Olivemom
I had a baby in February of 2009. It took all of a week and a half of my newborn’s life for me to conclude that the powers that be are conspiring to take all of the simple, organic fun out of raising a baby. Pay attention to this! Keep track of that! Worry and fret about every little blip that falls somewhere outside the norm OR ELSE!
To all of you I say: POOH POOH! Raising a peanut just can’t be that hard. Like my prenatal yoga instructor always told me while I was utterly failing at every pose that was ever invented: “Everything you need to be the perfect mother to your child is already in you.” That’s right, malpractice-suit-fearing-pediatricians!! I’m gonna go CRAZY and feed my baby when it seems like she’s hungry.
And while I’m at it, I know that there are greener (and SIMPLER) ways to bring up a baby than most mainstream sources would lead us to believe–but that don’t require living off the grid in a vegan commune (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Thus, I hope this blog will be a place for low-maintenance and generally irreverent parents who want to share simple, inexpensive strategies for raising children whose carbon footprints will start small and stay small, even as the kiddos grow.
Larms
I’m rural-ish mom to Olivemom’s urbanmom! The yin to her yang! Or something like that.
I’m about to have baby #1 (literally any minute now), and hope to be a low-maintenance mom myself. I’m concerned about trying to keep our lives simple and focused on the things we really care about – our families, our time together, and activities we enjoy. Not…stuff. I worry about falling into the stereotype of the overwrought suburban full-time working mom, and hope to do my best to maintain a healthy balance in our lives.
I’m not super-crunchy, and fail miserably in many many ways and do many environmentally bad bad things (like, um, live in an area where we are completely car-dependent, out in the boonies with our well and septic system). But I do think and hope there are little things we can do in addition to the big things, and have enjoyed starting to question many of my own practices and thoughts about things we “need”. Oh, and I’m cheap, so that’s a pretty effective motivator right there.
