Green-ish

“We recommend to all people that there be no undue pollution, that the land be taken care of and kept clean to be productive and to be beautiful”
--Spencer W. Kimball (Ensign, May 1975).

Happy Earth Day! So for a while now I've been eyeing the canvas bags in grocery stores that you can buy and use instead of paper or plastic, reading articles about cleaning your home the "green" way, etc. and thinking I really should start doing that sometime. Well, Earth Day and my friend Heidi inspired me and I finally took the green plunge. Yesterday while out grocery shopping I bought two lovely reusable canvas bags which they then loaded my groceries in. As you can see, Jonathan is very proud of me. Then today I cleaned my bathroom using only white vinegar, baking soda, and lemons. Here's the low down on how well that worked:

Vinegar: Despite the fact that this made it smell like I had been dying Easter eggs in my bathroom, this was my favorite cleaning supply of the day. I put a little on a cloth and wiped down the mirror then followed with a dry cloth and it worked beautifully! I used vinegar and water to clean the sink, vanity, toilet, and floor and it seemed to do just as good a job as the usual products I use. In the shower the vinegar seemed to do a slightly better job at dissolving the hard water deposits than my usual stuff. The smell even wore off as it dried so now there's only the slightest smell of vinegar in my house which could actually be coming from the cleaning rags in the laundry closet.

Baking Soda: Thumbs up for this one as a way to remove soap skum and hard water from the shower floor, although it did take a little extra elbow grease to do it. I just need a new box of baking soda now.

Lemons: These were supposed to do a good job at removing hard water deposits, and they did on the sink faucet, but the shower walls didn't show much improvement so I had to bring in the vinegar. They sure did smell good, though, and later I was able to run the peels through my disposal to make it smell nice. :)

The finished product:

So I know I'm still just light green, having just done these two small changes to be more eco-friendly. I still have a ways to go before I'm on par with, say, my parents who drive a hybrid, recycle most of their trash and compost a good portion of the rest (honesty, you'd think they were democrats), but at least it's something. And maybe next year I'll be brave enough to switch to cloth diapers. Maybe.

Kindergarten Day

I love random holidays. I stumbled across a site that lists all kinds of weird holidays back when I was teaching junior high, and I filled up my calender with them. Lately, though, I've been out of the habit of observing these holidays, which is a shame because they give you a reason to celebrate almost every day. So today I decided to start up again with Kindergarten Day. Because I love any reason to eat macaroni and cheese, dinner became a conglomeration of all the foods typically eaten by a kindergartner. We had mac and cheese with hot dogs cut up and mixed in, carrot sticks and apple slices with peanut butter, and little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (with crusts cut off, of course).

Here are my boys with Peter's meal (which Jonathan was deeply coveting):

Sorry, Jonathan, just some mashed up banana for dinner for you. Peter is such a good sport about all my weirdness. He ate everything without once complaining that it wasn't the most filling meal for a 6'2" man, bless him. Happy Kindergarten Day!

Bookmarked

Yay! I've been tagged by Ruth. I love books and reading, so this one's a good one for me. Here's what I'm supposed to do:
1. Pick up the nearest book (at least 123 pages)
2. Turn to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the 5th sentence on your blog
5. Tag 5 people

The book nearest me is one I just finished, Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. What a beautiful book. Anyway, here's my sentence:

"If Marmee had begged Jo to go cut off her hair and sell it," Swede hypothesized, "I wonder how heroic a thing it would have been."

The context is the protagonist's little sister is trying to convince him to use some money he's just earned to buy food instead of to buy a canoe he really wants by referencing Little Women, another great book. So there you have it. I now tag New York Lindsay, Charmain, Beth, Christian, and Heidi.

Touchdown for the Tender Mercies

(Thanks to Katie for the title.) You know that the Lord is looking out for you when the morning after posting that last entry you get a call from a girl in your ward inviting you along with some other moms to go to the museum and you have a really good time just talking and being with other adults. Yay for tender mercies and for people who listen to and act on promptings!

Mama (didn't say) there'll be days like this...

One thing no one ever tells you about being a stay-at-home mom is how lonely it can be. Not that I didn't kind of see it coming, but it's still been more of an adjustment than I thought it would be. Sure I have Jonathan and he's more than happy to be with me all the time and that is sweet and fulfilling, but sometimes I just miss my circle of friends. You see, I really like people (although I have a hard time remembering that at Costco on Saturdays). I love having friends around me. I'm a little embarassed to admit how hard I've cried over various friends that have moved several time zones away. Sure there's phone and email and blogs, but those just don't seem to fill the same void for me as actual face-to-face interactions. I still have friends locally and am making more, but at this stage of life people either seem to think that I'm to busy to do anything with them or that they're too busy to do anything with me, and that makes me a little sad. If we don't have time for people in our lives, what's the point of anything we're doing? I'm really not as down as this post is probably making me sound, but this has just been on my mind this morning. Maybe I should just enjoy the solitude for now because maybe someday I'll be standing in my kitchen with five kids running around, knocking things over, begging for my attention, and I'll miss being lonely. We'll see.