The Green Family's Further Adventures with No Poo

I know the blog world has been up at nights wondering about the state of my family’s hair, and whether or not we have stayed on the no poo wagon. So here it is, the key to your future good night sleeps: my further adventures in no-pooing (not to be confused with Grasshopper's earlier problems with not being able to poo {solved by putting molasses in her cereal instead of multivitamins w/iron}).

First of all, needed to use the baking soda every day, or my hair would get overly oily, and this dried out my hair, which there is a lot of, but which is thin enough that just looking at a picture of the desert is apt to dry it out. The vinegar rinse helped a little. My hair wasn’t dry the way shampoo makes it – I mean, shampoo strips and dries, whereas baking soda just dried, at the same time it at least left some of the natural oils on my head. Sounds strange, but that’s what happened. Now having these oils has been a blessing: my hair looked fuller, was interested in doing a variety of things its untexured, overly-shampooed state had prevented, and was glossier.

While I liked this effect, there were a few things about using baking soda I disliked. First of all, I wondered if ultimately my hair was even more dry using baking soda than just shampoo. Secondly, it was awkward to take this method travelling -- powders just don’t travel well. Thirdly, it’s awkward having baking soda near water, and showers tend to have a lot of that. Last of all, I felt as tied to baking soda as I had to shampoo, and I was ostensibly trying out the No poo method…and I realized poo was just baking soda in this new reality of mine.

I was considering giving up, which was a hard choice since I liked my textured hair, and so I did what any desperate person does in this situation: googled “no poo” one last time. The second hit was something I hadn’t seen before, an article by Audrey Shulman, a reporter for The Phoenix, in Boston. Her method, which she says is Mexican in origin, is to wipe the left side of your wet head 100 times with a rag, and then the right side of your head 100 times. I’d heard of doing this with a boar’s bristle brush, but that never really worked for me. But since I was at wits’ end, I decided to give her particular method a whack.

I am happy to report that was in November, and since then, I have had a fabulous no-poo experience, devoid of baking soda. When I first started her method, I shampooed twice a week, now I shampoo once a week. This is far better than the baking soda, infinately better than using shampoo.

This is exactly what I do:

I put a wash rag on each hand (one of those rags sewn closed like a mit would be ideal, but I don’t have one.) Standing with my hair under the water, I grab my soaking locks with one rag, pull down, and then grab in the same spot with the other hand. I tried with just one rag and that took too long to get to one hundred, and was actually more awkward – two rags is easier. I do one side, then the other, and I go pretty fast. With the first hundred I try to cover all the hair on the left side of my head, the second hundred, ditto on the right. It takes three or four minutes. Like Ms. Shulman said in her article, my hair feels the way they tell you hair ought to in the TV commercials: soft, conditioned, not too oily, manageable. For zee first time in my life.

I haven’t gotten my act together to make some rinse with my essential oils, for a perfumed coiffure, but figure I will in the near future. Right now my hair smells like nothing, which is fine by me.

Grasshopper, by the way, still uses Aubrey Organics Baby shampoo once or twice a week. In between her hair doesn’t require the washrag cleanse, thank God, because I can’t even imagine trying to convince her two year old self to go for that.

Foogo Stainless Steel Products Review (Sippy Cup, Straw Bottle & Children's Thermos)

A few months a reader named Von announced the forthcoming of Foogo sippys, in the comment section of my Klean Kanteen stainless sippy review. I sent away for review samples, and was pleased to receive a nice packet of ‘foogo’ baby products right before we went to India. Here is the official review that pushes me over the line from ‘mom-concerned-about-safe-sippys’ into ‘part time mom, full time sippy kook expert.’

Finally! Another stainless steel sippy cup! After (three, four thousand?) years of begging for safe sippys there is one more option out there for us. Out of two. I mean, there are now two companies (that I know of) making stainless sippys. Two companies and plenty of information to suggest there is enough interest in the product to support two dozen companies: for example, we get more than 500 hits a month related to the keywords sippy, glass sippy, stainless sippy, safe cup, etc. [In fact, about half of those hits are specifically looking for glass sippys. Ahem. Did you hear me entrepreneurs??!! If that’s how many hits our piddly Green Parenting site gets, can you imagine the number of products you’re busily not making that would be sold if you were? Egads!]

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am here to announce that the people who make thermoses have got themselves into the business of making baby sized ones, which I think is nice. Interesting, too, because they aren’t doing it to satisfy moms paranoid about leaching toxins into baby mouths. They just figured babies were as much in need of thermal containers as the rest of us. They worried about all the germs they discovered in plastic sippys full of milk, on hot days. Thermal sippys, they knew, wouldn’t have that problem.

So they stumbled into the green mom, non-plastic-sippy-fetish market. But that doesn’t mean their product doesn’t offer real competition to its sole competitor.

Pros:

Right off the bat, I’ll say Foogo offers real advantages over Klean Kanteen. The first, most important and obvious factor to me is that they aren’t trying to alter a product made for adults or older kids into something that could be used for a baby. Instead, they are actually designing the product from the outset with a baby in mind. The retrofitting of adult products for babies seems on the very edge of offensive when you think about the $17.95 you drop for the less-than-ideally-designed KK produc, and especially if you remember that they know you're buying it because you don't want your kids drinking out of plastic and there's nothing else out there. I mean, I can see initially retrofitting the adult product. But after that. You know. Make something my kid can hold onto. Don't make me feel like you're poking me when I'm down. Right?

The second advantage of the Foogo is related to the first: it is not one product, it is a line of products including a sippy with handles, a sippy without handles, a sippy-straw flip top thing, and a thermos for kids. The regular sippys look a lot like plastic sippy cups, they’re just made of stainless steel. The larger straw-flip sippy is as tall as the KK, but – and this is key – thin enough for little hands to grasp comfortably.



All this to say: my baby doesn’t look like she has a barrel in her hands when she drinks out of either the sippy or sippy straw cup: she looks like she’s drinking out of a cup that’s just her size. Which makes sense when you dish out $15 (two dollars less than the KK) for a toddler’s drinking vessel.

The third advantage Foogo has is that it is a thermos. If it’s winter and you live in Alaska, like my old friend Derick, you can fill it with warm cider and it will not only stay warm, but it will refrain from becoming a chunk of block ice, which it would not refrain from doing in most every other sippy in the world. If you live in Houston, like my friend myself, you can assure yourself your baby girl is drinking ice water, not boiling water, at the park. No matter where you live, as the Foogo people don't mind stressing, your Foogo is more hygienic for dairy products than any other product available for the little ones.

For all these reasons, I like the Foogo. It’s true that the water that goes to the park in the KK comes back hot, and it doesn’t in a Foogo. My baby can hold the dang cup. These are good, important attributes to a sippy cup.

Cons:

We talked about the half full part of the sippy cup. And I’m sad to report that there are definitely a few different half empty sides (it's not that I can't wrap up a metaphor, it's that I flunked geometry.)

Which is to say: sadly, like the Klean Kanteen, it has a lot of plastic parts. Of course, Thermos has only used the “safe” plastics -- #5, primarily. The spout on the sippy is made of Thermoplastic elastomer which is, the best that I can tell, a rubber of sorts. Many green sites (well, Treehugger) have little tidbits of info about TPE in ads for things they’re selling. TPEs are supposed to be biodegradable, and safer than plastics.

Unlike the Klean Kanteen, however, if you leave water in the Foogo for more than a few hours it starts tasting like plastic. Or TPE. Maybe it’s not a toxic leachy taste as much as an environmentally safe rubber taste: but it’s a bad taste. Especially this happens in the straw container, maybe it’s whatever plastic the straw is that causes it.

Sadly, I say, because I really like the Foogo. Since I do like it, we just keep up on changing out the water. I spend time hoping that “no known hazards” in the #5 plastic means “no hazards” instead of, “Oh, no. Yep. Ooops. There it is. Hazards.” If we’re going out into the searing heat, or if BabyG demands the Foogo, we opt for the KK.

The last annoying thing about the Foogo is this: if you buy a KK you get extra parts in case that little plastic thing that keeps sippys from leaking gets lost in the dishwater. Maybe those extra parts are the extra two dollars. I would pay them because in the life of a toddler’s possession, a tiny round slab of plastic stands a slim chance of lasting longer than two or three months. All parents will need a spare little piece of plastic, why not include a couple spares, like the KK people do?

Mind Blowing Conclusion:

My mom once met a slightly paranoid man who went around muttering all sorts of nutty things, her favorite being: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, kid, but nobody wants to die to get there.” In this land of inventors and entrepreneurs, I can't help noticing everybody wants to make a million bucks, but nobody will listen to the plaintive call of neurotic, maybe…but with reason!...and determined mothers across the planet that says: make me a plastic-free sippy. Day after day on this website the dozens of safer sippy hits coming in tells me somebody oughta.

Really I don’t get why the KK people didn’t figure out a different top. If people are shelling out $5 more for a stainless steel water bottle over a #5 plastic one, why not make stainless steel tops. Or those TPE, environmentally sound rubber tops? The Thermos people, I’m not sure they realized our part of the market exists. It seems to me they could tweak their tops pretty easily and make something more satisfying.

But. Sigh. Both options are better than all bisphenol A plastic. Or all ‘safe’ plastic, even, so far as I’m concerned.

Here is my expert advice on sippy cups: if you have a baby less than 2, go for a Foogo. Baby will be able to hold the cup. Change out the water every couple hours or so. If your baby is over two, and if they’re not jealous of their friends with straw flip containers, go for the Klean Kanteen. Both products are, for different reasons and in their own ways, and in the immortal words of Mary Hume, “almost perfect…but not quite.”

At the Greension we don’t use the plain thermos container so much because we picked up lots of stainless steel tiffins in India, and that’s what most of BabyG's snacks are stored in. They’re less bulky -- but I like the Foogo thermos and think one day it'll come in handy. Right now she’s not so much into soups, she’s more a Cheddar Bunny, Grape, and non-chicken Nugget kind of girl.

Despite our hesitations, we also do use the sippys every day. At least, we did until the little plastic part on the lid of the regular sippy fell off and got lost. I’ll send away for a replacement, but for now that sippy is nothing more than a freewheeling fount of water. Until it broke, BabyG loved it. She also loves the straw-sippy, which we still use every day.

Did I mention that in this land of inventors and entrepreneurs, I can't help noticing everybody wants to make a million bucks, but nobody will listen to the plaintive call of neurotic, maybe…but with reason!...and determined mothers across the planet that says: make me a plastic-free sippy. Day after day on this website the dozens of safer sippy hits coming in tells me somebody oughta.

Frog Nights in Houston

I walked my baby to sleep this evening. She climbed in the stroller when I rolled it out. She knew what kind of ride it would be as she hoisted herself in. It was intrepid of her to venture out with her father as the sun set. I had dressed her in a white long-sleeved shirt and white pants. I smeared the remaining little strips of exposed wrist and ankle with insect repellent. Storms have swept through the city over the past two days leaving big puddles everywhere. This gulley, bayou, and sewer drained swamp-turned-city is saturated. It is one of those nights when you think about the precariousness of our city, how we live on a gigantic concrete platform moored by thousands of oak trees over a heaving lake of clay. Usually when I pass people in the street after dark, they remain silent but this evening everyone said hello, maybe to tacitly acknowledge the beauty of a near flood or else to stave off fear with human voice.

At first, my baby babbled to herself. Then she began to strain against the belts by arching her back. She whined rhythmically, a plaintive kind of chant. I thought I would have to let her out so she could push the stroller herself or toddle across the nearest concrete lot. But all of sudden she was asleep and I realized she had been struggling against her circadian rhythms, trying to reset her own clock with a last burst of energy. The belts held her down, but it was the discipline of her own cells that did her in. I turned around and headed back home.

And then the frogs came out.

I saw dozens. Most leaped into the groundcover and under tree roots as we approached. Some frogs did not startle though. I bent over and looked at them closely as the baby slept.

A runner passed us from behind as I ambled along. I must have looked funny trying to stir up the frogs. He may not have noticed the frogs at all. He was probably too involved in his exercise to think about why I was running the tip of my boot along the puddles. I imagine he focused on his breaths, between which he rushed out a “hello” as he rushed by. I checked my baby and I felt thankful that I had her there, her weight in the stroller, her body heavy in sleep, slowing me down to frog-watching pace. I was glad to be a father fettered by my baby’s dependency.

Today was my first father’s day with my baby. Last year, she was in Salt Lake City with her mother helping Grandma Helen and Grandpa Lou. So I feel like I have a right to share my grandiose thoughts about the state of the world. On my walk, I thought about how vulnerable frogs are to toxins and that it must be a good sign that after all that has been perpetrated on the air, the water, and the land, these frogs have reclaimed one night. I thought about the hopefulness of finding frogs in Houston. I felt that hope in my heart, I felt it radiating in the world.

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?

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 Problem with Natural Parenting

I imagine that many folks who come by this blog think of us, and themselves, as natural parents. It’s a popular category. At least two major parenting magazines use the term “Natural Parenting” or something like it. There’s Natural Parenting and Mothering Magazine: The Magazine of Natural Family Living. There’s also the term “Nature Mom,” which I associate with a mother who is against circumcision, vaccines, pesticide-laden food, and products that use synthetic scents. I also think of nature moms wearing their babies in slings, co-sleeping, breastfeeding at Starbucks, cloth diapering, staying at home, home schooling, hiking, and hiding their TVs in the closet. I’m very, very sympathetic with many of these positions and practices, but not all of them. One reason we have called this blog Green Parenting is to develop new kinds of language to explore some of the difficult decisions where we don’t end up falling in the natural parenting category.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. An article about the effects of lavender, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, made it to the headlines of major US news outlets a couple of weeks ago. (See the WebMD article about it.) I think one reason the story got so much attention is because it exposes a problem with the idea of natural parenting. The article reported that three boys who used lavender products developed breasts and when they stopped using the products their breasts disappeared. Lavender apparently boosts or mimics estrogen while hampering androgens. The findings indicate that lavender, like certain plastics and cosmetics, disrupts the endocrine system.

I don’t think this report should be a huge surprise to people who use lavender products regularly. It’s well known that lavender has a soothing and relaxing effect, which must be because of a rather sophisticated chemical (i.e. hormonal) interaction with our bodies. And it’s also associated with sexuality. So the report basically confirms folk knowledge. I still drink lavender tea. I like to feel relaxed. I guess my testosterone levels need some readjustment on occasion. But I’m not a pubescent boy. My body is not growing rapidly. My cells are not responsive in the same way as a fifteen-year-old’s. Parents have to pay special attention to both natural and synthetic products because children’s bodies are constantly in a state of transformation. If some boy wants breasts, I'm fine with him drinking lots of lavender tea. But we shouldn't fool ourselves about "natural" products.

Going natural does not guarantee good health. Nature can be toxic. Nature includes poisonous plants. Nature includes diseases like polio that cripple thousands of children every year. Naturalness should not exempt products from our careful scrutiny. I know most natural parents know this already. Most readers of Mothering Magazine are not dogmatic or inflexible. We try to be thoughtful, consider multiple sources of information, and balance our decisions. I just would like to see more discussion of how the term “natural” has its limitations.

Gonna Wash that 'Poo Right Out of My Hair

Please see the updated post by clicking on health at the bottom of this post, and finding the new article.

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There’s this line in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about the Pardoner’s smooth hair that drips down in curls, and another about how the cook has a festering sore. Maybe I was smoking too many funny cigarettes in high school, because for many years I not only conflated the two characters, but I grossed out their appearances: I imagined there was a Chaucerian cook who was so disgusting that all the food he cooked was contaminated by his hair that was dripping with greasy, yellow oils and his sore that squirted puss. And sorry to say, this improperly combined, gross, imagined image is the only memory of the Canterbury Tales I took off with me, into later life.

It has come up because I’ve always had a friend or two who has decided to stop using shampoo, or to skip multiple days of shampooing. “Shampoo is just a capitalist consumerist conspiracy,” my friend Winona used to scoff during college. In Houston, my friend Chuck would say a little more humbly, “I find that if I don’t wash my hair, I don’t need pomades.”

For most of my life, I was terribly jealous of the likes of Winona and Chuck. Of people who could skip a day of washing their hair without looking like my nightmarish Chaucerian misread.

What I learned over the years, though, is that no matter what kind of shampoo I have used, throughout my life my hair has behaved more or less the same: it is thin; when shampooed daily, it is thin and brittle; when not shampooed, it looks like I put olive oil in my hair; also, it won’t grow past a certain length; it is flyaway and it never looks healthy. All these facts about my hair lead me to believe I was just another white girl with terrible, mousy, broken hair. Since I’ve read so much about the dangers of the toxins in shampoos, I was forced to buy super expensive shampoos (my favorite: Aubrey’s Organic Baby Shampoo).

And then, about a month ago, I read this article on “No-Pooing” – a name, I confess, I totally disdain. The writer I first read washed his hair with a baking soda solution, and conditioned it with Apple Cider Vinegar. Since I like mixing things together, and there is really nothing I can do to my hair to make it worse, I delved into this No-Pooniverse (can. not. resist. stupid. word. jokes. sorry. ch.).

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No-Poo Log, 2007:

#1: I washed my hair with 1 T. of baking soda dissolved into ¾ cup of water. As per the directions on the sites, I really massaged the solution into my scalp by first massaging around the crown, and then in the center of my head. I used no conditioner.
Result: Very clean, very manageable hair, slightly dry, though.

#2: I read that most people just mix baking soda into a hand paste before using. I tried this. And I also rinsed with 1 T. Apple Cider Vinegar and 1 Cup water.
Result: Hair was oilier than usual, but not gross with oil. It was sort of an interesting texture that held curl, and didn’t look brittle.

#3: I washed with the baking soda paste, again. I read that vinegar rinse should only be used on the ends of hair, and this time, didn’t wash my scalp area with it.
Result: A little less oily than before. I was not completely satisfied, though I already preferred this hair to shampooed hair, because my hair started feeling like, I don’t know, hair. I realized that my old hair felt more synthetic or something.

#4: Some people No-Poo by just skipping shampoo, but using conditioners.
Result: My hair was way too oily. The woman who suggested this was African American, though, and a lot of people on her site found it worked for them. Maybe it just doesn’t work on super fine hair.

#5: For about a week, I tried washing with varying amounts of the baking soda paste, and started skipping the vinegar rinse. I always needed 1 Tbs of Baking Soda: ½ I rubbed onto the top of my head, the other into the back.
Result: Varying degrees of hair feeling more oily than I had become accustomed to. Never hair I could go more than a day without washing, but hair that was much more manageable than it had ever been, previously.

#6: I washed with a lemon juice rinse (1 T Lemon Juice in 1 C water).
Result: Made my hair extra oily, again. But I was starting to worry because I felt like even when my hair felt more oily, it was also drying out the ends of my hair more.

#7: It occurred to me that my hair was the least greasy the day I mixed a T of Baking Soda into ¾ cup water. I had been assuming the paste was strongest in eliminating oil, but decided to test the assumption.
Result: Lo and behold: in the less concentrated version, my hair wasn’t oily at all. When I awoke the next day, even, it wasn’t oily. I didn’t have to wash my hair that day when I showered!

#8: I started using less and less Baking Soda in the ¾ cup of water.
Result: My hair needs about 2 t. full – 1 T. full dries it out.

#9: My hair was not oily everyday, but for the first time in my life, I worried it was overly dry. So I started using the vinegar rinse, and I added some rosemary essential oil – which strengthens and darkens hair.
Result: Voila! Hair not dry, not oily. But I can’t use this vinegar every day: more like every three days.

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There are a few really fabulous No-Poo sites out there. My favorites are BabySlime, and Motowngirl.   Pioneer Thinking offers various hair/skin recipes.  The No-Poo sites explain how there is a long process of figuring out what your hair needs: clearly, I’ve found this to be true. It has been enjoyable, though, experimenting. Now I keep a water-proof container filled with baking soda, a teaspoon, and a measuring cup in the shower.

BabySlime has a lot of recommendations for different rinses. I’m about to mix up a gigantic batch, so I won’t have to make a hair rinse every day. Even on days I don’t use vinegar, I’d like my hair to smell of something, so I’m experimenting w/different essential oils. Daily I’ll use that rinse, and some days I’ll add some vinegar or lemon juice.

And I love washing my hair. Because 2 t. of baking soda a day costs less than half a penny. Because when you actually massage your scalp with baking soda, or with rosemary oil in water, it tingles. Because even though I was totally screwed by shampoos for most of my life, at least I figured it out. Because my hair used to be this terrible, sad fate I would be sealed with forever, and now it is this fabulous, shiny, manageable cool-person hair.

Klean Kanteen Sippy Cup Review

Last year, GreenDaddy’s parents considered retiring early and becoming entrepreneurs: they wanted to manufacture an invention – they hadn’t decided on it yet – in their native India, and then sell in the states. Around this time GreenDaddy and I discovered that there was no such thing as a sippy cup made out of stainless steel, and we thought: that’s it! Mom and Dad can make sippy cups in India, the land of stainless steel innovations!

Why did we care so much about stainless sippy cups? It wasn’t so much they had to be stainless steel, we just didn’t want them to be made out of plastics that leach hormone disruptors into food – we’ve written a lot about this here, and here and here. Our family doesn’t eat off of any plastic substance: all BabyG’s bottles were glass, her high chair is wooden, we store leftovers in glass containers.

When it came to be sippy cup time there was no such thing as a non-plastic one. At first, we opted to teach BabyG to sip from a normal cup, which is fine at the kitchen table, but on long stroller or car rides, she wants a little something to sip, you know? Ergo our dream of getting rich on stainless sippees.

Of course, neither of us were good enough capitalists to do more than email a stainless steel manufacturer in his home state in India. Meanwhile, I regularly googled “non-plastic” sippy cups, and eventually hit up on discussions on the mothering.com forums and Berkley Parents Network announcing rumors of Klean Kanteen’s product. We bought it as soon as it was available.

The Klean Kanteen Sippy Cup costs a pretty penny – around $15 on sale. You can buy a matching, Built NY insulated sleeve and spend $20 on everything. We didn’t buy the sleeve, as $15 is already a hefty price for a sippy cup, but people who did buy it love that it keeps drinks at the temperature you want them, and say it makes them easy to attatch to strollers, etc. I wish I’d gotten one because when it gets hot here, cold water stays cold for about two seconds.

The body of the Klean Kanteen is made from recycled stainless steel, and it doesn’t have an epoxy coating inside. It features an adaptor that changes it from a kid-sized, stainless steel water carrier into a sippy cup. The actual drinking spout is the regular Avent toddler spout, and though we haven’t tried it, I have read that any Avent spout or bottle nipple can be used. I have read a few reviews from customers complaining that the spouts leak, but if they switch to a different Avent spout, that problem goes away. Ours doesn’t leak, though.

Design-wise, I am not the number one fan of the Klean Kanteen. When BabyG first tried to use it, at 9 months old, it was awkward for her to lift the 7 and a quarter inch long canister high enough. At 13 months, it is still awkward. The container is fat at the bottom – regular, adult sized, water bottle fat – and a little thinner at the top, where kids are supposed to grasp it. This means that the greatest weight of the liquid rests in the fat part, and the baby has to pivot that weight around, more or less, from the thin part. I mean, if you had a giant object that was wide and heavy on one side and skinny on the other, you would have troubles picking up the skinny side, too. It's physics.

Moreover, the baby has to tip the bottle extra high to make the water spill from the fat part of the canister “up” into the thinner part. All and all, it just doesn’t make much physical sense. Better if the whole bottle were thin, or there was an easy to grasp part in the middle.

Another feature I don’t like, is how the adaptor that converts the Klean Kanteen from a basic stainless steel water bottle into a sippy cup, is made from #5 polypropylene, as is the actual sippy spout part (which is an ordinary Avent sippy spout top).

Of course, if you’re going to use plastic, #5 is “an okay one” -- meaning it isn’t “known” to leach, but that it is hazardous to make. Bisphenol-A, that hormone disruptor scientists noticed leaching out of plastics #7 (which many baby bottles and sippy cups are made out of!), has not been caught leaching out of polypropylene. At it doesn’t contain the carginogens like plastic # 3 (the plastic pre-wrapped sandwiches, etc) or #6 (Styrofoam) is suspected of carrying.

As somebody who believed all plastics were healthy as no-sugar apple pie until just a couple years back, and who has read that no matter the safety rating, one should never put plastic in their mouth or heat food in plastic, I admit I’m not completely sold on the safety of plastics not “known” to be hazardous.

Still: if you don’t want your baby drinking water or juice or milk or whatever it is you feed her out of materials that are either “not known to be” or “known” to be made out of carcinogens or hormone disruptors, and you really need a sippy cup, none of my complaining matters a single iota: The Klean Kanteen is the ONLY sippy cup that is mostly made out of a non-plastic material.

If water sits in your car on a hot day, it will be touching the stainless steel, not the plastic. And Klean Kanteen never develops that plastic taste, even if you leave the same water in there for a couple days.

I think Klean Kanteen saw the need for the stainless sippy cup, and they converted a product they already had to answer a growing consumer demand. They’re a good company, and I’m grateful they’ve created this product. I think many of the design “flaws” are more results of not actually having designed their “kids cup” to be a “sippy cup” for babies.

However, I’ve been reading around the web, and here and there people have mentioned the existence of stainless steel sippy cups at expos, etc, that are actually designed for toddlers. I bet by the time BabyG is a few years old, there will at least a couple better options. Heck, maybe GreenDaddy and I will visit a stainless steel plant when we visit Gujurat, this summer, and actually become stainless steel sippy moguls ourselves.

Until then, I do recommend the Klean Kanteen, and we will continue to use ours. When I lost the first one, I shelled out the excessive moolah, and bought another. I believe the Klean Kanteen is safer for my baby than the other options available. I'd like it to be more steely. I'd like it to cost less. And yes, it’s awkward -- but, hey, at least in this aspect it’s giving BabyG an early lesson in adapting to the imperfections of the world.

Untitled

I am here to report on the woman who told you to wipe the Windex from your lives, to kick the Comet, to breathe freer with out the Frebreeze, to cleanse your lives of chemical cleaners of all sorts…the green guru who researched natural cleaning alternatives until the pads of her fingers burned and then announced that the smell of vinegar is cleaner than the smell of the “clean” most of us grew up appreciating…who is forcing her cat to forego the Frontline in favor of brewer’s yeast and lemon rinses.  That woman.  The Earthy Avenger.  The Chemical Crusher. Her.  I am here to report she entered willingly into a scuffle with a Rustoleum Tub and Tile refinishing kit and lost.  

She was looking for a new drain plug in a hardware store when the Rustoleum Kit blindsided her with it’s promise of a porcelain sheen.  She imagined herself chopping vegetables in the kitchen, laughing next to a sink glowing with clean.  Her dirty, bluish, stain-magnet of a dull sink would be a distant memory.  Nobody could be depressed in a kitchen with a sink like sunshine.  Her baby would bring baby friends over and say, “Look at that fabulous sink my mommy made.”  That’s the future she deserved, she felt it deep in her bones, as she plopped the Rustoleum Kit into her bag without even checking the long list of toxic hazards it contained.  

Fast forward a few days.  The plummer has already removed her water spouts and the drains.  Baby and Daddy have been sent off to watch a movie at Heather Auntie’s.  The Guru of Green has already scoured her sink, as per directions, with Barkeeper’s Friend and Barkeeper’s Lime Remover.  Her husband calls and tells her to open the kitchen window.  She does.  Then she sands the sink’s surface, and wipes it.  Finally, she is ready for the fun to begin.

Miss No-Toxicity-In-My-House-Pants stands at her trusty kitchen counter with can A, which is a clear liquid that smells like it could contaminate one of the smaller Great Lakes.  She pours can A into can B, which looks like paint.  Together they are thinnish paint with fumes so potent she doesn’t even notice how high she immediately becomes.  She is so high she forgets how she has turned a leaf against hanging out in noxious fumes, and she paints her sink with a baby paint roller.

In the hour before she applies coat two, she feels faint.  Just as she begins dipping the roller into the paint, her neighbors pop over and notice her eyes are glazed.  They prop up a fan in her window, which they open entirely; they make her keep her door open, even though it let in the mosquitoes; they tsk-tsk before leaving her alone to finish the work, which she does.

Afterwards, she escapes the fumes by hiding in her bedroom.  But she doesn’t really escape them.  She thinks of two separate emails she has received from her husband earlier that day, with the subject lines:  WE SHOULD WASH THE CURTAINS (they contain allergens, the body explains) and NO SANDING (of the cabinets, until they are checked for lead).   Her husband is in the middle of a book called, How To Raise Your Children Toxic Free.  He will be arriving any minute, with baby BabyG, who Miss Greeny-Two-Shoes and her husband have long ago agreed not to poison.  

There is too much storage under the bed to be able to hide there, plus, she is finally old enough to realize hiding doesn’t solve anything (especially bad smells).

So calls hubby and asks him to stay away, but now how bad the fumes are.  None of her friends are home, when she tries them, in her hopes hubby will be less angry if she finds a place to sleep for the night ahead of time.  Because the fumes are that bad.  She writes a vague message on her blog until she hear’s hubby calling her from outside the front window.  The baby is crying.  He says the whole backyard is full of fumes.  He knows the names of the fumes, and calls them by name, but he tries very hard not to be very angry, which makes her feel worse.  They end up sleeping on an air mattress in the empty garage apartment behind their home.

But the sink looks really good.

I Am Queen Moron

Sigh.

I'm not hyperbolizing.

Anybody who has been reading this site would justly be terrified by my activites.

But I'm not going to tell you why yet. Gotta wait till tomorrow night, so the extent of my moronicness is fully accomplished.

The person who is closest to guessing what I have done to earn this title wins the first ever Green Parenting contest, and a prize will be forthcoming.

Heather and GreenDaddy are not allowed to guess. Because they know. I am right now cringing because GreenDaddy and BabyG are about to come home and GreenDaddy is going to be freaked.

Gulp.

Sigh.

Green Inventions That Aren't

Since I just got back from Utah, where I could actually smell life in the air as opposed to Houston where I am oppressed by the flatulent odor of hundreds of factories that never stop oozing whatever into the air, I'm wondering just where in the hell is the Sky Vac.

We have rockets, we have airplanes, we have little cameras that can be cranked down into a person's veins, we have chemicals that if released into the air or water would poison a city the size of New York. So why do we sit around marvelling at the genius of our species in air contaminated by factory and motor vehicle feces? Why isn't there a vacuum to clean up all the toxins from the air?

I admit that it would be complicated to create. How to create a large enough machine that wouldn't create as many toxins while it worked as it ate up, for instance. Or, more prosaically, how not to suck up the birds and butterflies.

Still, if there's one thing I've become more certain of as I get older, the world is continents full of really smart people. It seems we not only should be able to suck up the toxins, but that we should be able to convert them to something we need more of. Ozone, chocolate, organic blueberries, something.

Your Baby and the Sewer

The Associated Press published a great story about sewer rats today. It seems a recent study has shown that rats living in sewers have better immune systems than rats raised in clean laboratories. The findings are in line with what has been called the Hygiene Hypothesis. My sister-in-law, who is an allergist at Duke University, told MaGreen and me about this hypothesis a few months back and we keep thinking about it. The basic observation is that children who live in the countryside generally have less allergy problems than kids who live in the city. It’s thought that country kids’ immune systems are challenged by living close to animals -- think hair, poop, germs. City kids’ immune systems don’t have anything to do but overreact to regular things. So the country kids build strong immune systems that attack harmful viruses and bacteria whereas spoiled, squeaky-clean city kids have bored, alienated immune systems that listen to punk rock and freak out over hair balls, wheat, and peanuts.

Dr. William Parker, a Duke doctor who co-authored the study, is quoted as saying, “Your immune system is like the person who lives in the perfect house and has all the food they want, you're going to start worrying about the little things like someone stepping on your flowers.”

When I read that, I started thinking about kids who live in filthy houses with peeling lead paint worrying about where the next meal will come from. Or kids who actually live with rats in sewers. Before I quit the medical track, I went to Ayacucho, Peru and studied an intestinal parasite that children often get from pigs. I remember this mother who brought her little boy who suffered frequent seizures to us. The mother knew that the parasite we were studying could have caused her son’s illness. But as a student researcher I didn’t have the means to get her son treatment, which was one of the experiences that opened my eyes to disease as a primarily political problem not a purely medical one.

I’m straying from my topic, but I guess my point is that we have to find someway to maintain hygiene without alienating our bodies from the world. Eat cheese with mold on it. Don’t wash the pacifier every single time it touches the ground. Camp. Hang out at farms. Take the cellophane off your baby.

[I stole the above picture from http://buy-garbage-pail-kids.com where Garbage Pail Kids merchandise can be bought.]

The Green Virgin and the Toxic Whore

I have spent the last week driving around Salt Lake City. The streets are wide. Every other yard boasts a half dozen rose bushes in full bloom. Even the most mundane of strip malls is set off against the backdrop of the snow-capped Rockies. Little streams – clear and frigid water just melted off the peaks – course through the gridded streets. I look. I admire. But I'm not here as a tourist. I'm here to support my wife and help her take care of our baby during a crisis. As I wrote in my last post, M's stepmother is in the hospital for a failing liver. This morning she had a TIPS shunt placed in her liver to lower the pressure in her veins and seems to be stabilizing, but she is still very sick.

Most of the day goes by in the ICU waiting rooms. We spread out a little blanket on the floor and L. plays there as if she were at home. She kicks and wiggles. She takes naps and wets her diapers. (Sometimes we practice elimination communication, but usually don't.) L. smiles at strangers who gratefully smile back even though their son is hanging onto his life after a motorcycle accident or their mother is struggling for every breadth. The man in the room next to M's stepmother (at the last hospital) had collapsed during a marathon and survived because a bystander performed CPR. His wife had been crying for a day and a half, but when she found out her husband fully recovered she took a liking to L. "Look at all that hair," she said.

Between the hospital visits, I look out at this beautiful city and I think about the Mormons who built it, and the Mormons who live here now. Frankly, I look down on the rigidity of their puritanical beliefs and I'm repulsed by their evangelism. I especially dislike their patriarchal hierarchies and their notions of gender roles. And there is so much silliness to Mormonism, just as there is with other religions, but with Mormons it is fresh and new, not shrouded with centuries of apologetics, so it is easier to laugh at them. For example, a healthy person who drinks an occasional glass of wine with an organic, vegetarian dinner would be violating Mormon standards by drinking alcohol, but a dangerously overweight person eating two pounds of prime rib and washing it down sugar-laden, syrupy sodas is not. They're a bunch of dupes!

Still, there was a principal behind the ban on alcohol, which is that people should not desecrate the body temple by consuming drinks that stimulate and intoxicate. With M's stepmother in the hospital for alcoholism-induced hepatitis, I've been wondering if we're not the dupes and the Mormons have it right. My own family hasn't had any alcoholism issues (as far as I know), which I attribute to the prohibition on alcohol sales in Gujarat and the general taboo on alcohol consumption among Bunyas, Brahmins, and Muslims. So who should be looking down on who? Something is terribly wrong with secular, American culture or else M, L, and I wouldn't be spending all this time in the ICU waiting room.

I have also noticed the strong presence of punks, slackers, hippies, hipsters, and other social groups who, like M's family, have defined themselves in opposition to Mormons. People who are not Mormon really aren't Mormon and they wear that difference boldly. They dye their hair strange colors with a vengeance. They bare their tattoos with great flare. And they drink with gusto. I would not be surprised if the rate of alcoholism among non-Mormons is much higher here than rates in other regions. In other words, is it possible that one group's valorization of purity can, in part, drive the rest of the population to excess?

I suppose I'm just restating the old feminist critique of the virgin/whore binary, but this time I'm doing so with tired-of-the-ICU-waiting-room feeling. At times, I've caught myself mentally composing a big list of everything that is toxic (alcohol, Windex, plastic water bottles, aromatic petrochemicals) and another list of everything that is anti-toxic (composting, gardening, cleaning with vinegar). I just want to look at these lists and know that I've figured the world out, that everything can be divided up, made sense of, and managed so as to maximize my family's and the world's happiness. But I stop myself.

No Shit Toxicity

In late January my paternal parents came to visit the baby for the first time, and we all had a marvelous romp together. On their way out of town they bequeathed our little family with a number of the sort of odd little items I have come to expect from a couple of aging, well-meaning alcoholics: a six pack of ginger ale, half a bottle of wine, Thai food left over from the restaurant next to their hotel, a dress my stepmother never liked and so gave to me, several pairs of black nylons, and a bottle of "odor neutralizing" spray. This post is the chronicle of the life of this last item, which was specifically Renuzit Odor Neutralizer.

For a little historical background, I'll note that I grew up loving the smell of these deoderizers. The cinammon fall blends, the summery citrus, the spring time BabyGc. I associate them with vacations because my parents have reverently saturated every hotel room they've ever stayed in with products akin to the Renuzit, since I can remember. Of course, I can't tell you who they think they're fooling when they try to conceal the Jim Beam/boxed wine/generic cigarette smells (me? the maid? themselves?)...but the consistent insistence that they CAN cover said smells with scented petrochemicals is nonetheless remarkable.

Before today I've written about how a) no matter how foolish I know it is I believe things ought to "smell" clean (foolish because if something were really clean it wouldn't be saturated in a smell); and b) that I dumped out all the family's toxic products last fall JUST IN CASE it might protect BabyG, not because I really believed the chemicals were harmful. Which is to say, I want to be a good mom by creating a safe environment for my child, even as its very difficult for me to believe products I've used all my life are really all that bad.

When my parents came to town and left the Renuzit Odor Neutralizer, then, it wasn't hard to convince myself to ignore all I've learned about toxic chemicals and to decide that using the rest of the bottle of Renuzit wouldn't be such a big deal. It looks environmentally friendly enough...it's not even an aerosol can. It's a spray. Ozone friendly is a good thing, right? I decided that I had been acting irrationally when pregnant, and surely odor neutralizer was harmless.

Well after dying my couch with beet juice, it smelled for a few days. I decided to neutralize the odor by spraying it with the Renuzit. No sooner was it sprayed than: 1)I got a tiny, annoying headache; 2) cat started meowing insistently about needing to immediately vacate the premises; 3) baby started crying; 4) most interestingly to me, I could detect the petro-y part of the fumes. And I guess, also, just I noticed for the first time in my life that it was a sweet fume. It didn't smell like I neutralized anything.

This is interesting to me because as I've noted, my family used this crap all my life and I really used to believe it masked smells. Maybe I was so used to chemical smells that I didn't notice them as being noxious? Took them as par for the course?

I went for a walk with BabyG, and was still blown away by the slight scent of orange scented gasoline when I came back in the house after the walk. Of course, after discovering the no-shit toxicity of the Renuzit, I of course threw the stuff away.

NOT.

I hid the bottle on a shelf is what I did. Because in my head still was this idea: I should save it to use for POWERFUL odors. Despite the cat and my head's insistence about the poisonous nature of my "neutralizer," a much older part of me said: "Stupid girl. The cat wanted outside because he always wants outside. And you got a headache because you went to yoga and pulled something. It smells bad because you've brainwashed yourself into thinking it SHOULD. But one day you will have an odor so bad that you will NEED this deodorizer. It smells powerful because it is."

So last week we had a party. Somebody threw something in the trash can and a few days later it smelled like a colony of rats had died in it.

I did not run for my all-powerful peppermint or eucalyptus essential oils. And I did settle for one or two cautious squirts of Renuzit. I let out six or seven cautious squirts of Renushit into the can.

And my head nearly blew up with pain, my throat ached, my cat's meows to escape the house were immediate and nearly convulsive. I left the door open and left for an hour. Still, this week, if I open the top of the can I am greeted with the slightest, yet most persistent tinge of petrochemicheadache.

Oops.

Morals? Getting rid of all the chemicals in your house makes you more susceptible to noticing and feeling ill because of said chemicals. So on one hand, since this is a world filled with these sorts of smells and cleaners, maybe we’d be better off getting used to the smell, like I used to be. On the other hand, do I want the little red flag in my head that detects poisonous sludge fooled with? Can’t help remembering about how American housewives, who spend their days inside their own not-very-well-ventilated houses, have much higher cancer rates than American women working outside the home.

For me, the second, unfooled hand wins mostly because even as I write this I find the degree of ickiness in that spray shocking. I know for a fact I used it not even a year ago, at my parents’ house, and thought it did its job very nicely. It’s spooky that just eight months into a less toxic filled home environment, my senses have changed so much.

technoratti tags: chemical, cancer, toxic, natural, green, cleaning

Natural Cleaning Products Update/Product Review

Perhaps it is too far back to remember, but last September I wrote about dumping and/or giving away all our commercial cleaning and deodorizing products. It was really, really hard for me to get rid of the products I'd grown up using. I felt ridiculous and wasteful: I'm fine and I grew up soaking myself with Ajax and Windex. Still. Just in case...I wanted to save BabyG from inhaling indoor petrochemically-based, toxic fumes throughout her youth and from accidentally ingesting some toxic substance, like dishwasher soap, which, as I've mentioned in past posts, is a leading cause of toddler deaths in the United States.

Since that time, I have had to buy Clorox bleach when we had a mold problem, and every couple of months or so I use a tablespoon's worth of the leftover bleach on BG's diapers. Other than that, I've stuck to my guns about keeping the house free of toxins.

For some things we've bought pricey, non-toxic products. For example, my dishwasher isn't powerful enough to use a borax/baking soda cleaner without leaving residue, so I use the Seventh Generation dishwashing stuff. I also decided against making shampoos or toothpastes, which seems way too time consuming, so I buy lauryl sulfate free brands from the Whole Foods nearby...I like Jason's toothpastes and haven't found an ideal shampoo, really.

We use the nontoxic Bon Ami and Barkeeper's Friend scouring powders, as well. I've recently started using Charlie's Soap for laundry, and I love it. It actually does make my clothes feel soft.

For most all other cleaning supplies...Windex equivalents, All Purpose Cleaners, floor cleaners etc...I really did convert to mixes of vinegar, cheap olive oils, baking soda, and borax...and I haven't been disappointed...though I did mix them with lots of essential oils in order to make sure the house SMELLED as clean as it looked. In fact, my friends come over and can tell I've deep cleaned because the house smells like pine needles, eucalyptis, or pepperment.

It is true that you have to scrub more with these products than with toxic equivalents. But I don't have to scrub very much more. Also, as a new mom who can't excercize as frequently as she'd like with baby in tow, I gotta say that any increased physical activity I get, I can use.

3rd Weird Thing: Got To Beet It To Love It

3) I wet vacuumed our old couch (and by the way, although Rug Doctor cleaners are called steam cleaners, they aren’t. I mentioned this to my father and he said, “Right. You pour boiling water in them.” Am I alone in figuring that because all the machines have the word “steam cleaner” written on them, I should expect them to steam clean?....) Anyway, I 'wet-vac'ed the couch using the organic laundry detergent instead of the bottled Rug Doctor mix. It procured a nasty black liquid that sure made me happy I'd taken the trouble. However. After an hour or so of cleansing, my couch still looked like its usual dull, faded-minty green self.

Not to worry. I liquefied 5 beets and 1 giant purple cabbage** in my juicer; I added two bottles of black cherry juice concentrate to that; and finally, I added about half a gallon of water. Then I smeared it all over the couch with a kitchen sponge. Application took about half an hour. To set the juice stain, I started ironing it. (Note to Self: Even though setting the iron’s temperature at the hottest temperature dries the couch, it also scorches it. Use a low temperature.)

I only had enough mixture to cover half the couch. I need to make another batch for touch ups, and to finish the seat cushions and arm rests. However, the couch is a MUCH better color than the Zombie-skin green it used to be. It is more like the color of an embarrassed zombie. A light pinkish purple for those of you not in-the-know.

The most obvious downsides are that the couch stunk a little for a couple weeks, and that it isn't particularly better looking than it used to be.

But the perks! There are no end to the perks...for instance, before, I had an ugly couch that I had been saddled with, unexpectedly; now I have an ugly couch that I created. I had a hand in creating its ugliness. I saddled myself.

Also, BabyG will be allowed to spill anything she feels like on that couch, forever. And I can always know I have stained a couch with beets, a bit of knowledge that I think will make me feel pretty content, on and off, for years to come.

** I read an article about vegetable dyes on the internet. Turns out beets make a dark stain, initially, but that purple cabbage stains last longest. So my recipe was a sort of covering all my bases type thing.

Green Parenting in Panama – The Navas Family

MaGreen and I married last February. One of the gifts was a set of frequent-flyer tickets for our honeymoon, enough to get us out of the country. We booked tickets for Panama because we heard it had rainforests but was not yet overrun with tourists. After spending a day in the city, we took a cab to the bus station and asked for a ticket to a national park in the next province. The conductors talked among themselves and then walked us to the bus.

It was a rustic vehicle, as in no air-conditioning and a passenger holding a crowing rooster in his lap. We rattled out of the city, over the Panama Canal, and into the Coclé Province. We made a turn at the town of Penonomé and started climbing into the mountains. The conductor had us switch into a van, which strained its way up steeper roads. Horses started to outnumber cars and motorbikes. It was getting dark and there were no hotels. The conductor had us transfer again and we found ourselves alone in another van that truly suffered its way up an unpaved, boulder-strewn road into the Parque Nacional Omar Torrijos. The lodging in the park, however, was occupied. Our guidebook said there was one other place to stay – the home of the Navas family.

The Navas took us in and fed us plantains, rice, and chicken. They had a nice, polished concrete porch where we sat and talked with the family. They were a grandmother, grandfather, grown daughters and son-in-laws, and grandchildren. About ten in all. The youngest was a three-year-old boy.

The grandfather, Santo, said to us, “You know, we had some Germans visit, but they called first.”

Then his daughter, Nuris, said, “Yes and there were the Irish ones and they called first too.”

We got the idea. We should call ahead. Still, the Navas did everything to make us feel welcome and want to stay. Our room was off to the side of their family room. It was made of cinder blocks and a metal roof. We had our own toilet and little single bed. I’d like to say that MaGreen conceived there on a mountain where two continents meet, where two oceans nearly meet, but part of the wall with the adjoining bedroom was made from a piece of cardboard and the bed creaked with every move. I could hear the children murmuring in their sleep.

In the morning, a son (or son-in-law?) named Santiago took us into the rain forest to give us a guided tour. He carried a machete with him. “What kinds of things do you want to see?” he asked.

“What kinds of things can you show us?” we asked.

“I’ve taken snake scientists on snake hunts, but that must be done at night with lanterns. Some want to see this bird or that bird on their list.”

“What do you like to look for?” we asked.

“I love the frogs,” he said, “but the red ones, which used to be so common that it would be difficult not to step on them, they have all died.”

MaGreen mourned with Santiago as he told us how thousands of these frogs had died only a few months before and that they were nowhere to be found. We kept asking him about his life and he started to warm up to us. As he took us deeper into the jungle where it was nice and cool, he told us how he grew up tromping around the wilds. He had been a hunter and his family had been loggers until twenty-five years before when the government declared the area a no-cut zone.

“Were you a good hunter?” I tried to ask, but my Spanish came out garbled.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t hunt any more.”

His skills as a guide were extraordinary. He showed us at least five varieties of toucans, countless varieties of hummingbirds, an orange bellied tragon which is a cousin of the quetzal, a white ruffed manakin, a bay headed tanager, a bright blue frog with black spots, a bright green frog with black stripes, a salamander, a huge chameleon that changed colors before our eyes, parasitic trees that eventually swallow up and kill the host tree, ants that carry leaves on their backs, central american squirrel monkeys, and a sloth hanging from a tree with a baby on its belly. While we trudged along, he would suddenly thrust his hand under a plant and grab a frog.







Santiago also took us up to a peak where we could see the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other. On the path, he pointed out abandoned logging equipment. On the way back to the Navas home, we picked fruit off the trees. We even got to pick a cacao fruit. Chocolate is made from the seeds. But we ate the sweet fruit part around the seeds.





When we got back, the grandfather suggested that we go out with the kids to bathe in the Barrigon river. What can I say? We swam with the kids in a pool at the base of a little waterfall. They showed us how to slip behind the falls and then dive under the pounding water.



We kept shouting to the kids over the sound of the water, “You are so lucky to grow up in paradise!”

When we returned for dinner, we talked with Nuris, a very intelligent woman who has two young daughters. When the Peace Corps held a training program at the Navas home, the program director asked her to move to Panama City and work for his family as their nanny.

“I get one weekend off per month to visit my family here,” she said. Her kids were growing up in the care of their father and grandparents as she took care of American kids.

“I’m paid two hundred dollars per month.”

“That’s exploitation,” I said, “you need a union.”

“No, no,” she said, “that’s good pay and this is a good opportunity for me.”

Nuris kept talking to us about her life, about how dear the Peace Corp coordinator’s children were and that they might take her abroad with them. The others were preparing dinner. All their ingredients were fresh and locally grown. They ground and roasted local coffee beans. The chicken was raised locally. We took a break from our vegetarianism to share in their regular meals. One of the men in the family worked yucca farms.

When we actually ate, Nuris joined the rest of the family and the grandfather, Santo, came in her place to talk to us. I asked him how they started their business.

“When the government made the forest a no-cut zone, they told us there would be tourists,” he said, “so that is when we had the idea of hosting visitors.”

I detected some bitterness in the way he talked about the policy. They forged new lives as hosts to eco-tourists because their former way of life was outlawed. Their current work, you could say, is green-collar, but is it as dignified as before? I think it’s wonderful there is income generated by preserving or reclaiming wilderness, but would inhabited wilderness have been a better model than a strict no-cut law?

“Next time,” Santo said, “you must stay longer so that we can take you to La Rica. You can only get there by hiking for a day into the park.” La Rica, La Rica, La Rica. He talked about it whenever his mind drifted. That was where the old way continued. No electricity. Living in the middle of the forest in homes made from wood not concrete. There are even more rivers and more waterfalls. The water tumbles down the mountains into Caribbean.

Before bedtime, the children put on a little play for us. I picked at their guitar and sang a few songs. MaGreen sat with one of Nuris’s daughters and flipped through our Lonely Planet guidebook with her. The girl was especially drawn to the section on Panama City. She pointed to a picture of some shiny skyscrapers and said, “That’s where my mom works.” MaGreen tore the picture out for her to keep. Nuris was leaving the next morning to go back to the American children she cared for in the city. She had already taken an extra day off and had to return.

We left after another day. Santo came with us down the mountain to Penonomé so that we could draw money from the ATM machine and pay him. I think he asked for $160 for two nights, three days of meals, and the tours of the park. We gave him $200. After we said our farewells, he walked straight to a bank and deposited the cash. Earlier he had said that several of the grandchildren wanted to attend universities – one wants to be a biologist – and they were saving money for their schooling. We hope to see them again and bring our baby with us.



If you would like to stay with the Navas family, call ahead. Here's their number: 507 983 9130.

Natural Cleaning and Green Cleaning Podcast

MaGreen and GreenDaddy talk about switching to green, home-made cleaning supplies.

Toxic Loss

Like GreenDaddy says, being pregnant has changed our perspective about things. So although I’ve known about the evil nature of toxic products since I was a kid, when I heard the Pacifica radio show about the way one woman eliminated toxins from her world, I was listening more carefully than usual. She noted a few studies – like women who spend most of their time in their homes have a much higher cancer rate than women who work outside the home, because of poor ventilation and the multitude of toxins present in the items we construct, furnish, & clean our homes with. The World Health Organization links cancer to industrialized nations, and in the US cancer rates are up by 49% since 1950 [http://www.globalstewards.org/toxics.htm].

Of course, there are thousands of causes for these higher rates. It is not just the products I choose to clean my house with. Or the plastics I fill it with. Or the plastics I wear. Or the pesticides on my food. Or the pollutants in the air. Or the 90% of synthetic chemical compounds in fragrances, personal products, cleaning products, and the air that have never even been measured for toxicity. My own geneology might work against me, or my sensitivity to products most people aren’t effected to. Like carrots. Carrots aren’t toxic to me, but they are toxic to some people, I’m sure.

But the point is, there are all these things, some of which I can control without much effort at all, effecting my life. Whereas before pregnancy I sort of shrugged off this information, and found it annoying, I’m feeling more revolutionary lately: I thought, well, we might as well try to do what we can to eliminate some of the risks. I quit drinking alcohol during pregnancy – why wouldn’t I quit hanging out in a house filled with petrochemicals? What harm will it do me not to buy milk in a jug? Or to give up my Windex for some old fashioned vinegar & water?

As it has turned out, I am still the girl that liked mixing Ajax and Laundry detergent to make ghost-paste. Another time, in childhood, my friend Scotty and I made a formula out of the forgotten chemicals in my father’s shed that not only killed stinging red ant populations for two and half minutes, exactly --- but if you used it to paint it would seep up through later layers of paint years down the road, so that even now, at least twenty layers of paint later, the brown letters we painted are still barely discernable on the whitish picket fence in the city park. And I reiterate: I am still this girl.

In terms of seeking out new solutions and supplies to clean my house, this is finally a good thing. I spent three or four hours on the internet, searching out different sorts of cleaning combinations that make different sorts of cleaning products. As it turns out, I am not the only person interested in “greening” my home. Hundreds of websites about eliminating toxic substances from your life exist. Hundreds more sites with recipes from people who just want to clean the house like “grandma” and don’t want to be reliant on buying cleaning products from the store. Between these two sorts of sites, I came up with my list. I think I’ll post the whole list on a separate post that details what we’ve found that works, and what we’ve found that doesn’t work.

For now, I’ll say I like knowing that I can clean my silver by leaving it in a sink filled with boiling hot water, a couple teaspoons of salt and baking soda, and a sheet of aluminum foil. The method is certainly faster than trying to rub all the nooks and crannies of the silver with silver polish. It makes me feel giddy and smart because its cheaper, its smarter, and its more fun than cleaning with products that give me headaches. I feel like I’m picking up knowledge my grandmothers’ knew, and that was if not stolen, hidden from me by the people who said my house isn’t clean if their product hasn’t touched it.

And most of all, I like knowing I’m doing this at the same time that I’ve taken a pretty simple step in making my house safe for our little girl. I’m grateful not have to worry about her crawling through a puddle of leaked bleach and dying of burn wounds or of eating toxic dishwashing detergent and dying of intestinal damage – two causes of baby and toddler deaths in American households more terribly common than you’d guess.

If she’s anything like I was, it’s good we’re getting rid of the toxic stuff. I’ll teach her [and any other little ones we have] to mix things that make useful products. I’ll dissuade her from putting Barkeepers’ Friend (a scouring powder sites say aren’t toxic) on her face, but I’m not against helping her search out and creating some sort of healthy, pasty natural “beauty product” she can use for pranks of her own. That’s awhile off, now, but I’m glad ahead of time.

Toxic Love Podcast

MaGreen talks about how she used to love smearing toxic chemicals on her face when she was a child.

Toxic Love

It does not take a rocket scientist to know bleach is toxic and dangerous. Or that nasty commercial mildew eater is. I mean, if you use a substance in your home that nauseates you, gives you a headache, or otherwise makes you want to leave said home for a couple of hours afterward for it to "air out" there's an eighty percent chance you're using something toxic and poisonous. And though you could continue to use toxic chemicals to clean your home for the rest of your life anyway, and though many of us do even though we know they're toxic, we don't have to.

This is not to say that I was not once the little girl who made a paste out of Ajax and dish soap, smeared it all over my face, and then tried to fool Arthur Young into thinking I was a minty-green faced ghost. Or that I didn’t understand my family friend Margot’s rage when she caught me coming home that day, or that I didn’t believe her horror when she said the Ajax was full of harsh chemicals. As a child, I believed adults weren’t lying about dangerous, poisonous things that could kill children, but I also believed that what they said was only true of most children in the world. I wasn’t most children. I was tough. I didn’t even get a rash when I put Ajax on my face and tried to convince Arthur Young that although I looked like little Miah Arnold, she was dead and I was her ghost. I was too tough to be effected by chemicals. Tougher than the rest of the world. Of course, I was also the type of kid who didn’t remember bad things, and so couldn’t recall how as a toddler I’d tossed back a jar of my aunt’s shellac, thinking it was milk, and actually would have become Miah Arnold’s ghost if not for the Duchesne County Hospital’s stomach pumper.

What I am trying to establish here is that I have had a long, intimate, and maybe even loving history with toxic chemicals. By the time I hit my mid-twenties, a statistically significant portion of my friends and acquaintances began developing weird allergies and sicknesses, my mother was increasingly bowled over by intense migraines, and for me, walking into the perfume section of a department store or the cleaning product section of a grocery store was liable to cause me a painful headache of my own. Did I choose to eschew these products ever afterwards? Of course not. I was resistant to the idea of eliminating toxins because:

Number One: It seemed wimpy in the same way smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol seemed cool. What kind of drip is afraid of a bottle of Windex? (Which, by the way, ought to be feared as it is particularly noxious according to countless sources as it contains butyl cellosolve, toxic to blood cells, kidneys, and livers. It's not listed on the label either. This irks me as I always imagined Windex as the most virginal of the cleaning products in terms of toxicity.)

Number Two: The whole comet smearing and other like episodes made me figure I was already too contaminated to save. I knew I couldn’t get out all the toxins, so I figured, why try?

Number Three: Some risks you take, even if they’re bad for your health, because their perks outweigh their downsides. Like smokers or drinkers (or breathers of the air in Houston, where we live) I figured so what if its bad for me. It’s too hard not to use them.

Number Four, which is really a subcategory of Number three: I don’t believe something is clean if it doesn’t have a brand name smell: windows like Windex, floors like Pine Sol, wood should be Lemon Pledgey…and I fully admit that if a bathroom doesn’t smell like its been the site of an industrial waste explosion, I don’t believe its clean. And if you think about this particular line of reasoning is illogical: I don’t believe something is clean unless it actively smells. Wouldn’t it be more logical to assume that something with no scent at all is cleaner than something I’ve wiped scent all over?

I should mention here that my transfiguration from badass-deer-ignoring-the-headlights into the crazy pregnant woman dumping all the chemicals in the house down the drain and declaring a moratorium on plastics was not immediate. As the conservatives would argue, it was part of a slippery slope most any liberal is in danger of falling into: a couple years ago we bit the financial bullet and started shopping at Whole Foods where we bought organic vegetables, free-range eggs, and hormone free milk. At some point, we joined a vegetable co-op to supplement this change. We toyed with and rejected (after watching SuperSizeMe) the idea of becoming vegans. We hovered at this stage a couple of years, through courtship and into marriage. And now we’re pregnant and we’ve taken enough small steps to consider taking a few larger ones, though, like GreenDaddy says, knowing which steps to take is proving tricky.

That Smells Like Vinegar Not Windex

One day I came home from work and MaGreen had dumped out all of our Windex, Mop N Glow, mildew remover, and the other stuff we keep under our sinks.

“A leading cause of death for babies is when they crawl through poisonous cleaning supplies or accidentally drink them,” she said.

Miah then spent many, many hours searching the internet for alternatives. She collected recipes from a number of different sources and started to experiment on her own. Most of them used combinations of vinegar, baking powder, lemon juice, borax, soap, oil, and alcohol. MaGreen made a two-page sheet with all of her recipes. Here it is: Natural Cleaning (word format) and Natural Cleaning (pdf).


I think what has been most disconcerting is that MaGreen put the new cleaning solutions in the old containers. So our vinegar based bathroom cleaner is in the old mildew remover bottle. When I went to actually clean the bathroom, I did a double-take because of the way the vinegar smells. (Vinegar is always good for a nice jolt to the nostrils.) But after a few minutes, the smell went away and the bathroom was in fact clean.

The sad irony is that the commercial cleaning products that smell good are part of what creates carcinogenic indoor air. Since I am employed as a professional feminist. I'd like to point out that poisonous household air is a gendered problem. Women, and children, often spend way more time in the house. The Prevent Cancer Coalition, which is chaired by a public health scientist named Samuel S. Epstein, have published short reports about this problem on their website preventcancer.com.

The Man Who Would Have No Plastic

When MaGreen was researching plastic, the website she found with the most forceful message was mindfully.org. The author recommends getting rid of ALL plastics including food containers, clothing, utensils, and furniture. Since this did not strike us as feasible, MaGreen sent in a comment. Here’s an excerpt:

“I have no idea where to begin. I have plastic drawers, storage boxes etc. I'm thinking they can stay longer than the milk jugs? What about the plastic wrap on cheese? How do you keep cheese from rotting without plastic covering? When you want to save leftovers, what kind of container do you use? Glass on the bottom...but what about the top? And what about those special, green plastic bags that preserve my organic vegetables for even longer? They're out too? I have no idea. Perhaps forty years ago people knew the answers to these questions -- but having been raised on plastic I find them baffling. The articles here are informative but more daunting than they need to be. One article that outlined what steps people should take, what plastics should be removed immediately, etc.”

So the author on the mindfully.org website, Paul Goettlich wrote back. Here’s an excerpt from his email:

“I know it's a tough thing to deal with, but the answer is to deal with one thing at a time and not get overloaded . . . . Your idea to get rid of plastic milk jugs before plastic drawers makes absolute sense. The variables for plastic to leach/migrate into the things that contact it are: the amount of surface area in contact; the materials in contact; temperature; and more . . . . Anything that touches food needs to be changed from plastic to glass or paper or hemp cloth... I have Pyrex storage containers with plastic tops. I always cool the food BEFORE putting the lid on. If it needs to go into the fridge while cooling, then put a plate over the top. You see, it's just common sense kind of stuff. And I know there are glass containers with glass lids available. I just don't know where off hand.

“OK, so here's something about my life. I haven't watched TV in more than 6 years. I don't use shampoo and my hair is in great shape. I never used deodorant in my life. (sorry :-) ); I use little or no soap when washing pots and pans; very little dishwasher soap in an extremely efficient dishwasher; clothes get dried on a line rather than a dryer and definitely no softeners; all fresh organic food; extremely little prepared food of any kind; many bulk foods packed in containers that I bring like glass jars and used paper bags. I buy apple cider from a local farmer at the Berkeley Farmers' Market as 4 gals. in a case and get a 20% discount. I buy olive oil from a farmer and he packs it in my own 10 litre stainless steel container that has a spigot on it.”

Miah and I enjoyed reading his email. We don’t know anybody who gets their olive oil from farmer (but we do know people who don’t use deodorant). We were very happy to see that Mr. Goettlich posted a whole new and very practicle article, "Alternatives to Plastic", shortly after our email exchange.

Download the podcast. 

Don't Drink Out of That Bottle!

I think that our desire to detoxify really got started when MaGreen was listening to a show on a local radio station about poisons leaching from plastic into water and food. The radio station, 90.1 KPFT, is an affiliate of the Pacifica network. According to the person hosting the show, we are constantly ingesting dangerous poisons. The only reason we don’t know about it, she claimed, is because the plastics industry funds all kinds of studies to clear its products and the big media outlets do not want to upset their advertisers by running stories about poisons in plastic. MaGreen came home that day visibly upset.

“Even our food processor is made of plastic,” MaGreen said. We just bought the thing and MaGreen loved to prepare food with it, but it is made mostly of plastic. “We can’t use the plastic leftover containers either,” she went on, “and don’t drink out of those water bottles at work.”

I was alarmed too, but I immediately became defensive. The Pacifica radio station often disseminates excellent information, but some of the shows purport debatable ideas as unquestionable truths. For example, the “Whole Mother” show is anti-immunization and claims that immunizations always harm children. I think routine immunizations have saved millions upon millions of children’s lives.

Miah went on the internet to do some research and I did too. A number of studies have shown that bisphenol A, which is widely found in plastic containers, leaches out into liquids and foods. Moreover, this chemical can affect the development of the brain and the reproductive system. It resembles estrogen. The LA Times ran a story on the subject April 13, 2005. The journal Environmental Health Perspectives published a review article that prompted the news coverage, but I haven’t had a chance to read it or find the citation.

Even if the whole plastics scare is unjustified, cutting plastic out of your life isn’t like not immunizing your child. It doesn’t put anyone at risk to use glass containers instead of plastic ones. So both of us agreed that at the least, we'll spring for $20 of glass tupperware. But we still have several questions:

How can you really get rid of ALL the plastic in the kitchen? Can we still use our food processor? How bad is the plastic for you really? Are the alternatives worse? If I am in the desert dying of thirst and I find a plastic Ozarka bottle, should I drink from it or should I drink my own urine until I reach a natural oasis?