green in the face today...

Well, it's day #2 of tracking and stomach flu has hit our house... so much for water usage! But I will note our small victories for the day:
1. Alan remembered to use paper bags on his emergency trip to Pick-n-Save in the middle of his work day. Thank you, dear, for bananas, applesauce, and pedialyte. Today we aren't worrying about going organic!
2. We're air-drying our extra sick-day laundry in the backyard.
3. Nathanael wants to eat extra bananas b/c the peels can go in the compost bucket.
I guess this is our sunshine in the clouds...

carly anne

all the cousins welcoming Carly Anne!

the audit - part one

I’ll start with our 460 pounds of trash per month. Are you kidding?? Immediately I start to rationalize…well, we don’t always pick and throw out garlic mustard weed. There won’t always be a broken toy. We don’t throw out batteries each week. Hmmm, this sounds an awful lot like working through our family budget. We don’t always go out to eat. The car doesn’t need repairs every month. But just like the budget, I bet there’s always something to jack up those numbers!

We had a jolly time picking through, sorting, and weighing a week’s worth of Krug garbage. I’d not done this since I accidentally left my retainer on a restaurant table in the eighth grade! Rancid. And the biggest heartbreaker for me? That would be the four pounds of food we toss PER DAY! Yes. Again, I can rationalize: I don’t always forget about a full bag of potatoes. We don’t always shame an entire meal because of a royal recipe disaster. But the numbers don’t lie, and truthfully, I knew going into this that we were a food wasting family. Shame, there goes another head of lettuce. That’s money in the trash. And then there’s the ugly feeling that hangs out with over-consumption. I’m so blessed, and yet I waste so much!

Yard waste rang in with the largest number, averaging nearly 5 pounds per day. Honestly, though, would we keep that up all year? I think not. We chip or burn our yard waste. That being said, I hardly think that burning the yard waste would be considered recycling.

Finally, I wasn’t pleased with looking in the mirror and finding laziness. I like to pat myself on the back for filling our little, blue recycling bin each week, but in going through our trash we had an eye-opening moment. All the laundry bottles, soda bottles, and cans used in the basement just ended up forgotten in the basement trash. We were too lazy to run the stuff upstairs, so we tossed it in the trash, and promptly (and happily) forgot all about it.

You don’t get to forget when you pick through your trash.



*note: thanks to Alyssa, our photographer at this event!
*and for those who checked before, yes, it is 460 lbs a month!! originally I'd looked at the wrong page of my audit sheet..what a disappointment!

celebrating big news

Alyssa lost her fourth tooth yesterday afternoon!

and then if that wasn't exciting enough...

Cousin Carly Anne Lorenz was born at 10:35 last night,

one day after her big sister, cousin Maddie, turned two!!!

going green - getting started

Going green!! Whew, where to start?

How about with that nagging feeling up there…

Yes, you know what I mean, don’t you. It’s that I-know-I-should-but-I-don’t feeling you get when you throw your junk mail in the trash. It’s wishing that you knew how to make things just a little better but feeling too intimidated, too busy, and too lazy (I like to call it “tired”) to get going. It’s that inner perfectionist subconsciously screaming “since I’m not going to get this all right, I’m not going to get it at all!” Yep, that feeling has been hanging around, and that’s not healthy.

Do you know, we actually have a box decorated with a cute little recycling sign upstairs in the office. My six-year-old daughter came home from school a few months ago and decided we needed a recycling spot for paper “just like at school.” She made a little sign, slapped it on a box, and voila, we’ve been throwing our paper in there ever since. I just never bothered to let her know that I empty that box into the trash can the night before pick-up! My rationalization for the fib: well, I’m just not sure how to recycle paper, so I’ll at least help her get into a habit of recycling. Nice, huh?

So perhaps it was this nagging feeling “up there” that initially prompted me to write in to the Go Green challenge. Could this be a way that I would hold myself accountable to changing habits? I’ve always been bothered by our personal and societal addiction to consumption. I’ve always felt that conservation at home might help give our budget a boost. I’ve always been sickened by the wasted food that goes in our trash because I didn’t get it used up before it started to grow.

How exactly this will all play out, I do not know. I am sure, however, of this:
1. My kids are excited, and will therefore learn plenty.
2. My husband is on board, so this will be a positive experience.
3. We are finding out an awful lot about ourselves this week.

Stay tuned! We have around 90% of our initial audit complete. Whoa! Lots to share!