Green Baby: Skip if you could care less about green living

My friend Jennifer, a life-long vegetarian and animal rights advocate, just started her own company: Mission Savvy (check it out at www.missionsavvy.com). She sells beautiful clothes that raise awareness about animal rights issues.

www.missionsavvy.com

The clothes are also eco-friendly (and expensive for financially strapped people like me...but I'm hoping my 10 year friendship with Jennifer will somehow materialize into this for my birthday next year (when I could actually fit into it). Please, Jen?)

Dewy Day Dress at Mission Savvy

I never knew that she was into the whole "green" movement, but it seems like a perfect fit for her.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about what I can do to make Little Nacho a "green" baby. We want to be committed to making Nacho's home environment as natural and as healthy as possible. There is so much in food (pesticides), toys (lead, cadmium), cleaning products (hormone disruptors), and furniture (formaldehyde) that we don't notice. Now, don't get me wrong, I've grown up around Windex my whole entire life (my mother is a lifelong fan) and she used all the latest and greatest products and it didn't seem to affect me. I'm alright, right? Right??? But, you never know. I could've been 5'5" tall instead of a 5'3" and maybe increased my ACT score by a few points. Who knows.

I've been reading lots of crunchy books and magazines and have come to the realization that there is a whole world of eco-friendly products out there beyond my local Whole Foods store. But guess what. They're expensive. Ridiculously, beyond-the-budget-of-a-full-time-grad-student-living-on-the-good-graces-of-her-boyfriend's-much-larger-salary, atrociously expensive. I mean, sometimes organic stuff costs almost twice as much as regular stuff (regular gerber onesies pack ranges from $6.99 to $9.99 while gerber organic onesies pack ranges from $8.99 to $12.99. Imagine what the price difference on bigger purchase items will be!).

However, not all hope is lost. Living green can certainly be cheaper (and quite possibly easier) than not doing so! For example, Billy and I have made the decision to cloth diaper our babies. What drove us to do that was our finances. We looked at the cost of buying diapers over the course of a baby's infancy and toddlerhood and were appalled. My friend Christy was the first person I'd ever met who cloth diapers her kids. I never knew there were so many families out there who did this. I thought disposables were the only thing out there. I had always grown up picturing myself as a baby in Pampers. However, when I told my mom were going to use cloth diapers (and as I waited for her to question why I decided to do so), she said, Great! I'm a pro. You used to wear cloth diapers. Imagine that.

Anyhow, cloth diapers are expensive to buy. And there's a whole slew of different types of cloth diapers:

Pocket Diapers: Have a waterproof outerlayer and a stay-dry inner layer with a pocket to put in extra stuffing (absorbent inner). Downside, you have to wash the whole thing after each use.

These are a type of all-in-one diapers: they have a waterproof outer, a one-piece inner, and an absorbent insert. Upside: Unless baby has a poop/major blowout, can reuse the outer part and just put in a new inner absorbent layer.

We're considering BumGenius and FuzziBunz diapers.  So, for a pack of 6 BumGenius organic diapers, it costs about $135.00. I know. Heart attack. However, we plan to buy 12 of these (along with extra inserts which are much cheaper) to start off with (along with just a few of the organic newborn disposables). If we love them, we'll augment our stash with gently used diapers from www.myuseddiapers.com, www.diaperswappers.com, and the used section of http://diaperdaisy.com. That's about $400 or so in diapering stuff. But consider that on Amazon right now, Seventh Generation diapers cost $0.22 a diaper. If you change a baby's diaper 7 times a day, that's $43.12 a month, which is $517 a year! So, in less than one year, you've recouped your money's worth in disposables. Plus, if you wanna have another kid, you can reuse them without any of the startup costs! Also, cloth diapering your baby reduces the chances of getting diaper rash and reduces the amount of time Little Nacho's private parts are touching plastic and dioxins (a carcinogen).

But Scarlett, what about WASHING them and all the poop and pee! It's not that bad. We're going to buy a little spray that attaches to the toilet to spray off any solids into the toiletbowl. Then we throw them into a pail and do the laundry. Easy Peasy. And the covers are all brightly colored and adorable. You can even get some with patterns on it.

Anyhow, we're currently transitioning to using all natural products for cleaning in our house. For some things, like dishwashing and laundry, we will have to buy eco-friendly products. But, for such things like window or kitchen cleaners, we'll make our own! My mother always said using vinegar water and newspaper was the best way to clean windows and mirrors. Things such as vinegar, baking soda, and lemon are great to use while cleaning. There are several websites out there that give you recipes for making your own cleaner at home.

Our house is also really, really old. We just put in the swamp cooler (for those of you non-desert folk, it's like an air conditioning unit, but instead, it passes the air over water and cools it and humidifies and cools your house) that's maybe 30 years old. Billy cleaned it and put in natural aspen cooler pads. I still worry about the air quality of the house, so part of our "greening-up" is buying plants that help detoxify the air.

English Ivy

Spider Plant

Dwarf Date Palm

I've been using Aveda products for my hair and some of their makeup products and I really like them. However, Aubrey organics (www.aubrey-organics.com) make fabulous products and their website is fantastic! For baby, we plan to purchase body products from www.californiababy.com and www.usa.weleda.com.

After all of the scare of lead in the paint being used on some child toys, we decided to go back to the basics and buy Little Nacho quality, long-lasting toys that can be cherished for several years. These generally do not include lots of plastic and are probably not battery-operated. I'm not against buying Nacho anything with batteries or made out of plastic (God knows my most favorite toys when I were little were the glow worm and cabbage patch), but we'd like for him to use his imagination and learn from his toys instead of being fixated on a computer screen or the TV for the majority of the day. Websites I've loved so far are www.peacetoys.com, www.babybunz.com, and www.naturalplay.com.

Finally, we've been VERY lucky to have been given lots of lovingly used baby clothing and gear (thanks, Christy and Heather!). I just picked up 4 garbage bags full of infant clothing, a bath sling for Nacho, a Boppy cover, and tons of other stuff. I mean, that's hundreds of dollars saved in baby clothing alone! Most of my maternity clothes was passed down to me from wonderful women that I know and I plan to do the same. It makes me feel great knowing that I don't have to contribute to the baby industry any more than I HAVE to.

Melanie, let's talk about some sort of baby hand-me-down/share system, since Nacho and Little Nico will be twinning it up for the rest of their lives (for those of you who don't know, Melanie is my sister-in-law who is almost 27 weeks pregnant...5 weeks behind me).