Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: california, children, eco, family, green, insomnia, kids, los angeles, mom, mother, organic, parenting, sleep, sustainable, tmfc, tmparenting, yoga, zzs
Stress. It’s killing me. I was never a nail-biter, but by now I’ve nibbled away the dry cuticles and sides of my fingers until I’m practically drawing blood. And sleep—what’s that? I toss and turn while my brain runs through my to-do list like a hamster in a Habitrail. But I’m not alone: According to the National Sleep Foundation, 76% of Americans experience symptoms of sleep disorders on a regular basis, making sleep disorders the most common health problem in the United States.
And while the grogginess that results from not getting the recommended seven-to-10 hours of shut-eye can be, well, tiring, the mental and physical consequences of sleeplessness—accelerated aging, increased risk of obesity and diabetes, memory loss and learning difficulties—are frightening enough to wake us all up.
What’s the number-one cause of sleeplessness? Stress. Like the kind that comes from reading the paper or watching the news and realizing that the world’s economy is balancing on a precipice, perhaps? Or the kind that comes from waking up every morning worrying that you might lose your job—or your house. Everybody’s feeling it. No wonder we’re not sleeping.
Yet despite how exhausted I might feel after a full day of kids and work that begins at 5:45 a.m. and ends some time around 10 p.m., once my head hits the pillow my eyes pop open like I’ve just downed a double-shot of espresso.
I’ve tried chamomile tea and all kinds of herbs, exercising and not exercising, lavender-scented creams and the like. But my new antidote is the Slip into Sleep Pose, created by David Romanelli, author of Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment: Getting to Ecstasy through Wine, Chocolate, and Your iPod Playlist. One part autobiography, one part inspiration and one part just plain hilarious, this book puts me on the path to enlightenment while making me LOL in the process.
In typical Yeah, Dave style, Romanelli recommends skipping the yoga mat and performing the Slip into Sleep Pose in bed. To add to the atmosphere, I like to cover my eyes with a lavender scented eye pillow. Then I follow these ever-so-simple instructions:
• Lie on your back with your legs slightly apart and your arms a few inches from your sides.
• Turn your palms face up.
• Take deep belly breaths and focus on them to quiet your mind.
• Flex all of the muscles in your body—from your toes to the top of your head.
• Lift your limbs and head a few inches off of the mattress. Hold for a breath.
• Now, release them back down and relax all of your muscles.
• Focus on completely relaxing each individual part of your body, beginning with your toes and slowly making your way up to your head.
• Imagine that relaxation is a warm liquid oozing through your body, flooding your insides and melting away all tension.
• If you know that some areas are especially tense, spend extra time there.
• Stay in this place of stillness for 15 to 20 minutes, then allow yourself to drift to sleep.
Sweet dreams!
Does this pose work as well for you as it did for me? Tell me about it!
Filed under: parenting
It’s been a rough week. My husband is out of town, leaving me with three kids and a schedule that consists of two baseball games, two baseball practices, one basketball game, one basketball practice, yoga (for kids, not for me, sadly), Girl Scouts cookie sales, a Powerpoint presentation (for kids, not for me, luckily), and countless play dates. The Barnacle (read: baby) has taken to waking up in the night, screaming, and my 10-year-old son has the stomach flu—or some form of baseball aversion.
I’ve been feeling pretty darned sorry for myself.
And then I get a call from a friend. Her niece has a lump on the back of her head. She can’t move her right arm. They have to do surgery. She’s seven years old–the same age as my middle daughter.
My fingers immediately move to the scar tissue on my neck. Four years ago, after an inconclusive MRI, a surgeon cut me open from the front of my ear to the back, lifted my ear out of the way, and continued about half-way down my neck. He dissected the nerves in my face to find the lump behind them, which turned out to be a benign growth resulting from scar tissue that probably built up when I had some sort of infection on my salivary gland as a child.
I’m fine, but there’s still a lump under my skin. It’s sensitive to the touch and will always make me wonder if there’s something suspicious in there that they missed.
When I spoke to my friend a few days later, they told me that the operation had been successful. They’d removed the lump, and her niece had regained movement in her arm. That’s all she knew.
That’s when I got scared. I remember from my own experience that they’d had an oncologist in the operating room. His job was to take the tissue and examine it right then and there. If he saw anything suspicious, the surgeon would go back in, excising all the tissue around where the lump had been in an effort to get all the malignant cells out.
It had been two days since her niece’s operation and my friend hadn’t heard yet whether or not the lump they removed was cancerous.
I spent the next 24 hours thinking about this little girl. Not all the time, but when I picked up the Barnacle in the middle of the night to soothe her. When I watched my middle daughter dance salsa with Elmo. As I saw my son hit a line drive down the middle of the field.
I don’t know my friend’s niece. I’ve never met her. All I can do is hope for her, and pray, if I knew how to do that. And when I meet her one day, I will tell her what she made me remember: That we experience miracles every day—no matter how trying, no matter how long, no matter how much we have to do. There are miracles all around us. And she is one of them.
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, green, organic, sustainable | Tags: beautiful, beauty, cosmetics, eco, ecostiletto, green, lead, lip stick, lipstick, make-up, makeup, natural, organic, pretty, sustainable, teens turning green
Apply. Lick. Repeat. Before meeting, after eating and, dangerously, while driving, I spend a lot of time applying lipstick or lip gloss to my lips. And according to the Environmental Working Group, all that licking means that I, an average woman, will eat more than nine pounds of the stuff over my lifetime.
Nine. Pounds.
All grossness aside, this fact wouldn’t be so alarming if it weren’t for another: In 2007, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a division of the EWG, found two-third of lipsticks contained lead, a known neurotoxin that has been linked to brain damage and miscarriages, among other horrors.
Nine. Pounds. Containing. Lead.
That’s enough to make me sit up, take notice, and dump the contents of my makeup bags into the trash (fearful all the time that I should be disposing of the stuff as hazardous waste).
But the news has gotten better: This year, Canada banned lead in lipstick. In August of 2008, a single vote in the State Assembly barred a similar ban in California. With a new introduction of the bill on deck for 2009, the geniuses at Teens Turning Green launched a clever “Lips Against Lead” petition, in which people are encouraged to apply lead-free lipstick and kiss an organic cotton petition, that will then be sent to the Assembly when the teens show up to shame them into passing it.
Last week, Sarah Jane Morris (“Brothers and Sisters”), Katie Gill (“Drillbit Taylor”), Kristen Renton (“Days of Our Lives”), Carolyn Hennesy (“General Hospital”) and eco-lifestyle expert and author Anna Getty slicked up with organic, paraben-free Terra Firma Longevity Lip Stain in gorgeous, berry-red Rosalie to “sign” the petition at my second-annual EcoStiletto Green Girl’s Night Out at Intuition for Dress for Success.
That’s me with Sarah, after doing my part and kissing the petition. After which I re-applied, licked my lips, and breathed easy.
Have you looked at the ingredients in your lipstick lately? Check your brand at www.cosmeticdatabase.com, then tell me what you think!
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, green, organic, sustainable | Tags: acne, aloe, beautiful, beauty, california, dry, eco, eco-friendly, green, honey, los angeles, natural, organic, pimple, product, shine, vinegar, women, zit
So the second-annual EcoStiletto Green Girls’ Night Out is tomorrow night. Hundreds of people donating shoes to Dress for Success and shopping the latest eco-friendly fashions at Intuition. Mini makeovers. Organic cocktails. Even the DJ is solar powered! I’ll be wearing a gorgeous vintage dress, vegan stilettos and…a big, fat zit on my cheek. Because regardless of the fact that I’m well past puberty, when stress hits and the spotlight’s on, chances are my skin will do something to muck it up.
With 24 hours to go, I’m on acne damage control overdrive—au naturale, of course. After spending most of the weekend swabbing with antibacterial tea tree oil, today I type at my desk sporting a giant glob of aloe. It seriously looks like a sneeze gone bad. But there is nothing better for pimple fighting than pure aloe vera. Simply break off and open one of the leaves and smooth on the clear healing gel inside. Its powerful antioxidants speed up the healing process and protect the skin from infection. As an anti-inflammatory, it also helps to bring down swelling and redness. I think every household should have a healthy aloe plant. Unfortunately, my black thumb means I have to keep replacing mine!
To combat any dryness from the tea tree, tonight I’ll do an all-over honey mask. Honey is a natural humectant, meaning it helps the skin to retain moisture, so it’s especially effective at times when skin gets parched–like after being repeatedly swabbed with tea tree oil. I keep organic honey sticks on hand, and when my face feels dry and tight I simply cleanse, crack open a stick, slather the honey on to my face, neck and décolletage, and let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes while I soak in the tub. When I rinse it off my skin is so soft and super hydrated–and I get to lick it off my lips in the meantime!
Finally, this obviously has nothing to do with the harrowing skincare situation, but it is part of my night-before-a-big-night beauty routine. My stick-straight hair gets so filled with static that I look like one of those pink-haired dolls from my childhood–you know the one that you’d spin and it’s hair would stick straight up? That’s me. So I tend to pile on the hair products. A palmful of mousse here, a slick of shine pomade there, a little hair spray to keep things in place. Granted, all of my products are eco-friendly and chemical-free, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still build up. When I need to show off shiny, healthy hair, I gently strip away product buildup by rinsing with a cup full of cider vinegar in the shower. Vinegar clears away product build-up from the hair shaft and closes the cuticle. It also promotes blood circulation in the scalp. A vinegar rinse leaves my hair so shiny and soft—so I can start piling on the products again.
What are your natural secrets to nailing the beauty spotlight? How about a fool safe way to NOT get those stress-related zits in the first place? Tell me about it!
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, parenting, sustainable, travel, vacation
What do you do when you have three kids and your husband just got back from a 20-day business trip? You take a vacation. What do you do when you have three kids and in-laws who can only take about 24-hours of them? You take a staycation. It’s cheaper, shorter and surprisingly more eco-conscious—no matter where you stay!
Now for those of you unfamiliar with the term, a staycation is when you take a vacation without ever leaving your hometown. I was surprised to find that this term has been included in Webster’s Dictionary since 2003, and is defined as a “stay-at-home vacation,” of which common activities include, “use of the backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals.” I’m guessing that the staycation will grow in popularity this year as the crash cuts short many families’ standing reservations for cross-country travel.
Since we did, in fact, drive to our staycation, it wasn’t as low on the carbon footprint scale as diving into a (preferably saltwater) backyard pool, not that we have one. But compare our 20-mile trek in a 30-mpg car to anything in an airplane, which emits carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide at heights that make these emissions twice as destructive to global warming as those emitted on the ground, and we look pretty damn light. In fact, according to TerraPass, one jaunt across the Atlantic can produce as much ozone-depleting pollution as the average driver does in a year.
But I digress. All green-mindedness aside, the goal of our staycation was to relax, reconnect and celebrate our (gulp) 12-year anniversary. Oh, who am I fooling? We’ve got three kids: The goal of our staycation was to sleep.
And sleep we did. In a giant, four-poster, enormous bed that looks like it belongs in a fairytale, during one truly fairytale weekend at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, CA. (Check out the pic and tell me you wouldn’t take that over Sleeping Beauty’s castle.)
Now, granted, the Langham is not marketing itself as a “green” hotel, like some of the others we’ve come across: The Starwood Element chain, for example, the amazing Ambrose in Santa Monica or the Hotel Felix, which will become Chicago’s first LEED-certified hotel when it opens this March.
But even at a hotel like the Langham, known for luxury rather than eco-mindedness, poolside drinks were served in compostable veggie plastic, an incredible meal in the hotel’s signature Dining Room included local and sustainable grown elements, amenities include an organic perfume blending bar by Ajne and visitors were encouraged to reuse and recycle. Yes, plastic mini bottles of water are still offered when you pick up your car from valet. No, the beautiful, old-fashioned, red-tiled roof is not yet adorned with solar panels. But the times they are a-changing.
And we feel well rested, indeed.
