Welcome to the March Carnival of Natural Parenting: Vintage green!
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month we're writing about being green — both how green we were when we were young and how green our kids are today. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.
When the idea came up to write a post on "green" things we did as kids,
my first inclination was to assume there wasn't anything. But then I realized — there was plenty, but we didn't identify it as such. Certainly
my parents would never have aspired to be eco-chic in the pre-recycling times I grew up in (I'm old! Yes!), and even now they might look a little askance at claims of environmental friendliness as PC hogwash, but I came up with this list of
vintage green activities that were eco-minded unbeknownst to us!
- We made our own Play-Doh. Here's a list of recipes. I remember ours always dried out really quickly, and it was always pale pastels (I was fine with that), so mold your pale pink and blue city tout de suite and then let it crumble!
- I spent most days outside, swinging on the playground, unschooling myself about edible plants and interesting bugs, and riding my bike all over the neighborhood. That's green and free-range! Definitely vintage.
- My older brother and I spent the summers in charge of dishwashing. We filled a tub in the sink with warm, soapy water and washed everything in it before doing a quick cold rinse and setting the dishes aside to dry. Very little wasted water!
- We had no air-conditioning, so my brother and I came up with a lot of games that involved electric fans. Did you know they make delightful vertical roulette wheels when you tape numbers to them? Now you do.
- My mom used cloth diapers on my older brother and me, or so I hear, and got us out of them early. By the time my little brother unexpectedly came around, disposables were much more the in thing, so she switched over. He took a lot longer to potty learn (hmmm...).
- She also breastfed all three of us, which is one of the most eco-friendly foods out there, and it was kind of rare and therefore radical for the time, though my mom does not think of herself as such.
- My mom still does most of the cleaning with a rag dampened with water. It's really all you need to dust and wipe up spills.
- When I started band? The cleaning cloth my mom sent with my (secondhand from my aunt) flute: cut-up scraps of my dad's old pajamas. I thought it was sweet if a little sad — because my dad loved those pajamas.
- My dad always wore everything until it absolutely wore out. His pajamas would have large swaths of fabric missing before he'd consent to a Christmas gift of a new pair.
- My dad was always solicitous of whether we had enough light to read by, switching on a lamp if he thought my book looked too shaded. But that was the only electrical extravagance. Other than that, our 60-watt-bulbed lights were turned off when not in use, and the heat was kept to freeze-your-toes crisp temperatures. If I complained, my mother told me to put a sweater on and my father would pass over a throw blanket. This changed only recently when my mother got thyroid cancer and was suddenly cold all the time; I guess there's a time to splurge.
- My dad refused to use anything chemical to unstop a clogged drain. He would take off the drain cover and get out some exploring tools and tweeze out all the gunky hair and other nastiness that resided within — and sometimes he'd make me do it, considering it was my hair and all.
- You know how microwave popcorn gives you cancer or something? My dad was old school. We popped kernels in a stainless steel pot. I've been converted back to this idea and am looking forward to trying out this recipe for the perfect pot-popped popcorn. We even bought a set of new (used) stainless steel pots off craigslist, even though I used to make fun of my parents for having the same stainless steel pots since their wedding instead of upgrading to something fancier. They also used wooden spoons, which for awhile I despised but am tempted now to steal.
- My mom collected antique kitchen implements, and I often used a hand mixer
to whip up my favorite chocolate maple milkshake, the recipe for which was in a kids' cookbook I cannot locate online. (My theory is the shake might be like maple milk shake 1 from this recipe list.) I wish I had one of those hand mixers now — so convenient, so easy, less clean-up time, and no plugs or batteries needed!
- Neither parent was drawn to kitchen duties, but for all that my mom cranked out hearty, home-cooked meals even while working out of the house. My dad stepped in each week to make his signature pizza.
- My mom is the most accomplished needlewoman I know. She sews, knits, smocks, cross-stitches, and quilts, and I know she could do anything else she put her hand to. She made my wedding dress for $97 to look like the designer dresses of the season, since the designer dresses weren't in my price range. I know needlework has lately become more of a hobby for those who can afford the supplies than a true money-saver, but my mom learned her sewing from her mother, who in turn learned from the Depression and from raising five kids of her own that if you want something, sometimes you have to make it yourself. My mom grew up just as resourceful and creative, and I like to hope she passed a little of that on to me.
Now that I've written this list, I'm shocked at how much I'm hearkening back to my parents' way of doing things. I know the green things I'm passing on to Mikko are a little more labeled, a little more explicit — a little more expensive and pretentious, too, perhaps. But, I hope the main thing I'm passing on is a spirit of making do, of keeping it simple, of not worrying too much about keeping up with the times or with the Joneses and all their latest and greatest products.
And I really hope for Mikko to have memories like mine of playing outside, teaching himself about the friendly bugs, and enjoying the sounds, the smell, the excitement of fresh-popped popcorn. Not to mention the real-butter taste! Yum.
Tell me your green memories, or your green dreams. Are they specific like popcorn or philosophical like resourcefulness?
Visit Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants.
(This list will be updated March 9 with all the carnival links.)
This is what I've been doing instead of writing. Look around you:
I changed the wallpaper!
To refresh your memory, here's what things used to look like:
You don't have to tell me it used to look awful, because
I really did like my cheerful vintage look.
(You know, like when you get a haircut and people go, "Oh, my gosh, that's SO MUCH better," and you want to kick them?)
But...isn't it beautiful now?
Sam worked so hard to get this together for me. Thank you, sweets! (He's one of the cuties in the screen shot there.)
We took the header picture several months ago in preparation.
That's Mikko in the ERGO on my back. For safety fanatics out there, those tracks aren't in use. They seriously run into a building several feet back from where we were shooting. I'm not such a hardcore model that I like to endanger my son! He was quite irritated by the time the shoot was over, though, quashing
my dreams of making him into a child star. Ha!
As all of you poke around and enjoy the site in the next days and weeks, do
let me know if things work for you or not so much. I tried to copy over all the functions of the old site, but you never know!
The other thing I've been working hard on is the
March Carnival of Natural Parenting — posting TOMORROW! Check back for lots of wonderful articles on old-school green living. You'll get so many good ideas — I guarantee it.*
*Unless you are (a) already a supremely evolved eco-warrior
or (b) unable to read. I just hope the reason you're unable
to read isn't because there's a glitch in my site redesign!
The other day after preschool,
Mikko's teacher pulled me aside (he likes to put on his Observant Teacher hat like this) and said to me privately, "Have you noticed Mikko's balance is...not so good?"
I started laughing.
I don't know if that was the reaction he was expecting, but Sam and I have the
worst balance in the world ever, so I just wiped away the tears and admitted it was genetic.
The teacher said Mikko will have trouble keeping going if, for instance, he's running and another kid bumps into him. He brought it up because a previous student had had balance problems along with speech delays, and it turned out this other kid had so much fluid in his ears that it was affecting both his balance and his hearing. So I appreciated the teacher's concern and his willingness to broach topics like that with the parents.
But I will tell you a few stories to explain why
I am not at all surprised that Mikko has terrible balance, considering his hereditary potential to be a klutz. I shared some of these stories at
my post on Hobo Mama Reviews about a balance board giveaway from
Paisley and Pretties as well as in the comments there, but I'm going to go out on a limb (
carefully! I might fall!) and assume that no one but
Slee and I read that post. So here they are, proofs of our physical (un)prowess, because I live to humiliate myself.
Sam and I used to love hanging out at science museums and children's museums, even before we had children. (Frankly, it was more fun then, since we got to play with whatever we wanted instead of having to share the best toys.) We once went to a science museum where they had a special exhibit where you could
test how well your body did at different physical tasks, like strength, flexibility, and coordination. There would then be a chart where you could compare your scores to the average for your age and gender. So, for instance, strength required pulling down on a big weight with a sensor reading your force exerted, and flexibility was measured by stretching your legs out straight and bending toward your toes and seeing where your fingertips hit along a ruler.
These are the kinds of shenanigans we used to indulge in.
The balance test was a square metal board that you stood on, not unlike a bathroom scale but anchored only in the middle, so that it would tip in the direction of either foot unless you kept it perfectly balanced between your feet, like a very small teeter-totter. There were handles to hang onto, and you were supposed to time how long you could keep the board balanced and not hit the floorplate, which had sensors on either side. Well, we failed, colossally.
We couldn't keep the board balanced for more than a second, and the minimum was several seconds.
But we couldn't figure out why the timer wasn't working for us. We were just having to count the time ourselves, when there was clearly a digital readout that wasn't going. We read the directions again, more carefully this time and found out —
you were supposed to take your hands off the handles! That started the timer.
Ohhhh... Doing it correctly, we now registered about a tenth of a second of balancing.
Our really crappy times were the result of making it too easy on ourselves. Our true crappy times were remarkably more embarrassing.
I broke my leg on my eighth-grade ski trip, which is a balance story all in itself. I've been skiing once since then and I really want to go again, but Sam is (rightly) resistant. I cajoled him into taking beginner figure-skating lessons with me. Sam's experience in the first lesson = face plant on the ice, broken glasses, blood, swelling, possible concussion — and
a refund of our prepaid lesson fees once we signed a form that said we had no intention of suing the rink. (How do you sue for a genetic predisposition to extreme clumsiness?) Sam previously suffered a head injury when he sledded into a tree as a child, so winter sports in general haven't been our strong suit. Considering all that, I haven't pushed too hard on the skiing thing, but if you live near Seattle and want to accompany me next winter and don't mind the thought of the excursion perhaps ending with an ambulance, do let me know!
A reenactment of that fateful trip (and fall)
down the mountain.
But, anyway, when I got my cast off my leg, I had to go to physical therapy. The doctor wanted to see how much my balance had deteriorated, so he asked me to stand on my left (the formerly broken) leg and close my eyes while I counted upwards.
I made it to one before I fell over.
"Oh, dear," he murmured. This was bad, apparently. Very bad. "Well," he said, putting on a brave doctor face, "try it on your good leg, so we have a baseline."
On my right leg, I made it to two seconds before falling over.
Now the doctor wasn't as worried about my bad leg. Though I have to wonder if he remained worried, just in general.
Sam and I have tried a couple things to help us improve our balance.
I've started riding bikes again, though I always make sure to select a bike with thick tires, and Sam has discovered a scooter he loves. I've been taking ballet the past several years, and even though I
suck, it has definitely helped my balance.
I can now almost, sometimes, stand on one tippy-toe without crashing into the mirrors. As long as I have a hand near the barre to catch myself.
You know, maybe Mikko
does have some rare balance disorder — and so do Sam and I!
This would explain so much. I only wish I'd known back when it could have gotten me out of gym class...
If you dare to share: What embarrassing physical defects run in your family? Has a teacher or physician ever expressed concern at your atrocious athleticism? Come on, join me over on the loser wall, where we always get picked last for the team!
at the gardening store!
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