We’re back! (And we brought veggie dip!)
March 23, 2010
Confession: My “couple day” break to catch up turned into a full week because it just so happened that last weekend was Larms’s baby shower! The event was a ton of fun, but basically put us both out of commission for the duration. Although she’s still trying to dig her way out of the pile o’ gifts and I’m still trying to unpack from the trip (I am so bad at transitions it’s not even funny), we’ll do our best to get back to posting–we’ve got a great series on couponing, or rather, our utterly fearless and ridiculously simple lack thereof, lined up for you over the next week.
Until then, I’ll leave you with a recipe from her shower that is delicious, absurdly easy, and yes, comes from Rachel Ray. I know what I’ve posted about her in the past, but as one of my friends put it so accurately, when you shoot out 8 million recipes a year, a few of them are bound to hit the mark.
My Secondhand Baby
February 26, 2010
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!
February 19, 2010
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!
