Great Books for Green Parents

Whether you read them enough to make them worth buying, or just borrow for a quick read from the library, books are another great resource for parents wanting help in taking care of the environment and their families. There’s so much to know!

Free Range Kids
I was lucky enough to be sent a review copy of this one for one of my other sites. Great book, and while it’s not about environmentalism, there’s a lot to it that can be combined with teaching kids to care about the environment.

Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home
I reviewed this one a while ago. Lots of tips on living cleaner and greener, and broken into separate sections so it’s easy to pick the areas you want to get started with.

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
Another book I got to review a while back. Lots of fun and a great reminder of how very important it is to get your family outside.

Books I haven’t read that sound promising:

The Green Teen: The Eco-Friendly Teen’s Guide to Saving the Planet

The Green Parent: A Kid-Friendly Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Living

Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care

Our Water Restrictions Are Now Official!

Actually, they were official on July 1. I’ve just been too busy trying to find a new place to live to write about it before now.

Ours require paying attention. We can water Saturday, Monday or Wednesday. That’s hard because that’s not how the settings on my sprinkler timer works. I can schedule for every day, every other day or every third day. Doesn’t quite work.

I guess it will be nice to get moved and not have to worry about the sprinklers here. Just have to find out what the restrictions are in the new area, because they will exist.

I like how they’re doing it where my sister lives better. They just restrict the time of day. I could wish for a time of watering limit too or even a number of days per week restriction there, just to really emphasize the need to cut back, but at the same time it makes sense to say “only water when it’s not all going to evaporate immediately because it’s really miserably hot and windy out.”

A combination of the two would be good in other words. Limit time of day, length of watering and how often each week but not days of the week. I could program that pretty well into my system.

I can’t help but suspect that the restrictions are so simple where my sister lives because there are so many relatively new developments, all with Homeowner’s Associations, which typically have rules about how green a lawn must be kept. I’m sure they don’t like it when homeowners can’t keep up due to restrictions, so I can picture them campaigning to make it easier to keep having those perfect green lawns.

Personally, I still want either rocks or native plants in my front yard. Much more interesting than lawns. And then fewer worries on keeping the front watered on schedule, just have to deal with the back.

Keeping Kids Green and Busy While School’s Out

With the kids at home more, summer is a time that can be a little bit challenging for green parenting. Somehow you have to combat all the boredom that comes from having more free time, while facing the fact that the weather is warmer. Here are some of the things I do:

1. Try to get the kids outside early and late in the day.

I have a lot of sympathy for them wanting to be inside during the hottest parts of the hottest days. Who wouldn’t prefer that?

But even on the days that it breaks 100 degrees F around here there are times that they’ll willingly play outside. Rather than let them turn on the TV first thing in the morning, as they would love to do, I boot the kids outside to play. They can come inside when it really starts to warm up. Then I do it again when the day cools off sufficiently.

This also has the advantage of limiting the need for sunscreen. My kids generally aren’t out in the most powerful of the sun’s rays, so I don’t have to apply sunscreen to them so often.

2. Make homemade popsicles.

Sure the store has cheap ones, but they’re often little more than sugar water.

I prefer to make my popsicles from smoothies, but you could use regular juice or pudding if you prefer.

3. Hit the library.

Hot days are great for spending at the library. Get some new books for your kids to read while not having to run the air conditioning in your own home. The library’s there, after all!

4. Combine lawn watering with running through the sprinklers.

We have water restrictions starting up in our area, which means watering only on certain days and only after 6 p.m. and before 10 a.m. and only for 10 minutes per section on timed sprinklers.

On hot enough days, 6 p.m. is still plenty hot enough for running through sprinklers!

And of course there are always local swimming pools, beaches and so forth if you want to cool off during other parts of the day.

5. Crafts!

Within certain age ranges, it’s easy to come up with kids’ craft ideas. My kids love saving magazines and other things that might otherwise go into the recycle bin for a path through their crafting table first. Saves me a lot not having to buy everything they craft with, and the reuse is a great habit.

As kid get older, they may have particular ideas about what they will be willing to do, but if you find something they really enjoy making, try to encourage it.

6. Have friends over.

It won’t necessarily help to keep the kids cool, but having friends over certainly helps with the boredom factor. I always tell mine no TV or computer time with friends over.

7. Know when to give in on TV and computer time.

Really, it’s not the end of the world if kids watch a bit more TV or spend more time playing on the computer during the summer. What matters is that they get enough activity overall.

Really Pleased With Our Water Usage

Let’s face it. I’m normally not that excited to get my water bill… any bill really. Where’s the fun in that?

But with all our efforts to conserve water around here, I was really excited to get our bill over the weekend.

We used just 16 units of water for this two month period. That’s down from 19 units for the same time frame last year. Pretty good, especially considering that average residential usage in our area I’ve seen quoted as 30 units per month.

I won’t say our lawn is thanking us for our efforts, but that’s been done in as much by gophers as by lack of water, I think. We have one really pretty weed with purple flowers that I hope continues to spread.

The garden, which I will truly miss when we move, has been one of our big outdoor water changes. The ugly watering solution really seems to be helping us cut down on how much water that needs.

Overall, I hope we can do so well wherever we end up living when we move. I just had to share my delight at seeing how well we’re doing, though.

Clearing Out the Freezer Before the Move

Getting ready for a move takes so much effort. It’s not just cleaning out the garage, excess toys and so forth. Some ways using up as much as I can from the freezer is just as much trouble.

It’s not so hard using the things I froze because they were on a good sale. It’s using up the chicken bones and such that I saved for soup that is a bit challenging. Not exactly the right weather for that to be a popular meal.

I could move it, I suppose, but I’d rather use it up and have to restock than deal with trying to keep things cold during the drive up.

Nice thing is, it means I will know what’s in there and not be wondering later on what that mystery package in the back of the freezer is. It’s good to clean things out sometimes anyhow.