going green (or blue)

there is this small (growing) part of me that wants to be a home-birthing, home-schooling, cloth diaper using, veggie eating, bike-riding, trash composting, 100% organic, carbon neutral, asset (instead of liability) to my family and this earth we call home. i am motivated by many factors, but mostly, i think all the products we use and consume today and the way we live our lives is to toxic and covered in chemicals to make things bigger, brighter, smellier, tastier and it can't be good for us. and i think it all causes cancer. i have no proof. but somehow, somewhere, i think that if i eliminate all of this toxic stuff from my life and my house...we are reducing our risk of getting cancer. and that makes me feel in control :)

i have lofty ideas, but unfortunately (as with many areas of my life....i am trying to get to the root of this behavior / complex don't worry!) have little follow through. there are so many competiting interests. namely, $...and time. but this weekend....i took a step. a little step that seemed so crazy to me just a few weeks ago, but now seems quite rational. and of course i am forcing this experiment on sweet ben. enter: cloth diapers! bronwen and i have done a respectable amount of research this past week and both purchased one cloth diaper for our babies. (don't remind me....i know ben is hardly a baby any more!)

you can see how happy he is in his cloth diaper and my sneekers. albiet he looks a bit like a sumo-wrestler.













minutes later there was a diaper malfunction. apparently it only took ben a couple minutes to figure out that the big white obvious velcro works just like on his sneekers and he took it off.













i put it back on, with shorts (that were a little snug with the bulky cloth diaper....yikes, something else to consider!) and he played and napped happy in his super soft cloth diaper. he also peed in his super soft cloth diaper. and i thanked him over and over and over again for not pooping in his super soft cloth diaper. so then it got washed and ready to go for the next trial date, which has not been set. if i'm going to commit to this....i'm going to have to buy more than one. and put it on him more than once. but one step at a time.