Mommy Goes Green

Have you noticed girls are “blooming” earlier and earlier?  According to a new study, almost one in four black girls and one in 10 white girls in the U.S. had developed breasts by the age of seven.  SEVEN.  My daughter will be in first grade when she’s seven.  First graders should not have breasts already!

By age 8, the numbers are worse, almost 1 in 2 black girls and 1 in 5 white girls.   These numbers are getting worse.  In 1997, the proportion of white girls that had developed breasts by age seven was 5% – so in just 13 years, the number has doubled.

Early puberty is linked to early sexual experiences, low self-esteem, higher risk of eating problems,  depression, suicide, and a greater risk of breast cancer.

So what is causing this alarming trend?

There are several possible causes: the environment and childhood obesity.

One of the top environmental concerns are endocrine disruptors – chemicals that act on hormones to change bodily functions.  Bisphenol-A (BPA) sound familiar?  If not, you can read more about this chemical in plastics here, here and here.  If you drink soda – you’re ingesting a little BPA.  If you have old baby bottles (older than 2008 or so) – you’re feeding your child a little BPA.

The other endocrine disruptor commonly found in plastics are phthalates.  Phthalates are everywhere. Personal care products like perfume and nail polish,  vinyl floors, vinyl upholstery, toys, paints, packaging, detergents and even medication.   Just researching this post, I found that the medication I take to control my Crohn’s Disease is covered in a coating containing phthalates and since I’m taking large quantities per day, let’s just say my internal alarms are flying off the hook.

One other interesting finding in the study was that the prevalence of early puberty was different amongst regions.  Girls in San Francisco were found to have a lower rate (11.6%) than girls in New York (15.3%) and girls in Cincinnati (18.9%).  This could be due to San Francisco’s reputation as an area for healthy eating, exercise, low plastics and chemical use.

Let’s keep our little girls, just that. Little girls.  Not concerned about bras, sexual experiences or obsessed with their image.    Free to have tea parties with their friends, ride bikes through the neighborhood and run unabashedly through the sprinkler.

I can’t believe we’re in ‘Back to School’ season already.  In the Pacific NW, summer started, like yesterday.  It was a loooooong rainy winter and I’m not sure spring even showed up this year. 

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice has just released their Back to School Guide for PVC Free School Supplies.  Remember, PVC is the “poison plastic” and one you should avoid as much as possible because of the nasty chemicals it leaches.

This comprehensive 17 page guide lists everything from art supplies to backpacks to binders to dry erase markers and paperclips (colored paper clips are coated with PVC).  Everything you could possibly need for school is on this list.  Print it out and take it with you to the store.  If you want the condensed version, print out the wallet size version.

A great place to start your shopping is Stubby Pencil Studio.  The owner and mama, Kate, finds non-toxic school supplies for all ages.

My kids aren’t yet of the age where I need to purchase “school supplies” but many of the the items on the list we still use in our home office or for home craft projects so I’ll be referencing it frequently.  You’ll be surprised at how many things you use on a regular basis that have PVC.  The good news is that there ARE alternatives!

What PVC free school supplies will you be buying this year?

The obvious way to get more life out of your shoes is to give them to someone else who will use them or donate to a local charity. But sometimes, shoes just aren’t in good enough condition to be worn again.  Like many things these days, don’t put them in the garbage – it takes 1000 years for shoes to decompose in a landfill.    Recycle them!  Here are a few options:

Nike Reuse A Shoe – Shoes are put through a process that uses a “slice-and-grind” technique, where each shoe is cut into three slices – rubber outsole, foam midsole and fiber upper. These slices are then fed through grinders and purified to be made into Nike Grind.  The Nike Grind material is then made into new products such as track or playground surfaces, outdoor tennis courts and some Nike products such as the outsole of the Nike Pegasus.  Only athletic shoes and LIVESTRONG wristbands are accepted at a drop off facility in countries all over the world or you can mail them in.  I live near a drop off facility and drop off our old shoes there.

Recycled Runners – This online shoe recycling directory will help you find a place to recycle athletic shoes at a drop off facility near you.

Okabashi Shoe Recycling – Okabashi will take back their own shoes, sandals and flip flops and recycle them into new shoes or other goods. When you send them in for recycling, make sure to include your email address and they’ll give you 15% off a new pair!

Unique Eco – A company in Kenya takes old flip flops and makes them into raw materials for local artisans to make unique hand made crafts to sell in local shops and craft fairs.  You have to mail them to Kenya but consider the postage a donation to a great cause.

Earth911 – This online recycling guide will tell you where to recycle anything – just type in ’shoes’ and your zip code and will find the nearest facilities.

Hey mamas, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be contributing to another fabulous blog, The Creative Mama.  If you haven’t stumbled upon it, head on over there to find “everyday living with a touch of creativity”.  With 13 other contributors, you’ll find a wealth of knowledge about home, kids, photography and DIY and of course, green living.

I don’t know how I ever survived without my iPhone   iPhone apps are the coolest thing to happen to mobile technology.  There are tens of thousands of apps out there already and more created everyday.   Here are 10 of the greenest iPhone apps for moms :

1. What’s on My Food – search for specific foods to find out what kind of pesticides are on them and what chemicals are the most dangerous.  Compare organic to conventional foods.

2.  iRecycle- iRecycle makes it easy to find recycling locations anywhere in the U.S. Find places to drop-off your old cell phone (or water bottle or motor oil, etc.), get directions and find out what else they accept. And new to this version, iRecycle also now hosts information on local green events in your area and the newest stories and features on Earth911.com.

3.  GreenMeter – computes your vehicle’s power and fuel usage characteristics and evaluates your driving to increase efficiency, reduce fuel consumption and cost, and lower your environmental impact. Results are displayed in real time, while driving, to give instantaneous feedback – amazing!

4.  Whole Foods Market Recipes- find healthy recipes from Whole Foods with ingredients, directions, a store locator, and other handy features.

5.  Seventh Generation Label Reading Guide- ever at the store looking through all the ‘eco-friendly’ products but have no idea what is REALLY eco-friendly?  Use this label reading guide to decipher all the label ingredients and take the fear out of buying a new safe product.

6.  Kindle - read more than 400,000 Kindle books on your iPhone.

7.  CouponSherpa, Yowza and GroceryIQ- eliminate all the wasted paper of coupon clipping and the TIME spent doing it!  These apps let you search for your product,  show the check out person the coupon on your phone, scan the coupon and done!

8.  Good Guide – scan the bar code of any product to find detailed ratings for health, environmental and social responsibility.  Over 50,000 food, toys, personal care and household products.

9.  Reqall- instead of making your to do lists on paper (and then leaving it at home!), use Reqall to jot down your notes on the go.

10.  EWG Sunscreen Guide – I have this app downloaded and it makes it so easy to choose a safe sunscreen when I’m at the store.

If you have a favorite iPhone app (green or not!), share it with us here by leaving a comment!

I don’t enjoy cooking all that much.  I do it, but not with much glee.  So I was totally surprised at how much I enjoy making my infant’s baby food.  It’ SO easy and I love knowing exactly what is in his food – which isn’t much – organic fruits, veggies and water.  I like the versatility that I can make changes when I need to.  At 6 months, I started with thin purees but quickly realized that my son could handle chunky so I changed the texture.   I also love coming up with new concoctions – and seeing my son squeal with delight – for a little guy, he LOVES to eat.

If you haven’t ever made food for your baby, I promise you it’s EASY PEASY.   I make a new batch of food every 2-3 days, it takes about 15 minutes.  Here’s the method I use:

1.  Buy fresh or frozen fruits and veggies.  You can make the whole process even quicker by buying pre-cut items like broccoli florets or baby carrots.  I’ve also found butternut squash at Costco that is already cut and sliced apples. 

2.  Cut into small chunks unless they are pre-cut.

3.  Put fruits and/or veggies in a steamer basket until you can pierce with a fork – depending on the item, it’s anywhere from 5-12 minutes.   Save the water used to steam the food.

4.  Put the steamed items in a food processor and puree them until you get the texture your baby needs.  The thinner the puree, the more water you add.

5.  When you’re done, pour it into ice trays and put into the freezer.  Once they are frozen, put them into a freezer bag or freezer container to store. 

6.  Take cubes of food out when you need them and defrost in the microwave or refrigerator.

There are a dozen or more ways you could modify this to make it work for you.  There are tons of recipe books, I reference one called The Petit Appetit.  Better yet, there are great websites dedicated to making baby food, like Weelicious.   You can also find tools made just for making baby food like food grinders and baby food mills but if you have already have a handheld blender, blender or food processor then there is no need to buy something new – any one of these will work.  There are many ways to store baby food from the simple, like ice trays to the classic, like jars.  Again, you can buy storage made just for baby food but I’ve found that ice cube trays are easy to find and inexpensive – just make sure they are BPA free.

I’d love to hear how you make food for your baby!  What works for you?

I finally feel like we’ve moved successfully from conventional products to eco-friendly products in our lawn and garden.  The icing on the cake was finding a safe way to control our weeds:

1. Water plants, not weeds.  We turned off the sprinkler heads in our garden beds and used a sprinkler head conversion kit to install a drip system.  It’s inexpensive and very easy to install.  Each drip is set to only water plants, flowers and trees, where necessary.  The rest of the bed doesn’t get watered, saving water (and $$) and keeping weeds down.
2. Use a thick layer of mulch or bark.  We’ve spread mulch too thinly for the past couple summers.  At only 1-2 inches, it thinned out quickly and disappeared before summer was over. It didn’t help with weed control.  This summer, we spread it 3 inches thick and it has made a huge difference.  Mulch also helps keep your water needs down (and $$) as it reduces evaporation by up to 50%.
3. Plant drought tolerant ground cover.  Ground cover acts similarly to mulch so it covers the dirt, keeping weeds down and reducing evaporation.  By choosing drought tolerant ground cover, you further reduce your water needs.
4. Use a weed killer, if necessary.  The final piece of our eco-friendly weed control puzzle was finding a weed killer that worked and WE. HAVE. FOUND. IT.  EcoSmart contacted me to see if I would check out a few of their new products and I was excited to try out their Organic Weed & Grass Killer.  I just hoped it worked and it does!   We have some weeds in a rocky area that are hard to hand pick so I started there.  It was a hot day and I sprayed all the weeds in the morning.  By afternoon, all the weeds were shriveled up and dead!  {I did a little happy dance} 

So the good news is that you don’t need a big bottle of Roundup to kill weeds particularly because I’m not convinced on any level that Roundup is safe.  For example, scientists in France evaluated the toxicity of Roundup on fetal umbilical cord cells. They found that every formulation of Roundup caused total cell death within 24 hours.  And they weren’t even testing with agricultural levels of Roundup, they were using levels that would be found in food or feed.   Roundup has also been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  If you think you are safe using it in your yard, did you know that it’s half-life is at least 47 days?  It also contaminates surface waters and is not readily broken down by sunlight or water.  Scary stuff, just say no.  Promise you, EcoSmart works just as well.  If I get one reader to stop using Roundup, I’ll feel better

A couple years ago we ditched the Round Up and chemical filled fertilizer for more eco-friendly alternatives.  It has taken some time to figure out how to maintain our lawn without chemicals but this summer we’ve found some great methods that are doing the job. I know it would be more eco-friendly not to have a lawn at all but we have two young children who love to run barefoot through it.   It doesn’t take any more effort than conventional methods to have a safer, eco-friendly lawn. 

1. Know how much water your lawn needs.  Your lawn only needs 1 inch of water a week and preferably, all at one time.  This way the water gets down to the deep roots.  To determine  how much water your lawn needs,  put an empty tuna can in the middle of the yard.  Turn on the sprinklers and record how long it takes to fill the tuna can up. Once you know how long it takes, set your sprinkler system to water 1x per week for that length of time.  Remember, different parts of your lawn may need different amounts of water.  We water 30 minutes, 1x per week in our front yard and 1 hour, 1x per week in our back yard.
2. Don’t waste water.  Water in the morning.  If you water during the day, it evaporates before it hits the ground. We start our watering process at 5am.  If you have a sprinkler system, turn it on and watch how each sprinkler head is functioning.  Is it overwatering by spraying sidewalks or driveways?  Do you have too many sprinkler watering the same area?  The spray area on each sprinkler head can be modified, usually with a screwdriver applied to the top.  We have turned off about 25% of our sprinkler heads totally because they were watering areas that weren’t planted yet or were overlapping with other sprinkler heads too much.
3. Don’t mow too short.  Keeping your lawn about 3 inches long
4. Use free fertilizer.  By leaving your grass clippings on your lawn, you reduce your fertilizer needs by 25%.  To keep our garden beds grass clipping free, we bag the grass clippings while mowing and then empty the bag back onto our lawn.  You also reduce your trips to the recycling center to take grass clippings.
5. Get chicken manure.  According to SafeLawns.org, chicken manure is the best fertilizer so we picked it up.  This is the product that has made the biggest difference for our lawn.  It took a thin, yellow lawn and made it lush, thick and green in about a week.  As long as we remember to use it every month, the lawn is awesome.  We buy chicken fertilizer at Lowe’s – it’s not any more expensive than conventional fertilizer and it contains no chemicals.   SafeLawns recommends one called Chickity Doo Doo.  EDITED TO ADD:  We don’t use plain chicken manure, it’s an organic fertilizer where the primary component is chicken manure!

Using these methods, we’ve saved money on our water bills and have a safe lawn that I feel totally comfortable having my children play on.  For more tips, I highly recommend checking out SafeLawns.org.

Check in tomorrow for tips to keep your garden beds organic AND weed-free!

This is part of the Healthy Child Blog Carnival - an effort by Healthy Child Healthy World to help inspire a movement to protect children from harmful chemicals.  For great posts from other green mamas, check some of them out!

• The Most Expensive Egg We’ll Ever Eat by RookieMom
• Clean Food, Dirty Kids by Spoonfed
• Our Grass is Greener by Farmer’s Daughter
• Quick Spray to Save Summer Veggies by Easy Peasy
• How to Relax and Let the Kids Have (Non-Toxic) Fun by Almost All the Truth

I’m working on replacing  all of my personal card products with safer products.  Recently, I was looking to replace my face wash. I’ve used the same Aveeno face wash for years but is has parabens in it and a few other fun chemicals.  Fortunately, my search was short lived. 

My first try was with Burt Bee’s Deep Cleansing Cream.  I like creamy facial washes and it’s affordable at $8.   Unfortunately, it just didn’t do it for me.  Something in it made my eyes water and I never felt like my makeup was totally removed.

My second round was with Desert Essence Thoroughly Clean Face Wash and I love, love, love it!  I definitely feel that it ‘thoroughly’ cleans my face, makeup and all. The face wash has a great rating on the Cosmetics Database- 1.  It contains castile soap, olive oil, tea tree oil and many other essential oils and plant extracts. It’s liquid and only takes one pump to wash my face.  I’ve been using it for a month and have used about 1/4 of the bottle.  At $10/bottle, that’s $30/year in facial wash ( or $2.50/month ) and I was spending about 2x that on Aveeno so this is a great win/win – saving my body from toxic junk AND saving money. 

WHERE TO BUY:  Find a store locally or buy it online here.

Do you have a favorite face wash?

Buying produce at the grocery store often requires those awful plastic produce bags that are hard to clean and reuse because they are so flimsy. There are many options to reduce your use – find one that works for you:

1.  Choose paper produce bags.

2.  Take a large basket, bag, or wagon to the farmer’s market and store produce there until you get home.

3.  Encourage your local grocery store to carry the BioBag– a biodegradable, compostable produce bag. Compared with plastic, they have a greenhouse effect reduction by up to 49%.

4.  One of choices I’ve made to get rid of plastic produce bags is to use reusable bags. I’ve been using Bag the Habit bags, courtesy of Abe’s Market, for several months now. They are heavy duty – they’ll hold several potatoes – without breaking or stretching. They have a wide opening for bigger items like a head of lettuce and a draw string to keep everything inside. Not only are they great for putting your produce in, but you can also use them for your bulk purchases like beans, raisins or pretzels. My only complaint is that I don’t have more of them!

5.  If you’re crafty, make your own reusable bags with these instructions from Mother Earth News or Instructables.

If you do use plastic produce bags, here are some options to reuse them:

• Packing material
• Pick up doggy doodoo
• Put in the diaper bag for dirty diapers
• Line garbage cans

If you don’t want to reuse them, make sure you dispose of them properly by recycling them. If your curbside recycler doesn’t take these bags, many grocery stores take them back like Fred Meyer, Walmart, and Whole Foods – search for local locations here. Every couple months, I drop off any plastic bags I have ( shopping, produce or packaging ). The collection bin is usually near the entrance.