Mom Confessions: Eco Edition
I would looooove to be a perfect, attachment parenting, unschooling, chemical-free, organic, natural-living warrior for the environment kind of mom.
Sometimes I’m pretty good. I hang cloth diapers on the clothesline. The girls and I cook homemade play dough on the stovetop, and scent it with food coloring and essential oils. We eat husk cherries straight from the garden. I sew sweet summer party dresses for the girls from thrifted pillowcases, and sew myself a matching skirt.
Sometimes, though, I am very bad. Have you heard of that True Mom Confessions book? Here’s my version, Eco Child’s Play style:
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Sometimes I put a load of wet laundry for the clothesline out on the porch in the morning, then forget about it until it’s just a mound of stiff dried clothes in the afternoon.
When someone has vomited, I bring out my secret stash of disposable disinfectant wipes.
Sometimes I buy nice, local, organic food, then put it in the refrigerator and forget about it until long after it’s spoiled.
At my girls’ birthday parties, we use paper plates and plastic cups.
I buy individually-packaged snacks for the girls to eat when we’re all out of the house.
If the scraps bucket for the compost bin is full, sometimes I’ll just put additional scraps down the garbage disposal until I can make another family member empty the bucket.
I tell my husband that I don’t mow the lawn regularly because I’m too busy doing stuff with the girls, but really it’s because I find mowing with our reel-powered mower hard work.
I don’t usually cook organic for company, because the cheaper ingredients are cheaper.
I use a LOT of Ziploc bags.
I let my husband buy a new TV, even though our old one worked fine, because he didn’t want to have to use a digital converter box. I knew it was a crap excuse, but I wanted a better TV, too.
Any confessions you want to add?
I let all this rain and the overwhelming weeds keep me from having a productive garden this year!
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http://thereluctantcitydweller.blogspot.com
Wonderful post!
When my youngest daughter was an infant (she’s 2 yo now) she had colic. Some of the ways we tried to calm her where not always so eco-friendly. They included: turning the shower on full force and letting it run, taking endless drives to put her to sleep and turning on the dishwasher… with no dishes in it. Shocking, I know and I felt extremely guilty each time I employed one of these methods… well, unless it worked… then I just felt grateful!
“Sometimes I buy nice, local, organic food, then put it in the refrigerator and forget about it until long after it’s spoiled.”
Same here, and more often with non-organic food, I think we lost way too much food…
“I buy individually-packaged snacks for the girls to eat when we’re all out of the house.”
Same here, we buy way too much prepared food, and we really do not cook often… oh and we bought a lot of non-organic baby carrots
Well, here are mines
I use a towel only one times before I wash it!!! But I must say I wear my pants really often before washing it, and my sweater even more…
We don’t compost.
I cannot resist to buy brand-new-non-organic-cotton clothes when I see a major deal.
We sometimes put a recyclable container in the garbage when its all dry and moldy and plain disgusting or very smelly…
We do not have a cloth line, so we use the dryer even in the summer, but we have a frame-thing-that-I-don’t-know-the-word-for it for air drying but we underuse it.
I forgot many more…
I let my son play with the water hose and water running for 20 min. It´s just too cute to watch him play.
I get my coffee from Dunkin Donuts in those awful styrofoam cups instead of brewing my own coffee at home and taking a cup along.
I leave a few lights on in my house when I am not home.
I also use way too many ziploc bags…I just felt bad about it this morning when I was getting my sons lunch ready.
I love True Mom Confessions and I love your take on it. I can envision any of these confessions on that site.
Here’s my ecomom confession: I served bottled water at my son’s recycling-themed birthday party.
There are a lot of things we can’t do in this downtown condo
(like having a compost) but we do waste a lot of water. .my daughter loves playing in bathroom sinks for 5-10 mins at a time, a few times a day (when we clean her up after meals.) Hm. We also use ziplock bags though I am trying to stop, hate them.
We do walk everywhere (we don’t drive at all), buy almost entirely local and organic. . .we do crank the AC. Give and take, we all do our best I suppose.
You’ve inspired me to do my own confessions post:
http://missionofmamahood.blogspot.com/2009/07/confessions-of-eco-mommy.html