The world is coming to an end.

Funny, I was in the middle of composing a “deep thoughts” post for the weekend that might ACTUALLY make you think the world is coming to an end, when my sister caught an ad for these on TV:

Really, that sums up my point far better than any academic essay I can dig up.

(But how brilliant are they, making it a “Limited Edition” so everyone will flock to the stores to get theirs before they’re gone?)

Diaper Cream Rave

First let me say that I don’t usually do rave product reviews. And secondly, this isn’t really a totally natural solution as in a raw product like witch hazel or eucalyptus. But it is natural and petroleum-free, and it is SO nice: Weleda’s Calendula Diaper Care.

It’s not greasy, doesn’t stain, smells fantastic, goes on and off easily, and is very soothing. I won’t give details on how I personally know that it is very soothing. Just trust me. Pregnancy does horrible things to your body, people. Horrible things!

I’ve bought it both online and at Target (sometimes it’s in the baby section, sometimes also cosmetics with other “upscale” type beauty/bath products). It is expensive, but a little goes a long way. My husband does complain that it smells SO nice that it can be hard to discern whether a diaper is wet or not when he’s recently been all freshly slathered-up with it. But that seems like a small price to pay! I’ve been using the baby wash and lotion from the same line and love the scent. He’s such a delicious little baby! I must gobbleses him up!

I’ve tried a few others and had various complaints (greasy, stained, didn’t seem to work well, etc.), and this seemed to fulfill the two main functions of providing a barrier and soothing irritation. That said, I’m new to this world of diapers and welcome any other rave reviews!

Two more planned baby steps

The post below was written by Larms a few weeks ago. She’s the type of hyper-organized person who takes the time to queue up a bunch of articles for her blog before her first child’s arrival so that you won’t miss her while she’s out on maternity leave. (Is there such a thing for the blogosphere? Well, anyway, she’s on it!) Check out the beautiful baby boy!

Then read her post, which I apologize is slightly out of order because this blog’s dumb admin screwed up the sequence. (You can find the results of her toilet-cleaning experiments here!)

(This is hearkening back to the whole reducing-chemical-use topic from a few weeks ago…I promise, we haven’t fallen off the wagon on it! I’ve got a big ol’ bag of baking soda just waiting to show this dirty house – okay, parts of it – who’s boss)

I tend to get very gung-ho about things like this! I have a big stockpile of some traditional cleaning products I’m trying to foist off on others so I can REALLY get into it. So, two things in the works:

I am fired up about toilet bowl cleaning, people. We installed new water-saver toilets when we moved in, but still abide by the old “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” rule to save water and do not flush, um, with every liquid-visit. While water-friendly, this can however make for some funky toilets that require that adherence to a rigorous cleaning schedule. There’s apparently a litany of various Borax/vinegar/baking soda concoctions online for me to test out. Hopefully I don’t accidentally turn our toilets into meth labs somehow.

And a shameful confession! We have gotten very, very lazy about overusing Clorox-type wipes. I first started buying the wipes for basically one purpose: to wipe the particularly nasty parts of the toilet. But then we started using them for more general wiping-up on occasion in the bathroom, and now it’s degenerated to such a point that Mr. Larms thinks that wiping a filthy sink down with one counts as “cleaning” it, and I’m also guilty of doing this on occasion.

They’re expensive, chemical-laden AND wasteful paper-wise, so I’m ‘fessing up and committing to stop buying them completely so they just will not be around for us to waste/overuse. Also, they are a good example of the sort of modern cleaning product that you don’t have to bother trying to save money on via sales and coupons if you…just don’t use them!

So, those are two more feeble little steps in the works around our house! I plan to do some toilet-cleaning experiments in the near future. If you’re lucky, I won’t include before and after pictures for documentation.

Simple Green Toilets

As I was thinking about what household cleaning products we use most, toilet bowl cleaner is definitely up there. And as we have a septic system, everything that goes down the drain basically goes into our backyard, and back into our and our neighbors’ water eventually (which, when you think about it, is ultimately the same thing whether you have a septic system or not, it’s just on a much smaller scale). That thought will do wonders for bringing on substantial guilt about your household cleaners!

As part of our chemical-free adventures, I set out to figure out a simple green way to clean our grungy toilets. There are all sorts of recipes out there, ranging from the very basic (mostly involving baking soda + vinegar or borax) to the fairly frou-frou that involved too many ingredients to meet my “simple” requirement. And the weird: pouring in a can of Coke? powdered Tang? Um, I decided to skip those.

I initially was confused about whether borax is a legit non-toxic product or not.  Apparently it’s one of those things that’s natural, but still has the potential to be toxic to humans and other various critters. So you do have to be careful about keeping it out of children’s reach and with use around pets. But I figure it can’t possibly be worse than whatever makes my old cleaner 1) antibacterial and 2) blue.

Let’s get to the good stuff! Here’s what I found.

Baking soda and vinegar. The suggested ratio I saw on the interwebz was 1 part baking soda to 4 parts vinegar. I didn’t use that exact ratio because that just seemed like an absurd and unnecessary quantity of vinegar unless one was only going to use a tiny amount of baking soda. I mean, it was either gonna clean it or it wasn’t, you know? So, I sprinkled in about 1/4 cup of baking soda (from a giant 12-lb. bag I bought. Who knew baking soda came in 12-lb. bags??) and thought I’d be dainty and spray in the vinegar with a little spray bottle. That was pretty ineffective so I just dumped in some vinegar and got to scrubbing.

While the bubbleses were quite pleasing, this was not as effective as I’d hoped, cleaning-wise. BUT I must give the disclaimer that this toilet was especially grungy. I think on a more standard-dirty toilet, pretty much any mixture of baking soda and vinegar would prove decently effective.

Borax and lemon juice. The back of the borax box tells me I can also just dump 1/4 cup in the bowl, swish it around and let it sit for 30 minutes/overnight. So I tried that as well as pouring some in with some lemon juice and brushing/flushing right away. Both worked well. On a day-to-day basis, I’m not sure how practical it is to “need” lemon juice to clean your toilet. But I had a couple in the fridge so tossed it in.

The verdict, in my humble opinion? Well, since I now have a big box of Borax, and our toilets tend toward the grody, Borax it is for our household, I think. Apparently it’s quite the multipurpose cleaner, so I may give it a try for other things when baking soda won’t quite cut it.

It’s RAINING diapers! Or, how to ruin a deal in 10 days.

Larms pointed out earlier in this series that one problem she has found with “deals” is that they can make her, the coupon-dabbler, purchase something she wouldn’t otherwise. In such a case, rather then saving money, she is spending an extra $.99 to get that thing that yes, normally does cost $1.99 but that normally she would never buy in the first place. Which means she really would have been better off without the coupon. Could she have avoided this pitfall if she were more judicious in her clipping? Sure, but I would argue that if she knows she is prone to veering off the tightly-disciplined path every highly effective couponer must follow, she could just as easily save herself the trouble and not start down said path in the first place. She’ll come out about the same money-wise but WAY ahead of the game in time and effort expended.

The thing that bites me in the you-know-what is along the same lines but hits my checkbook PayPal account (and the poor environment) from a slightly different angle. Here’s how it goes down:

A friend (we’ll call her Parms) alerts me to a completely irresistible deal. I mean, this deal is so smoking hot it would just be stupid to pass it up. Basically it’s some obscene amount of diapers for some obscenely small amount of money. By some calculations, the final price could come out to 8 cents per diaper. For my little lady’s size, I think it was 11 cents per diaper. Still, a very, very good deal (as 17 cents per diaper is already considered an EXCELLENT PRICE among the diaper-purchasing-savvy out there). Of course, this deal is on Pampers, which, you know, are not the chlorine-free diapers that the planet and I prefer, but I just decide I’m going to do it. I’ve been such a goody-goody-earth-friendly-diapering mama for so long, don’t I deserve some CHEAP STINKING NAPPIES, and lots of them, now and again???

So I do all the things I’m supposed to do. Plug in this code here and that coupon there, add that filler item to my cart, print out and send in a rebate. And I get my diapers. And I say to myself, fairly pleased with the situation, “Now this is a GIANT box of diapers! What an AMAZING DEAL.”

And then…something goes…awry. See, my normal diaper-changing routine looks something like this: Take kiddo upstairs, take off old diaper, look at small stack of expensive chlorine-free diapers (33 cents a pop, in some cases!!), think about how I don’t want to pay for those again anytime soon, nor make a trip to the store to get more (and now here’s the important part) choose to use the cloth diapers instead.

But here’s what the routine looks like now that my jumbo tub o’ Pampers is sitting in the corner of the room, beckoning me with its abundance: Take kiddo upstairs, take off old diaper, look at pile of Pampers so plentiful it’s like manna from heaven, look at cloth diapers gathering dust under the changing table, (and now here’s where things completely unravel) pop another one of those sweet, sweet disposables on.

And there you have it. All I have to do is go through the Pampers three times as fast as the chlorine-free diapers and I have suddenly crushed myself two times over: 1) I haven’t saved any money in the end (meaning all the time I invested “earning” the deal by jumping through their technical hoops was also wasted) and 2) I just put 3x the number of diapers (that are already more harmful to the environment to begin with) into the landfill than I would have if I’d stuck with my combo of chlorine-frees + cloths.

I know you’ll say, “What is your problem? Just have some self-control and don’t burn through the Pampers so fast, you moron!” But see, a lady’s got to know her limits and these are mine. After a long day at work, I WILL take the easy way out if I don’t have the proper incentives not to. What can I say? Unlimited access to Pampers broke me.

I’m sure most people do not have willpower issues like I do when it comes to getting the most out of a bargain. But I also bet most people are vulnerable to SOME hidden downside of the “can’t lose” deal. The key is knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and working within them to get the result that will make you happiest and not, say, filled with self-loathing that your child is wearing chemically-loaded diapers that smell so strongly of fake baby powder that you can no longer even sniff out if she’s pooped or not.

On hinie-wiping

So, I’ve been kind of bummed that cloth diapering really isn’t feasible for us for the impending-bundle-of-joy-and-poo. And then I had high hopes of, well, maybe I’ll try to do some cloth wipes, but I realize this is a lot less practical when you’re not doing diapers too (unless one wants to throw poopy wipes in with one’s bath towels). Still, I bought a few and had been planning to give it a try.

Well, wonder of wonders, shopping around for homemade diaper-wipe-solution recipes made me realize that you do not, in fact, have to use cloth wipes to use your own homemade butt-cleaning solution! You can just use paper towels.

Seriously, I don’t know how whatever brain cell synapses that were required to figure out this concept never fired, but apparently they did not.

Various and sundry instructions and recipes here and here and here and just a quick google away, there’s tons more, knock yourself out! Everything from plain ol’ witch-hazel, of which Olivemom is a proponent, to complicated home chemistry experiments.

Using them with paper towels definitely cancels out the reducing-waste aspect of cloth wipes, but it does still at least give the opportunity to use non-chemical products on baby’s dainty patookus.

Give me about four weeks and I will have more to report on any particularly good methods/recipes/etc!

My daughter’s butt smells like roses.

As promised, I am here today to share with you the very few aspects of my household that would currently pass the chemical-free test. And they truly are few at the moment! (Really, I can’t tell you how excited I am about using my current supplies up as fast as possible in order to speed the process. Suddenly I’ve become religiously responsible about random things like swishing with mouthwash and applying cuticle cream at night, which makes me realize an unintended consequence of this project will be a huge upgrade in my general hygienic presentation. This is probably a good thing, as it is becoming less and less legitimate to claim, “NEW MOM!” when confronted with the deterioration of my beauty regimen, which, incidentally, was never that stellar to begin with.)

So first things first. Two chemical-free choices I made long ago:

1) I have not used traditional deodorant/antiperspirant in many years in favor of the trusty Crystal. The aluminum-laden antiperspirants never actually kept me from sweating anyway and always destroyed my clothes. So this is way better, since it will also give me a lot less breast cancer. (I will admit, though…when I have a very important reason to remain sweat-free, I will break out the aluminum-shock-inducing Certain Dri. I’m not sure any amount of threat to my health would be enough to make me give this up in clutch situations. For instance, at my best friend’s wedding in which the bridesmaids stood up front in 90 degree afternoon sunlight for the entire 30 minute ceremony, I was the only maid who remained bone-dry where it counted. I will cling to the idea that using this just a few times a year can’t be as bad as using the milder-but-still-aluminum-filled basic stuff every day.)

2) We clean kitchen surfaces (floors, counters, etc.) with just vinegar and water.

The other two earth- and human-friendly products in our house arrived around the same time as the Olive last year:

3) To wash her cloth diapers, we started buying Charlie’s Soap. I cannot say that this is chemical-free, but it is biodegradable and non-toxic which seem like nearly-equivalent measures to me in terms of health/environment. I thought at first we would just use it for the diapers, but then I quickly expanded it to her clothes, and now it’s the only laundry detergent/stain remover we use for all our wash. The little graphs under the Research section of their website will blow your mind (and ensure you never purchase Tide again!):

Yes, that is indeed a chart demonstrating that a) Tide will make your children burn…BURN! and b) Charlie’s Soap can actually make your children…FLAME RETARDANT? Just, wow. Also, Tide and the like actually ADD WEIGHT to your clothes over time from so much residue! Crazytown.

4) For the little lady’s delicate bum, we use cloth wipes and witch-hazel. I didn’t originally intend to go entirely disposable-wipe-free, but as I’ve realized that wipes can leave quite a bit of sticky film and a strong chemical smell, I’ve slowly moved toward exclusively using this stuff at home:

And yes, it does indeed leave her tush smelling as fresh and clean as a bunch of roses.

Spinach Poop

Had an interesting discovery last night. You know how when you cook something with frozen chopped spinach and then it’s time to clean the pots and pans and if you’ve let them sit at all you’ve got a tough road ahead of you, scraping-wise, to get the little paper-thin bits of spinach unstuck from the bottom/sides? And then even when you do get them off it’s a whole repeated effort to actually rinse out your sink and get them all to go down the damn drain?

Turns out, the exact same thing can be said for those stinking spinach bits on the way out of a baby, especially if you’re on the phone when it happens so don’t get around to changing the baby until the individual bits, apparently behaving much the same way they do on the pots and pans, have had time to separate from the main mass of poop and are now dried and stuck hard and fast all over the baby’s bottom.

By the time I got it all clean, the poor kid had been on the changing table for a good 10 minutes, my fingernails might have come into play once or twice, and I had to change the entire mat on the table because it was as if someone had taken dried spinach bits and sprinkled them all over the mat to give it a little seasoning.

It was pretty spectacular. She might not be allowed to eat frozen spinach again until she’s potty trained.

(Note: She was wearing a cloth diaper at the time–don’t know what, if any, kind of difference that makes regarding the behavior of the spinach, but wanted to clarify in case someone is wondering how the hell I left my child in a diaper long enough for the poop to start drying–I swear it was only 20 minutes–but a lot more air moves through the cloth ones.)

Update: It has been asked and so I must answer…yes, this lasagna primavera recipe was the culprit.

Fun with Chlorine-Free Diapers!

I have this friend who works full time and loves the idea of cloth diapers but does not love the reality of making them work when her children are going to be spending more time out of the house than in it during the workweek. My post about cloth diapers inspired her to do some serious research comparing prices of chlorine-free diapers to the regular kind, and seeing if she could figure out some deals that would make her feel like buying the more ‘spensive non-chlorine brands was easy enough on the budget to commit to it–since it’s a much earth-friendlier choice than all-chlorine all the time.

She came up with this nifty spreadsheet for starters that breaks down pricing at various stores on a per diaper cost if you use the best standard deals available (bulk, etc.). We plan to keep updating it as we poke around for more information. It’s a work in progress, but what we did notice immediately is that the price difference is not THAT great–if you are somewhat committed to the environment and making a few small sacrifices where you can to do what little you can. I think we expected it to be an “OMG it’s TWICE as much! That’s insane!” kind of thing. But it’s just not. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be if you order wisely!

Update: At some point we will expand on all this to include discussions of the other earth-friendly options, like bio-degradable diapers and “diaper-free” living (which from hereon will be referred to as: “Never-ever-leave-your-house-or-wear-clothes-that-can’t-get-peed-on” living).

Update 2: Until then, this article nearly does it for us!

Fun with Cloth Diapers!

Before the arrival of the li’l one, we talked with some friends who were living the dream–all cloth diapers all the time. We expressed an interest in doing the same, so they referred us to this website: www.greenmountaindiapers.com–which has more helpful information than I ever really needed to know even existed about cloth diapers and the options available.

After WAY too much research about the different types/approaches (warning: for me this step was NOT simple–but perhaps that is my own personal problem with the paradox of choice, which is why I try to AVOID situations that present too many options in the first place!), I settled on a “plan.”

It involved the purchase of the following items:

2 dozen small yellow pre-folds: $48
10 infant fitted diapers: $80
5 small hemp doublers: $15
4 small super-snap covers: $44
1 dozen two-sided wipes: $13

And let’s not forget, a bottle of Charlie’s Soap for cleaning all of this stuff: $20

That’s a grand total of $220. Ouch.

But as I placed the order I told myself that I would be saving money in the long run because I would be using far fewer disposable diapers. On top of that, I would not be adding the li’l one’s toxic human waste to landfills…so there’s that eco-feel-good factor, too, of course, which is worth a small financial sacrifice on our part.

Now, to parse out the “savings” if there are any, in more detail. This becomes a fairly difficult task because it depends on many factors that vary person-to-person. For instance, do I calculate the savings based on the very cheapest diapers available (on-sale with a coupon!), or on the more expensive chlorine-free option (that of course never go on sale) that I try to buy when I can? Also, every person’s child grows at a different rate–in our case we have gotten a lot more use out of these “small” sizes without having to pay for an upgrade yet because the babe has doggedly remained in the 5th percentile all this time. Many other kids would have grown out of these in a matter of months, however, thus requiring another $100 investment in fresh supplies. Also, clearly the savings are greater if you exclusively use the cloth, which we have not done due to the kiddo starting daycare part-time at 3 mos. The only thing I hate more than inconveniencing myself is inconveniencing others, so I was not about to demand that her sitter go cloth for us.

So, understanding that any calculation is subject to quite a lot of variance depending on your situation, I will do my best ballparking here.

Let’s assume that each disposable diaper you use costs twenty cents. (That number comes from buying a carton of 200 Luvs brand diapers at Target for $40.) Let’s assume that you use an average of 7 disposables per day. That brings you to about $10/week in diaper costs. At that rate, it would take 22 weeks for you to come out even on your initial investment if you were using all-cloth-all-the-time. And that’s not considering the cost of washing/drying all those diapers, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms. If I estimate that each load of wash costs $.75 and I wash the diapers 2x/week, that’s another $6/month in cloth costs. Which means it will take until week 26 for the costs to actually meet up. By then the average person would definitely have already had to buy more diapers in the next size up to accommodate their growing child.

Of course, you could also consider the fact that you will be able to use these supplies again for subsequent children–so maybe I have not saved myself anything this time around, but by next time I will not need to spend ANY money on the cloth. So there’s that at least, as long as you’re planning on having more than one kid!

But what of the environmental value? In the past six months, you just threw 1,176 fewer diapers full of human waste into a landfill! (Holy crap, that’s a lot of diapers!) Then again, you also just did a lot of extra laundry, using up resources like water and electricity. Then again, the carbon footprint of CREATING all those disposable diapers is heavy, too.

In the end, I found this article to be fairly thorough in its weighing of the comparative and controversial costs of each–and for myself concluded that cloth probably eeks out disposable in terms of environmentally-conscious choices, if not necessarily in terms of your budget. Fortunately, the article also very kindly reminded me that HAVING A BABY in the first place was the selfish, environmentally destructive variable that truly matters most in the whole equation.

DAMNIT!!!