Lemony Fresh Cleaning

I do a lot of my cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, but sometimes another choice is better. That would be cleaning with lemon juice.

You can’t beat the smell for one thing. An area cleaned with lemon juice smells good!

A classic use is as furniture polish. There’s a reason why so many store bought furniture polishes are lemon scented. You can put two parts of olive oil to one part lemon juice to make your own hardwood furniture polish.

Plain lemon juice is also good for cleaning wooden cutting boards.

Mixed with baking soda into a paste, it can polish chrome or copper. Salt can work in place of the baking soda, as it provides grit for scrubbing. I like baking soda in most cases, although it is less gritty.

Lemon juice is also good for your laundry, as it can help with natural bleaching. Hanging clothes out to dry in the sun can help with stains too, but sometimes you want that boost from lemon juice. Just add a half cup of lemon juice to the rinse cycle, then dry in the sunlight. A small amount of lemon juice also just makes clothes smell good when they dry, but honestly I’ve never found the need to worry about how my clothes smell after washing.

You can also soak clothes in a mix of vinegar and lemon juice to get a stain out. Just soak for a half hour before washing.

Lemon juice is a pretty flexible cleaner, and delightful for those times you don’t want the smell of vinegar when you clean. Sometimes scent matters.

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.

It’s Not Green If You Don’t Need It

I’ve posted occasionally on green consumerism in the past, but it’s one of those points worth revisiting regularly.

If you don’t need it, it’s not green!

I don’t care where it came from.

I don’t care what it’s made of.

If it’s the accumulation of more stuff, it’s not green.

We all struggle with this, especially since “need” is such a personal definition. Just look at what we think we need to get by in the United States versus other countries. In many cases the difference just ain’t pretty.

Be realistic about why you buy what you buy. Reusable bags and bottles are green because they keep you from using disposable bags and bottles. But having a whole collection of which maybe only a few are used is far less green. You hit the limit when you buy more of these things than you need.

Buying new things because you want to replace what you have with organic, fair trade, etc. is green in some ways, but wasteful if what you had was still perfectly good. Hopefully it’s all at least going to the thrift stores, Craigslist, Freecycle or something similar so that it will be used by someone else.

Being green can be complex at times. The right decision is not always obvious. A moment’s thought can do a lot to limit your mistakes.

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.