Updates

Our family set of stainless steel bottles by Kleen Kanteen arrived last week and they have been fantastic. Not only is our Brita jug giving us great tasting water straight from our tap, but the stainless steel keeps it cool so we can have the bottles of water around us all day long. My son loves his new sippy cup cuz its "coldies" to hold when I first fill it up for him. And now he's drinking more water this way too. Its been a great 'small step' for our family. Not only are we drinking tap water, filtered and tastey, but we're drinking more of it, which is great for our bodies!

Also, I have been LOVING my cast iron frying pan. I made pancakes & eggs in it this weekend successfully. The eggs cooked a bit quicker than I expected so I threw a lid on top to get the yolk to cook a bit better but I'll learn as I go along.

And, while I have remembered a few times to take my cloth shopping bags, I forgot the time I did a big shop and was feeling so guilty accepting all those plastic bags. So, I need to get better at remembering my bags. Its grocery shopping day here again today so I have pulled them all out and put them on my purse in hopes that I will most definitely remember today! I'm also going to try & remember to take back all the plastic bags I've been saving to put in their recycling. One less thing cluttering up my laundry room and then I should hopefully remember to do it more often!

Yay for Cast Iron: No More Teflon for Me!

Another small step was successful yesterday. I finally was able to buy my first cast iron frying pan.

We are phasing out our teflon coated non-stick frying pans and I have to admit I was a bit afraid to make the switch. I loved the convenience of my non-stick pans and I kept reading that cast iron needed all this special care, seasoning, etc.

How easy it was!!  Lastnight I browned my ground beef in it. It cooked so evenly. I coated the bottom with a tiny bit of oil first and let the pan get hot before I dumped the beef in. I thought it would stick wickedly or something, no problems at all. And to clean it, just scrub with a little hot water (no soap) and dry, add a teeny bit more oil and put it away.

Today I was eager to try my grilled ham & cheese sandwhich. Its my pregnancy craving. I've had one every SINGLE day since November. And it cooked just the same as it always did in my teflon pan! I just wiped it out with a paper towel & put it away!!

Even better, I'm getting the iron benefits which we all need, but I seem to need even more during pregnancy.

I learned that you probably shouldn't cook acidic things, like tomato sauce in cast iron as it really causes the iron to leech out & can give an iron taste to acidic things. However, after a while, once its been frequently used, this doesn't seem to be a problem. So the pasta sauce I was making was completed in my stainless steel pot. But for these purposes, I think I'll invest in a good size stainless steel pan as well.

So what's wrong with Teflon coated pans you might wonder?  This is what I've read:

Taken from the Environmental Working Group's website article:

"Teflon is the brand name for the synthetic chemical polytetrafluoroethylene (a term that does not easily slide off the tongue), or PTFE. It was introduced for commercial use by DuPont in 1946. The original version had the problem of being easily scratched by ordinary cooking utensils. Instead of getting trace amounts of iron from food cooked in cast-iron pots, we were getting trace amounts of Teflon. Silverstone, the next generation of nonstick cookware, is more durable than Teflon. It is chemically related to Teflon, however, as are all nonstick coatings in use today.

... PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid, used to make Teflon) is known to cause cancer and other health problems in laboratory animals, and Houlihan is especially concerned because in people, "blood levels are too close to the levels that harm lab animals." Additional animal studies show that other chemicals used in food packaging, carpets, and clothing break down into PFOA in the environment, as does Teflon when ingested.

There are two concerns with Teflon and other coatings: the potential toxicity of residual chemicals used to make the coating, and release of chemicals during product usage. PFOA is a key chemical in the first category. It is listed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a persistent chemical and potential human carcinogen (cancer-causing chemical). DuPont maintains that all Teflon-coated cookware is safe because no PFOA remains in the finished product. But the company acknowledges that when heated in excess of 660 degrees Fahrenheit (340 degrees C), an empty Teflon-coated pan can release toxic fumes into the air. Independent tests show that during preheating on a regular kitchen stove, nonstick cookware can easily reach a temperature of 736 degrees-in as little as about three and a half minutes-and release toxic fumes. Two chemicals in those gases are linked to cancer or tumors in laboratory animals (PFOA and TFE, tetrafluoroethylene), two are potent global warming gases (PFB, perfluorobutane; and CF4, tetrafluoromethane), and one is used as a warfare agent (MFA, monofluoroacetic acid). At higher temperatures achievable on kitchen stove tops, additional extremely toxic gases are released, including PFIB (perfluoroisobutene) and a chemical analog of the World War I nerve gas phosgene.

In fact, the Environmental Working Group found 16 studies conducted over the past 50 years showing that heated Teflon decomposes to over a dozen types of toxic gases and particles. Many of the studies were done by scientists at DuPont who were looking into "polymer fume fever," a condition documented among workers making Telfon products. Symptoms (which can be confused with flu) include malaise, shortness of breath, headache, chills, cough, sore throat, and fever. Pulmonary edema, a potentially fatal condition, may also develop. Cases of polymer fume fever from home kitchen exposures have been reported in medical journals, leading some doctors to recommend stove ventilation whenever using nonstick cookware."

Doesn't sound very pleasant does it?  I had heard that teflon pans emit potentially dangerous chemicals before (you know, pet birds dying and all that) and had read that you should never heat a teflon product beyond medium heat, and never use a product that has scratches in it.

But the more I read, the more I decided that even these precautions weren't enough for me to keep using the pans I had.  I just had to make the step to buy my cast iron pan & give it a go!

I will probably have a bit of a learning curve for things like eggs & pancakes, but I'm looking forward to the challenge if it means I'm protecting our health!!

Ignorance is bliss??

We really are in a "don't ask, don't tell" sort of society aren't we? People don't like being informed that what they are doing (living, consuming, etc) could be bad for them, and most don't care if its bad for anyone else around them.

I didn't really think I would be one of those 'stand on my soapbox' sort of people but the more I learn the more I feel like its my duty to inform the uninformed. Imagine my surprise that people don't want to be informed and when they are, they prefer not to know or care because they don't want to change anyways.

I'm fairly passionate about things like breastfeeding, cloth diapering, anti-smoking, etc. And, while it makes me sad, I'm used to a lot of my "information" falling on deaf ears, or just being the 'thanks but no thanks' attitude of receiving new information. But now that we are trying to green up our world, trying to find more things to make our lives & the lives of our kidlets healthy, its like we've crossed over in to the realm of extremist.

When I learn things that could be potentially dangerous to my health (like the plastics & bottled water stuff) I feel like this is "big news" that I want to share with others. It seemed eye-opening & shocking to me. Or what I've recently read about teflon frying pans. And we're still learning, daily, as a family, the things that are health hazards and wishing we weren't so ignorant to them in the past few years...

So why does it seem so many people are content with their ignorance? Why do they desperately not want to know? Are they afraid of change? Or do they just not care for their own health? Or the health of others around them?

I'm definitely not out to save the world. I honestly don't give a rat's a$$ about "global warming" or "protecting the environment". I'm troubled by what I see is going on in the world, but my focus is not that big. I want to protect MY environment, my home, my family for our health & well-being & for the longevity of my children. I want them to have less exposure to all the health risks we have been so ignorant to in the past few decades. I want to be more informed about what is in my food, my drinking water, and what chemicals are being let off from my possessions, disrupting the natural balance of our bodies, my children's bodies, and the natural balance of the earth around me.

And once I've learned the facts, I can NOT be ignorant to them. I can't always make immediate changes for the things I learn, usually due to finances, but I make the goal to make those changes as soon as I can, even if its just small steps, I always want those steps going forward, not backwards, and certainly not standing still.

So, if I come across as a bit of an activist, an extremist, or just plain eco-crunchy-hippy-preachy-OUT THERE, then too bad, at least I will not leave you with the excuse that you "just didn't know", because Ignorance is NOT bliss!

Filtered Water & thoughts on herbs

So we got our Brita filter jug yesterday. Hooray! We were waiting for a green one to come to the store that we ordered but found out the green was discontinued so we got the pink "breast cancer support'' one instead.

I'm so pleased with it. The taste of the water 100x better than straight out of the tap! It does say quite specifically on the box that it does not filter out flouride (like that's a good thing) so I'm extra happy that my town does not flouridate its water supply.

We are still waiting for our Kleen Kanteen water bottles to arrive in the mail but at least in the mean time we have good tasting water, right in our own fridge.

Meanwhile, its -33C today and still dark out at 8:15am.

I had plans of starting some small herbs, like chives in a windowsill greenhouse, but with these frigid outside temps, even our windowsills are too cold still to support plant life.

Hopefully in another month I can get my little garden growing. In the mean time, we are still researching which herbs & plants we would like to grow for ourselves in the future. With all the restrictions suddenly being placed on "healing herbs" in the European Union, we know that we're going to have to act fast to get some seeds and rights to get growing and learning about the healing herbs we can grow in Canada.

And not just medicinal herbs, but we want to grow some of our favourite culinary herbs (many of which have great health benefits) like basil, dill (my personal fave), summer savory, thyme, rosemary, sage & maybe even oregano, depending on what will grow well in whatever region we end up in.

So for the cold winter, while we make other small steps, we will continue to do our research and educate our minds to keep them off the freezing cold temperatures outside.

No More Plastic Bottles

We have officially banned plastic bottles in our house.

This past week we have been learning A LOT, thanks to Netflix and the internet. We watched two documentaries: Flow: For The Love of Water and Tapped on Netflix and let me tell you, our eyes were opened!!

I highly recommend both of these documentaries if you want to learn more about the world water crisis and how BAD plastic bottles truly are, for the environment, for your local water and for your health.

Here is a link to FLOW and apparently you can watch it online now too here but I have not tested the video quality. The quality on Netflix was very good.

Here is a link to TAPPED and here also.

Anyways, not only learning how poorly bottled water is regulated and the fact that it mostly comes from public water sources (and not some mystical glacial stream) made us take a second look at our own tapped water, that we have been avoiding.

First of all, our local water smells BAD, its super chloriney and I didn't want the flouride. So we were going over to my in-laws house who have double filtration on their water & filling up bottles to take home for our drinking water because the chlorine taste & smell was filtered out.

After watching these shows we decided it was time to invest in a Britta water jug for our fridge. While a reverse osmosis system would be the best option, we aren't going to be living in this home for a long enough time to make it worth the extra expense so I thought I would start smaller.

But then the news brought up the whole flouride issue and I couldn't find any information about Brittas being able to filter out flouride so I was back to wondering about what we could do to drink 'un-flourided' water and I had a simple brainwave: call the water department!! Seems obvious but we're new here and I guess I wanted to know how they cared for the local water.

I received great news! While the water contains a higher level of chlorine than I hoped, it contains ZERO added flouride! Hooray! Finally a town that doesn't feel the need to medicate its citizens without their opinion! Way to go La Crete, Alberta!!

So, armed with the new knowledge that I can filter out the taste & smell of the chlorine, we ordered a nice big Britta water jug from the local homehardware which should arrive today or tomorrow!

And, seeing as we all drink a LOT of water, in keeping with my 'ditch the plastic' theme, I ordered all three of us Kleen Kanteen stainless steel water bottles.  I searched around a few of my fave eco parent Canadian online stores and found Parenting By Nature even has them on sale right now. So I got two big ones for the husband & I, and one sippy cup style for the munchkin.  If it weren't for wanting a sippy cup style one, I would highly recommend Otter Bottle - a Canadian company that sells stainless steel water bottles with some great designs & decent prices!

So hopefully our new water bottles will come this week, our Britta filter will come and we can say goodbye to toting water back & forth in plastic bottles for good.

FLOURIDE : Is it in your water?

Today there is an article on CNN: Government recommends lowering fluoride levels in U.S. drinking water

There are many people questioning WHY flouride should be in our water at all, and why they can't just remove it altogether. I suppose lowering the levels are a start, but that's definitely not going to make people forget about the fact that its still there.

I'm not going to go on about the reasons it shouldn't be there, just check the comments after the article and you'll get the jist of it.

But it did get me thinking. We are in a new town and we don't drink our water right from the tap because it smells too 'chloriney' to me. But I figured I should find out about the flouride as well. A couple phone calls later, I'm very excited to learn that this town doesn't add ANY flouride to the water supply. Bonus! While the chlorine levels are higher than I'm comfortable with but we usually get our drinking water from across the yard at my in-laws double filtered fridge water. However, now knowing that there is no flouride, I think we'll also get ourselves a Brita filter pitcher for our own fridge. On the Brita website they claim among the things they filter, chlorine is one of them, but there is no mention of flouride so I wasn't rushing out to get one previously, now I will feel more confident using one because flouride isn't a big concern.

While I've been on the awareness wagon about flouride only for a short time, I do make sure that my son has flouride-free toothpaste. Its not your basic baking soda & water concoction but its the Tom's of Main children's toothpaste. To me, it looks like wood caulking, but it smells yummy (strawberry) and he generally sucks most of it off still anyways.

I would like to switch my own toothpaste to something flouride-free as well. I'm afraid of not liking the taste. I really hate the taste of ALL toothpastes really so I hate the thought of too much trial and error because the natural toothpastes are pretty pricey. Would there be anything wrong with using the same toothpaste as my son? I guess I need to look into that. I have super sensitive teeth so I've been a sensodyne user for years. Perhaps I need to find some more natural ways of dealing with sensitive teeth first.  Always something new to research!

So What's Bad About Household Cleaners: Bleach

I suppose I should clarify why I'm wanting to use homemade cleaning products. Beside the obvious, that I'm worried about toxins, I'm also super sensitive to smells, again, whether or not I'm pregnant.  A strongly scented product sets alarms off in my head. If something needs to smell that strongly it can't be good. Its a lame way of reasoning but I've come to find that its true most of the time.

Let's take household bleach for starters. The choice of generations for cleaning & disinfecting all & every thing! What's so bad about bleach?

Well, from what I can find from googling a few pages: EVERYTHING!! Yikes! Now for the most part, I use vinegar in place of where many use bleach but I have been known to get some "real bleach" for my cloth diaper inserts to freshen them up, and soak my toilet brush in the stuff too (I bet I can use vinegar for that as well right?)  I HATE the smell of bleach, and have every exhaust & fan in the house running when I do those bleach soaks. Fortunately, I long since ran out of that bottle & just continued using my vinegar :)

So, about bleach then. The list of 'bad things' contain words like respiratory problems & asthma, chemical burns, skin reactions, headaches, confusion, vision disturbances, hormonal imbalances, reproductive problems, nervous system damage, carcinogens (the cancer causers) dangerous chemical reactions and so on. 

References: Here and here and here and here

Now we've all been warned not to mix bleach with amonia because the fumes can be fatal. But, we should also be aware that our own urine contains quite a bit of amonia and so even cleaning the toilet bowl with bleach can cause a similar toxic fume, maybe not fatal in the sense of a total mixture of bleach & liquid amonia but the fumes from even a small mixture are NOT good for us to be breathing.

Then there are just simple accidents, like children or pets ingesting it, and the fumes are even more damaging to little lungs of babies and pets and especially, the ever sensitive tell-tale warnings of our pet birds. And environmentally damaging as well because every time we use bleach in our sinks, tubs, toilets & washing machines, all that bleach water is carried out into our sewer or septic systems. Ground water, marine life, and other biological disturbances affecting what should be left alone from all these toxins.

So, these are just a few examples of what is not so great about bleach. I'm sure there are many more.

Some bleach alternatives: Well of course, our trusty vinegar can do just about all things that bleach can without being toxic. Here are some great facts about vinegar.  Baking soda gives it a boost as well. And for something like disinfecting, I read here you can try grapefruit seed extract or eucalyptus oil (diluted with water)

Another thing to remember in this obsessive anti-bacterial world is to TAKE IT EASY!! Not all germs & bacteria are bad. The more we over-bleach and use anti-bacterial everything, the worse we are making our immune systems. We are the ones creating the "Super Bugs". We're vaccinated for everything under the sun, wash our hands & children & toys & everything we touch with anti-bacterial stuff so that we don't get a germ but this is not how we fight these bugs, this is how we make them stronger. 

'Nuff said for one day.

Homemade cleaning products

Ok, I'm the first to admit that I hate cleaning bathrooms. Regardless of whether I'm pregnant & nauseous (like right now) or if I'm feeling great, bathroom cleaning always makes me gag.

But add to that, the over-powering & toxic fumes of typical bathroom cleaners and I can hardly set foot in there. Fortunately, my wonderful hubby does most of the bathroom cleaning (when I beg & plead) but I believe his lungs have as much value as mine do so its time to look into new cleaning products.

We've tried the Green Works brand and to me, it smells just as potent, and just doesn't do a job as good as my trusty Mr. Clean or Chlorox sprayers. And besides, the big CAUTION: IRRITANT warning on the bottle kind of freaks me out. *shudder* I know, I'm just a newbie right!

So I thought I would browse around and see what the good old fashioned way of doing things is like. I couldn't believe how relatively simple the ingredients are! The majority of cleaning can be done with your basic baking soda & vinegar. Now, I already clean some things (like my floor) with vinegar so it won't be a hard change to try cleaning other things with these products. Vinegar is a miracle product - anti-bacterial, mold-killing, deodorizing, polishing, window cleaning, etc. Yay for vinegar, and as an added bonus, its usually CHEAP!! That earns vinegar a gold star in my books.

The first site I came upon is a great site called Care2 as in Care2 make a difference, as their title suggests. This looks like a site I'm going to frequent a lot in my small steps!

Anyways, tomorrow, if nausea cuts me some slack,  I will try some of the recipes I found for cleaning and see what I think of them & report back.

If you have some homemade recipes for your cleaning products, please share them with me!

Plastic Bags

I loathe plastic bags! Not only are they much weaker than paper or re-usable fabric bags, but they are everywhere. Any property near a garbage dump is strewn with them, and the planet is littered with them. Recycling definitely gives you some break from the guilt of using them but here is my confession:

I have two HUGE bags of bags in my laundry room.

There is no recycling services here in this small northern town and we have been struggling with it a bit. It seems horrifying to us to just throw away things like cereal boxes and papers. Back in Osoyoos, we could recycle everything and it was picked up every other week, as much as you could pile on the curb that was recyclable, they would take. There is no service like that here. However, we have learned that there are some sorting bins at the local land fill... so, we have some hope that some things can be taken, I just want to learn where it goes & how its sorted.

And, I have discovered that the grocery store has a big bin in the entrance that you can return your plastic bags to. All plastic bags I'm hoping. Those two big bags don't look too bad, but I decided to unstuff one and see how many bags were actually in it...

Eek! That's a lot of bags. I'm horrified at my wastefulness.

Its nice to recycle when its convenient so this will be one of our first tests of commitment is to make the effort to sort our recycling and take it to the appropriate drop off place. And especially these plastic bags... I hate seeing them piled up in my laundry room.

Sooo, all this to say that one of my goals, my first small step, is to ALWAYS remember my re-useable grocery bags, not just for when I get groceries but when I do any shopping. I have a couple of those bags that fold up into a pocket smaller than my cell phone that easily fit in my purse. I want to keep those in there for when I do random purchases and to keep my other shopping bags near the door so I can grab one on my way out if I know I'm picking something up.

I know this is possibly something some of you always remember but I've definitely fallen out of the habit of remembering them and so I figured it would be the best place for me to start.

2011: A Year of Big Changes by Taking Small Steps

Let me just start this blog by saying, I'm not looking to change the world.

This is about the small steps our family is going to make, little by little, to improve our health, our lifestyles, our consumption and maybe, just a few of the people around us might make some small steps to change as well.

We've spent the first part of this winter researching ways to do things better. How to eat better, foods without chemicals, including vegetables and meats. We've been researching with herbs & spices have health benefits and have decided we want to grow some for ourselves. We want a big chemical-free garden, chemical-free fruit and to no longer live in the 'pesticide belt' in the south Okanagan where the chemicals were surrounding us and poisoning the air we were breathing.

We want clean water, cleaner air, not just outside but inside our home and want to know more about the toxins that our  "stuff" could be giving off. We want to make healthy choices for our son, and his future brother, for our own health, improving our bodies, improving the way we do things like cleaning, cooking, and consuming.

We're watching documentaries, reading blogs & websites, ordering books and asking friends in the know.

We have so many ideas that it can practically feel overwhelming to know where and how to start, but nonetheless, we are starting!

We're happy to have you join us on this journey and we welcome suggestions, ideas, links and thoughts along these lines. Big changes are coming, but this Wolfe family will be taking Small Steps to get there.