moved on everything we can live without.  Yet, we had to rent two trailers and a moving truck to move all of our things here.

This is such a stark contrast to living in a camper!  And yet, we are not the least bit sorry about it.  On the contrary, our entire family has come to realize how much we love the possessions we have collected, because each item is carefully selected.

We have enjoyed our time in the camper, and we are grateful that we have been able to stay together during this phase of our move.  But we are happily searching out our own little farm now!

 While Walter is looking forward to having ALL of his things back, I am most excited about my favorite rocking chair again.

Mom Hacks Monday - How to Properly Hang Laundry

Hanging laundry seems like it would be fairly intuitive, and it is!  However, there are some simple tricks to make life easier for the person in charge of the laundry.  Conserving line space and pins is a priority, while minimizing wrinkles is a great bonus.

The first trick is to overlap the edges of clothing slightly so as to use one pin for two garments.  This works best for like garments - two shirts, for example.

Also, you may notice these shirts are hung upside down.  Hanging upside down uses the weight of the clothing to pull any wrinkles straight.  Also, when it comes to shirts, the straight bottom edge hangs more easily than the shaped shoulders.  Which brings us to button front shirts.  They should always be hung by the tail, even when the tail is not straight.  Ensure that the sleeves and collar are smooth and straight.  This saves ironing time later.

Even pants should be hung upside down, by the legs, which decreases wrinkling and makes hanging easier.  However, it is difficult to hang pants overlapping because of their thickness.

Also, longer items, like pants, should be hung at the end of the line, as the center of the line may sag and drag the item in the grass or dirt under the line.  Another trick for particularly long items is to use two lines for them, as I did with this sheet.

Conversely, smaller items can be hung with only one pin.  These are best hung in a row to maximize line space.

These overalls were also hung with one pin.  I used the straps of the overalls to hang and the pin to keep them from sliding.

You may have noticed by now that I have tall clotheslines and short clotheslines.  The kids love to help hang laundry and giving them their own line and stack to hang really boosts their self-confidence.

Mom Hacks Monday - Easy Glass Jugs

I wrote a few weeks ago about our goal to have a 90% plastic free house, and how we accomplished that goal with very little money.  One of our early challenges was our dishes.  We didn't want to use plastic for the things that we ate.  I drink a glass of orange juice every day, and drink decaf tea all day long.  We had a few plastic pitchers that needed quick replacement.  But the price of glass pitchers can be a bit high.  Even at the thrift store, they can be expensive.

And at the same time, we were trying to feed our child and ourselves good foods.  We did our best to buy hormone and antibiotic free milk.  We discovered a few great companies at the grocery store who produced a great natural milk product, and packaged it in glass jars!  Win, win.  We loved the milk, and the fact that they came packaged in glass was a total bonus for us, since it helped us keep the plastic in the house down and kept it away from our food.  When we finished a jug, we took it back to the store and we got about $1 refund for it!  Perfect!

And then we realized that $1 was a pretty inexpensive glass pitcher for our tea and juice!  So, we saved the jugs and reused them.  They came with plastic caps, but that still made the container at least 90% plastic free.  At least, that is, until the lids broke.  Then Papa, in his infinite wisdom and hardware store knowledge came home one day with giant corks from the hardware store!  Ding, ding!  Winner, winner!!  Now, all of our jug that touched the beverage was plastic free!

We've been dairy free for almost 4 years now, and those jugs are STILL the perfect solution for glass beverage containers.  Best of all, they fit right in the pocket of the refrigerator door, even in the camper!

Life at the Campground

My post about living in the camper was so popular last week that I thought I'd just share some images from around the campground this week.

Walter enjoying our favorite afternoon activity - splashing in the mini washtub.

Not that we mind swimming in the big pool, either!

Elliott doing some gardening.

And the fruits of our labors.

Walter, sporting his new haircut.  Yes, I said haircut.

Sofi has taken up photography!  A rare shot of me, enjoying a cuddle with my little man.

Walter hanging out in a play silk.

And this friendly toad that we found!

A (Mostly) Plastic Free Life

Welcome to the June 2012 Simplicity Parenting Carnival: Green Living
This post was written as part of the monthly Simplicity Parenting Carnival hosted by The Lone Home Ranger and S.A.H.M. i AM. This month we are discussing how we find ways to be more natural parents and stewards of the environment. Be sure to read to the end to see a list of the rest of the excellent carnival contributors.
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Many years ago, before my husband and I had kids, we agreed that we didn't want the standard house full of plastic that seems to be delivered with the baby.  It was simply an aesthetic that did not appeal to us.  Both of us, even before succumbing to our environmentalist roots, were more naturally minded, and didn't feel that the house full of plastic was necessary for healthy, happy babies.

And then, we actually had a baby!  And you know how it goes when you have a baby and things start changing...  We never did buy any large plastic equipment for Sofi.  I found a wooden high chair that needed a little work (which I promptly volunteered Papa for), at a sale for $10.  The price was right and the chair was truly beautiful.  So, Papa sanded, varnished and glued and that wooden high chair has served 3 kids so far.  We were gifted a giant plastic swing when Sofi was a tiny baby and we still lived with Papa's parents, but when we moved out, we left it with them and invested in a small travel swing that folds flat.  The legs are metal and the seat is cloth.  It fit better with our vision, and it fit better in our teensy apartment.  But, the toys were, of course, almost all plastic.  The shape sorters, pop beads, balls, blocks, stackers, gyms and teethers - all plastic.  And, we kind of hated it.  We drew the line at logos and characters, batteries, lights and noises, and we generally preferred classic toys.  But, every new stage and toy brought a growing sense of discontent.

And as we grew as parents, we grew more in touch with our natural, environmentalist roots.  We stopped using Johnson & Johnson's Baby shampoos after the news of their containing carcinogens broke, and we began using natural body care products instead.  We stopped using disposable diapers after 6 months and switched to cloth.  We didn't use chemical cleaners at our little apartment, and used soap, water, baking soda, and maybe some vinegar or tea tree oil if it was a tough job.  We got rid of any disposable products, with the exception of writing paper and toilet paper, and the rare piece of foil or zip top bag.  We replaced those products with things that could be washed and reused.  We recycled obsessively.  And we watched our baby chew on those plastic toys.

We learned about BPA and phthalates and how bad they are for people.  We learned about the plastic island in the ocean.  We learned about plastic sitting in dumps, not breaking down completely for hundreds of years.  We learned about off-gassing.  We learned more about the world's obsession with petroleum products and how much this raises our carbon footprint.  We learned about all of these things, and there sat our precious little baby, with a plastic ring in her mouth, happily gnawing away.  We looked at the amount of plastic in our home.  And we looked at each other and our level of discomfort with the situation.

And we decided to make a change.

We decided that we would get as far away from plastic in our home as possible.  We decided that we would stop buying plastic toys.  We decided that we would slowly replace the plastic in our home.  At first, the goal was simply to get rid of as much plastic as possible.  Soon, we narrowed our definition and aimed for a 90% plastic free home.  And at that time, in that place, it seemed next to impossible.

No longer in our tiny apartment and still able to reach our goal of 90% plastic free home!

We had a lot of roadblocks in our newly idealized journey; things that may have caused the faint of heart to turn tail and bury their heads in the sand.  But Papa and I are nothing if not adventurous.  So we plunged bravely ahead!

Wooden swing, wooden play house, wooden wheel barrow, and metal truck.

One major road block was that we didn't want to cause a further strain on the environment by dumping our plastic things in a landfill and buying new plastic things.  So, we made the decision that we would only replace items as needed with non-plastics, except for a few key items.  So, when something broke, or had reached the end of its useful life, we would replace it with an item that was non-plastic.  We got reusable grocery bags, and stopped bringing plastic home.  We examined everything we bought and truly thought about it, for the first time.

Wooden ladder and wooden "climbing structure" next to our clothesline full of cotton.

The key exceptions being that we began replacing dishes and toys as soon as we could.  We did not want things that touched our food, or went into our baby's mouth to be made of plastic.  She was still young enough at that point that replacing the toys happened easily, albeit slowly.  Babies naturally go through stages with toys very quickly.  The six month old can't use the shape sorter yet, but the one year old can.  So, when new toys were bought, we bought non-plastic.

Wooden play kitchen and wooden bookshelves made by Papa - filled with wooden, cloth, metal and cardboard toys and baskets.

Another road block was that we were completely, flat broke.  We lived every month down to the penny.  There was nothing extra to go around buying expensive wooden toys with.  So, we made the choice to buy less toys that were better quality.  This meant that I couldn't go to a garage sale, spend $3 and come home with a room full of toys anymore.  But it meant that if I was careful, I could find the Melissa and Doug stacking train at a garage sale for 75 cents.  It meant that we began making more of our own toys to be able to afford them.  And it meant getting creative about what qualified as toys.

Wooden table and chairs made by Grandpa, and other assorted wooden, cloth and cardboard toys.

Our project took a lot of time...  A lot of time.  It took a lifestyle change - much like a diet, if you will.  It took a lot of initial conscious thought.  And then, one day, we looked around and realized...  We had reached our goal!  Without thinking about it anymore, without agonizing over every decision, without spending a fortune, we had created a home that is 90% plastic free (or maybe more - exact measurements are hard)!

Our dining room, complete with two wooden high chairs.  The plastic in the front corner is our birth kit and pool, as this picture was taken when we were getting VERY close to having our second baby at home.

We think our home is an aesthetic joy.  It is warm and inviting.  It doesn't have a lingering plastic smell.  We don't worry, even subconsciously, about what our kids are putting in their mouths when they play.  We have learned to be even more careful with our money and the amount of things we accumulate.  We are better stewards to our environment.  And we are happier because of it.

Our living room, full of wood framed furniture covered in cotton fabrics.

***As a side note, the pictures here are of our house in Missouri.  We moved in to our camper (even tinier than our tiny apartment) in April and we are working to bring our non-plastic aesthetic to our home there.***

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Thanks for reading the Simplicity Parenting Blog Carnival! We hope you’ll take time to read these other great contributors’ posts:

• Almost Crunchy - Molly at Molly Makes Do writes about her life as "Almost Crunchy" and the baby steps she's taken to get from "Not at All" to "Almost."
• A (Mostly) Plastic Free Life - Kellie at Our Mindful Life reflects on the recent intrusion of plastic into her usual plastic free home.
• Slowly Greening Our Home - Dana at Urban Hippie Momma has slowly reduced the amount of paper waste in her home with a few simple practices.
• Being Green - Anne at Raising Sweet Grace shares her tips on being a green parent.
• Back to Basics - Justine at The Lone Home Ranger channels her greatgrandmother’s cleaning tips to make her household healthier, more frugal, and more earth-friendly.
• It's Not (Always) Easy Being Green - Emily at S.A.H.M. i AM discusses the little things her family does to be more eco-friendly but admits it's not always as easy as it sounds.

Thanks to all the fabulous writers and readers for being a part of our simplicity parenting community! Stop by The Lone Home Ranger and S.A.H.M. i AM to see how to join us for a future carnival.