Hello again, goodbye and congratulations

This is just a brief post, you’ll see why.

After 5 days of utter frustration the site is back up and running (kind of). Our hosting company apparently had major problems. Anyhoo, I’m not going to get stressed about it anymore. There is more important stuff going on.

The tinygreenfamily are on the move. Yes we are departing suburbia this week and heading westward. Our new home is close to the beach, a forest and a small but perfectly formed village. More details anon…

If we ever manage to move there, that is.My tiny helpers haven’t grasped the whole packing thing properly and seem to be trying to take stuff out of boxes as quickly as I can put it in. But on the plus side we’re finding new homes for loads of stuff, a real grand finale to the No More Stuff Challenge. Which I will reflect on and compose a thought provoking and witty post later.

So this tinygreenmama doesn’t have much time for posting at the moment and may be without broadband for a few weeks. But I’ll be popping by the tiny green village regularly and will update you all on our great adventure when family commitments permit.

In the meantime congratulations to Tanou who has a won a pair of Bobux thanks to www.belgiantreasures.ie

Toys. Who needs them?

I found myself a few months ago justifying the amount of toys we had acquired for Buttercup.
‘Well, she doesn’t go to crèche, so we need to have everything here for her.’
I also eagerly enquired from my friends, ‘What do your little ones do at crèche?’ As if my darling might be missing out on something. Talk about getting it arseways!!

My darlings are not missing out on anything by being home with their mum. In fact being home with their mum is the very best thing for them.
Maybe it was my lack of confidence as a first time mum or seeing that I was in the minority as a SAHM or a bit of both that left me feeling I was poor substitute for ‘professional’ child care.
I was wrong; I am my little girls’ mother, their companion, their guide.

There is nothing Buttercup likes better than to help me. All toys are abandoned in favour of pulling up a chair and helping to make dinner or bake bread. At 20 months she is great at stirring and pouring things into things. I make sure there is always a snack near her so that she’ll quite happily often just suck on an orange piece or munch an apple while watching me make a curry or prepare a stew.
She wants to do real stuff. If I’m making a list it’s the pen she wants to use, she won’t be fobbed off with crayons.
Take the shape sorting box as an example, she looked quizzically at me as I showed her how to drop shapes into the appropriate holes, then she lifted the lid off and demonstrated to silly mummy that it was much easier to put them into the box this way. Then, a few days later she spent most of the day in the garden playing with the padlock for the shed and it’s key, until she finally came over to me holding the lock with the key inserted, and beaming ‘wow.’ Wow indeed.
So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how we spend our days. We now spend them doing stuff together. When we get up in the morning Buttercup and I make the porridge, she pours everything into the saucepan and stirs it, and then I put it on the ring. Primrose supervises from the sling or her chair. Throughout the day Buttercup loves to bake and prepare meals with me, as I sort the laundry she runs around putting items away in the appropriate drawers. But she’s the boss of her own time and if she gets bored she’ll just wander off and do something else. We often go for a walk if the weather isn’t too horrendous or visit with friends and in the evenings lie about on the floor reading books and drawing. Primrose comes everywhere with us and kicks about at our feet or dozes against me in our stretchy wrap. While Buttercup watches me, Primrose is fascinated by her big sister. The weekends and the evening are particularly special times when we have tgd around too.

There is a nice rhythm to our days now and there isn’t much time for toys. I hope our days will continue to be filled with the wonder of learning and of finding joy in the simple things.




Some books that are influencing my thinking: Teaching Your Own John Holt, Unconditional Parenting Alfie Kohn, The Continuum Concept Jean Leidhoff

Get your own stretchy wrap for baby wearing by entering our competition here, thanks to mumandme.ie.

Less stuff and more time

Almost 3 months into the No more Stuff Challenge and we are definitely the happier for it. It is refreshing to spend less time getting and wanting and more time being.

The biggest and best thing that we’ve managed to acquire so far is time. The time that we used to spend shopping, or just browsing in shops is now spent on much more useful things, like:
• Hanging out together as a family, often just lying on the rug chatting and playing.
• Making boats from cardboard boxes, Hallowe’en costumes from old clothes, colouring, reading and building stuff with blocks.
• Cooking and baking together (well, Primrose mostly watches)
• Sharing lazy mealtimes. As half the participants are under two the conversation often ends up in renditions of ‘Old McDonald’ or that great Spike Milligan favourite ‘On the Ning Nang Nong.’
• Visiting friends and family. And just hanging out with them.
• Pottering about in the garden. Looking at slugs and worms, collecting leaves and cutting flowers and herbs.

We seem to rush about less and to have more time for laughter in our lives. Maybe it has something to do with me not being hormonal and pregnant (tgdada certainly thinks so) but I think we are now taking more time to find the joy in just being with each other.

I love my little family.

By the way, don’t forget to check out our nappy giveaway, thanks to Ecobrats.

Re-use.

My latest mission on our journey to become a greener family is to reduce the amount of packaging we bring into the house. Our recycling bin is collected every two weeks and I want it to be at a maximum 1/3 full.

It took me a while to realise that Reduce, Re-use, Recycle is written in order of priority (duh, you may well say). So I’ve moved beyond feeling all warm and fuzzy about recycling and become determined to have less that needs recycling.
All this may explain why I was spotted this morning chasing a young lad down the road while brandishing a new phone book and shouting, ‘we don’t need this!’

We have the shopping bag thing down pat at this stage, I keep spare bags in the car and changing bag, so we don’t really accumulate those anymore. We read newspapers online, so no waste there either.
Toy packaging is no longer issue since we began the No More Stuff Challenge. But on that subject, we got a present of a tiny wooden tea set recently and there wasn’t a piece of plastic packaging in sight. Everything was wrapped in little brown paper bags. It was made by PLAN toys, check them out here.

Kids yoghurt tubs are another source of packaging that were upsetting me, not least because I had to wash all the tiny tubs and lids. Anyway their banishment had led to our discovery of a great new lunch time game for mummy and toddler. It involves:
1 large tub of yoghurt
1 pot of sugar free jam
Berries and chopped up fruit.
Rice crispies
A bowl each
Plenty of spoons
Full body armour bib (for toddler).
I think you get the picture.

So what’s left to fill the recycling bin? There are empty tins, jars, bottles, cardboard milk/juice containers, egg boxes, plastic wrapping, tubs, and trays.
We’ll have to see what we can do to keep it to a minimum. The jars I’ll keep for my jam making friends. Egg boxes can go back to the farm or be used to balance the ph levels in the composter. We’re going back to real butter and have started to use nut butter (cashew is yum), so tubs are rarer now. When we go to the market on Thursday I’m going to get myself organised enough to bring my own tubs to be filled and reuse some of my paper bag collection.
I haven’t been able to source organic chicken locally without packaging, but I’ll make more of an effort to buy full birds (less packaging) and use all the bits. With two tinys I’m not sure how I’d manage without my tinned tomatoes and corn, and my stash of frozen vegetables, but sure we’ll keep doing our best.

All this has me thinking……..maybe we should get a few chickens and a cow.

I’m not sure our little garden is suburbia is up to the task…but check this out.

No more stuff: a month in.

Well we’re a month into the challenge and getting used to life with less stuff. As we’re not buying any stuff we spend very little time in shops and shopping centres. We spend one day a week at the farmers market, getting everything else delivered and, in general, seem to have much more family time. Impulse buying is gone from our lives and all our purchases are now thought out, planned and budgeted for (mostly).

I will admit there are times when I find the rules I’ve set myself a little tough. This week I bought a bag of second hand clothes for Buttercup, who has just gone through another growth spurt. I did spend a little more money than intended (bad mama), but got some nice clothes for her to wear for a few upcoming family parties and for Christmas.
I’ll make the money back, I thought, there’s a car boot sale at the weekend. So we spent three days gathering together stuff from the attic, boxing and pricing it. Then, enter Irish weather. The car boot sale had to be called off due to torrential rain and howling winds – disappointing but understandable (the decision not the weather). So we’ll be eagerly waiting for the next fine car boot sale weekend.

In the meantime, it’s out with the camera and back to advertising online. I’m going to be playing with eBay this week.
Here are some tips for selling with ebay.
Here are some tips for buying in online auctions.

I know you have all been waiting excitedly for an update on the great vegetable peeler hunt! Well, success. A friend of tinygreenpeople who is due her first baby shortly has offered to swap a vegetable peeler for some newborn vests and babygrows. A cunning plan methinks as my poor fingers are in bits from the one I’m using and sure I was just going to give them the vests anyway.


Check these out;

Mammydiaries update on how she’s revelling in the challenge

RTE TV’s new show Living Lightly. Tinygreenpeople suspect that someone in RTE may have been reading mama’s blog,

No More Stuff: Toys, Shoes and other stuff....

I think the success of this challenge will lie not so much in our ability to get rid of stuff and cleverly source new stuff but in our realisation that we don’t actually need that much stuff anyway.

Apparently a western baby uses 17 times more resources than a baby from the developing world*. While we are lucky to be comfortably well off in a wealthy country, now that I’ve begun to look more objectively at our accumulated stuff, I can’t help but see most of it as excess. The ole consumer mindset is difficult to lose but losing it we are (on so many levels!).

In fact this clearing out and simplifying is becoming quite satisfying in itself.

Buttercup has loads of new toys to play with, and it hasn’t involved accumulating any more stuff! A friend and I have done a toy swap. She has a little one Buttercup’s age and so last week pulled up with a car load of toys and we then filled her boot with Buttercup’s toys. Both girls have new stuff to keep them amused for a few weeks and when they’re getting bored again, we’ll just swap back.

In my spare moments I’m ferreting out stuff to give away and sell and hatching cunning plans for its disposal. I’ve found homes for a few bits on Freecycle and so far have resisted replying to any of the Offered ads! My wedding dress is on its way to Barnardos Bridal Shop and I’ve also sold a bunch of maternity clothes (well, they’re promised, the actual transaction will take place in the next few days) and some CD’s.

I’ve managed to find second hand waterproofs for Buttercup for the winter, I texted an old friend who has smallies a little older than ours and sure enough she had the desired garments in her attic.

In anticipation of Buttercup outgrowing her shoes, I’ve been looking into kids eco shoe options. In Ireland there's http://www.bobux.ie/ and I found this a fab company in Devon, Greenshoes.

We’re managing without a decent vegetable peeler for now, but I may have to splash out!

Oh, and by the way another place for advertising and finding second hand stuff is gumtree.

*(ref Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding)

No More Stuff:Update 1

Right, progress report: no more stuff acquired and a little bit of stuff passed on.

I would like to say that this challenge was well thought out but actually it was more of a spur of the moment thing.

It resulted in a bout of panic after posting, in which I found myself listing stuff we would need over the next four months: vests, shoes and waterproofs for Buttercup, tights for Primrose. We were going to purchase a table and chairs for Buttercup to paint at, I would love some new clothes as I lose my pregnancy weight and the vegetable peeler has just broken. Then I began thinking, what if the washing machine breaks or the oven?

Now, don’t fret, my children will definitely not be left shivering this winter for lack of clothes. Primrose has her sister to thank for passing on her wardrobe and I bought 2 bags of second hand clothes for Buttercup about 2 months ago. We have many of the necessities and the nice stuff we can do without.

And I’m proud to report; we have less stuff now than we did last week. Our neighbours have just given birth to a tiny one, so all Primroses newborn stuff has made its way there, soon to be followed by the 0-3 collection.

But it’s definitely time to get my act together (time is an issue here with an 8 week old and a 17 month old), sell some stuff, and start a small kitty for emergencies.

In anticipation of offloading some of our stuff I’ve signed up to Freecycle and Jumbletown, both places for giving away and finding free stuff. One persons junk……and all that.

And I have company, I’ve been joined in this challenge by fellow blogger, writer, mum and friend mammydiaries, check out her fab blog!

Now, I must just getting photographing my maternity clothes (with the exception of those I’m still wearing) to offer them on Rollercoaster classifieds.

And anyone know where I could pick up a vegetable peeler that actually works (we’re all left-handed here)?

No More Stuff!

Right, in order to practice what I preach and in light of these recessionary times I’m setting myself a challenge. Until December 1st

No more stuff.

Stuff means clothes, furniture, household gadgets, toys etc.

Stuff we don’t need I’ll sell, exchange or give away.

I will endeavour to get everything we do need (and only if we really need it) by borrowing it, creating it or buying it second hand.

Anything new must be the most eco friendly possible and be bought with money made from selling some existing stuff.

And for your entertainment I'll blog about the experience.

Anyone like to join me?