Not a Perfect Earth Mom

There are some things that I am good at: being late, quoting random movie lines mid-discussion (usually from Bridget Jones’ Diary or Bridesmaids) and pretending to not hear the kids crying during the night.

One of the things that isn’t on this list is breaking up.

I tried to break up with Ryan, now my husband, when we first started dating. He was a great guy, someone I could see myself with for the long term. So essentially, I had to end it. Thankfully he called my bluff (and my friends all said I was an idiot) and we’ve been together, for better or for worse, since.

I am once again trying to break up . . . this time with plastic.

I’m not getting rid of all the plastic in my life – there are still plastic toys in my house, plastic laundry baskets, plastic cups and plates for kids. But I’m trying to get rid of disposable, single-use plastic.

And, just like my previous experiences, this breakup is being met with mixed results.

Can you explain single-use plastic?

Yes! Well, actually, let’s let people who know what they’re talking about do it. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council,

“. . . single-use plastics are goods that are made primarily from fossil fuel–based chemicals (petrochemicals) and are meant to be disposed of right after use—often, in mere minutes. Single-use plastics are most commonly used for packaging and serviceware, such as bottles, wrappers, straws, and bags.”

Okay, so I was a Social Work and Psych major, so let’s talk about relationships again.

One of the reasons why breaking up is hard is because you’ve spent countless hours (usually) investing yourself in this other person. And now you’re left to start all over again, after you:

1. stop pretending you’re fine
2. do something drastic to your hair
3. indulge in one/all of the following: chocolate, ice cream, alcohol, listing everything you never liked about your ex

When you’re ready to try love again, you go through an almost predictable series of steps in building a new relationship.

As I thought about these steps, I realized there were parallels between starting a new romantic relationship and starting a new relationship with a plastic alternative. Just like a romantic relationship, building a relationship with your plastic alternative takes time and has different levels of commitment.

The Plastic Alternative Relationship Stages

• Reusable shopping bags – this is the equivalent of saying “hi” to your crush

• Bringing a commuter mug to your coffee shop – you are name-dropping your crush around your friends to see their reaction
  
  
• Using Tupperware instead of Ziplock bags – you and crush have gone on a first date
  
  
• Purposefully shopping for products that are not packaged in plastic – I love you territory. Ahhhh! Who is going to say it first?
  
  
• Weaning yourself and your kids off those plastic squeeze packs – walking down the aisle

While I love a good relationship dissection, this post is just going to cover step 1: the reusable bag.

Why We’re Breaking Up

The more I read about it, the more I realized there are a lot of reasons to break up with plastic. But, let’s look at just two of them:

1) It’s a stalker.

It never disappears. Really, it should have a restraining order. Or, as Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) says: “Left alone, plastics don’t really break down; they just break up. Over time, sun and heat slowly turn plastics into smaller and smaller pieces until they eventually become what are known as microplastics.”

2) It doesn’t respect my boundaries.

Again, NRDC: “These microscopic plastic fragments . . . are just about everywhere. . . . They end up in the water, eaten by wildlife, and inside our bodies.”

I clicked on the hyperlink NRDC had with the word bodies and found an article about my kids’ favorite word: poop. According to The Guardian, plastic has been detected in human feces.

I am not a Dr. but I’m going to go out on a limb and say if they find plastic in your poop, that can’t be a good thing. If there was a page in the book What’s Your Poo Telling You? about plastic in your poop, I think they would say it’s telling you to break up.

New York State Says Hi to its Crush

This year, the state we live in is taking a first relational step: it’s banning (most) plastic bags.

Our family has been using reusable bags for groceries for many years. For us it was a fairly easy step in the relationship (once we got in the habit of remembering to take them with us).

Here are some fun stats about plastic bags:

• According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 23 billion plastic bags are used in New York State annually.
  
  
• Plastic bags have been found in the deepest part of the ocean. National Geographic states: “A recent study revealed that a plastic bag, like the kind given away at grocery stores, is now the deepest known piece of plastic trash, found at a depth of 10,975 meters (36,000 feet) inside the Mariana Trench.”
  
  
• According to detailed analysis from Stay at Home Mom Childhood Development Engineer blogger Not A Perfect Earth Mom, there are no benefits to using plastic bags for your groceries. Citing plastic bags’ inability to hold more than 5 items without tearing as well as their laying down (literally) on the job when placed in your trunk, it’s essentially statistically accurate to say that for this task, reusable bags (or the paper ones available for purchase) are far superior.

But two things I hear people say they use grocery store bags for are:
1) trash bags
2) animal waste

In these categories we have both triumphed and failed. Or, to be more specific, my idea led to mice, and Ryan’s idea led him to feminine hygiene.

“It’ll be Fine”

During one of my many I-should-be-sleeping-but-instead-I’m-on-the-computer episodes, I came across a website selling cloth trash bags. Ryan had some doubts about this but I assured him it would be a great alternative to using plastic trash bags in the kitchen.

Confident in my purchase (and also to justify the amount of money I had just spent when I should have been sleeping) I returned the large box of unopened kitchen trash bags I had recently purchased. See, we were kind of saving money and we were on the road to plastic bag freedom!

I enthusiastically put the cloth bag in the kitchen trash but was less enthusiastic about emptying it regularly into the outdoor trash can. Somehow, though we hadn’t poured any liquid into the kitchen trash, there was a slightly smelly liquid that dripped out the bottom of the bag when you lifted it up. Strike one.

Then there was the question of cleaning the bag. I’m pretty sure my idea of throwing it in the laundry with other things was shot down. I think it got its own cycle. Strike two.

Perhaps the cloth bags would still be in use in our kitchen if it hadn’t been for strike three – the mice. Not too long after my attempt to save the planet with my cloth trash bags, we noticed some strange droppings next to the kitchen trash. Well, they weren’t that strange, just mice. It appears the smelly liquid inducing trash bags were attractive to the earth and to mice. And so we bought traps and plastic kitchen trash bags.

Thus concludes my short lived stint with cloth trash bags. I’m sure there are places other than the kitchen I could use them and perhaps some day, when the Lysol smell from cleaning up the mouse droppings has stopped lingering, I will be brave enough to try.

Why Yes, My Husband Did Buy Those

Some time after my cloth failure and mice adventure, Ryan was successful in finding a plastic alternative for scooping our cats’ litter box. Yes, we have two cats and yes we had a mouse problem anyway. Our cats are fantastic at catching chipmunks (outdoors), breaking lamps and sitting on warm laundry. They do not excel at catching mice.

To be fair, Ryan probably told me about his plan for what to use in place of plastic bags. Regardless, I was still a little shocked when I found out he had purchased a box of 500 Sanitary Napkin Disposal Bags on Amazon.

One of the great assets of my husband is that he very rarely feels awkward. About anything. As someone whose emotional radar is always tuned slightly too high, I can truly say he has a gift.

So my liberated husband saw nothing odd about his purchase. And, unlike my purchase, his has not led to mice.

The bags have a wax coating that prevents leakage. They are sized well (when we remember not to wait a whole week to scoop out the box). Simply scoop extracted waste from box into the bag, roll the top of the bag down and toss into the outdoor trash.

As an added bonus, Ryan no longer spends 3 minutes every time he has to scoop the litter box digging through our plastic bag collection, muttering to himself while searching for one without any tiny holes. Over his lifetime this will save him 84 hours and at least 10,947 words.

Okay, so what’s the point of this?

So the cloth bags were a dumpster fire didn’t work. I found out my husband can order 500 Sanitary Napkin Disposal Bags without my knowledge (who says marriage is boring?)

I think the point is that we are trying to reduce our plastic and that is better than not trying at all. Even if they had worked, my cloth bags wouldn’t have solved climate change. But, they were a step in the right direction.

To go back to our crush analogy, just because one relationship didn’t work out doesn’t mean you eat ice cream in the fetal position forever. You get back up, shower and say hi to someone else.

I want to do this! AKA not a to-do list

• Say hi to your crush and use reusable bags!
• Eliminate one type of single-use plastic you use regularly.
• Extra Credit: find an alternative to plastic kitchen trash bags that actually works and tell me what it is.

My kids are melting down faster than the ice cream I haven’t put away yet, please give me the bullet points!
*Because plastic is prolific and harmful, the author is trying to reduce her usage of single-use plastic (plastic that gets used only once).
*There are creative alternatives to single-use plastic. Some of them have been successfully implemented by the author, some of them have not.
*Reducing your plastic use takes time. Using reusable bags for groceries, etc is a great way to start!

My husband Ryan takes the bus to work. This is amazing for me because it allows the kids and I to take our one car (that’s a topic for another post) exciting places, like the grocery store.

When I was in elementary school my brothers and I, along with a handful of other kids, would ride the city bus home. In college I frequently rode public transit during my off campus semesters. Even as a newly-wed in Denver, I had the option of taking the light rail.

But these days, as a stay at home mom in the suburbs, the biggest connection I have to public transit is usually the trolley in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

Surely I can do this with kids

I recently decided to look into taking the bus with the kids instead of always driving. Here’s what I found:

• Some of the places we go, such as my daughter’s preschool, have no public transit options available.
  
  
• Some places, such as the library where I take my younger daughter while the older one is at preschool, have bus service that interferes with other things in our schedule, such as picking the older one back up from preschool.
  
  
• Some places have public transit options but the idea of that outing on a bus with kids has me in the fetal position. For example, according to Google, I could take the bus with the kids to the grocery store. See what I mean about the fetal position?
  
  But, one place the kids and I needed to go was accessible by bus, worked with our schedule and didn’t terrify me. It was the annual trick or treating event at Ryan’s work. I decided we would take the bus, even if it meant riding in our costumes.

I hope I’m not alone when I say we have three working strollers at our disposal. They all play a different yet vital role, right?

For public transit, taking the small umbrella stroller would be easiest to navigate. But, our chances of catching the bus if we had to walk there at 3- year-old speed was slim. So we took our minivan stroller.

The wheels on the bus do eventually stop

I had assumed the bus would be fairly empty and we would have lots of opportunity for photo ops. I was wrong. Our route at that time of day was full of riders, mostly kids coming home from school. A kind man gave me a hand getting the stroller on the bus and another kind rider gave us their seat.

Balancing Curious George on one knee and the Man with the Yellow Hat on the other, I realized this was not at all what I had envisioned. I unzipped George’s costume so the kid wouldn’t overheat with all the bodies on the bus and hoped that our generously sized stroller wouldn’t fall off the storage platform and hit any of the standing riders.

When we got downtown, I realized I hadn’t actually looked at where we were supposed to get off. So, when someone signaled a stop in the general area we needed to be, I decided to get off there too.

The bus etiquette I remembered, even though it’s been a long time since I needed to use it, dictates that I get off using the rear door. We were sitting almost directly across from this door so that would have been great, except that our minivan stroller was in the cargo area next to the front door.

So, like salmon fighting upstream to lay their eggs (why is everything about children so difficult at times?), I carried my trick or treaters towards the front of the bus, through the wall of standing riders and past an elderly lady who was getting off the bus using the correct door.

This process took me so long that the bus actually started going again while I was still trying to get to the front door. Thankfully one of the middle-schoolers spoke up for me and yelled “Wait! We got ourselves a mama! She has kids!”

The bus stopped and I finally got out. Thankfully, the elderly lady who had used the correct door offered to watch my kids that I had plopped on the sidewalk while I went back into the bus to grab our stroller. As I assembled our minivan and got the kids situated, she asked me “Do you ride the bus very often?”

The girls had a great time collecting candy for us to eat (let’s be honest, most of their haul was a choking hazard to them). And of course the bus ride home, where I wasn’t wrangling both kids by myself, was serenely quiet and empty.

I learned a few things from my bus adventure.

1. Taking the bus, alone, with two young children can be challenging. Some parents do this every day. I’m lucky that this is only one of my options instead of my only option.
   
   
2. I felt a bit beat up after our ride in. But, I feel a bit beat up after going to the gym sometimes, too. I think the more we ride the bus together, the easier it will be. It’s not doable for all our outings but can be done for some of them.
   
   
3. I don’t care what people say about kids these days, if it hadn’t been for that middle-schooler, I would probably still be on the bus, trying to make my way to the door.

One year, my husband and I actually made a new year’s resolution to bathe our daughter more often. Our goal was to increase frequency from once a week to twice. Now that we have two kids, it’s still a work in progress.

But my children aren’t the only ones that probably need more bathing.

It started with a selfie

A few weeks ago, after taking approximately 50 photos of my 1 year old playing in the leaves, I decided to try a selfie with her. She was ecstatic! Honestly, I have never seen anyone so excited about a selfie before.

As we took the photo, I realized I was perhaps bringing down the Facebook worthiness of the photo. It wasn’t the maternity sweatshirt I was wearing (though not pregnant or postpartum). It was instead, the beginning-to-be-evident fact that it had been several days since I had showered.

Although I love taking a long hot shower, most weeks there are a few days where I go without. Given the talk I hear from other moms about dry shampoo, I know I am not alone.

Sometimes, especially if we don’t have any place we have to be that day, my thought line as a stay-at-home- mom goes like this: “I didn’t shower yesterday and look, I’m still alive and people are still talking to me (never mind these people are my offspring). Why would I shower today?”

I think we sometimes consider our lack of daily showering and regularly spaced child bathing a sign of bad time management, lackadaisical child rearing, letting ourselves go, etc. when in reality it’s been environmental activism in disguise (a disguise mostly known as grease).

The Ice Cream Test

What I’ve determined is that taking a shower is like eating a bowl of ice cream. Could I eat ice cream every day? Yes! Should I eat ice cream every day? Probably not.

The first person I told my analogy to was my husband.

Me: “Showering is like ice cream!”

Husband: blank stare

Me: “There are times in your life when you absolutely need ice cream every day.”

Husband: “When in your life would you need ice cream every day?”

Clearly striking a chord with my first explanation

There are times when you definitely need a shower every day, for a variety of reasons, including the following:

• When you’re a mix of baby spit, leaking breasts and other liquids and you just want to be clean. For a few minutes.
• When you want to cry but not make it look too obvious.
• When you want to get out of making breakfast. “I’m going to run through the shower – can you give the kids their breakfast?”

But do really need that long hot shower every day?

How does my shower impact the environment?

The Washington Post’s article “Your shower is wasting huge amounts of energy and water. Here’s what you can do about it”
says almost 17% of water used in American homes is due to showers. Similarly, almost 17% of American home electricity is used to heat water.

According to The Eco Guide’s “Have you tried the five minute shower challenge,” 0.18lbs of Carbon Dioxide is created to heat 1 gallon of water. Comparing a five minute shower to the average 13 minutes shower, the author states: “Taking five minute showers for a whole year would save as much CO2 as is sequestered annually by half an acre of U.S. forest.”

Read more on energy and heating water here.

“I try to say goodbye and I choke, try to walk away and I stumble,” Macy Gray describes my shorter showers

I decided to try “The five minute shower challenge” the other morning, since the benefit sounded really good. I debated setting a timer on my phone but since I knew there was no way I would be done in under 5 minutes, I knew I would be in one of the following situations:

1) I would have to get out of the shower and drip all over the floor and phone to turn off the timer.

2) I would have to yell loudly for my husband to come into the bathroom and turn off my timer.

3) I would have to continue showering with the timer going off.

Like Bridget Jones in the first movie where she’s picking out underwear, my decision was also “very tricky.” So, I just looked at the time when I went in and then again when I got out. End result: 8 minutes. That was pushing it for me.

Since I don’t relate well to pounds of CO2, let’s take a road trip

Using the formula from above, my 8 minute shower created 1.44lbs of carbon dioxide (CO2). Unfortunately, I don’t relate to pounds of CO2 very well.

What I can relate to is driving. Using the EPA’s Carbon Footprint Calculator as well as the EPA Fuel Economy Listing for my car, I determined how much “driving” my shower was doing in a day and a year.

One 8 minute shower is equivalent to me driving about 1.5 miles in my Subaru Forester. If I took an 8 minute shower every day for a year, it’d be equivalent to driving 581 miles or roughly from Boston, MA to Virginia Beach, VA.

Let’s talk about ice cream again

If I skipped eating a bowl of ice cream for a day or two a week, I would feel good about this decision. So maybe I should take the same approach with showers.

And here is the beautiful thing about the ice cream test. It means that by doing nothing I am actually helping the environment! So I’m not an irresponsible parent for not bathing my kids more than once or twice a week and I’m not lazy for skipping a shower (or two or three). That’s why we have deodorant.

I want to do this! AKA not a to-do list

If you want to try to cut back on your showers, here are some suggestions. See what works best for you!

• Cut out one or two showers per week
• Give your kid a spit bath
• Try the five minute shower challenge
• My personal favorite, a suggestion from one of my friends. Listen to music while you shower. After a few songs are done you’ll know it’s time to get out. I tried this with my phone and as a bonus got to shower to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston.

I have spit-up in my cleavage, please give me the bullet points!
*Grab any nearby cloth (dish towels, throw blankets, pillows are not off limits) and read the rest of this later.
*Showers are great but have significant environmental impact.
*You can think of taking a shower or bathing your kids like eating a bowl of ice cream. Sometimes necessary on a daily basis but usually not.
*5 minute showers are difficult for the author but better for the environment.

We’ve had a compost pile (a collection of produce scraps, egg shells and coffee grinds) in our backyard for several years but recently we decided to sign our compost up for “school.”

Originally an open heap started by the previous owner, a few years ago our waste upgraded to a hand-me-down black bin from my parents. I love composting but am a terrible compost mom. If my compost pile was a child, it would definitely not be caught up on all its shots and it certainly wouldn’t know what a book is.

My composting parenting style

I don’t think any resource would suggest my composting method. I just dump my food waste in and occasionally throw in some leaves. I don’t turn it or water it or layer it. Last week a neighbor asked me if I get good soil from my compost and I had to tell her that honestly, I’ve never gotten that far. When we’re at a garden shop, I eagerly throw in bags of top soil while my husband asks “don’t we have soil from the compost?”

In the Winter, I basically abandon my compost completely since I live in upstate New York and don’t often want to bundle up through several feet of snow to pry a frozen lid off my compost and empty more scraps into it.

Why am I so neglectful? Honestly, it’s too many details for me to take care of. I realize how “first world” and petty this sounds, but at the end of the day I only have so much I can take care of, and the needs of my compost aren’t one of them.

If you are wondering how composting benefits the environment, join the club!

A few weeks ago my husband asked me for the scientific details on how composting helps with climate change. Since I’m not a scientist, I quickly checked with my bff (her name is Google).

According to RecycleNow, compostable materials in a landfill create more methane than they do when allowed to decompose naturally.
A quick visit to Garden Collage reminded me that methane is a green house gas causing global warming and that, according to the EPA, 20% of methane released in the USA is from food waste.

Outsourcing our parenting

After having it on our to-do list for several months, we signed up for a biweekly compost service. We pay $16/month and every other Tuesday morning, a 4 gallon bucket of food scraps is picked up off our porch and replaced with a clean bucket for us to start filling. Our picked-up food scraps go to a composting facility (aka school) where they eventually turn into soil. In the Spring, we’ll receive several containers of soil that have been made from ours (and others’ contributions).

Not only do I now not have to pry the frozen lid off the compost bin in the Winter, but I can also compost more things than I could in my hand-me-down bin at home. Check out everything our compost service says that can go into the 4 gallon bucket!

Like any first time mom, I eagerly wrote down all the pickup dates on the calendar, something I apparently didn’t need to do because yesterday I received this text:

So last night, I put our bucket on the porch and today was my compost’s first day of school – our first 4 gallon bucket was picked up and replaced with a clean one for us to start filling! I missed the pick up because I was busy with my, um, actual kids. Ah, you’ve gotta cut the cord at some point.

I want to do this! AKA not a to-do list

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can compost, here are some helpful links:
Step By Step Guide from RecycleNow about setting up a compost at home
Where to Compost listing of composting services throughout the country from Litterless.com

My kids are screaming, please give me the bullet points!
* Instead of throwing your food scraps, coffee grinds and egg shells into the trash can, you can compost them so they decompose naturally
* Composting reduces greenhouse gas emissions
* If you don’t have time to DIY compost, many communities have compost services available, which might allow you to compost more than you can at home