Confessions of a pregnant homeschooling greenie

Looking back over my blog, I'm aware that it may be possible to come away with the impression that things like homemade bread and yoghurt are standard fare in our house, that disposable nappies are only reserved for dire emergencies, that we have an extensive and productive garden and that we spend oodles of time immersed in improving books.

Time for a reality check

If these things get blogged about, it is generally because they're so novel and exciting that I want to share them.

Sure, before we were expecting baby#3 I hardly used disposable nappies/diapers, and I cooked from scratch most nights, and I almost never used the clothes drier. But there come times in your life when you just need to *let it go* and do it the easy way.

I had a day about a month ago when I looked at the wet clothes in the washing machine, looked at the bright sunny day outside, and gave in to my exhaustion. The clothes went into the drier because on that day it was honestly a choice between using the drier and leaving the clothes wet in the machine. Since then I confess that the drier has been getting quite a work out.

I also confess that I can't recall precisely the last occasion I used cloth nappies. I know it was within the last few weeks, but I think it was actually Merl who put them on Miss2. It wasn't me!

Tonight for tea we had fried chicken-and-cheese-sausages with tomato sauce (ketchup), and as a token gesture, a corn-on-the-cob each. That was it. No wholesome fresh-dug potatoes, or wholemeal bread, or salad, or anything. Sausages and corn. Miss5 looked at her plate and said "this isn't a very healthy meal, Mum". I replied, "Nope, but it's not too bad - you've got corn, and you can have an apple for dessert."

My microwave is getting quite the workout too.

The 'garden' is currently one bare circle waiting to be planted out, and one circle full of wheat-grass that is overgrowing the valiant struggle for survival of the veggies. And some herbs. Mint mostly.

As for the books, well, we do spend oodles of time immersed in them. They just aren't all 'improving' ones! Miss5 reads tonnes and tonnes of Asterix. I read bulk quantities of historical whodunnits (okay, I do get annoyed if the history is wrong, but they still really are pulp fiction). Merl reads a lot of fantasy/science fiction - some of which is brilliant and 'improving' - some of which is pulp escapism.

We are happy, lazy and messy people. When I get less tired then I will be able to lift our sights up out of bare-minimum housework. But until then, *letting it go* is working quite well for us!


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Nappy Composting Service

Well, it turns out that any disposable nappy can be composted!

School Project Leads to Nappy Compost Business

A Christchurch girl's school science project is being developed into a business thanks to a Rangiora couple, a Canterbury firm and a multi-national company.

In 2003, Natalie Crimp, then 14, scooped an Environment Canterbury prize for her science project on composting dirty disposable nappies.

She shredded the nappies and threw them into a rotating drum with plenty of leaves, turning it regularly and ensuring it was kept warm.

Six weeks later she had compost which could be easily separated from the non-biodegradable plastic...

How cool is that?! Read more...

Zero-waste catch-up

Well, we're not doing so well this week on the whole Zero-waste thing. Miss1 has had a bad nappy rash, which I was attempting to treat with lots of 'nappy off time'. But after 2 days in a row of hunting down where that smell was coming from and inadvertently stepping in it and having to bath a poo-covered baby, wash my shoes and scrub the carpet, I have decided that 3 days of disposables with frequent changes to keep her dry will be better for my sanity, if not the environment! Happy to report that the rash is much better. But I've wiped out about 3 weeks worth of progress as far as waste reduction goes.

I think that we'll go back to using disposables at night - perhaps every second night. She does seem to get quite soggy at night-time in cloth, and if she's eaten something a bit acidic (oranges, tomatoes, yoghurt...) then her poor wee skin takes a hammering.

In other news, I am starting to pull more stuff out from the cellar and list anything vaguely sale-able on TradeMe. Babysteps though - I don't want to get overwhelmed with too much stuff sitting in the house waiting to be sold! Just a couple of items at a time. And I'll freecycle or appropriately donate anything that doesn't sell. Listed this today.

It feels good just to have moved something out of the cellar and to be doing something with it! There is in unbelievable amount of clutter under there - the previous owner was a builder and he stored anything that 'might come in handy one day' under the house. Vast quantities of random bits of wood etc. Also lots of 'empties' - empty boxes, empty sacks, empty bottles, jars, buckets, planter pots... lots of stuff that will go straight to freecycle or a skip I think. Read more...

Look what I made! Woolly leggings!

I used instructions from Joy's Cloth Diapers website. (one additional suggestion I'd make is to do all your seams in a zig-zag to let them stretch a little).

Starting with a $5 woolen jersey from the Op Shop (St Vincent de Paul, for those sticklers for detail), I chopped the sleeves off, and cut them flat. Then I roughly drafted the pattern based on Joy's instructions (tweaking to make it bigger) onto some scrap paper, and just chopped them out! The old sleeve cuffs are now the ankle cuffs, and there's a gusset and everything. I'm extremely chuffed.

The best bit is that they only took me an hour or so to make. Plain leggings take 6 times that long to knit, and I just do not do fairisle.

A few pairs of these will solve our winter trouser shortage for Miss1. So many of the cute little pants that you can get for 1 year olds do not fit over cloth nappies.

Now I just need to come up with something to do with the rest of the jersey. Originally I bought it to make overnaps, but since Dubbin-ing my Down-Undies, I'm back to having 5 that work very well.

The only sad bit is that I used to be able to show off my handiwork to Mum, who used to ooh and aah appropriately. Missing her just sneaks up on me in the middle of all sorts of activities. Read more...

birthday photos

Miss1's birthday was last Monday and the week has gone by so fast I haven't gotten around to posting photos yet. So here they are - just a couple. I'll get some more from my Dad and my Aunt. Hopefully somebody remembered to take a photo with Miss1 and the cake - I completely forgot!

In other news, I found this great site for all about cloth nappies - Boise Cloth Diapers. It's got a great list of all the options, the pros and cons of different fabrics, how to look after the different types of covers, and most usefully, a good troubleshooting page with tips on what to do if your waterproof covers aren't waterproof anymore - which has been a problem in our house! The answer is to get some waterproofing stuff from an outdoors store. (well why didn't I think of that!) So I compromised and used some Dubbin - hopefully it will work as well on PUL as it does on leather! Thanks to Planet Green for the tip.

Am also immoderately pleased to have found the 12th Matthew Bartholomew mystery at the library. Medieval Mystery novels are a weakness of mine. So I will be neglecting my home and children for the next day or so until the mystery is resolved. Fortunately Merl and Miss3 are off to a birthday party this afternoon so that gives me a couple of hours for reading right there!

Oh I miss lying in bed on Saturday mornings and reading for hours and only getting up when I was too hungry to stay in bed. Unspeakable luxury! Read more...

Pic of homemade nappy

Well, here it is - the soaker pad on the left is made of a single flat nappy folded into quarters and then sewn as you can see. It gets folded into three, along the central seams, then inserted into the pocket you can see at the top of the fitted pocket portion.

The fitted bit was made from two flat nappies - two layers each side of the pocket. So baby has 16 layers of flannel to soak up the mess.

The nappy gets put on just like a disposable - the front portion comes up between the legs and the tabs reach around and wrap over at the front, but instead of pins of anything, we just put a sturdy Velcro-fastened overnap over the lot and away she goes.

The main saving from doing it this way is the folding. This set-up will take next to no time to get from the clothes line onto a bottom, whereas the flat nappies by themselves take a little more doing. Folding nappies is Merl's job, so this will free up maybe 15 minutes every 2 to 3 days. Not a huge saving in that light - but I'm thinking of giving some to a friend who has a much lower 'inconvenience tolerance threshold' than we do - this might just tip her over into considering cloth! I'll take some to show her and see what she thinks. Read more...

home-made fitted cloth nappies

Or 'diapers' for those who live in North America.

Today I made some pocket-nappies all by myself :-) Out of some old flat cloth ones that were way too thin to be useful the way we normally fold nappies. I looked up a bunch of different free nappy/diaper patterns online and then figured I could probably manage it from scratch myself.

It's past my bed-time right now, otherwise I'd take some photos and do a big tutorial on how I did it and pass on the free-pattern goodness. Maybe over the weekend.

[Find later blog post with pictures and explanation here]

My friend AB who went into hospital on Wednesday has been told she needs to stay there until the baby is born - up to 11 weeks away! So her son JB will be joining us for three mornings a week until further notice. If you are interested in following her progress and musings while in hospital her Livejournal is here. She's writing a paper diary and her hubby is typing it in for her each evening.

My baby will be Miss1 on Monday, so preparations are afoot. Miss3 decided that she'd like to give her baby sister some 'tiger slippers' for her birthday - so we bought the fabric and yesterday and today we together sewed them up on the machine (Miss3 helping by pushing the 'reverse' button as required). I'll post a photo of them too - after monday, cos they're all wrapped up just now. Used a 'charity pattern' found here.

We've decided that the girls get lots of cool presents from everyone else, so we'll be low-key for birthdays. Something small but special. This year it'll be a name-plaque for her wall and a pre-loved book from the Sally Army store. I'm making the name-plaque - actually painting a store-bought shape and mounting store-bought letters. Mum had bought the letters and given them to the baby for Christmas, so actually getting them mounted on the wall will be quite special.

The birthday is going to be very hard without my Mum. Its just so wrong that she isn't here to see them grow up.


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One week of Zero Waste-wards

This is our waste that is going out for collection in the morning. The plastic tub is for the Recycling collection, the white supermarket bag is our mixed paper, sitting in front of our one cardboard box. The black bag is a 45L Council Rubbish Bag. Tying it up tonight was a breeze - it's already much less full than even a week ago. Perhaps those occasional day-time disposables were more frequent than I thought. I also find that I'm more careful about putting the paper into the paper recycling bag rather than the rubbish bin.

I'll probably find that I'm subconsciously hoarding rubbish in an effort to keep the bag empty - perhaps I'll stumble upon a huge pile of non-recyclable margarine containers behind the bed, or just discover that I can't find the desk anymore because it's hiding under a pile of plastic wrapping papers or something. No doubt the rubbish bag volume will stabilize somewhere above this first 'bag of consciousness', as all the things that should have been discarded this week eventually do find there way out of the house. I am determined that, in the process of trying to keep stuff out of the landfill, that this house will not become the landfill.

Tonight I'm trying the baby in a cloth nappy. Eventually I will probably do this every night, but for now I'm just trying it out. Today I realised that I'd been wanting to use up the disposables we'd already bought before going to cloth at nights, but that's just silly. They will probably get used every so often anyway - it's handy to have one in the car in case of emergencies, and tummy bugs are simply not to be contemplated with cloth (not for this mummy, anyway). If she grows out of the ones that we have, then I can always pass them on to someone else!

I think that just getting rid of disposables will drop us down to one bag every two weeks. The problem will be the smell. Our rubbish tonight is only one week old and it stinks. I forgot to rinse out the meat wrappers, but even then - what will I do about bones? I shall investigate what to do about bones and meat scraps - cos even if I boil them up for stock, I still have the bones, and lots of things I've read have said not to put meat into the compost heap.

Perhaps in the mean time I can have a 'meat waste' bag in the freezer and try to remember to put it in the rubbish bag before putting it out to be collected.

Oh, and one more thing - we're now collecting beer bottle-tops, to make one of those rattly beer-bottle stick things that folk musicians use. I think Miss3 would really like it, and it's one less thing int he rubbish bag. (so far, I've collected 1. We're not big beer drinkers - it could well take us several years to collect enough for a rattly stick thing). Read more...

Zero Waste - can we do it?

Merl gave me this book for Christmas (Teach yourself Green Parenting by Lynoa Cattanach and BabyGROE). On the whole it's a very good, pragmatic book. It's British, which makes it that fraction more culturally accessible to me than US books, and I agreed with almost everything.

Almost. I have some hesitation about the advice given about birthing choices - a first time Mum could definitely come away from a hospital caesarian feeling like a failure if she took that chapter too much to heart - OK, sure, giving birth in your own home and cleaning up afterwards is more 'natural', but then so is dying in childbirth (which people still occasionally do - even in the superduper West). So personally, give me an Independent Midwife-managed hospital birth any day. But each to her own.

Enough of birth politics, however, because the real reason I'm writing about this book is that it has sparked me off on another journey of discovery. What might Zero Waste look like on a family scale? How low can we go?

So, having assimilated the truth that I can bite off more than I can chew, this will not be a 6 week crash landing into the world of fully biodegradable everythings, this is a slow and steady evaluation of our personal waste stream and a sustained and sustainable effort to reduce it. (not very exciting, but there you go - hopefully interesting, if only to myself!).

What do we currently throw out you ask? How big is our waste problem? The broad brush stroke estimate is that if we buy the small City Council rubbish bags (45L) we use one a week, plus our recycling bin, but if we buy the big ones (65L) we use one every second week (or possibly 3 out of 5 weeks). My half-thought-about mostly pulled out of the air goal is maybe a 45L bag every second week? Can we halve our rubbish output?

Already I've identified some things that will need to go (disposable nappies, synthetic nappy wipes) and some things that bear further investigation (how expensive is a hand-cranked paper shredder and does our Council recycle yoghurt pottles or polystyrene meat trays?). The nappies shouldn't be too big an ask - we already use cloth for most of the time, but I put the baby into a disposable at night to keep her drier, and I generally use one if we're going to be out and about for a while for the same reason.

So. Goal for this week - cloth nappies only during the day. No more trusting to petrochemicals and bizarre absorbant gels to keep her dry while I actually leave the house. No more tripping out the door encumbered only with small-bottomed child, one spare nappy, wipes, toys, food, bib, and all MY essential items. Oh no, from now on it is large-bottomed child, wipes, two spare cloth nappies, one spare overnap, one change of clothes, two plastic bags, toys, food, bib etc etc.

Cloth is good, but the poo can be messier.

Oh, and a change-mat for changing pooey pants on other peoples' floors.

It's not as cumbersome as it sounds. Honest. Most of that stuff can just live in the car in case I need it anyway - i do not need to bring the whole lot inside with me everywhere I go. And I did this all the time with Miss3 - it's only with the baby that I've taken up the cheater's option of disposables while out. But I did so enjoy the freedom :-)

But a little footloose environmentally irresponsible freedom is a small sacrifice. And it will be cheaper too - always a good thing in a one-income family!

Now that's looking on the bright side :-) Read more...