Filed under: food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: candy, china, eco, green, halloween, holiday, organic, plastic, styrofoam, sustainable, treat, trick
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I actually wrote the majority of this post last year. And not that I’m so brilliant or anything, but I wanted to run it again to highlight the fact that despite a bout of Buddhist soul-searching in order to instill some semblance of self-realization upon my children, their materialistic yearnings are in full swing, yet again, this Halloween.
In fact, not much has changed chez nous this year: The $7 Mona Lisa’s skeleton portrait, purchased from the Chinese crap factory otherwise known as Party City, hangs on the door in an effort to thwart my kids’ relentless requests for a styrofoam graveyard on the (ec0)lawn. We grew three gorgeous pumpkins in the garden this summer, which are just waiting to be carved. And despite the fact that I’ve been hoarding cardboard in anticipation of designing some truly terrifying gravestones, last night they told me anything homemade wouldn’t be scary enough.
Sigh.
Yes, Halloween has truly evolved from what I knew as a kid: Kleenex ghosts hung with thread in the window, a few hand-carved pumpkins on the porch, a pillowcase to carry the loot and a ghost costume made from a sheet over my head. (A sheet with the over-the-head part colored yellow made me an fried egg one year. The visual still makes me cringe.)
Today I get guilt from my kids every time we exit or enter the house. Why don’t we have cobwebs. Why can’t we get a tombstone. Why nothing screams or sighs when you pass through our front door.I’ve tried to explain that we’re trying not to buy so much plastic. I’ve tried to explain that plastic is made from oil, and oil is non-renewable, causes pollution and wars (not necessarily in that order) and that it never, ever goes away, it just breaks into tiny little pieces that swirl in the middle of the ocean. My in-laws even made bat cut-outs for the windows.
All they want is a $49.99 screaming ghost hanging in our entry way. Oh, and candy, did I mention the candy?
Far be it from me to deny my kids a little Halloween candy. But it’s with a wince that I witness the bags stacked high in the supermarkets, filled with candy that’s made with (un)fair trade chocolate, artificial food colorings that have been linked to hyperactivity and ADD, and high fructose corn syrup, which health experts say alters the way our metabolic-regulating hormones function and basically tricks our bodies into wanting to eat more and more of it. (Ergo the post trick-or-treating gluttony.)
Last year, I sourced candy free of petrochemically derived artificial colors and flavors, and not made in China (whose melanin-tainted milk chocolate gave us quite a scare). I found indie packs of USDA certified organic cotton candy made from evaporated cane juice, single-serving bags of organic gummy worms, individually-wrapped organic hard candies and yummy bubblegum made from a natural chicle gum base sustainably harvested in Central American rain forests, rather than the synthetic plastic that’s in conventional gum. (Thinking twice about handing out Hubba Bubba?)
That didn’t stop my kids from bringing home bulging bags of chemically-enhanced candy, which they ate in gluttonous frenzy until they made themselves sick.
This year, I might just shut off the lights and hide. Although the sight of the Barnacle (read: baby) done up like a kitty-cat might be worth staying up for. I think I’ll leave the lights on. Keep the bats in the windows. And hand out organic pretzels.
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: 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: food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: california, children, dad, dinner, eat, education, family, food, kids, los angeles, lunch, mom, parents, school, shop
Back to school for my family revolves around food. After a summer’s worth of ten o’clock breakfasts and 4 p.m. “linners,” we’ve got to stock up on the essentials for three square meals a day. And because all three of my children have, shall we say, distinctive taste buds, that involves a lot of stocking up.
First there’s the new water bottle, because invariably the caps for the ones we have were lost over the summer, leaving us with a cupboard full of indestructible stainless steel containers that are completely worthless. And though my kids might still complain about toting the bottle around rather than tossing a plastic version, I simply remind them that the (filtered) tap water that I pour is tested weekly, while bottled water isn’t required to be tested at all. And that independent tests have found all kinds of icky stuff like giardia and chemicals in bottled water—in fact, last year several kids in our district were hospitalized after buying it from a school vending machine.
That’s enough to get them running to the water fountain.
The water bottle is followed by a new set of BPA-free plastic containers, since the tops to those have invariably gone the way of the water tops, and our existing sandwich boxes became bongos for the Barnacle (read: baby) in June. To fill them, I fill a cart with three types of food: bland for my 10-year-old (peanut butter sandwiches, no jelly), salty for my eight-year-old (seaweed chips and olive snacks) and hearty for the Barnacle, who eats pretty much anything—just a lot of it.
Yes, I buy organic food, and no, I don’t find it’s more expensive. Studies found that because kids eat four-to-five times more fruits, veggies and milk than we do, they’re way more vulnerable to the pesticides in the conventional food. If I can justify buying a coffee for $3 at Starbucks, I can certainly justify paying $1 for milk if it prevents my daughter from early onset menstruation and my son from smaller testicular size linked to infertility (yes, it’s true).
At the market, I add a bunch of goodies for our annual end-of-summer block party. We roll the barbecues into the front lawns, block off the street with trashcans so the kids can play full-court basketball, and break out the beer. Because summer can’t last forever, but fall’s fun too. Cheers!
P.S. Pic above is from a few years back when my daughter started kindergarten, and my niece was evacuating Katrina. Ah, the good old days.
P.P.S. Looking for great eco-friendly lunchboxes and water bottles? I got mine from OneSmallStep.com, where they’re giving readers 10% off now through September 15th with “EcoStiletto10″ at checkout. And for insulated lunch bags made from 100% recycled water bottles, check out KidsKonserve.com, where they’re giving readers 15% off with “ecostil” at check out through September 20th. Note the EcoStiletto.com connection, where it’s all about the ecoswag, baby. Subscribers get discounts like this, plus a chance to win free sustainable shoes, every week!
Filed under: eco-friendly, food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable, travel, vacation
The last trip my husband and I took was a few months ago, when we traveled a whole 20 miles from our home to hole up in a hotel and—insert naughty thoughts here—sleep. (We have three kids, what can I say?) By virtue of our low mileage, and our destination’s tentative steps towards sustainability, that staycation was relatively eco-friendly.
The next is this month, when we’re taking advantage of an Air Tahiti promotion—kids fly, eat and sleep free—and traveling to Bora Bora for 12 days of bliss. (Hence the head’s up: EcoStiletto Kids archived content will run on Mommy Greenest for the next two weeks.)
Obviously, in sustainability terms, it’s deplorable to travel thousands of miles to sleep on a beach when you live not 10 miles from a perfectly snoozable stretch of sand.
But to all you sustainabullies out there, I say consider this evidence:
- We haven’t taken a vacation in the 14 years that we’ve been married. (Despite their tourism-friendly locations, annual visits to family and New Orleans or Santa Fe don’t count.)
- The trip is to celebrate my husband’s 40th birthday. (If making it this far doesn’t deserve a celebration, I don’t know what does.)
- With a 10, eight and two-and-a-half year-old in tow, we’re in the halcyon days between terrible twos and tweendom. (This may be the only family trip we get without massive stretches of screaming and/or sulking.)
Can you let us off the hook?
But between the staycation at the hotel and the real vacation in Tahiti, my husband and I managed to squeeze in a perfect day. Somewhere between a vacation and a date, this is what I’m now calling a “daycation.”
It was even—relatively—eco-friendly. First, we spent the day scuba diving from a boat just off the island of Catalina, staring at bright orange Garibaldi and having a face-off with a corpulent bat ray, who watched us for one fascinating minute, then swooped away.
Sitting on the ocean in the middle of a kelp bed? Priceless.
Because it was the final day of our SCUBA certification process, the boat trip was a group affair—public transport, natch. We were certified by the fantastically eco-conscious (no spear fishing, regular reef rebuilding trips, on-board recycling and monthly beach clean-ups) Eco Dive Center in Culver City, CA. It is, hands down, filled with the coolest, most diverse, amazing and dedicated group of people we have ever encountered. If you’re going to spend four hours shivering, this is the group to do it with.
Spaced out and hungry after our dive, we headed a few blocks down Sepulveda to the yummy new Vietnamese restaurant Pho Show for bowls of tofu soup and rice-paper wrapped spring rolls, but were diverted by the Five Senses Spa, which had just debuted next door. Super clean, with traditional screened rooms and trained masseuses, it’s open seven days a week, from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. They squeezed us in just under the wire, and we spent $50 for an hour’s worth of bending, pulling and kneading that unknotted muscles we didn’t even know we had.
Yes, the staycation was sleep-friendly and Tahiti will be spectacular. But one day I hope my husband and I can squeeze in another daycation, which took us underwater, to Thailand and Vietnam in eight hours and 40 miles.
Bliss.
Six weeks and one day ago (not that anyone’s counting), I became a vegetarian. A pescatarian to be exact, since I could give up the thrice-weekly chicken and occasional In-N-Out, but sushi? C’mon.
My intention was to walk my eco-friendly talk a little more. Some sources estimate that animal production contributes more to global warming than cars, and last month I saw a PETA video that really drove the point home (and totally grossed me out in the process).
As PETA puts it, “You can’t be an environmentalist and eat meat.” And although I only bought organic and free-range meat, and tried to avoid inorganic meat in restaurants (except, of course, the aforementioned In-N-Out), even the conscious meat eating was weighing me down.
And that, of course, was also the point. After more than a few friends told me how those last few stubborn post-Barnacle (read: baby) pounds virtually melted away after they went vegan, I was sold. Reduce my carbon footprint and my one-pack? Sold!
But it didn’t work out that way. After eating tofu, beans and whole grains for six weeks, I’m now six pounds heavier. Apparently, my type-O blood needs straight protein, not protein-rich carbs.
So now I’m faced with a conundrum: Save my ass and start eating (free-range, organic) steak or gain 50 pounds over the next year to help save the environment.
What would you do?
Filed under: eco-friendly, food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: birthday, california, children, dad, eco, family, father, green, kids, los angeles, mom, mother, organic, party, sarnoff, sustainable
It’s been a month of birthdays for the Sarnoff family. First there was my husband’s 40th surprise party, which ended up with a karaoke performance of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” complete with lifts. (Yes, tequila was involved.) Then, my daughter turned eight, and we hosted a five-girl, two-movie sleepover party. (No tequila, but an equally painful morning after.)
For both parties, I tried to keep it simple—and conscious. For my husband’s party, we splurged on dinner was at our favorite organic restaurant, Akasha. As a gift, I gave him a DIY Grain Surfboard kit, made from sustainable hard wood. Guests came back to our house, where we served organic gimlets in reusable cups, recycled the bottles and composted the lime peels, with a little help from my favorite sustainable party planner, Paige Anderson of Bash Eco Events. For my daughter’s sleepover, the theme was “Christmas in July,” so we broke out the box of ornaments, borrowed a reusable tree and played freeze dance to carols.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t totally consistent on the sustainability front. I wanted to put a childhood photo of my husband on his cake, so I ordered it from a traditional baker. My daughter craved egg rolls, so we ended up ordering Chinese (luckily, we can recycle Styrofoam in Los Angeles). We even decorated miniature stockings with fabric paint—not the most eco-craft idea, and they loved it.
But both my husband and my daughter had fun, and I survived another July.
Besides the “no one puts Baby in a corner” moment, my favorite memory of the whole week was between parties. The day before her birthday party, I took my daughter to the beach, leaving my son and the Barnacle (read: baby) at home with their daddy. While everyone else sat under umbrellas in the sand, my daughter and I joined hands and ran into gigantic waves that were breaking so hard we had to dive under them so we wouldn’t get knocked over. I taught her to body surf, showing her how to race the wave to the shore in order to catch the lip before it crashed. Every so often the current tumbled us, ripping our hands apart and flipping us around in the “washing machine.” But my daughter popped up every time, her eyes wide with fear but ready to laugh it off and jump back in with me. It’s the same spirit she’s shown since the day she was born, since she toddled into pools without warning, since she stretched up to her full five-year-old height in order to ride the roller coasters at Disneyland. She’s so fascinating to me, and so foreign, since I’ve always been so afraid of consequences. My daughter is fearless. And I am so blessed.
Happy birthday, my loves.
P.S. Here’s what my daughter is reading these days, 113 Things to Do by 13 written by Brittany Macleod, with a little help from her mom, Treehugger alum Terri MacLeod, which includes tips like “save water” and “go organic,” as well as “go off the high dive even if you don’t dive” and my personal favorite, “make dinner for your parents.” Preferably organic.
Filed under: eco-friendly, food, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: breakfast, california, children, dad, dinner, eat, eco, ecostiletto, family, food, green, infants, kids, los angeles, lunch, mom, organic, parent, pesticides, sarnoff, sustainable
Yes, you can get away with just buying organic milk and meat products. Yes, an organic apple is twice as expensive as conventional. Yes, there’s a reason they call it Whole Paycheck.
But then you come face to face with the truth: Unless you’re buying organic, your food is full of chemicals that are banned in other countries because they’re dangerous to our health.
The Pesticide Action Network’s new WhatsOnMyFood website is a revolutionary resource that makes this fact undeniably clear. Created with information from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program cross-referenced with data from Environmental Protection Agency (among others), WhatsOnMyFood.org is destined to do to grocery shopping what the Skin Deep Database did to beauty product perusal.
Scroll down their list of common foods—from almonds to watermelon—and click on your favorites to pop up a list of pesticides and information on their toxicity. Like the aforementioned apple, which presents the residue of 14 different pesticides such as dimethoate, a carcinogen, hormone disruptor, neurotoxin and developmental (or reproductive) toxicant. Or blueberries, which can include a record 48 different pesticides in each tiny little globe.
You can also search by pesticide, such as Atrazine, a cancer-causing chemical that it’s banned in Europe, but so widely used in the United States that it’s found in 71% of our drinking water. Or check out water-cooler facts such as: Apples can be sprayed up to 16 times with 26 different chemicals, just a few of the 400 pesticides that are legal in the U.S.
In fact, according to Pesticide Action Network, “Pesticide regulations in the U.S. are well behind much of the rest of the industrialized world.” In a country that represents more wealth per capita than most others, how can this be possible? PAN cites agrichemical corporations with serious pull in Washington, for starters, but also because “pesticide regulation in the U.S. does not adequately account for things like additive and synergistic effects.”
Huh? Basically, what this means is that the EPA regulates chemicals on an individual basis, rather than considering the cumulative effects the mixture of pesticides that the average American ingests each day.
And here’s what all of this means to parents: The average child gets five or more servings of pesticides in their food and water every day. According to the Department of Health & Human Services, organophosphate pesticides are now found in the blood of 95% of Americans tested, with levels twice as high in blood samples taken from children. Exposure to organophosphate pesticides are linked to hyperactivity, behavior disorders, learning disabilities, developmental delays and motor dysfunction.
And we wonder why our kids are having problems in school.
Parents, please feed your children organic food. I know it’s more expensive. I know times are tough. But think about that $4 Starbuck’s latte you ordered yesterday. Or that lunchtime sandwich you could have brown-bagged. Cut out a few weekly splurges of your own to make up the difference in grocery bills for your family. But please don’t cut costs when it comes to your kids.
