My Brain's A Mess--Focus

I've been horrible about blogging lately.  It's on my to do list every day, and it just seems to get pushed to the bottom.  I feel like when I do blog it's kind of random and not very green, which is, after all, the whole point of writing the blog.  So in the midst of thinking about this move and renovating the new house and functioning on a day to day basis with my four kids, I'm having a hard time keeping a little place in my mind to stay focused on my greening mission.  When I get overwhelmed, I do two things.  First, I follow the directions on my wall.  Pause, relax, breathe.  Then I quote my mother's adage that she always said to me when I was younger, "One thing done and that done well, is a very good thing as many can tell."  So since I'm losing my focus on living a greener life (I DID almost buy the book Raising Goats on my last trip to Lowe's.  Now THAT's living green!) I'm going to pick one thing, and do that well.  I always focus on food and cleaning so I'm going to pick something a little different this time.  Since it's Thanksgiving, the time of year for being thankful for what we have, I thought I'd keep that in mind when trying to be greener.  Reduce, REUSE, Recycle.  I'm going to look at reusing in our home.  Now comes the list.



First, I think we do a lot of really good reusing here.  First, I pack the kids lunches in almost entirely reusable containers and bags.  (I use Planet Wise reusable snack bags.  They come in different sizes and lots of fun fabrics.  They even have a sandwich wrapper that's great for packing the sandwich and also doubles as a placemat when the kids' are eating.) We use reusable containers for food storage and, I thought this was something that everyone does, but I guess not, we use REAL plates and flatware when we eat our meals.  Evan got a TON of little refill bottles of hand soap at work and we reuse our pump dispensers.  We reuse our spray bottles for cleaning and just refill it with vinegar from gallon jugs.  We use cloth napkins when we eat.  Of course the cloth diapers.  We bring our own bags when we grocery shop.  There's always room for improvement though, so I'm going to pick one thing to add to our list of "things we do really well reusing." So I googled, "What else can I reuse?"  and I hit a pretty cool site with a list of 100 ideas to reuse commonly thrown away things.  Many of them are a little out there, but check it out and see if you can find something, just one thing, that you could reuse instead of throwing out.  I think I'm going to go with baby blankets.  I have 4 kids worth of baby blankets that I'm pretty much done with.  I still need a few for Olivia, but I don't want to move a ton of receiving blankets that I'm not really going to  use on a daily basis.  So I'll be doing two useful things, reusing and decreasing the number of things I need to pack.  So what to reuse the blankets for?  I'm actually not going to reuse them myself.  I'm going to donate them to "babies" in need.  The rescue where we got Jack, Save A Mom Pregnant Dog Rescue is always looking for blankets to use with their new litters of pups.

So there.  I sat down and focused my messy brain on one thing that's important to me--living greener.  In doing that I also helped myself weed out unnecessary stuff to move, and I'm helping a charity that I feel passionate about.  Suddenly, today seems a little more productive.