Filed under: eco-friendly, food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable
What a month. After desperate, late-night trips in search of third-grades’ perfect notebook and fifth-grades’ essential pencil sharpener (“Not that one, this one!”) and endless potty pleadings with the toddler (only to realize that her new school doesn’t require it), I finally got the kids into school.
Part-time, on behalf of the Barnacle (read: baby), but school nonetheless, conjuring up visions of four—count ‘em, FOUR—whole hours of uninterrupted time, with which to do as I please (read: work).
And then the boom dropped, in the form of paperwork. Endless paperwork. Entire forest’s worth of paperwork. Paperwork that takes hours upon hours to complete, distributed in duplicate, in case you missed it the first time.
In the throes of major recession, apparently our bankrupt school system still has the wherewithal to publish a 100-page booklet—in both Spanish and English—which, as far as I can tell, is basically the bible of the Los Angeles School District.
I flipped through it before recycling, grumbling about the waste of paper, until I stopped short at three pages of something called the “Approved Pesticide Production List.” Apparently, the LAUSD is now required by law to disclose the pesticides that they’re spraying on the properties where our children are playing (making me wonder how many years they’ve been spraying without notice).
A form asked parents to indicate if we wanted to be notified when spraying was to occur. Well, duh.
This is not a new subject for me. I’ve been reading a lot about pesticides, most recently about those in drinking water, which have been linked to aggression in children. As cited in a recent study, “Some…children were observed hitting their siblings when they passed by, and they became easily upset or angry with a minor corrective comment by a parent. These aggressive behaviors were not noted in the [pesticide-free]…[children].”
A recent National Academy of Sciences study suggests that “more than 28% of developmental disabilities in children may be caused by environmental factors.”
Ouch.
With that in mind, let me give you the short list of what they’re spraying at my kids’ school: Hydroprene, Linalool, Piperonyl Butoxide, Pyriproxfen and Orthoboric Acid.
That’s just the first page.
All of these pesticides are indicated as “dangerous” by the school district. Some of them are on the National Resources Defense Council’s list of governmentally sanctioned “pesticide poisons,” of which NRDC scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman said, “This is really an example of how public human health is not being protected in our current system of pesticide review.”
Yet they’re approved to spray on a regular basis around children, who absorb—pound for pound—many times more pesticides than adults.
According to HealthyChild.org, which just launched an “Eat Healthy” campaign that clues in parents to the dangers of pesticides in food, we now face a “historically unprecedented rise in chronic diseases and illnesses such as cancer, autism, asthma, allergies, birth defects, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and learning and developmental disabilities. Credible scientific evidence increasingly points to environmental hazards and household chemicals as causing and contributing to many of these diseases.”
Kind of makes you want to take your kid out of a pesticide-laden school, doesn’t it?
Home schooling isn’t an option: Apparently, I’m really not smarter than a fifth grader, especially in four hours a day.
So my husband and I will sign the notification forms, keep our kids home from school the next time they spray, and hope for the best.
What else can we do? Any suggestions?
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, sustainable | Tags: california, eco, ecostiletto, fashion, fur, green, los angeles, peta, sarnoff, sustainable, vegan
“There’s always a way to wear fur”
–Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief, American Vogue
“Anna is the most powerful woman in the U.S.”
–Andre Leon Talley, Editor-at-Large, American Vogue
“Nobody was wearing fur until Anna put it on the cover in the ‘90s.”
–Tom Florio, Publisher, American Vogue
Are you sensing a pattern here?
Yesterday, I saw a matinee of “The September Issue.” I ditched my life for 90 minutes of escapism, hoping to understand a little better what makes this fashion industry tick.
But five minutes in, the escape was over. I grabbed my notebook and pen and started scratching out notes in the dark. I was appalled. Appalled. What started out as a lighthearted look at fashion’s bible quickly degraded to a revelation of the industry’s dark side.
I’ve been a journalist for more than a decade. I have a master’s degree in the subject. I spend hours agonizing over how to honestly present Ecostiletto’s sponsored newsletters and dedicated emails. And, as a result, I’ve spent a year wondering when my little start-up will actually start.
Yet at Vogue, where last year’s September issue weighed in at record 644 pages of ads (versus 196 of editorial) there is clearly zero separation of church and state. No wonder Tom Florio is happy.
Anna Wintour is filmed as she interacts with retailers and manufacturers—Nieman Marcus, the Gap, Mango—which are an obvious influence on her editorial choices. Anna’s resident jester, Andre Leon Talley, takes his tennis lesson wearing a Louis Vuitton scarf and Piaget watch—both perennial Vogue advertisers. And after the first 10 minutes of watching her flamboyant outfits, you have to wonder if Wintour’s salary is subsidized by the Fur Commission.
Apparently, back in the wonder years of 2007, the demand had even outstripped the supply for luxury fashion—but fashion desired product placement, as well, which “The September Issue” was happy to supply. About midway through the movie, even Wintour’s instruction to her driver to take her to Starbuck’s seems like an obvious plant.
This is a magazine that has clearly been bought and sold by the commerce it supports—with no question of the consequences. Beknighted designer Thakoon is photographed threading up a dress for the Gap, but there’s no mention of what third-world hands will stitch the thousands of copies to be sold in Gap stores. Florio nods to Wintour’s support of fur without a hint of irony. And $50,000 in editorial is scrapped because it doesn’t show enough of the clothes.
I can image that, for some, “The September Issue” is an exciting, insider’s view of a glamorous industry. For me, it was a testament to how far we’ve come in a year. This September, I celebrate the eco-friendly shows of designers like Mr. Larkin at New York Fashion Week. I look forward to Portland’s forthcoming all-sustainable fashion week. And I toy with the idea of joining The Great American Apparel Diet, in which participants pledge to buy no clothing or accessories for an entire year.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Image from “The September Issue.”
Filed under: eco-friendly, food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: children, ecostiletto, family, green, kids, los angeles, menopause, menstruation, mom, mother, organic, period, PMS, prozac, sarnoff, sustainable, woman, yoga
OctoMom has 14 kids. I have three. Yet those three—plus the demands of life, work and marriage—may be making me just as crazy. Not insane enough to have another brood of babies, mind you. (Although once you have three, what’s another 11 more?) But crazy enough to:
- Seriously consider jumping out of a moving car when my husband engages me in yet another financial discussion.
- Completely forget the dates and times of crucial engagements—like my son’s playoff baseball game.
- Let a faulty cordless phone lead me to yelled profanities and an innocent appliance smashed on the floor.
Now, obviously the demands of the aforementioned kids, life, work and marriage do take their toll. But it seems to me that as I move later into my 30s, my patience for said demands becomes especially thin during one particular time of the month.
Oh yes, you know where this is going.
Let me preface this post by saying that I’ve always thought PMS was a load of hogwash. Cramps suck, I know, but I’m of the buck-up, bootstrap mentality—publically I sympathized, but privately I scoffed at those who drowned their sorrows in a bag of cheese puffs.
Ladies, I now feel your pain.
Not that I feel any more literal pain than I always have. Save one morning at age 11 when I just about passed out in the nurse’s office, my menstrual cramps have always been pretty consistent. Painful, but not debilitating—as long as I have an ample supply of ibuprofen on hand.
No, my pain is more of the psychological variety. As I said to my husband just the other day, “I actually think I’m kind of insane for about two days before my period and three days in.”
“Really,” was his deadpan response. Apparently this is a well-known fact in the Sarnoff household.
But it scares me, the depth of the rage that I feel when I’m on the rag. I’m quick to yell at my kids and slow to apologize to my husband. I can’t sleep at night and won’t wake up in the morning. I walk into the house in a perfectly fine mood until the sight of unwashed dishes in the sink makes me fire-spitting furious. I spend hours organizing drawers and closets, only to lose my shit when they get messed up again.
In a nutshell? Insane.
So, like any (thankfully insured) red-blooded American, I went to see my doctor. Who thought I might want to consider Prozac.
An antidepressant 30 days a month to combat five days of strife? That’s like putting a cast on your leg when you need a bandaid on your ankle.
Whose take are these doctors on, anyway?
Instead, I took a good, hard look at the patterns of my month. And realized that before and during my period, I slack off on exercise. I take in more carbohydrates. I check my email obsessively and make Important Lists of things that are decidedly unimportant. In short, I stop doing the things that make me feel calm, and start doing the things that make me feel frenetic.
This month, I’m tracking. I’m doing yoga, whether I want to or not. Waiting until after breakfast to check email. Deep breathing when I walk into a messy room, and making sure the family calendar has me on red alert for soccer games.
But I might just grab a few bags of snacks, the next time I’m at the market.
Hey, whatever works, right?
What works for you? For those of you late-30s moms, are you finding a difference in how your time of the month goes down? For those of you 50-somethings, how the hell long does this last? Let me know what worked for you, and what didn’t. Thanks!
Filed under: eco-friendly, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: eco, ecostiletto, family, green, infestation, kid, lice, mom, parent, rid, sarnoff, school, sustainable, tea tree, teen, tween
And so the war continues. If you’ve been reading MG for a while, you’ll remember that last year, right around this time, my daughter came home from school with a lice infestation that prompted an eco-reversal on my part (read: Rid) and a style change on hers as she chopped her waist-length hair to a chin-skimming bob.
This year, apparently, it’s my 10-year-old son’s turn. My close-lipped, typically tweenage son who can barely tell me what he did all day, let alone let on when his head itches.
And here’s the kicker: He’s blonde.
Now if you’ve ever dealt with lice, you know what that means. Nits happen to be the exact shade of yellow—dare I say, blonde—as your child’s hair.
But having been through this once before with the brunette, I knew my weapon of choice. No, I didn’t repeatedly douse my three children’s heads with Rid, which contains an active ingredient–piperonyl butoxide–that’s the Environmental Working Group has indicated is a “low hazard” for cancer and reproductive toxicity, but still smells mighty toxic to me.
Although I did shampoo him to kill the critters that I saw crawling on my son’s scalp (plus the rest of the family, proactively), I then got to work with a more natural arsenal: A bottle of tea tree oil, and a fine toothed comb. Every morning for the past three days, I rub tea tree oil on my palms with a little water, then run my fingers around their hairlines—concentrating on the back of the neck and around the ears—to dissuade any stray bugs from trying to take up residence.
And each afternoon I wash their hair with regular shampoo, then sit them down in strong light to go through their hair strand by strand. I haven’t found any nits in my daughter’s dark brown hair, and I’m praying that the quick check of the wiggly Barnacle (read: baby) is thorough enough to confirm the same absence of wigglers of the insect variety, but each time I examine my son, I find a few more tiny—hopefully dead—eggs, which take about 15 minutes to pick out, one by one.
Ugh. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
I dread this kind of infestation. I go crazy washing all the towels and sheets and hats in the house. But the reality is this: I hole up in the bathroom and my son—who usually ducks his head when I try to kiss him goodbye and will only let me hug him if no one else is looking—actually talks to me as I comb through is nit-masking blonde hair.
Yes, gentle readers, I’m using a pest infestation as a means to communicate with my tween. Have I no shame?
I hope that by today, I’ve got them all. But I’ll keep checking in the back-to-school weeks to come. I may not find any more lice, but at least my son and I will have a few days more of decent conversation before the wall of silence goes up again.
What’s your chem.-free method to combat lice and/or communicate with a tween or teen? Tell me about it!
