Vicious Canines Attack BabyG

It happened in Utah, the second to the last day we were there. My cheerful, funny, walky little baby was mauled by what I think were two canines sometime between breakfast in my mother's hotel and lunch. It happened that fast.

What started out as a fever and mild crankiness, evolved into her most painful teething episode yet. It has meant a two hundred percent meltdown from a general feeling of discontent into an outright rage, several times a day, for the last 6 days.

Teething has always been hard for our little one. She refuses to eat anything but breastmilk, she gets diahrrea, she has 100.9 degree fevers, she wakes every couple of hours and requires long bouts of nursing...And these canines, they have been the worst. And I hear the most painful teeth to come in are molars.

I've decided to amass a list of green teething solutions. I'm going to say upfront that BabyG has been eating lots of Infant Motrin because nothing else I tried came close to working for her. We tried Hylands teething tablets, teething bisquits, teething toys.

However, I know there are levels of teething, and I know there are lots of remedies out there I haven't tried, and that might work alone for mild teething or (for us) augment the pain medication. Maybe there's a natural solution that will beat out Motrin...

So this is a general call: What teething remedies have you all used or have you seen used to good effect?

I've heard about: frozen bananas, vegetables, frozen washrags, clove oil. Anybody use any of these methods, or know anything about them? Teething post will be up in a week or so...

Why You Might Not Try To Save $2,000

The ATT&T Lesson: When you called AT&T two months ago to complain about the ever-increasing bill, a young man put you on a new plan to help you save $35 a month. The new plan, it turns out when you get your bill, costs exactly five dollars more than the old one. Because you like the quality of AT&T, you call and ask if you can get their cable internet without the phone. You can! If you also get their cable TV, which will eventually cost you $75 a month. Nobody believes you don't have a television (or that you have one in the attic, in case of emergencies). So you decide to switch to Earthlink cable. When you call to cancel AT&T, they tell you that it will cost you $100 because you were just put onto a new plan that requires a one year contract. You say you weren't informed of a yearlong service contract, that you wouldn't have signed up for one since you were considering the switch to cable for awhile now, and that even if they had told you, they lied about the price. They ask if you if you want to pay the one hundred dollar cancellation fee or keep your service. You ask for the manager. They say it's the weekend, the manager will call you by Wednesday. They have told you this before, about another issue, and you know what they mean is that you should call back on Monday. I haven't had the resolve to do this as of yet.

**Update** 43 minutes into a call in which you speak to 6 different AT&T reps, half of whom think your contract actually expired in August, half of whom think it began in March, you are informed that the manager has to call back because they're backloaded. Turns out it's not only on the weekend you can't talk to a manager, it's everyday.

The Internet Switch Lesson: No matter how proficient you have become in the last twenty years, it will always take at least eight solid hours, usually thirteen, of your time. When the installation guy leaves, for example, you will discover you don't actually have a working connection. The Earthlink call center will help you along and a few days later you will learn a 56k modem is faster than your new Earthlink cable. The Earthlink call center will tell you to unplug your modem and cable connection and restart your computer (the old goat takes more than 5 minutes to restart every time, and throughout this process, you will restart it at least 20 times) and swear your problem is solved. An hour later, you will call the same call center, tell them about the same slow problem. The new call center employee will try a completley different solution that sort of works. Eventually, they will refer you to Time Warner, who installed the service. Time Warner employee will perform all the same tests from your computer that Earthlink did, look at various settings, finally refer you back to Earthlink. At the last second the employee will get a bright idea, have you fix one more thing, and that will work.

The Energy Company Switch Lesson: You sign up for a new service April 16th or so, and get a note back from the Texas Power Commision telling you they've approved the switch for June 15. It takes two months, I guess, to. Um. What???? Whatever. I'm not making any phone calls.

The Bank Switch Lesson: Switch banks before you switch phone companies or you may not have enough life force left to fill out the online application and send it in via snail mail. We are switching from Chase, king of $12 service fees and low interest rates, to EverBank that charges nothing and gives 6% interest on both checking and savings. It's an internet bank...meaning I'll have to send in deposits, but it pays for ATM charges at whatever local bank you make withdrawls.

The Saving $2000 A Year Lesson Ask the internet readers to come up with one. You spend too long trying to think of a pithy aphorism or metaphor, but your brain is in a hateful mood and won't help out.

I Love You Sleeping Worker

Today, for lunch, I ate two sandwiches garnished with dill and chard from the garden. Then I walked back to the office from home. I usually ride my bicycle back, but I had a flat tire and I didn't want to switch out the tube right then. It's about a two mile walk. Probably the most walkable two miles in all of Houston. Nearly the whole way the sidewalk is shaded by oaks and magnolias. I walk down Woodhead street through the lower Montrose over I-59 and into the elite neighborhood near Rice University. The trees over there don't just shade the street, they form perfect canopies. Most of the people outside in that neighborhood are brown like me. They're landscaping or taking white babies out for a stroll. Of course, I don't pass among them. My spectacles and at least a dozen other markers give me away as someone walking to the campus.

After I crossed Rice boulevard and entered the campus, I noticed a facilities worker sitting on the grass by the side of the road. He had his back resting against a tree and his legs stretched out in front of him. I thought he might be sleeping, but I couldn't tell because of his sunglasses. From about ten feet away, I heard him snoring. As I passed him, I saw a line of saliva hanging from his lip, gleaming brightly because the sun was hitting it at just the right angle. I thought about taking a picture of him with my cell phone camera, but was afraid that even allowing my camera to record the light bouncing of his body would ruin the perfection of his sleep. So I just kept walking and smiled for five minutes straight.

Economics for Humans by Julie A. Nelson

I was surpised a few years ago when I found out that economics comes from the same root as ecology. The common root is oikos, which is Greek for home or household. Back in the seventeenth centure, if you read a book of oeconomics, you would find dinner recipes, home remedies, and advice on managing expenses. Green Parenting is a 21st century blog of oeconomics in a way. The archives of this blog are largely dominated by our documentation of how we cook, what we throw away, what utility companies we use, and our struggle to share responsibilities. Then all of a sudden, we post about the World Bank or Global Warming. You see, we're harking way back to the oeco- in economics and ecology, like we're ancient Greeks. Call me Aristotle, baby. We're erasing the modern boundary between the public and private, the domestic and the civic, the personal and the political. Agoramania in the blogosphere!

A book called Economics for Humans helped me think through what it means to question the separation of what goes on inside a home and what happens in the global economy. Published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, the book moves from economic history to the challenges people in the United States face now. I think what's most interesting about the book is that Nelson takes aim at right-wingers who think the marketplace solves all problems and "her friends," who believe that corporations are intrinsicly evil. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Probusiness, neoliberal zealots firmly believe that the economy is a machine. They assert that any direct concern with ethics or care is unnecessary because a market economy automatically serves the common good. Antimarket critics also believe the economy is a machine. They assert that ethics and care are impossible within capitalism since the system automatically runs on the energy of self-interest and greed. Either way, the metaphor forces us to divorce the "body" concerns of economic provisioning for our lives from the "soul" concerns of social responsibility and caring relationships. The economy-as-machine metaphor has blinded us to the real-world qualities that make humans work and care and organizations run.

Non-profits, she argues, are not necessarily the instruments of good. Nelson gives examples of corporate hospitals that provide better benefits to their workers than non-profit hospitals. She's extremely critical of lefties who think of non-profits, churches, and volunteers as mop-up operations for the inevitable destruction of mega-multinational corporations. She's also critical of those who insist that government has no place in making sure everyone has access to childcare, eldercare, quality healthcare, and paid leave. She argues that the first step to addressing the caring crisis - a crisis I believe most parents are acutely aware - is to jettison the economy-as-machine metaphor. Then we'll be able imagine pragmatic solutions that involve corporations, non-profits, government, and individual responsibility.

I talked to an economist who specializes in the study of big corporations about Nelson's arguments. This person said, "We know the economy isn't a machine, that's Introduction to Economics stuff." Maybe that's true, but it's that Intro to Econ rhetoric that actually drives the public debate. Most of our politicians and journalists didn't get past that intro class. So I would recommend this book, along with The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre, for anyone who wants to learn a humanist and feminist economics.

TIme for Change at the World Bank

I find this last video released by Avaaz.org, as part of its Fire Wolfowitz Campaign, less slick than their past videos on climate change and the Israel Palestine conflict. Since I don't watch The Office television show, the jokes don't quite click. What I love about the video, though, is how it portrays how absurdity of the current situation at the World Bank.

Some of my friends think that the World Bank is an inherently evil organization, designed from the beginning to maintain a world of economic inequality. Only the wealthy benefit from World Bank loans, they say. Although the loans are supposedly given to spur economic development, poor nations are burdened with debt and the terms of the loans prevent governments from spending on healthcare, education, and other kinds of social provisioning. I believe, however, that the World Bank is an institution that often funds studies and programs that help lift entire populations out of terrible deprivation. If World Bank governance were improved so that the interests of marginalized groups were considered more substantively and loans were administered in a way that did not constrain nations from pursuing solutions right for their particular economic challenges, the World Bank could be a central part of a successful struggle for a more just and peaceful world.

Instead of working towards a reformed World Bank, we have a sex scandal. Paul Wolfowitz, who Bush appointed as its president, has embroiled the organization in controversy. Here is a man whose last job was to design a unilateral invasion of Iraq. At the World Bank, on the basis of his anti-corruption campaign, he bypassed the normal processes at the bank and cut off funds to poor countries. At the same time, he arranged for his own girlfriend at the bank to receive a huge raise. He really should be fired. Parents around the world should - in solidarity with the mothers, fathers, and children whose lives are profoundly affected by the World Bank but cannot make their own voices heard - demand that the World Bank board fire Wolfowitz. Then we should demand a real change in how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are governed.

Baby Steps to Green Parenting

After dinner last night, BabyG walked for the first time. That is, in my opinion, she walked for the first time. It has been a longer process for her than for her toddler friends. She has taken steps before. She has pushed her stroller for blocks. She has traversed without assistance the distance between the couches, but that’s not “walking for the first time.” We always had to get her started and encourage her. This evening I took BabyG to the Rothko Chapel. There’s a large paved area between the Broken Obelisk and the chapel itself. At first, I held BabyG’s hand as we walked around this area together, but then she let go of her own accord. She walked towards the pool around the obelisk. When she fell and whined, I offered my hand and she said, “No!” Then she got up, brought her feet closer together, and began walking again. She fell and raised herself up. She walked for some twenty minutes occasionally asking to rest on a bench. A couple of time, I took off her shoes and let her dangle her feet in the pool.

I feel hugely relieved that she's walking. It's one of those montage moments in a syrupy movie, flashy through scenes from the beginning - MaGreen moaning in the delivery room, BabyG rolling over in her Grandpa's house, BabyG learning to toss her wrist from Uncle Chuck...Who was I two years before BabyG was born, back when we started this blog? I'm astonished by how much we've changed. Astonished, and a little self-congratulatory. Also, I recently read Christine Gardner's post called Baby Steps to Green Parenting on Gristmill, which got me thinking about making a list of steps. So here we go. In honor of BabyG's steps, I offer five baby steps to Green Parenting.

1) Seek Complementarity

Consider what ideals or principles you have besides environmentalism. For us, gender equality in our own household over the long term is a must. So is living joyful, creative, and expressive lives. That means for everyone – MaGreen, BabyG, and me. Amartya Sen’s capability approach and Martha Nussbaum’s working list of core capabilities helped me think more completely about just what our goals are. Then, when we considered our lifestyle and our choices as parents, we looked for things that matched up with all our hopes, i.e. complementarity. For example, buying our food at the local co-op and at nearby farmers’ markets means tastier and cheaper food, a stronger sense of community with our neighbors, and a lower impact on the environment. If you find yourself consistently using words like “trade-off” or “sacrifice,” you may not be on the right track. I think looking for complementarity is the best way to begin.

2) Baby Proof Grandma Style

Every handbook on parenting says that you should go through your house and lock up your poisonous cleaning supplies. Why just lock up your poisons? Why are there poisons in our houses at all? The more MaGreen read up on what our cleaning supplies were made of, the more horrified she was. Then she started to have fun making cleaning supplies from vinegar and baking soda like her Grandma used to. I’ve learned from MaGreen’s playful experimentation. I never thought cleaning supplies could take on so much meaning. Check out MaGreen’s guide to cleaning supplies. I think this is another good example of complementarity. Your wallet wins, the health of your whole family wins, the environment wins, and you don’t have to commit much more time than “non-Green Parents” do to baby-proofing.

3) Celebrate Often

Every day I hear about some innovative way to celebrate holidays, birthdays, achievements, recoveries, or whatever else in environmentally and socially responsible ways. The reason I think that celebrating is central to Green Parenting is that it can build communities of love and support around you, it can reaffirm your identities, and it can transform your lifestyle, all while you enjoy yourself. For example, check out our gift giving guide and MaGreen’s compilation of 1st-year birthday cake recipes.

4) Try Lazy Composting and Incompetent Gardening

One of my favorite schools of environmentalist thought is permaculture. I’ve never read a permaculture book, attended a permaculture class, or joined a permaculture society, but I think I understand its central tenet – tap into the ecological systems around you. What I like is that it sounds like an advanced form of laziness and stinginess to me. For example, when we wanted to compost, we didn’t buy an $80 bin from Home Depot. We just started to bury our peelings in the backyard. I found digging the little holes strangely satisfying. Then we became more confident, so we leaned some shipping pallets we found in a lot against each other and we piled all our yard waste, along with our peelings, in this make-shift bin. The compost didn’t get hot. No teaming masses of red worms. We didn’t even turn it regularly. But just about anywhere except the desert, if you leave out a pile of clippings and peelings, it turns to black gold in a few months.

Once you have compost, no reason not to start gardening. I didn’t have any experience gardening, so I really messed up most of my plantings. But the few plants that have defied my incompetence gave us wonderful food and an intense feeling of satisfaction. Between the decay of composting and the birth of gardening, there’s a good chance you might find what you need as an overburdened parent. I hope you can hear complementarity bells ringing. If you want to read more, check out our collection of writing on composting and gardening.

5) Join Collective Actions

Hate to say it, but your own actions and those of your family will not save us from environmental collapse or propel us into a utopic world of social justice. One of the main reasons to systematically green your lifestyle is that your choices connect you with other people. Half the friends we have, we met through activism. And networks of individuals can change social norms. We can, as groups, force governments and multi-national institutions to change the rules of production, trade, consumption, and waste. Sierra Club and Avaaz.org online petitions count, but a meeting in the park with your neighbors who support light rail is better. Avoid caustic activists, but don’t give up on activism.

These five points are not exhaustive, of course. I’m just suggesting some initial steps. Start with what’s easiest and most obvious, then go step by step. I’m completely amazed by how much we have changed since MaGreen became pregnant. BabyG has motivated us – not to “sacrifice” or “give up luxuries” – but to actually pay attention to our well-being. We haven't arrived, but we're walking.

Care of Objects: Guest Post by Cake

It is tempting for me to view people who are overly concerned with keeping things clean and in good shape as being materialistic. I often see people who are meticulous about caring for their cars, or who fuss over stains on clothes as being too fussy. After all, objects are meant to be used, not preserved.

True enough, but as I was preparing some baby clothes to take to my favorite consignment shop, I started to think differently. When I keep clothes and other items that I only plan to use for a short length of time (most baby items fall into this category) clean and in good condition, I prolong their lifespan.



I can take them to a thrift store or consignment shop, and someone else can use them and maybe even pass them on one more time. Sure, I can take stained clothes to the thrift store, and they will accept them, but will they actually end up getting used by someone else if they are trashed? Most of us who purchase used items want them to be in pretty good shape. This also holds true when I pass things on to friends. I don’t want to give away stained or torn clothes. It’s insulting.

So I have started to view the act of caring for our possessions as an ecological gesture--a form of resistance to the throw-away consumer culture. As a result, I’ve been learning about stain removal and I might even get around to washing the car one of these days.

Hungry for more Cake? Check out her very toothsome blog Whistling Leaf Blower.

Dadaism isn't Dead

For two years our doors looked like this:

I tried to install new knobs, but the tubular latches that come with new knobs were too large for the little hole on the side of the door they were supposed to go through. Eventually, I bought a special file that fits in a drill, and enlarged the hole. I created a little pile of actual sawdust in the process: MA-CHO!

But unsuccessful: I soon discovered that the big hole the door knob goes through was too big to install modern handles in. I needed a giant backplate instead of the tiny round one. After a fruitless six months search, my dad said he'd had the same problem, I should go to Lowes.

When I went to Lowes for the 90th time in search of backplates -- oh, yes, I had gone and not found any many times before -- I found them immediately because I was channeling my father. He would think what I had failed to: I need a giant backplate, and if the the only big backplate the store carries is a crazy, giant sized rectangle meant for a door with an old fashioned key lock, that's what I'm looking for.

I tossed several backplates into my cart, browsed my way back towards the counter, and we have finally arrived at the story I intended to tell:

I found myself, at Lowes, in the large powertool section. I was searching for water pressure washers. Some seventy or eighty year old white man came up to me and said, "You finding it?"

No I said, asked where the power washers were, and noticed his hedging and confused body language. "Oh, I'm sorry!" I said, simulaneously realizing he had no Lowes uniform and noticing his wife was behind him, checking out the rotary saws, "You're just another customer. I thought you worked here but you were just being friendly!"

"Yes, I am friendly!" he nodded, looking relieved. But I was a bit flustered, I am terrible at chatting with nice people in stores, it makes me nervous. So I was trying to flee -- one of the 200 main reasons I didn't become a General.

"Are you a member of that group?" he said as I turned away. He motioned towards my Code Pink, Women For Peace T-Shirt.

In Texas, you never know where a question like that might take you. Friendly old men in mega-hardware stores could swing either directio on the political scale, but "that group" is particularly ominous phrasing. The only thing worse than making small talk with a friendly old man in a store would be watching the friendly old man transform into a raving lunatic. In the power tool section of the store.

So, again, he says: "Are you a member of that [Code Pink, Women for Peace] group?"

And so I say about the most nonsensical thing possible: "Guess we all are, bye."

I know, I know. We all are what? Women? For Peace? Members of Code Pink. I was five or six steps away from him, turned towards the lighting aisle, but still tuned into his voice when I heard him say in this voice that sounded totally baffled but convinced:

"We sure are!"

It was good to agree, but what were we agreeing on?

An Ode to the Two-Bedroom Apartment

We must cull
what our lives,
and your walls,
cannot fit.
Room one,
room two.
Where I had a desk,
the baby sleeps,
so I write on the bed.
I must cherish
the multifunctional.
Not even room
for self-hate,
you therapist.

You don’t know
about my drawer,
the bottom one,
where I keep
useless things,
expired IDs,
campaign buttons,
and cassette tapes,
in sweet defiance
of your parsimony.

Opposite Day

I had a long day and missed the bus home, the last bus for the night. MaGreen had to pick me up. We didn't get to the apartment until ten pm. No time to cook, so we bought veggie burgers, french fries, and a Coke from the Burger King drive through.

BabyG enjoyed the break from being an exemplar of green.



She insisted that the cat try out this strange and exciting lifestyle her parents have somehow neglected introducing to her.



Here she is totally blissed out on ketchup and french fries.



May the Green Goddess forgive us.

O Quandary, Thy Name Is Electricity

I have been a Green Mountain Energy (GME) subscriber since before meeting GreenDaddy. I love getting the monthly bill that tells me that by using 404 Kilowat hours of wind electricity, I have saved 593 pounds of C02 Emissions from being released into the atmosphere -- the equivalent of 659 automobile miles not driven.

But in the excavation of our energy costs, it turns out we're paying a lot of money for the 100% wind energy. The average amount we pay, per month, is 17.2¢ KWh. If we went for the cheapest power company in Houston, we'd be paying about 11.2¢ KWh -- a difference of upwards of $40 per month or $480 a year.

So it feels good not dumping coal into the atmosphere, and bad thinking about how GME claims to cost the same as Reliant, the region's major power source. The truth is, there is no energy in Houston that costs as much as 100% wind from Green Mountain. I went to GME's website to research what was going on, and realized the deal that costs the same as Reliant is not 100% wind energy derived: it is 90% water/dam energy and 10% wind. Both are renewable energy sources, unlike coal, and if you sign up for a year contract, this plan is 14.3¢ kWh.


I would prefer dams to coal, but still. I hail from Utah, the land of many incredible, historic, unusual canyons erased forever by dams -- usually created to create recreational lakes. I grew up reading Edward Abbey. Dam energy isn't the renewable source I prefer...though, it certainly helps the budget out.

As a last resort to using dammed water, I sought out other electric companies in the area using 100% wind, thinking I wouldn't find any. But it turns out there are a few 100% wind plan offers including:

Commerce Energy: 14.8¢ kWh
Reliant: 15.4¢ KWh
Spark: 13.7¢ KWh

So my quandary is this:

I think:

Aren't these companies able to offer a reduced 100% wind rate because the majority of their sales are from coal, and the coal energy people offset the price of my wind?
Isn't it because of companies like GME, who invest money in alternative energy technologies, that these traditional providers are entering the green market?

And at the same time...Isn't it the goal of green energy to induce the mainstream providers to include green options...and eventually, to offer soley the green? So shouldn't I let these 'dirty' companies know I value their green options?

And at the same time...Shouldn't I support GME, who invests in soley green technologies. If they go out of business, what incentives do the others have to keep providing green solutions?

And at the same time...Shouldn't GME figure out a way to be more competitive in this market?

I don't know what to do. I do know we need to spend less on electricity. Of course, we're going to work on making the house itself more efficient, but I also want an efficient energy company.

So I'm trying to decide between 100% wind energy, my preferred energy source, from Spark and 100% renewable energy, mostly dammed water based, from my preferred provider GME.

Anybody have any information that might tip the scales of my indecision one way or the other?

Seder

Robin, the illustrious author of The Other Mother, and her partner, Marcia, had us over for Passover Seder last week. I’d never been to a Passover Seder before and didn’t have any expectations ahead of time. At first, BabyG was happily dazed by the company of the other children – Pearl, Carrie, and Miles – and after about fifteen minutes she started playing. Robin and Marcia told us that they would keep the Passover ceremony short and child-friendly. Their tone was reassuring, as if I was thinking, “G-d, I hope it’s not going to be one of those long ones,” which I wasn’t thinking since I’d never been to one.



We all sat in a circle on the floor around a platter, in which several kinds of food were arranged. I can’t recall the ceremony exactly, but I remember eggs, parsley, horseradish, a sweet mix of apples and nuts, unleavened bread, a chicken bone, and wine. (I hope I didn’t miss anything.) Robin explained that each food had a symbolic significance connected to the Jews fleeing slavery in Egypt. Actually, she started off by explaining that Passover is for all people, not just Jews. All groups of people, she said, have experienced different high and lows in their histories. Then as we ate each kind of food, she explained how we might understand its significance. All this discourse took place in English. Later, when we sat down at the dinner table, Robin led the recitation of a few Hebrew prayers.



Though we apparently experienced an abbreviated Seder ritual, I found it very meaningful. Hindu rituals are almost never performed in English. Our wedding sacrament, for example, was in Sanskrit. I hope one day American Hindus can emulate the way American Jews have woven Hebrew and English together in their ceremonies. And I’m so impressed by the way Robin drew us into her tradition and expressed that tradition in an inclusive way. MaGreen and I have the ambition of doing the same with Holi next year.

Every Day is Kids' Day at the Bayou City Farmers' Market

Two of our friends wrote a great article about a farmer's market in Houston. They go by "keefski" on the internet. We got to know them when we were all organizing peace/anti-war events. They published their farmer's market article on the Houston Indymedia site. I think the article gets right to the core of what Green Parenting can be so I am republishing here. Enjoy!

It’s getting harder to see the food for the forest of non-food items at the big box food chains. Shoppers must weave their baskets around lawn furniture, seasonal displays, greeting cards, toys, and DVDs.



Grocery store shelves are lined with rows and rows of boxes and boxes of bleached out, dead, dyed, depleted substances, that have been “fortified” with "nutrients" defined by The Food and Drug Administration. The same entity that approved Vioxx® and Sacharin®. Packaging and branding are the food industries equivalent to spin and propaganda. The last thing the Agriculture Industrial Complex wants is a consumer who asks questions. What’s really in that colorful box? Where did it come from? How was it grown and should my children be putting it in their mouths?

So where does food come from? For starters, food comes from soil. Healthy soil is very complex. There are fungi that interact with minerals that interact with bacteria that interact with enzymes that interact with birds, beasts and bugs in a way that cannot be duplicated by the FDA’s selective fortification and Big Ag’s chemical fertilizers. The best food comes with the least amount of time between it being in the ground and it landing on your table. Take the quickest trip away from Monsanto’s mutants, Chiquita’s death squad hirelings, Wal-mart’s version of “organic,” and gigantic Dean’s Foods buying up every once-independent dairy farmer. Visit your local farmers’ market. You can put food on your family and have fun doing it. Vendors will gladly give you the dirt on their produce while the overhead PA plays live music. There is fresh coffee, cake and cookies as well as the freshest produce in town. There may even be a baby goat or two frolicking among the bokchoy.

A rainy March 31st was Kids Day at the Houston’s Bayou City Farmer’s Market. Below are pictures from the event.

Little shopper



This little cutie beat the drops in her best rain duds. The woman in orange is holding flowers grown without pesticides or herbicides. The commerical flower industry is a heavy user of both.

Babes at the market



A tuckered out chick gets a gentle tot tickle.

Rabbit


There were ducks, chickens and a rabbit for the kids to visit at the Bayou City Farmers Market annual Kids Day on March 31. But every day is Kids Day where you don’t have Monsanto lurking about.

Cooperative Neighbor Kids



Just a small sample of local produce you can put on your family, includes grapefruit from Pearland, tomatoes, fresh basil and eggs from Weimar, mushrooms from the Sealy area, a bar of handmade soap from Spring and oregano grown by students at Houston’s Kolter Elementary.

This Houston market is located at 3000 Richmond Ave. between Eastside and Kirby, in the back parking lot. Hours are, Saturday from 8:00 am - 12:00 pm, and Wednesdays from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Find a farmer's market near you (United States directory).

Running the Numbers

GreenDaddy is away for the weekend and I've been chasing BabyG around all day...except for the two and half hour nap we stole together. We don't usually do that. Well, she does, but I don't usually go down with her. It's napping weather today though: strong rains, humid.

I don't usually get to spend so much time with BabyG, alone. It's been very lovely, and I have all these things to brag on her about, but I'll save that for a time I'm less lulled by the weather. I'll write a more proper post tomorrow.

Today I thought I'd share images from this art series by Chris Jordan that I've admired for a few weeks now. Just like GreenDaddy, he's running the numbers on consumption...but clearly in a very different way.

Cans Seurat, 2007
60x92" archival inkjet print

Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Skin Deep: It's in the Details

I.

Little Scotty Meek announced one day, out of the blue, that Vaseline is made of petroleum, just like gasoline. I was seven and he was nine. His information launched a heated conversation in which I reminded him that Vaseline neither smells nor looks like gas, and that if it was at all related to it my father surely wouldn’t put it on my lips when they were chapped.

Then came the quest for the bottle of Vaseline, which he pointed out, is also called: “petroleum jelly.” Since we lived in oil country, I knew petroleum was a fancy name for gas, but the new knowledge didn’t trip me up. Plenty of words, I told him, sound the same, but have different meanings. I couldn’t pull the word homonym from my pocket, but I did have examples: board/bored, write/right/right, and every child’s favorite: but and butt.

He wouldn’t concede, so we took the matter to my grandfather, a mechanic, and of course, I lost the argument. After that I refused to use gasoline jelly. No matter what people said, my child’s brain would not allow for the dual use of petrol in our car and on my lips. Lucky for my dad that Scotty didn’t know pajamas, toothpaste, or baby oil, vitamins, and bubble bath were also petroleum products or I’d have had the excuse I’d always needed to be in actuality the naked, dirty, deficient little varmint with rotting teeth that I’ve always been at heart.

II.

Lucky for BabyG, in the last couple of decades knowledge about not only the petroleum, but a host of other chemicals used in bath and body products has almost become mainstream. The likes of the world’s hippies, old-fashioned-recipe-traditionalists, new agers’, yuppies, and power-yoga-enthusiasts expressed so much distress at using these sorts of products that a number of new, more “natural,” often organic products had been called into being.

Of course, plenty of people working in the beauty industry did not relish being left out of the new order of environmentally-friendly upstarts. They realized many people weren’t even sure what they wanted when they bought 'natural'…that the word itself had become a fad. They hired ad executives who concluded something like: petroleum comes from old dinosaur bones: what’s more natural than that?, and then stuck the word natural on all sorts of dangerous, healthy, and not what I would consider "natural" products.

As a green consumer, I thought one simple way to ensure I get more “natural” products, is to shop at stores that are geared toward environmentalism. So for awhile, after our family decided to go green, we shopped at Whole Foods, and bought the exorbitantly priced lotions and toothpastes and shampoos there. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind that just because it’s at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean it’s natural. That’s like thinking buying a product at Safeway’s or Randall’s means its safe. You would like it to be so, but experience suggests you need to take the quest a few steps further.

I googled around until I found recommendations from environmental-friendly sources. But I was dismayed that while many of them told you what major-consumer-brands to avoid, why to avoid them, and what to use instead, they rarely if ever explained what products were used in the making of the ones they touted.

So I got online and researched the sorts or chemicals I definitely wanted to avoid. You’ll note the length of that list if you click on the link. It was a little much for me to carry every time I went to the grocery store, so I settled on just a few of them.

III.

Enter the Environmental Working Group, “a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. focused on safeguarding public health and the environment.” This group spent two years compiling information on almost 15,000 products, and they offer up their findings in an online database called Skin Deep. If you want information on a beauty product not already in the database, you can send the brand in and get it added.

Skin Deep has an incredible database that not only includes information on brands like Crest or Suave, but it covers alternatives like Tom's of Maine, Jason, and Avalon Organics.  It analyzes the numbers of toxins, the number of ingredients that haven't been studied, and the known risks of the toxins that have been studied and comes up with a level of safety: 0 for products that pose no risks, 5 for extraordinarily toxic products.  You can search the database by typing in a brand name you're interested in, or by searching via a general area, like baby shampoos.

Below, I entered "Jason toothpaste," which I switched to when we first went green.



If you click on the product name, you get a long page detailing the particular products analysis, as well as a side bar glance that sums it up.  To the right, is the sidebar that came with the Jason Sea Fresh Spearmint Toothpaste my family has been using awhile.  It took awhile to get used to Jason -- it's a clear gel with a tingly taste totally unlike any toothpaste I'd tried before -- and I wasn't looking forward to switching brands.  I was relieved that although the Sea Fresh Spearmint we were using rated as moderately unsafe, the Sea Fresh Plus Coq-10 rated a whole point lower (go Coq-10!).  The lowest rated toothpaste, Fresh, is made of Umbrian Clay and costs $20 for 4 oz. -- I can get a 4 pack of my Jason Sea Fresh Coq-10 for that.  Its safty rating ties with Burt's Bees, but and lags only behind Fresh, Dr. Bronners, PeelU, Accelerade and Garden of Life. One day I might get sick of shelling out money for toothpaste and revert to using Baking Soda like my dad (but what about fresh breath!?)...but until then, I'll enjoy the days dappling in the oddities of health food toothpastes.

For those of you dying to see a general topic search, the first one I looked up was baby shampoo.  Because while GreenDaddy and I have gone no-poo, Lila is an Aubrey Organics girl.  Here's what I found:



Clearly, I was pleased to see BabyG's was the least toxic on the list...of 18 shampoos, it was only one of two with a low concern rating.  But one thing I like about this list is the surprises: Johnson and Johnson was in the lower 2/3...but still ranked about the same as the "green" brand, Desert Essence.  However, Desert Essence signed a cruelty-free compact, and Johnson & Johnson didn't.  The worst rated shampoos are Gerber, Mustela, and Modern...they got actual red, high risk dots.  

IV.

Admittedly, obsessing over these sorts of things can be loony-bin-making material.  I'm still not sure how bad moderate is, really, or how good low is.  When I look up one of my favorite products and get a long list of the toxins it contains, the ingredients nobody knows anything about since they haven’t been studied, and the final analysis of its safety, I am slightly flummoxed. I am no scientist. I don’t really understand the analysis, but the spirit of the site: which is free, which sometimes recommends big-named-brands over the health-food store brands, I trust. And in this era in which the numberless amount of labels claiming to be natural finally suggests the word "natural" itself has crossed into homonymuous terrain, this might be the closest I’m going to get to understanding what I put in or on my family’s bodies.

A Recent Interview with My One Year Old

My Baby: Daddy, I’m not so sure about the narrative of progress and justice that I gave you in our last interview.

Me: Why not?

My Baby: Last weekend when we stopped by your office, I looked through a copy of the 2007 UNICEF report (pdf download). Just the picture on the cover made me so sad.

Me: I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that picture. That poor mother with her two kids and in the background a train is leaving, like global prosperity is leaving them behind. India’s growth rate may be 9%, but they don’t seem to be benefiting.

My Baby: What’s wrong with the baby in the mommy’s arms? He doesn’t look right to me.

Me: He's underweight. The report says that 78 million children in South Asia alone are underweight.

My Baby: Do you think it is because of the way our global economy is structured so that governments can’t provide social protection for the most vulnerable groups even if there is the political will? Or do you think it is a legacy of colonial exploitation? Or do you think that there is some kind of cultural problem and it’s the values in our South Asian communities that need to change?

Me: I don’t know BabyG. I don’t know. I do know that mommy wants to feed her children well.

My Baby: The girl in the yellow dress looks like she could be my friend. Maybe if we were friends, I could help make sure her family has enough food. We could form an organization that overturns the economic order. Children for a Revolutionary Economic Order – CREO.

Me: That girl is probably very nice. Her dress looks pretty doesn’t it? But I’m not sure you could ever be her friend. There are oceans between you and her. The Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the ocean of difference in your class. She doesn’t have a basket of toys or three shelves of books like you do. And you don’t speak her language either.

My Baby: But things have to change now. I’ll learn her language. Teach it to me.

Me: The UNICEF report says that putting resources into gender equality is the best way to raise children out of deprivation, because women are generally responsible for childrearing and they are more likely to invest in their children’s education and health. If resources are put into achieving gender equality, they say we can get closer to the Millennium Development Goals.

My Baby: Get closer? That family deserves justice now!

Me: So much has to change BabyG for that family and all the families like theirs to have justice. Kofi Annan said it takes time to train teachers and build clinics.

My Baby: Are you crying daddy?

Me: Daddy cries about this kind of thing all the time.