Happy Belated Earth Day!

It appears I am as good at remembering Earth Day in a timely fashion as I am about remembering the birthdays of those I love. (I’m sorry…everyone…for forgetting your birthday…every year.)

Next year we’ll have some sort of month-long thematic celebration and there will be much fanfare and hoopla, I PROMISE. (And if you’re sensing that that pledge is about as realistic as when someone on Lost says “I WILL get you off this island. I PROMISE,” then you, my friend, have a good sense about things.)

But really, isn’t the mere existence of this blog hoopla enough? We are living the dream every day, people. We don’t need no stinkin’ feel-good, pandering holiday.

My Secondhand Baby

No, I didn’t actually pick her up at the consignment shop. But pretty much everything else in her life was passed down to her!

We can look high and low for sustainable products made locally without too much radioactive runoff (and trust me, we will be doing plenty of that here in the next few months!), but the simple fact is that one of the best ways to protect the environment is simply not to buy anything. Ever. Or at least as infrequently as possible. (Btw, this blog is not about how to get us out of a recession–obviously not spending money is highly counter-productive in that sense.)

The great thing (environmentally speaking) about babies is that their needs are few (though we are often told otherwise), and their stages of development fly by extremely fast! Thus most of the products they DO need can be reused, as the average child will not, in most cases, be sleeping in her crib for the 20 years or so that it might take for said crib to deteriorate to an unsafe level of sturdiness.

For my own baby shower, I decided it would be great to try to get as many people to lend, pass down, or buy that baby equipment used as I could. I made a sad little GeoCities webpage (that’s right, kickin’ it 1997-style) that served as my secondhand registry. For the most part, people adhered to it. And many of them were really happy to have a sanctioned way to get rid of the extra baby stuff in their house they were sick of storing and/or wondering what to do with. Guilt-free re-gifting ahoy!

My self-made approach was time-consuming, however, as well as sort of clunky, as I asked guests to email my husband when they got something so that he could remove it from the list. Or tell me to remove it since he’s not-so-quick on the technological uptake.

Well, how handy that a talented friend of mine (with more programming skills than either me or my husband) got so inspired by this idea that he decided to create a website that would do the job for future moms-to-be. It works just like a typical registry–except that you’re using it to request items that were already purchased long ago and now are out there waiting to find their way to you! Brilliant. And oh, so earth-friendly.

Check it out here: www.mysecondhandbaby.com and then go tell your pregnant momma-friends!

More forays into slightly-less-simple territory!

I’ve got another guest post today on my friend Carrie’s blog. Check it out if you’d like to see how I threw/will throw some completely respectable baby-parties without going overboard or causing myself tons of stress!

The most delicious finger-food you’ll ever serve to guests that doesn’t involve bacon

Curried Snow Peas with Peanuts

Ingredients:

24 fresh snow peas

4 ounces cream cheese (softened)

1 and 1/2 Tbsp. mango chutney (I use Major Grey’s)

1/2 tsp. curry powder

1/2 cup dry roasted peanuts chopped fine (can also use honey roasted)

Directions:

1. Remove the strings from the snow peas. Rinse them and pat dry.

2. In a small bowl, beat together the cream cheese, chutney and curry powder until well blended. Place the chopped peanuts in a shallow bowl or soup plate.

3. Spread a small amount of the curried cheese on one end of each snow pea. Then dip end in the peanuts to coat.

(I find that there is enough cream cheese mixture to dollop a “healthy” amount on each end. It can/should cover a good 1/3 or even a bit more of the length of the pea. Actually, they’ll look exactly like those holiday cookies with the chocolate on the ends when they’re finished! But, you know, a lot greener.)

To the death, Entropy!

I have a small obsession with fighting the inevitable forces of man-made entropy. And I’m not just talking in terms of keeping my own house organized. While I do like to keep a general level of order in that realm, I wouldn’t even say that I’m all that compulsive with messes on a day-to-day basis (maybe because I know they I CAN and WILL clean then up eventually, when I’m good and ready). I’m more talking on a global scale. At work, I have ACTUAL, REAL LIFE daydreams about all the rubber band, ink pen, and paperclip production of the world grinding to a sudden halt and forcing all of us to use up the existing office supplies that have gotten lost in the drawers of our desks and long-forgotten supply-cabinet corners. When I walk through the trash-littered streets of my city (I love you for so many reasons, Philadelphia, but the inability of your citizens to place even a small fraction of their garbage into actual trash cans is not one of them), I dream of the day when I will be able to stop time and pick up every last piece of trash and put it all into the appropriate receptacles, thereby launching an unprecedented era of civic responsibility. (In this waste-free utopia, restaurants will also stop stuffing fistfuls of fliers into my door and Chase will stop sending me 5 credit card offers per day.)

So you can only imagine what holidays like Christmas do to my order-seeking sensibilities. The wanton consumerism! The massive amounts of non-recyclable packaging! The influx of pounds upon pounds of additional, mostly unnecessary items into our homes and the world! I realize this makes me sound like a complete scrooge (and certainly like someone who hates America and never wants to see our economy recover), but in many ways, mostly related to a childhood where my mother and a kitchen cross stitching routinely chided us with the old shame and guilt-inducing mid-western phrase, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”, I am one! It’s in my nature to cringe at the new, the expensive, the unnecessary. That’s not to say I don’t partake in those things from time to time, and that I don’t find a way to enjoy it when I do, but it is to say that you can far more frequently find me lamenting my lack of new/decent clothing than actually doing anything to remedy the situation–since for me that process brings with it a different but equal dose of emotional distress.

So what’s a momma to do, now that she’s brought forth into the world an adorable but wholly entropic mini-monster? A mini-monster who just had her first Christmas and is approaching her first birthday and everyone who knows her and loves her wants to shower her with gifts and gifts and GIFTS!

I struggle with this. I feel like it was one thing to put my foot down for my own shower and say, “Only used things, please!” But it feels much more scroogey of me to tell people that no, you shouldn’t give my rosy-cheeked daughter anything for Christmas or her birthday because she doesn’t need it and it just creates more waste/spending in the world and the money could be better used elsewhere. Because really, people aren’t giving her these things because they think she must have them, they want to give her gifts because they love her and they love us–and in our culture this is largely how we demonstrate that love! And after all, it IS nice to have special things from special friends to remind us of that love on a daily basis.

On the other hand, does a girl who already has “everything” really need more of it just because an annual tradition dictates it? We’ve got a world that is already crammed to overflowing with people and junk that those people can’t even be bothered to dispose of properly, and in the grand scheme of things, my family is taking up far more than our fair share of what’s available to go around–when is enough enough?

So I’m going to go out on a short limb for the upcoming birthday. Of course I’ll tell my family and friends who already bought and are excited about a gift for the little gal that we are THRILLED that they thought of her and love her so and that we will cherish said gift always, but I will encourage anyone else who was toying with the idea of a gift to instead give the money to their favorite Haiti-related organization in honor of the birthday girl. And I’ll continue reiterating that used gifts are always welcome and even especially appreciated. My hope is that slowly we can just turn that into the expectation, the “usual” for our family–Christmas and birthdays are for getting just a few very special new things and a few more just as special old things, but mostly for giving our friends and family the opportunity to show their great love for us by doing some good elsewhere in the world. Right now Haiti is an obvious and much-needed target for that good, but I will work to get more personal/creative with it in the future.

I Do…want to make my wedding about more than just me

So for all my whining in an earlier post about my wedding not reflecting my core values blah blah blah (if you haven’t noticed yet I tend towards hyperbole), it was actually not a complete wash. There were still many simple components strewn amidst the non-simple (read: pricey) parts. One was that I did manage to do my wedding registry through this great site started by some college acquaintances of mine. Their premise was hey, there are VAST, UNKNOWABLE quantities of cash being thrown around at these events–maybe we can find a way to painlessly capture a bit of it for some good, lasting causes rather than having it all sunk into a cake that doesn’t even taste that good in the end (and anyway by the time it gets cut everyone is way too drunk to remember to eat it, or to remember eating it).

If you register for your wedding gifts through the I Do Foundation’s partner stores (and they have many of the biggies like Macy’s, Target, etc.), a certain percentage of the purchases go to a charity of your choice. They already have a lot of the most common/popular causes in their system, but you can also get any smaller organization you’d like approved, as long as it’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit. (For example, I raised money for the school I was working for at the time.)

You can decide if you want just the sales percentages to be donated or if you also want to “register” to allow people to give donations as gifts straight to the charity. We offered that option, too, and were thrilled that some people took that route. You can also donate yourself in lieu of favors (which I realize many people do anyway without the website, but I like the way that using I Do Foundation tied it all together for guests as one cohesive start-to-finish approach).

In the end I think we raised about $1800 for our “cause”–a completely respectable chunk of change that would otherwise have just sort of “vanished” into big box stores and shopping malls. Woot!

Keep it simple, stupid!

I am a simple lady. Although in recent years I have given in and started paying more than $10 for my haircuts, and I have tried to invest more time in accessorizing according to the Friday night admonishments I receive from Stacy and Clinton (my kicky Kate Spade purse has pink lining, people!), I still can be found without makeup many days of the week and I can’t ever seem to keep more than one pair of jeans in the house that I actually feel comfortable wearing in public.

I tell you this so that you have some context when I try to explain how woefully unprepared I was three years ago when I passed from the uncomplicated, carefree bliss of single womanhood into the mystical, surprisingly intractable social construct that is WEDDING PLANNING. When I had bothered to envision this momentous step of my life at all, I assumed it would go like most things in my world. My husband-to-be and I would keep it simple, map out some general plans, make a few phone calls, and make it happen. Little did I know that weddings are this living, breathing entity with a mind of their own, and that if you are ill-prepared or not paying attention (or are an overwhelmed and exhausted inner-city teacher), your low-key celebration can turn into a recipe for bridezilla mania!

This is not to say that I don’t now appreciate having a Kitchen-Aid handy and all, it’s just that if I could have a do-over, I would have invested more time and vigilance into ensuring that the festivities bucked more of the typical “wedding” stereotypes and reflected more clearly a few of my own core values. But you can’t have a do-over (well, not if you’re really into your current husband, which I am). What I realized I DID have, however, was another chance with the next BIG event in the average woman’s life—the arrival of the first baby.

This time I would be prepared! I would take charge and preemptively simplify at every step possible. I started by trading my high-stress 60-hour-per-week teaching job for some low-stress part-time desk-work (like, is this even WORK?). Then I decided the next step would be avoiding at all costs having a baby shower that would drown me and my growing belly in the tell-tale piles of boxes, bows and ribbons that to me scream, “AMERICAN BABIES MUST HAVE ONE OF EVERYTHING IN THE BABIES-R-US STORE IF THEY ARE TO SURVIVE IN A WORLD OF UNCERTAINTY! WE WILL SHIELD THEM FROM THE CHAOS BY MAKING SURE THEY ARE SURROUNDED BY AS MANY TOP-OF-THE-LINE PLASTIC PRODUCTS AS POSSIBLE!”

Thus it was that when I became pregnant, I began announcing EARLY and OFTEN to anyone who was listening or just had the unfortunate luck to be within earshot that I would only be accepting reused and recycled items as baby gifts. To ensure that my wishes were actually followed and that my friends and family didn’t think I was just making idle threats, I made a website explaining as much that could also double as a bootleg “registry” for said used items.

Nearly ten months later, and with everything ready for the new baby, I can proudly say the sum total of “brand new” supplies in my house would probably fit inside two grocery bags. Absolutely everything else has been handed-down, re-gifted, bought at a thrift or consignment store, or lent to us by friends who jumped at the chance to free up storage in their house until their next newborn comes along.

But gathering supplies was just the beginning! Now I’ve got a living, breathing, pooping-machine whose sole purpose on this earth right now seems to be generating dirty clothes and diapers faster than I can even get them off her little body. (Question: how can something so tiny emit so many fluids simultaneously out of so many orifices?!)

So, welcome to my blog, a chronicle of a first-time mom’s part-time pursuit to find cheap, simple ways to lighten her adorable offspring’s imprint on the world.