Deciding to Decide

This month the APLS Blog Carnival is focused on decision making. Deciding to live a sustainable life is a big decision, which is made harder by the fact that is then followed by many smaller choices. How do people decide where to focus their time and energy? What are those areas of focus? And what drops off in the meantime? Below are my (past and current) answers; be sure to check The Good Life on March 18 to read about the decisions others have made.

When my family first made a conscious decision to live a greener, more sustainable life, it was made up of only two people – my husband and me. At that point our top priority was saving money so we could pay off our debt. For us that meant scaling back across the board, exploring the world of thrift stores and used cars, and finding hobbies that didn’t involve expenditures. Having such a clear cut objective made lots of decisions easy and helped us make many of changes to our life. Read more

Simple Changes for Healthier Eating

After posting an earlier article on how to afford organic food, I realized that it may have given the impression that I believe organic food is healthy food. I do believe, based upon loads of research (like this and this) and my family’s own experiences, that organic food is healthier than non-organic options of the same items.

However, I don’t believe that organic = healthy. A diet of chips and cookies is not high quality nutrition, even if the chips are made with organically grown potatoes and the cookies contain only unrefined sweeteners. Choosing organic food is only one consideration of many for healthier eating.

It can seem like eating healthier is amazing complicated but there are some simple changes you and your family can make that will have you all eating healthier soon. Here are a few: Read more

Family Friendly Ways to Save Energy

Like many people, we’ve been reviewing all our bills and looking for ways to reduce our spending wherever possible. Since we’re also trying to reduce our use of nonrenewable resources, finding ways to save energy are bonus items. The Koala Sisters (aka our daughters) got into the act so we bring you four family friendly ways to save energy. Read more

Family Friday: For the Birds

Lucas Miller begins the new year with another fun and inexpensive activity that will get you and your kids out into nature. The Christian Science Monitor’s gardening section recently shared planting advice in Annuals and Perennials that Attract Birds to Your Yard so, if you have wee ones, know you can also explore the world of birding by bringing nature to you. Read more

Thinking About Next Steps for Greening Families

The last several months have been exceedingly busy for my family. My business has been more in demand than ever. As someone who is self-employed, I always feel an internal pull to make hay while the sun shines since future projects (and thus future income) are never guaranteed. I’ve had additional reasons to do just that since Rich launched his own business with his partners in 2009, making our family completely self-employed. It is fair to say that switch caused my normally high level of concern about finances to go up a couple of levels!

We believed in the new business, obviously, but expected it would take some time for Rich’s work level to ramp up to a point where he would bring in much income. As a result I took virtually every job that came my way happily. Then things began to move faster than we had anticipated for KELL Partners and Rich’s work level went up significantly. There are start-up costs to cover so his income still hasn’t rebounded but everything looks promising. Suddenly Rich and I were both working very long hours and trading off caring for our daughters, pets, and home to give each other uninterrupted time to complete work projects.

We’re still in that zone and I anticipate being here for some months to come. We’re still working to green our life but right now I want to spend my free time with my daughters (and my hard working husband when our work stars align!) rather than more time with my computer. What does that mean for Greening Families?

I’ve really enjoyed writing this blog and helping others who are interested in greening their lives but need to cut back right now. I’ve decided to post here to once a week, on Fridays, until things settle down a bit. We also tackle the broader topic of sustainable living on Family Profits, so check for helpful information there as well.

Why do you read Greening Families? As part of my “working smarter” push, I want to make sure I’m hitting the topics you’re most interested in so please let me know how I can best help you green your family.

Our Journey to Green

This post is a submission to December’s APLS Blog Carnival. Read about the journeys others have taken and are currently taking at The Conscious Shopper, one of my favorite green blogs, on December 18.

We’re deep into goal setting for 2010 around here so the topic for December’s APLS Carnival fit into our ongoing discussions perfectly. Below is an overview of the main vehicles that led us to begin making changes to live a greener life. I’ll be reviewing our progress towards our 2009 goals and laying out our goals for 2010 in a future post.

Our journey began more than ten years ago with finances as the impetus. As I wrote on our sister site, Family Profits, when we met both Rich and I were carrying significant student loan and credit card debt. The total when we finally added it up (it took us a couple of years to work up the nerve) was more than $180,000 worth of debt. That’s right, we were $180,000 in the hole even after making payments for several years. Not a good place to be.

We knew we wanted to pay off all our debt. Since we worked mainly in nonprofit organizations, we weren’t bringing home the Big Bucks so had to learn how to be super frugal. One of the unanticipated benefits of living frugally was that it was also a green lifestyle. We didn’t buy much of anything and the few things we did buy were often used. We were all over Reduce and Reuse because those actions saved us tons of money but we began to love the difference it made to our impact on the environment as well.

The next leg of our journey was spurred by medical issues. A week before our wedding, a driver ran a red light and T-boned my car, narrowly missing a direct hit to the driver’s side door. My car was totaled and I was injured pretty badly. My recovery took more than a year and led us to explore complementary and alternative medicine. Rich gave it a try as well and soon discovered that his back pain, for which surgery had been recommended, completely disappeared when MSG was removed from his diet.

We began to pay close attention to the food we consumed and as a result made many changes to our diet. We switched first to less processed foods, then to whole foods, then to locally grown organic options. Our spending on food remained fairly constant during these switches, in large part because we traded “convenience” for healthier options. A host of green living topics were revealed to us through these changes and we’re now huge proponents of organic farming, local food options such as CSAs, and the Slow Food movement.

The decision to become parents sparked the next shift. There is nothing like being completely responsible for the health and welfare of another living creature to get one’s attention! The more we learned about fetal and child development, the more concerned we became about items that had alwasy seemed innocuous. From baby lotion to sippy cups, there were serious matters to consider at every turn. While scientists argued about potential long-term effects and “safe” levels of exposure to various chemicals and compounds, it was clear to us that our first job as parents was to protect our children and so evoked the Precautionary Principle whenever we weren’t sure what to do.

New changes, like storing food in glass containers and making our own cleaning supplies, were implemented. And it became clear that the journey to a greener life was one that could last our whole lives.

Now that our daughters are a little older, the lives lived by other families is becoming the driver of change for us. We want all children, human and animal, to have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. We’re talking a lot this month about what we can do to help make that a reality but I can already see that more alterations will be coming to our lives soon. And I can’t wait.

Family Friday: Owl Prowls

With the days getting shorter and the nights getting longer, what is a nature-starved family to do? Once again, Lucas Miller has the answer! This month he discusses how to go on an owl prowl with your kids. With a little preparation, warm clothes, and patience, you are sure to have a good time. And the possibilities for learning about the world around us are owl-t of this world!

This month we’re going to talk about owls.  Owls have fascinated and humans for millenia (they appear on many ancient petraglyphs and artifacts) but, with Harry Potter and a number of other children’s books featuring them prominently, they seem to be especially hip at this cultural moment.

Most owls are non-migratory so, even in the winter, you can still hear and even see them. Winter’s actually a great time to go on an “owl prowl” because you won’t have to keep the kids up way past bedtime since the sun sets earlier. Read more

Family Friday: Enjoying Nature Around Us

It is the first Friday of October so that means another thoughtful article by Lucas Miller. This month Lucas urges us to notice, appreciate, and enjoy the nature all around us. Take advantage of the great fall weather by getting outside with your family!

In the past couple of years, Last Child in the Woods, a book by Richard Louv, has had parents, environmentalists, and educators contemplating, discussing, and making some pretty big changes.

If you haven’t read it I suggest you do, but I will summarize. Louv presents a heap of scientific evidence and a whole lot of anecdotes that compellingly show that children need nature. They suffer emotionally, mentally, and physically when it is denied them and show tremendous benefits when they are reunited with it. Children have never been more inundated with scientific factoids by multiple cable channels dedicated to wildlife and “discovery” (and singing zoologists) but information is trivial compared to unstructured time spent in contact with nature (that means soccer practice doesn’t really count). His term for our children’s lack of free-time in the natural environment is “nature-deficit disorder.” Read more

A National Day of Service and Remembrance

Tonight, in response to a question, I tried to explain the significance of September 11th to my children. They are just six and four so there are many, many things about that day that I don’t want them to know about yet so my explanation was very brief.

Earlier in the day I had happened upon an old post by Tall Grass Worship. The post begins:

A couple of years ago we watched the excellent movie “United 93″. The movie takes place on September 11, 2001, and it’s director tried to stay as completely faithful to the events regarding that flight as possible, down to the exact words of the various passengers, as recorded or recollected by their relatives. As you may remember, United flight 93 was the airliner on which the passengers chose to attack the terrorists who had hijacked the plane, resulting in it crashing in a field in Pennsylvania rather than into Washington, D.C.

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie involved a very young woman calling home on her cell phone. She had just comprehended that the plane was destined to crash, one way or another, and that she was facing certain death. At her parent’s home, her stepmother answered the phone. The young woman, in a panicked voice, explained to her stepmother the circumstances she was in. The older woman had already seen news coverage of the other three planes crashing, and quickly understood the situation. She drew a deep breath, and, in the calmest of voices, began to guide the younger woman through her final moments. They expressed their love for each other. Then, the stepmother, seeking to calm the panicked girl, said something like,”I have my arms around you. Do you feel them?” With that, the demeanor of the younger woman changed. She relaxed. “Yes, I feel them,” she replied.

I sobbed as I thought about all the people who have missed the hugs of their friends and family members over the last eight years.

Later in the day I read Honoring the Dead by Serving the Living, which talks about the work two of those people have done since that day. In order to ensure that the memory of all those lost that day is truly honored, Jay Winuk and David Paine founded MyGoodDeed, which is now known as 911DayOfService.org. Their mission is:

to honor the victims of 9/11 and those who rose to service in response to the attacks by encouraging all Americans and others throughout the world to pledge to voluntarily perform at least one good deed, or another service activity on 9/11 each year. In this way we hope to create a lasting and forward-looking legacy — annually rekindling the spirit of service, tolerance, and compassion that unified America and the world in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Now I know how I can better explain the significance of September 11th to my children. The response people around the world had after the attacks, and can continue today, is the main lesson I learned from September 11th and is the lesson I will teach them. Sometimes it is just hard to remember through the sadness so I am deeply appreciative of the reminder from  Mr. Paine and Mr. Winuk.

Please join us, and many others, in engaging in a charitable activity in honor of all who were killed and injured on September 11, 2001. If you need help thinking of ideas or want to share your family’s plans, you can do so at 911DayOfService.org.

Benefits of Going Green – 7 and Counting

As we have been preparing for the new school year, we’ve been looking backwards as well as forward and reviewing our progress over the year to date. We have our green goals and have been tracking our progress on them but it struck me that the benefits of going green have gone far beyond meeting those goals. Here are the main benefits of going green we have experienced: Read more

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