Toxic Carseats

Here are 2 articles I found.
Carseats save lives. Did you hear about the Evanflo recall?
We have Britax Marathon.
http://healthycar.org/documents/healthycarseatguide07.pdf
http://www.buffalonews.com/nationalworld/national/story/79794.html

Household Toxics

Ok, so check out this site: kids-health.net
I was at one of those events where Avon, Tupperware, Cookie Lee, etc were in a big room showing off their stuff.
Well, this group had a table. I met both ladies. One of them was pregnant! Cool!
Anyway, they do presentations over the phone or on the computer.
I also asked if they wouldn't mind coming and doing a presentation at a home in-front of a bunch of women. They said they can. Would you be interested?
They had on hand the different types of plastic baby bottles, cups, etc and saying which # plastic was dangerous for babies and kids to drink from, etc...
I also got 2 phamplets "Please protect yourself from household toxics" and "Let's stop poisoning our Children!"
I thought this would go in-hand with my medical side of things, as we had discussed at our first meeting.

Reducing the number of toys with batteries

Our house will be a little quieter now...

We did a toy purge today. As I'm sure all you parents know, it's an overwhelming task. Part of us feels bad taking any of their toys away, but if we don't go through them every now and then they just become clutter. So while the boys were napping Calvin and I started the dreaded task of sorting the toys. How should we decided which ones to get rid of? Well Calvin had a great idea, he said, "let's get rid of the most annoying ones first." So we made a pile of the most annoying ones, and guess what? They ALL had batteries.

I've been thinking a lot about toys today. Emily's email earlier today (I forwarded it to some of you, but if not here is the interesting link, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10000192&sc=emaf) got me thinking more about the kind of toys we have in the house. The link is to an NPR interview with the author of Buy Buy Baby. The whole topic of kids and consumerism is something I want to learn more about.

I have a lot of thoughts swirling around right now and I want to keep this related to being green... Voluntary Simplicity is a concept that I have done a lot of reading on in the past and I feel like I am just now, finally really beginning to start to align my life in that direction.

Yes, getting rid of some annoying toys is a small thing. But having less loud battery toys will start to change the "tone" of the boys play time, and hopefully will start to bring some of that simplicity into our house that I crave. And I think that living more simply, and enjoying the simple things in life, is a big part of living green.

Adopt- A -Green Space

I grabbed the flyer at the community center today( I dunno if you read my comment on the other post or not) and it seems like this adopt a green space program may be just what we are looking for!

A quick summary of what it is :
We adopt a space somewhere is Santa Rosa ( Sarah B. I know you don't live here, but would you still be interested?). As a community group (Green Mommies) we would commit to that space for a whole year. We would clean it up, weed, perhaps plants some flowers and just maintain it in general. A month after adopting the site they will put up a metal sign in our space that says "This Green site adopted by Green Mommies of Santa Rosa", or something like that...

I think that this would be a GREAT experience and educational opportunity for all of our kids! It would be fun to meet up at "our" site once in a while and have a clean up day or something like that...

I am really excited about this idea, what are all of your thoughts? It doesn't have to cost any money, just a commitment of time and energy. If there is another program that everyone likes better I am all for that too, I just really like the whole concept.

Teach Children to Love the Earth

In honor of my boy's birthday, today's post is about teaching them to love the earth. Part of loving the earth is doing small things to take care of her. I know that's what we've all been trying to do. At the same time I do this I want to help them to develop earth-friendly habits. It warmed my heart the other day when I had been running the water a bit too long, and David looked at me with a very serious look on his face and said, "Mommy, don't waste the water." The other part of teaching them to love the earth is to let them enjoy the outdoors. I think this includes getting them out into nature as often as possible. Our family plans on making that a priority this summer. In the past I have not been a real enthusiastic camper, but I'm really going to try to get into it, for them. And hey, I bet I'll end up having a great time too. We also want to become a biking family. I think that will be a fun way to enjoy the outdoors more as well.

A couple other things...

The Oprah yesterday on green living was really good. You can check out www.oprah.com for tips if you missed the show.

and

Have a HAPPY EARTH DAY tomorrow!!!