Category Archives: Eco Friendly Parenting

The 3 Rs with a Baby, Part 1: Reduce

Having a baby means you start using a lot more things. You can’t help it. Babies have a lot of needs. But you can do your best to keep things under control. This week is about keeping up with the the three R’s with an infant in the house.

Anyone with more ideas is welcome to share.

Reduce

This is a difficult one in some ways, as having a baby means you will have a lot of new needs. You aren’t going to be able to avoid it all. But you can cut back, way back, on what people say you need for a baby.

Reuse is the easy way, but today we are looking at reduce.

I posted last month about things I feel you don’t need for a new baby. Not everyone will agree with the list, but it’s a place to start thinking.

Things I didn’t find useful included changing tables, multiple strollers and walkers. There’s more, but you can read it there.

If it works for your family, cosleeping also lets you reduce the things you need for baby. You can probably skip the cradle and maybe even the crib, depending on how dedicated you are to the idea. It works great for many families, but others struggle. Do what works for you.

Another key step to reducing what you get for a baby is taking control of baby showers and such. This is difficult, since you aren’t generally the one throwing the party, but if your registry is under control it will help. Better yet is if you can talk to whoever organizes the shower so that you can encourage simplicity and maybe even encourage used gifts in appropriate categories.

When your baby is old enough, making your own baby food is a great choice. You’ll cut back on waste by not buying so many jars of baby food. You will, however, need some other supplies.

With my first too, I used a baby food food mill once my babies were old enough for food that wasn’t completely pureed. It worked great, and I’ll be using my food mill again this time. I had one of the KidCo mills.

But I also want to use our blender to create my own pureed food, and then freeze it in blocks for use. BPA free baby food trays are getting easier to find, making it simpler than ever to make your own baby food.

There are a lot of things to be careful about with making your own baby food. You have to be very careful about food contamination. Wholesome Baby Foods has some great resources to help you figure out how to make baby food safely for your infant. I’ll be looking at keeping our current VitaMix blender in condition to be safe. I’d prefer to not have to buy something just for the purpose of making baby food when I have a good blender at home already. That would make a bit of a mess of the whole point to reducing.

Reduction is one of the hardest areas to come up with ideas specific to having a new baby, I think. Reuse, tomorrow’s topic, is in many ways much simpler. There are so many things that can be handed down from child to child.

Cloth Diapers vs. Water Use Reduction

Talking with my mother the other day about our plans for cloth diapering baby Selene once she’s big enough to fit the bumGenius 3.0 diapers we have brought up a very good point.

Cloth diapers take a lot of water to wash.

Recent storms may change matters somewhat, but all the talk has been on water restrictions lately. I’m really hoping this doesn’t turn out to be a problem.

However, I do have things I would give up sooner than my cloth diapers, if it’s left up to me. I’d be quite delighted if my landlord would let us just kill the front lawn, and maybe add in some drought tolerant plants instead. The gopher seems to be leaving things alone at long last, thanks, I would imagine, due to the hunting prowess of the neighbor’s cats. I know they caught at least one gopher.

I’ve also been scolding my husband for some of the ways he wastes water already. I don’t think he’ll go for a bucket in the shower just yet, but if things get bad this year he might.

If the discussed water restrictions hold this year, things could get interesting. I hope to see enough rain, or rather enough snow in the mountains, to get us out of the drought, but if that doesn’t happen I have no doubt that restrictions will happen.

But I just can’t see giving up the cloth diapers. My mother is concerned that it might be a sensible solution, even though she agrees disposables are more of a waste overall. Going to have to keep on planning as the season goes on.

Baby Selene is Here!

Yes, I had my sweet baby girl about a week and a half ago. Finally I have the energy to post about it. I’ve barely been on the computer at all lately!

She was born on January 30 by C-section. I really had hoped for a natural child birth, but as things turned out, she was breech and the C-section was the best option to go with. Such is life. I’d rather have a healthy baby than the most perfect birth plan followed.

The C-section went just fine. I even watched part as one of the lights happened to be so oriented that I could see what was going on. Didn’t tell the doctors that because I wanted to be able to see, and I figured they might move it if I said a word.

There’s something really special about seeing your baby being born, even if it is by a C-section. Thank goodness for epidurals so I didn’t have to think about what all was going on.

She’s a little thing for a full term baby, a mere 5 lb 9.7 oz and 18.5 inches long. Just a tiny bit bigger than her month preemie brother. It’s so much like holding a doll picking her up, especially since my first was 8 lb 10 oz.

I do consider there to be one advantage to that C-section, however. I had already signed the paperwork to get my tubes tied. No more birth control worries!

That was something we had planned. If I had succeeded in the VBAC I wanted, it would have been my husband’s problem, shall we say. But with a C, much simpler to have things tied off and be done with it.

No more considering hormonal birth control or other methods. I really am delighted about that even with the occasional “OMG I will never have another baby” twinge. I know I don’t want or need more children.

She’s great at breastfeeding. In less than a week she put back much of her birth weight, despite having lost close to 10% of it while we were in the hospital. Considering how low her weight is, that was a real relief to me.

She sleeps. I mean really sleeps. Wakes up once a night already. Once in a while twice in the night, but she’s my first good sleeper. Since she’s growing so well I really don’t mind.

Bit by bit I’m feeling better myself.  I really detest incision pain, and I’ve been lucky enough to have tons of help from family. But I’ve been feeling the urge to get some work done again while Selene naps beside me, so here I am.

Green Your Baby Bottles

Some of the things I need to replace from raising my older kids are my baby bottles. I had the drop-in kind. They were nice, since you can get the air out of the disposable plastic sleeve easily, but there are those two words.

Disposable.

Plastic.

Ugh. These days, just plain ugh.

As a mom who intends to breastfeed the first year and however much beyond, I don’t exactly need a lot of baby bottles. Just a few for those times when siblings want to help, Daddy needs a turn, or the grandparents are babysitting. I know all that is going to happen, and often.

So I’ve been shopping around Amazon trying to figure out what to get. Wherever I end up buying, I like being able to get a good feel for what’s out there and what people think of things before I actually buy.

So far I’m liking the Evenflo glass baby bottles. You can get better nipples for them, they’re fairly inexpensive for glass baby bottles, and they fit on the Medela Pump in Style.

Then again, I’m still thinking about the Klean Kanteen baby bottle. That one just fascinates me.

I have a lot of thinking to do on this, as well as discussions with my husband. He isn’t quite so on board with the BPA concerns, but then he doesn’t do as much reading on parenting topics or environmental topics as I do. He does, of course, hear from his parents every time we do something too “tree hugger” or “environazi” for their tastes. That of course just means doing something green that they think would be easier done some other way.

The plus side is that I’ve converted my mother-in-law into an enthusiastic supporter of breast feeding. Took more than a year, though, and my refusal to quit until each of my kids weaned on their own.

I expect glass baby bottles and cloth diapers will be a similar battle.

Thinking Baby Sling

With two other kids around, I’m thinking this time around I really need to give a baby sling a serious try. The only thing I’m not sure of is… which one?

We had a sling with my oldest, but it really didn’t work out. It was one my mother picked up, and we just couldn’t get it to work. I don’t recall which type it was, but we just couldn’t get the adjustments right.

This time around I’m thinking with two other kids a sling sounds really nice.

Something other than a stroller to push when I pick my daughter up from school.

Something to keep my hands a little freer while still holding my baby.

We had a front carrier with my daughter, and it was pretty nice too, but not always comfortable. I’m thinking about comfort as well as practicality here.

I’ve heard good things about Maya wrap and Moby wrap, but no idea what’s best.

Any opinions out there?