I was lamenting fruit flies on Twitter several years ago, and Teacher Tom stepped in to save me.

Seattle had decreed that all food and yard waste needed to go in the compost bin rather than the garbage. This was a change I could get behind as an eco-friendly ideal.

But the small kitchen waste bin the city handed out for collecting our kitchen scraps had two distinct problems: The smell of rotting food seeped out into our kitchen, and fruit flies gathered to feast. It didn't seem to matter how often we emptied the little container, and we even bought a fancier one with a locking lid and filter, with no accompanying improvement.

I have watched my share of videos of tiny house conversions, to the point where YouTube now shows me more as recommendations. I say, Sure, YouTube, ok, just one more. And the cycle continues.

I don't live in a cool tiny home, just a normal small apartment. But I find it inspiring to see how people use a little space and still live big.

Except, that is, when a family is growing.

Don't get me wrong — I love seeing families with little children navigating small spaces. As a family of five living in under 960 square feet (capacious by tiny house standards, I admit), you'd think that would be right in my wheelhouse, and you're right.

However, it's primarily these families that make me yell at my computer screen.

Because they don't know a simple undeniable truth. Ready? Brace yourselves.

BABIES GET BIGGER.

In the spirit of Earth Day, I'm sharing 10 simple changes you can make to create a more eco-friendly environment in your home. Some of you might have done all these and then some, but for those of us who need a nudge in a new direction, here are some baby steps to pick and choose from, according to where you are on your environmental journey.

1. Replace paper towels with cloth dish towels, sponges, and rags.

It can seem daunting to discontinue paper towel use when you’re accustomed to grabbing one several times a day for all manner of cleaning projects. If the idea of going cold turkey scares you, keep a roll at hand but gradually increase the number of reusable options you have as well.

Here’s what we use in place of paper towels:

Here are some simple ideas to jazz up your Christmas gifts this holiday season. They aren't professional-level wrapping techniques, which makes them doable for any of us mortals; they use materials that are easy to source; and they still add a snazzy touch to your presented presents.

Do you hate wandering aimlessly through the aisles, trying to remember which one has the salad dressing, peering at a hastily scribbled list and trying to decipher if that addition by a family member says beef or beer? Do you hate getting home, only to realize you forgot five things you needed for the week's meals?

I recently came up with an incredibly easy shopping list hack that I want to share with you. It's an ongoing shopping list that's targeted to our family and that matches the order of the aisles in our local grocery store.

Ta-da!

Allow me to elucidate.

I wanted this list to have five salient features:

1. Offline: My husband doesn't believe in new technology. His phone cannot handle a fancy app that syncs with mine. In any case, I actually do prefer to have a physical list on the fridge, because that's where we're thinking about what food we need.
2. Tracking all our regular purchases: We wanted to see at a glance what foods we normally buy so we could run down the list before a shopping trip as we checked our stock of essentials.
3. In aisle order: I wanted to walk from one end of our usual store(s) to the other, gathering our groceries in an efficient manner as I went.
4. Easy to mark: I needed this list to work well from a practical standpoint. It needed to be easy to see what we wanted to buy, what we'd already gotten, and any notes or additions we had.
5. One page: This isn't a manifesto, people! It's a shopping list!

It's one thing to DIY in a garage or workshop — it's another to paint, sand, saw, and otherwise muck around with no outdoor space to call your own and wall-to-wall beige carpet covering your whole living space.

Here's how we've handled doing super-messy and time-consuming projects — painting cabinet interiors and doors, retexturing and painting walls and ceilings, staining and painting furniture, and spray painting hardware — in a second-floor condo with a teensy balcony and no usable uncarpeted area.

Tip #1: Choose a less-trafficked area if possible.

This might not be possible if your space if super small, but give it a try. If needed, choose a space with a door to block out kids, pets, and other curiosity seekers. I've had cabinet doors dry with sweet little paw prints in the paint. A studio apartment might not have a door option, so you'll have to work quickly and supervise any interlopers.

Welcome to the January 2015 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Household Chores

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants have shared stories, tips, and tricks on tackling household chores. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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Wouldn't it be nice to be able to tidy up easily, because everything had a dedicated place to stow neatly away?

This is the dream we have for our small space, and it's one we're slowly (slooowly) achieving. As a consequence, this post is still somewhat in the "do as I say, not as I do" category, so fair warning. But we're getting there!

If you don't have a lot of space (like us), or if you have a lot of stuff (like we have had), or if you just plain have more stuff than room for it (like many) — and assuming acquiring substantially more space isn't a viable option at the moment — you'll breathe more easily if you reconfigure your stuff to fit your space.

Save your energy

Having a place for everything means — hard truth here — having less stuff than absolutely fits. In other words, don't cram your space; get rid of things instead.

Back when feng shui was "in," I read a bit about it. I know, I know — ancient Chinese wisdom as a fad! My heartfelt apologies to anyone who's an expert and a believer. But it was quite popular a few years back in Western home decorating, so I was curious what feng shui was all about. I didn't embrace the concept of energy as a mystic force, but I did take away a huge lesson in psychology. To wit: Clutter steals energy.

We continue to be delighted with the inspiration and wisdom our Carnival of Natural Parenting participants share, and we hope you'll join us for the next carnival in January 2015! (Check out December, November, September, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January 2014, and summaries of all our 2013 posts, 2012 posts, and 2011 posts if you missed any.)

Your co-hosts are Dionna at Code Name: Mama and Lauren at Hobo Mama.

Here are the submission details for January 2015:

Theme: Household Chores: Oh, that dreaded word! We all have 'em, but how do we manage to do them? Talk to us about your household tasks, how you divide the labor, and how you involve your partner or housemates and children, or how you wish you could. Submission deadline: January 6. Carnival posting: January 13.

Deadline: Tuesday, January 6. Fill out the webform (at the link or at the bottom) and email your submission to us by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time: CarNatPar {at} NaturalParentsNetwork.com

Carnival date: Tuesday, January 13. Before you post, we will send you an email with a little blurb in html to paste into your submission that will introduce the carnival. You will publish your post on November 11 and email us the link if you haven't done so already. Once everyone's posts are published on January 13 by noon Eastern time, we will send out a finalized list of all the participants' links to generate lots of link love for your site! We'll include full instructions in the email we send before the posting date.

Yesterday was the Carnival of Natural Parenting, and we all gave a little home tour. Only … my home tour turned into a loooong home tour (despite our small space — how is that possible?), so I'm posting the second half, the upstairs part, today.



Turning upstairs now! This was one of the safety fixes we had to make to the place when we moved in: making these dowel openings smaller so a baby head couldn't squeeze through. We've considered covering the stair treads with one of those wood retrofitting kits, but maybe it's just gentler on our clumsy kids for now to have them be carpeted.

We're slowly making a gallery along the stairwell of vintage postcards, maps, and photographs. 1920s, ahoy!

Top of the stairs. That clock is cracked because it's such an antique. That's a joke. It's from Pier 1.

And, yes, we routinely drag home odd pieces of driftwood.

Turning the corner, you can see our linen closet. Yeah, we don't actually have one of those. This will do for towels.

I had this idea that the upstairs could be an amalgam of beach-cottage style with a more formal but still livable Swedish Gustavian-modern look. Hence my Pinterest boards: Hobo Cottage and Gustavian Modern, Hobo Style. We've been concentrating on the downstairs for now, so not much has been done, design-wise, upstairs yet.

Welcome to the September 2014 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Home Tour

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have opened up their doors and given us a photo-rich glimpse into how they arrange their living spaces.

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Hello, and welcome to our beach house!

And by "beach house," I mean 1980s condo near the beach. While most people try to upgrade and modernize, we're trying to antique-ify. We love the look of 1920s beach bungalows but the upkeep and lower price tag of a 1980s condo, so we're trying to meld!

Our entryway, with redone tile floors. It took us so much effort to find someone who could do black & white tile the way we wanted. Apparently we're weird?

When entering, the downstairs half-bathroom is on your left, the galley kitchen on your right, and the living space straight ahead, past the stairs leading up to the second floor.

All told, we have 990-ish square feet of living space, and two bedrooms, with soon to be five occupants. Because we're smart about family planning that way.

Le kitchen de galley. (That's the French for galley kitchen.) (It totally is.) (Don't question it.)

If you're eagle-eyed, you'll spot the things we've done … and the things still undone.

There is so much still undone!

We've lived in this place for five years now (wow! time flies!), and it continually astonishes me how much time each renovation project takes, even now that we have some people we hire to help us with all the stuff we're too clumsy and helpless to manage.

We continue to be delighted with the inspiration and wisdom our Carnival of Natural Parenting participants share, and we hope you'll join us for the next carnival in September 2014! (Check out August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January, and a summary of all our 2013 posts, 2012 posts, and 2011 posts if you missed any.)

Your co-hosts are Lauren at Hobo Mama and Dionna at Code Name: Mama.

Here are the submission details for September 2014:

Theme: Home Tour: We want to see, and you want to invite us over! Take us on a viewing of your home. Show us one room you love, or all of them. Show us how you organize your pantry, arrange your play space, or make room for a family bed. We want the fifty-cent tour!

Deadline: Tuesday, September 2. Fill out the webform (at the link or at the bottom) and email your submission to us by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time: CarNatPar {at} NaturalParentsNetwork.com

Carnival date: Tuesday, September 9. Before you post, we will send you an email with a little blurb in html to paste into your submission that will introduce the carnival. You will publish your post on September 9 and email us the link if you haven't done so already. Once everyone's posts are published by noon Eastern time, we will send out a finalized list of all the participants' links to generate lots of link love for your site! We'll include full instructions in the email we send before the posting date.

It's fruit fly season. Time to keep our kitchen compost bin's lid closed and keep control of Rainier cherry pits and other fruity detritus!

If you're suffering from light infestations of common household pests, here are a few natural remedies to rid your home of critters you'd rather stay outside: fruit flies, fleas, and ants, to be specific.

Warning: If you are the catch-and-release type, don't read on. These methods are harmless to humans but not so much to the bugs in question.

FRUIT FLIES

Fruit flies always make me feel like a bad housekeeper, even though we've had them often enough that I recognize they're more of a seasonal certainty. Summer brings ripe fruit, and lots of it, and fruit flies piggyback on all that lushness.

Keeping fruit flies at bay involves diligently removing their food sources while setting out simple traps to diminish the population. Otherwise, they reproduce like … fruit flies!

Take away their food.

Be ruthless about putting away or throwing out fruit and fruit bits. I can't tell you how many cherry pits and stems, apple cores, grape halves (spat out by the little one), and orange and banana peels I've had to sweep into the kitchen scrap bin … because apparently everyone else's arms are broken. No matter. If you don't put them away, the fruit flies will … into their stomachs. See what I did there?

Keep kitchen scraps in a closed container, or do what Teacher Tom recommended to me (genius!) and keep a compostable bag of scraps in the freezer. If you've reached the overflow point (or, preferably, before), walk those scraps on outside to the yard-waste bin or your yard's compost pile.

Clean, clean, clean.

Sticky dishes need to go immediately into the dishwasher or the sink to soak or be cleaned. Fruity rags or napkins need to go into a wet bag or the laundry (or trash … if you're still using paper, you destroyer of trees, heh heh heh). Wipe down counters to get rid of crumbs and juicy puddles. Be sure to regularly clean out your kitchen scrap bin with hot, soapy water.

Trap them.

There are a couple traps that work for fruit flies. They require ingredients you already have around the home plus a measure of patience.

• Take a small bowl and fill it with no more than about an inch of apple cider vinegar. Place cling wrap over the top (unless you're not using that anymore — good for you; you're ahead of me with that one) and secure with a rubber band. Use a knife or scissors or a fork or whatever to poke tiny little holes in the film. The fruit flies are attracted to the smell of the ACV and will fly into the holes but then not be able to figure out how to fly back out. Or so goes the idea. If they do get back out, try again with smaller or fewer holes.
• Take a jar and put a piece of fruit in the bottom. Roll up a piece of paper (scrap paper! recycled and reused! you didn't catch me there) into a cone shape and stick it into the jar. Ideally, the top unfurls to the size of the jar top, and the bottom is a tiny hole just above the fruit. Again, flies will go, "Oh! Yummy rotting fruit!" and fly on down, and then buzz around there until they die. Which they do rather quickly, because their life span is very short. I feel like this is a peaceful end, because they got to eat something delicious before they go, but they didn't get to reproduce quite as much. Win, win! 
• You can obviously switch the baits for each trap. Knock yourself out. I've found the fruit works better, personally, and you can just use whatever scraps you have. Who wouldn't take fruit over apple cider vinegar, though?

This paper was picturesque but stank as a trap. I recommend something thin: (recycled) notepaper, newspaper, or computer paper

Welcome to the March edition of the Simply Living Blog Carnival - Clearing the Clutter cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. This month our participants wrote about de-cluttering and cleaning up. Please check out the links to their thoughts at the end of this post.

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I am a confirmed and reforming clutterbug. I was a packrat as a kid, and I still have problems letting go.

But: I live in a small space that demands a certain level of minimalism. Plus, I'm raising kids so need to set a good example. We have honest-to-goodness hoarders in our family, and I want to avoid that fate for our set.

The first step to successful downsizing is working through the emotional roadblocks we hang onto along with our stuff. Here are the ways I got through the psychological aspects of decluttering and am now able to face parting with most of the things I need to:

• Stuff does not equal memories.

  You can keep the important memories in your head and through the best photos and a very few mementos. You don't need to remember everything, like what movie you saw that one Wednesday seven years ago, so throw away the ticket stubs for that one. Your best memory-keepers are the people around you, so tell stories, take photos, write down priceless moments, and let the memorabilia go.

• You are not emotionally responsible for what people give you.

  If someone gives you a gift, it's now yours, and you get to choose what happens with it. Often relatives will give me things they don't know what to do with. I've realized my role is to be the gracious accepter, who mediates the path of this object from them to me to the thrift store, since a direct route to the thrift store was impossible for the other person. They obviously have some guilt about giving up the item; I do not have to assume that guilt for myself. Obviously, special cases would be heirlooms or loan items — in that case, I state clearly that I don't have room for or interest in certain items, and I offer to return them to the giver, with appropriate thanks for the offer or loan. We've occasionally had to be quite firm and open about what the choices are for the giver: Either take it back, or we will give it away.

Welcome to the December 2012 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Childhood Memories

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have talked about memories of growing up — their own or the ones they’re helping their children create. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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It's Christmas, when we break out the boxes and bins we store for this one month only out of twelve, and when we add additional things to the piles we already have.

When I was a child, and through my early adult years, I believed in archiving my life. I couldn't part with anything, because it was like throwing away a memory. Those ticket stubs for a movie — perhaps I'd like to remember what date I'd seen that flick, and that would trigger a suggestion of what friends saw it with me. That brochure from a museum — it would fill in the gaps about the family vacation we took and perhaps bring to mind that funny thing my brother had said in the car afterwards.

Only, the older I got, the more I realized it doesn't work that way, at least not reliably. I see the ticket stubs and think, "That was kind of a dumb movie. I can't believe I saw it in the theater." I look at the brochure and can't remember what vacation we were on, and am not sure why I saved something so dull in the first place.

Even reading back through the copious journals I kept growing up, I have flashes of "Yes! I remember! How lovely" that pop up in between loooong stretches of "Seriously? You wrote down every week how much you didn't want to go to piano lessons?" and "Oh, yeah. I do remember that awful day now. I wish I didn't."

Here's hoping this can go down as my weirdest post ever.

Just before Alrik was born a year and a half ago, we bought and installed two bidet seat attachments to our toilets, and I am here to tell you of my continuing satisfaction with the choice. Ready?

The bidet we chose was the Blue Bidet BB-1000: Ambient Temperature Water Bidet. Doesn't it sound fierce? The BB-1000, suckas!

I want to make it clear that we paid for both our bidets and that I'm not being compensated for this post. I'm writing about bidets for free. I cannot say that frequently and proudly enough.

Why a bidet?

Why not a bidet?

Oh, wait — you want more? Oh, ok. Well, then:

Does this picture amuse everyone else as much as it does me? That's quite the stream!

Welcome to the July edition of Authentic Parenting Blog Carnival: Pets and children.

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Authentic Parenting Blog Carnival hosted by The Positive Parenting Connection and Authentic Parenting. This month our participants are sharing their thoughts and experiences with pets and children! Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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Mrs. Pim was our cat before Mikko was born. We adopted her at age two from the animal shelter, where she'd spent several months in a cage, growing gaunt and nervous from the barks in the room next door. She stole our hearts by poking her paw through the bars after we'd placed her back in her cage. After that plaintive signal, how could we not choose her?

We knew a little about her from the form that was filled out when her previous family released her to the shelter, but it was missing one vital piece of information: the genetic condition that would be the cause of her death.

At age 6, she went in for some extensive tooth care, and blood tests revealed her kidneys were failing, an inherited disorder to strike such a young cat. I became pregnant with Mikko soon thereafter, and we prepared for one life to enter as the other would exit.




Only Mrs. Pim stuck around — for four more years — happy ones, I think and hope. Mikko and Mrs. Pim got to meet and know each other, and there was love: entirely one-sided love. Mikko thought Mrs. Pim was so stinking interesting that his second sign and his first spoken word were "kitty." Mrs. Pim was much warier of her admirer than he was of her (despite the fact that she had all her claws and many of her sharpest teeth), but she typically tolerated him.





For my part, I loved watching Mikko care for her, in all the senses of that word. He was eager with her brush, and he loved to help scatter her food into her feeding tray. He helped us scoop her litter box, which did not always make it easier, but I appreciated his awareness of her needs.

When Mrs. Pim declined, suddenly, as I was pregnant with our next baby, I tried driving to the vet alone through an unusual Thanksgiving snowstorm but had to turn back on the icy hills. Mrs. Pim had a reprieve of another few days with her family, and then we all went together to the vet to hear the news we knew was coming: She needed to be put to sleep. We had to let her go and end her suffering.