Make Your Own Cleaners

My wife and I started eating organics a few years ago because we wanted to cut down on the number of chemicals we were exposed to, but we never realized how many chemicals were in our cleaning products.

After some prodding from a friend and an inspiring movie, my wife and I decided to make our own cleaners from scratch.

First we took an inventory of the cleaners in our house. We can’t replace our products if we don’t know what they are.

Second we investigated what was actually in those bottles. There are many different ways to do this, but we found Skin Deep’s cosmetic database to be the most user-friendly. You simply type the name of your product and it gives you a green, yellow or red rating.

Third we decided what we needed to change. Because we had been worried about what we were eating, our dish soap was actually rated green — no need to worry there. But our moisturizer and general cleaner were big red X’s. I didn’t even realize moisturizer soaked into your bloodstream!

Cleaning Product Recipes

After some research, we realized that most natural cleaners are easy to find, like:
Baking Soda
Vinegar
Lemon Juice

General Cleaner Recipe
2 teaspoons liquid Castile soap (natural grocery stores carry this)
4 cups warm water

Mix the ingredients and put into a spray bottle.

This general cleaner worked on all of our floors, counter tops and even a spot on the carpet. It sometimes felt like it left a film behind, so we did a second rinse with vinegar (the “Window Cleaner” — next recipe).

** Do not mix Castile Soap and Vinegar or it curdles **

Many online recipes call for mixing castile soap and vinegar in one cleaner, but I do not recommend that. I tried that and had a globby, curdled mess on my hands. I researched why castile soap and vinegar curdle and found a great post on Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap blog. It said that one is a base and one is an acid, so when they mix they bond so tightly with each other that there’s nothing left to fight the germs and dirty. If you want to clean with both, use two spray bottles. Clean it once with the soap and then a second time with the vinegar.

Window Cleaner Recipe
3 teaspoons white vinegar
4 cups warm water

Mix the ingredients and put into a spray bottle.

Our outdoor patio window had not been cleaned in 1 year and it was a mess. Vinegar seemed to streak a bit more than other window cleaners, but I didn’t mind doing a second coat since it was a nice day outside. After the second pass, there were no streaks. I’m guessing a less-messy window would only take one application.

We also use this window cleaner on our kitchen counters. If some of it ends up on our fruit bowl, I have no worries about eating vinegar. Just remember vinegar is an acid so it can slowly eat away at stuff like marble.

Stainless Steel Scrub
Baking Soda + Elbow Grease

To clean my stainless steal kitchen sink, I generously sprinkled Baking Soda on my slightly wet sink. I took my sponge and scrubbed. All of the grime came off, but it took a bit more elbow grease. Maybe it was my imagination, but if the baking soda and water mixed into a paste and sat on the sink for a minute it was much easier to clean.

Baking Soda also worked very well to get rid of the grime on my bathtub and my son’s big plastic car. Someday I’ll be adventurous enough to try it on my oven.

Sharing a Child’s Accomplishments

Like most parents, my weeks are usually filled with another first. You have first laughs, first words, first crawl, first steps, etc, etc, etc. But the most heart-warming part of all these firsts is that my son wants to share them with ME.

Whenever he’s working on a new skill, he always takes time to show both my wife and I what he just mastered. Of all of the billions of people in the world, my son chooses to tell me about them — that’s such an amazing honor that I try to show him the same respect back. I make sure to give him some undivided attention every day. There’s no phone call, iphone message or TV show that’s more important than the excitement he feels after discovering something new.

So take a step back from your day and try to give your kids fifteen more minutes of completely undivided attention than you did yesterday. Just watch them play. Marvel at how much they’ve grown and learned… then you’ll wonder why you ever did anything else with that time.

Should Parents Have a Date Night?

After months and months of passing up baby-sitting offers, my wife and I recently decided to have our first date night. Taking time for a date was our best idea this year! After twenty minutes of discussing our routines and what sort of dirty diapers we had changed , we actually started conversing like adults. We laughed. We talked about how we were doing… and we both finally relaxed.

So should parents have a date night? Assuming you have a reliable baby-sitter, the answer is YES!

Don’t Feel Guilty

One of the biggest struggles my wife and I had finally setting aside some time for a date was that we felt guilty leaving our kid behind. We felt like we were abandoning him — but this was all in our heads.

When you become a parent, you are a PARENT. There aren’t many breaks… newborns need a lot of love attention, so it’s natural to feel guilty, but that doesn’t mean it’s right to feel guilty. Leaving your kids with a good baby-sitter, food, water, shelter, warmth, etc is far from abandoning them. If you don’t build up a bank of energy, how are you going to keep giving-giving-giving?

Parenting is tough

Even if you have the best kids in the world like me, they’re still kids… and that means parenting is tough. You owe it to yourself to have some downtime so you don’t go crazy. Sometimes its helpful to get away so you can admit how tough parenting or talk with your partner about how they’re actually doing.

Add some play into your routine

When I became a parent, I was amazed by how much my life was dominated by routines. Kid like schedules. They need regular feeding, attention, changing, etc. Sometimes you forget what it’s like to do something spontaneous — like order a dessert. Plus, playing is a great way to relieve stress. (Toddlers play all the time and look at how few heart attacks they have! :)

It’s hard, but worth it

Fitting an occasional date into your life won’t be easy, but it’s worth the effort. Dates are a great way to reconnect with your spouse, unwind and be an adult (instead of a Mom) for a night. So enjoy — you deserve it!

What a Dad Learned by being a Mother

This Mother’s Day my wife was unfortunately sick for the day and that meant I had to do everything (but breast feed!). I took our son for walks, played with as many toys as we could find, made all of our meals — and of course clean up afterwards… or clean as well as dads can.

I knew it wasn’t easy to be a mother, but I had no idea how exhausting it actually was. By the end of the day my back was sore, I was running out of things to entertain my son and absolutely ready for bed.

It gave me great respect for single parents who never get the breaks I’m used to… but more importantly it made me think about empathy. I learned so much about my wife’s day by literally walking in her shoes that I wondered how much I could learn about others through empathy. I thought about bad days with bosses, times friends let me down, off color remarks others made. Thinking about all of those situations, I realized there were probably good reasons why others acted the way the did… even if it’s not apparent to me.

I’ve decided not to take things as personally because everyone’s simply trying their hardest — and trying your hardest is far from being perfect.

How to Memorize a Poem

When I was ten, I had to memorize a poem a month at school. Twenty years later, I’m amazed by how many of those rhymes are still tucked away in my brain — like a favorite memory or old friend.

It got me wondering: How in the world do you memorize a poem? Here are some tips I came up with.

1. Start with a short poem. If you have never memorized a poem before, pick a quick one so you get the hang of it. I’d recommend one that’s 4 lines and filled with words you easily understand.

One of the first short poems I ever memorized was Too Many Kids in this Tub by Shel Silverstein:

There’s too many kids in this tub.
There’s too many elbows to scrub.
I just washed a behind that I’m sure wasn’t mine.
There’s too many kids in this tub.

2. Pick poems with strong rhymes and rhythms. Re-read that Shel Silverstein poem and listen to the rhythm as you say each word. It has a distinctive flow that wants to roll off your tongue. The rhythm can help you memorize because your brain knows what kind of sound it should be saying next. Similarly rhymes give you a clue about what word should be at the end of each sentence.

3. Visualize the poem. Close your eyes and imagine the poem. What does the main character look like? What expression is on their face? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? If you can picture the poem like a little movie in your head, it will be easier to remember it (because who doesn’t remember their favorite scene from a cartoon or movie?)

4. Write your own poem. Write a short poem and then try to memorize it. Can you remember what you were thinking when you wrote the poem? Do you remember why you chose certain words? If this helps you, think about other poems as if you wrote them. Why did the author choose the words they chose? What mood were they in when they wrote the poem? Who did they write the poem for?

5. Memorize a poem that makes you laugh. Everyone remembers their favorite joke because it makes them laugh. Sometimes it can be easier to remember a funny poem because it has you in stitches. Another poem I had to memorize as a kid was The New Kid On The Block by Jack Prelutsky. It was about a terrible kid with a really funny twist at the end. (You’ll have you get the poem to find out the ending — I don’t want to spoil it). That poem always made me laugh, which made it more fun to memorize.

6. Imagine the poem as you walk someone familiar. First you need to picture a walk that you have done thousands of time. What are some landmarks along the way? I have walked out of my front door millions of times. At the end of the driveway there is a mailbox and then a massive tree.

Next you need to mix the lines of poetry with those landmarks. For example, if I wanted to memorize:

There’s too many kids in this tub.
There’s too many elbows to scrub.

I would imagine lots of little kids crammed in the mailbox at the end of my driveway followed by scrubbing their elbows on the bark of my big tree. If I ever forget what the second line is, all I have to remember is that second thing I see as I leave my house is a big tree…. then I’ll suddenly remember scrubbing their elbows on the bark.

Hope these tips have helped. Remember poetry should be fun! If you’re getting frustrated, take a short break — run around outside for five minutes — and then come back and try again.

Why do I eat Organic Foods?

I grew up in cattle country surrounded by wheat and red meat — so it was a surprise to my family when I not only became a vegetarian, but an organic vegetarian. They were confused, upset, surprised. What had they done wrong? I got questions ranging from “why” to “can you still eat cookies”? But the biggest question I got was “Why bother with organics?” They’re expensive. The fruit looks funny. It seems like a lot of extra hoopla. Do organics really matter?

So I wrote this blog post for my friends and family to explain to them why I choose organic foods for my family. I’m not out here to convince people to change their minds — what you eat is your choice. I simply want to answer that “why” question I had heard so many times.

A carrot is not a carrot.
If you look at two carrots, it’s impossible to say if one is organic or conventionally farmed — but that doesn’t mean they are equal. I was surprised when I learned that a carrot is not a carrot. They can have very different nutritional values depending on how they were farmed and what nutrients were in the soil. If I’m going to bother to eat something “healthy”, I want all of its nutrients… so that got me interested in investigating organics further.

You can’t wash off pesticides.
I was told by many people to simply wash off the pesticides — however that isn’t possible. Vegetables like potatoes and celery grab moisture from the soil and use that to water grow the veggie we eat. If there are pesticides in the soil, the potatoes suck them up and build the edible part from pesticides. The vegetable is literally made of pesticides, so you can’t wash them off! That got me thinking do I actually want to be eating pesticides? I wasn’t sure.

I couldn’t find enough research to satisfy my doubts.
When I started reading more about pesticides, I didn’t find enough research to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt that they are safe. There are plenty of findings that small doses to healthy adults don’t make a bit of difference. However, I couldn’t find any research about giving my developing kid pesticides — or the long term effects of eating small doses of pesticides over a whole lifetime. That kind of comprehensive research seemed to be missing. Did I want to feed my son something that nobody understood? Did I want to eat something that could have long-term adverse effects?

The system is broken.
For me, the icing on the Organic cake was that our system of farming appears to be broken. 100 years ago, people had a handful of livestock and a small farm. The two were self-sustaining. Animal poo enriched the soil. The soil grew food for the animals.

With pesticides and industrial farming, the self-sustaining cycle is broken. Farmers have to import tons of fertilizer to enrich their soil. And factory stockyards have tons of toxic leftover poo that is poisoned with antibiotics and other medicines.

As cliche as it sounds, I want to leave the world a better place than I left it. This big, pesticide-driven industrial farming doesn’t seem to be sustainable. Instead, it seems to be creating two new giant problems: the need for more fertilizers and stockpiles of toxic animal poo. As a result, I wanted to help an alternative, sustainable method of food production — the organic method. Every time I eat, I get to vote for my preferred method of farming. I wanted to use my vote for a sustainable method that will leave the planet in a better place for my son.

The exciting world of organics.
As I started to pay more attention to my food, I was surprised by how little I knew about it. I had taken for granted that every week I could buy strawberries from the grocery store — but when I went to my first farmer’s market I was surprised that they didn’t have any. I asked the farmer and he told me they weren’t in season. I had never realized foods have natural growing seasons. That’s why you have pumpkin pie and apples in the fall — they’re ripe then. I’ve tried to be more aware of food’s seasons since becoming organic.

I was also surprised by all the foods I didn’t recognize. I learned that there used to be 200 types of broccoli and thousands of different apples. But in the grocery store, we only see one broccoli and a dozen apples. I have really enjoyed trying purple heirloom tomatoes, zucchini with a hard shell like pumpkin and white carrots. Variety is the spice of life!

Whatever you eat, give it thought.
I don’t care if you’re a vegetarian, meat-a-tarian, organic or fast-food junkie. I think the most important thing to take away from this article is that food is important. Our bodies are built entirely from food. Food nourishes us and sustains us. Our life is food… so think about what you eat. Be thankful for the food on your plate and don’t ever take food for granted.

The Magic of a Box

To my son, everything is a toy. Throwing placemats on the floor, grabbing sweaters and hitting boxes are just as fun as shaking rattles and rolling balls. He’s shown me every day objects in a new light and taught me to see the magic in everything.

Yesterday we were playing with a box for about an hour. He drummed on it, sat in it, opened and closed the flaps and we put stuff in the box.

The next time you open a box, throw out junk mail or take the last granola bar — remember that the cardboard doesn’t have to be garbage. It can be whatever your imagination is capable of. In fact the whole world is as magical as your imagination.

Your Health is your Wealth

My dad always said “Your health is your wealth,” but I never remember how true that is until I catch a cold. When my sore throat first starts and I wonder if it’s the dry desert air or a cold, there’s a bit of excitement — will it be a cold? Will I get to sleep and watch movies? Will my wife make me cinnamon toast? My colds always come when I’m tired and run down, so the sleep and movies sounds like the best plan ever.

But it never is. After one day of a cold, I’m over it and wish I were still healthy.

This cold was more traumatic because the whole family got sick. As miserable as I was, it broke my heart to see my son sick because he didn’t understand what was happening to him? He just knew he didn’t have the energy to play even though his mind wanted to.

I’m writing this post to remind myself (and you) how important health is. I certainly appreciate feeling better.

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