Regreening: Personal Care Products

First, I started buying only organic produce again.  Then I started hang drying my clothes.  What was the next step I would take to get back to being as green as I was before I started to get lazy?  This is the question I've been asking myself as I do laundry, make beds, clean and make lunch.  So I thought about advice I've given to people asking me how they can be greener--start where it's most important to you.  Food has always been the most important aspect of living a greener, healthier life.  That's why I chose to start going back to solely organics first.  (The rest of the food will follow, but slowly.  What I realized, as I got less and less green and farther and farther away from organics--I was saving $150 a WEEK by buying conventional and crap food.  Not healthier, but definitely cheaper!)



So as I was thinking about what I could do next to get back to how I was, I just thought about where my guilt was.  Which was easy to do, since I feel guilty about nearly everything all the time.  It's personal care products.  I feel guilty that I've strayed from natural, organic, homeopathic, all around hippie, personal care products.  This is not me being lazy.  This was a function of me being cheap.  All natural, paraben-free, phylate-free, PABA-free all the --frees are expensive!  They're this way because they're made with real ingredients.  They're expensive because they're made with quality products and  crafted in a sustainable fashion.  You have to pay for that.  I get that.  But I also am dealing with children.  Which is why you would think I would want nothing but the most natural, safest, chemical-free products.  And you're right.  But I also watched Caden use body wash to soap up the shower walls.  Vince used 1/4 a bottle of shampoo as bubble bath.  Toothpaste gets squirted in the sink, bars of soap get smashed, gouged or left to melt in the bottom of the tub for the duration of a bath.  This leaves me at a cross-road. On one hand, I want my children as far from carcinogenic chemicals as possible.  On the other hand, I can't afford to watch a $10 bottle of shampoo be used as entertainment to add soap scum to my shower walls.  So I need a compromise.  In the past I started with just a little natural here and there.  It was manageable.  I was only buying an expensive personal care product every week.  Ok.  But when they waste like they do or even just spill, it becomes three or four a week and no longer within my budget.  So what I need to do is research.  In comes cosmetic database.com.  I need to find products that are as green as I can afford until my kids are old enough to understand and respect the fact that this stuff isn't free.  It's not free for me,and it's not free for the planet.  Each time they dump a bottle of soap down the drain in the name of play, it's wasting not only the soap, but the resources that were used in the manufacturing of the soap as well as the resources that are in the soap itself.  Time to get shop around for the best prices--*sigh* my kids LOVE when I do this!  Time standing still and just staring at bottles of shampoo-can you think of anything more fun for toddlers and preschoolers!?!?