'Llowance Lowdown

On the off chance that my recent research can get your family's child cash conversation kick-started, here goes:

1)Many people recommend an allowance of a buck per year of age, something large enough that a child can purchase tangible items of interest and can also benefit from saving money. She and she alone should decide how to use this money. She can spend, save, or share it -- and will benefit from hearing your beliefs -- but she must be empowered to make her own choices. To make it worth her while to save, pay her an exorbitant interest rate (at least 6%, steep but allows the money to grow visibly in child time) once a month, a la The First National Bank of Dad, a great book on teaching kids about finances that also provided the next point of advice.

2)Distance allowance from parental dollar hostage-taking from the get-go. It is tempting to threaten to take it away and effectively banning linking the allowance to behavior is important. That would be boring. And kids should have to participate in household tasks as part of a family team effort. Choosing not to do chores (ie I don't need that stinking allowance) shouldn't be an option.

3)Optional jobs offered as extra money-makers should be just that, optional, above-and-beyond jobs she can opt to do to earn extra $ above and beyond her allowance. These tasks will come as a set; just like there are parts of your employment you dislike but do anyways, she can't pick and choose from the xtra joblist. It's all or nothing. {I got this idea from Michelle Singletary -- I totally love her column The Color of Money and was reading her archives last week while on the hunt for books for my 10-year old entrepreneurial cousin (this and this look promising).}

4)Any ideas your kid comes up with that save your family money should go directly into her pocket, ie if she finds us a $1 off coupon for her favorite yogurt drinks, give her the dollar. This idea comes directly from my maternal grandfather. I totally loved when he did this for me as a kid. I still clip coupons.

Here's hoping that lots of discussion about money will help our kids have a healthy relationship with cash -- respect for the power of money to do good, to make our lives easier, and to provide freedom of choice and freedom from want.

Also, this via Green as A Thistle: by all means save, but only with a figurative piggy bank -- hoarding coins is bad for the environment. Think about that when you are fuming about the person in front of you in line (me?!) fishing around for exact change. Read more!

Reading Up for A Green New Year

Poster child for Carol Gilligan here. Tell me your life story and I am yours. My librarian at my elementary school used to set aside biographies in stacks for me. Didn't matter the person involved. Nowadays with time being short I tend to try to read about folks I want to emulate.

I have *really* been enjoying reading about people who are trying to live green and chronicling their lives day by day (ie taking on some new enviro lifestyle change every day). It's certainly changed my paradigm (one woman in Canada has unplugged her fridge and given up toilet paper! Me? SO light green. Her? Darker than forest.) You might be into some of them, too, so here's my faves:

• Green as A Thistle...in which aforementioned young Canadian explores life without tp among other moves
• Going Green...in which a suburban mother makes enviro choices in the DC area
• Fake Plastic Fish...in which one woman systematically tries to rid herself of plastic

Got any daily-change-type blogs you'd like to share? I'm so into learning by imitation -- I'd rather watch someone program my remote than read the manual.... Read more!

Crafty New Year

Thanks to BeanPaste, author of the unparalleled blogpost chronicling her husband's dire Crouton Lung diagnosis, I've been inspired to gift something handmade to three lovely readers. I love handmade stuff for many reasons: its individuality in our cookie-cutter world, its tendency to reuse/recycle materials, its potential to support indy and sometimes SAHparent artists, and, of course, its lure for bored 4 year olds needing pleasant indoor activities.

So without further ado, I announce my very first give away! All you have to do is be one of the first three readers to post a comment below.

If you live nearby, I would vouchsafe that this will be something culinary in nature. Further away? Hard to say, but it will be amusing to see the result (I love crafts but tend to create limited quantities of things, never really achieving mastery). Please include your email so I can be sure to contact you to get mailing info.

I will mail the handmade gifts out early in the New Year. Read more!

BS and V (Green Clean Duo)

Lucky for me, the nesting frenzy I had right before procreating five years ago has carried me a ways down the parenting road. In a prescient moment while swollen like a tick with my darling daughter, I realized if I didn't act immediately to start a green cleaning routine pre-kids it would never happen.

Said cleaning routine's been pretty much undisturbed for about 5 years now. I must say that I need this routine to be automatic so I basically clean everything with baking soda and vinegar.

Many people have asked me what recipes I use to clean and I would like to say that Annie Berthold-Bond's book is my favorite on this topic; I consult it whenever I, say, have an ant infestation and can't remember what repels them safely (cinnamon).

My faux spray cleaner is just water, vinegar, and eco-friendly detergent. I mix them in a bottle with roughly 2/3 warm water and 1/3 vinegar with a squirt of dish soap (in my inaugural and never-repeated use of my label-maker, I printed out the recipe and stuck it onto the spray bottle, which was a key move in those early days post-partum when I was a complete germ fanatic but also suffering from total nursing brain death). I no longer measure out ingredients, I just make sure I have more than enough vinegar and soap in the bottle. This works for bathrooms, counter tops, floors, you name it.

To clean baked on pans I put baking soda on with enough water to make a paste and leave it overnight. This also works for cleaning your oven but it's very messy. And you all probably remember from scouting that if you're out of toothpaste you can use baking soda mixed with salt.

To clean my toilets, I mix vinegar and baking soda right in the bowl (those of you who have made play-dough volcanoes will be able to imagine the fizzing). Baking soda's a great scourer for things like bathtubs and the vinegar gets rid of soap scum.

I abandoned essential oils a while back when I learned that lavender oil and tea tree oil may cause hormone disruption in boys (holy man-boobs Batman!) but should you desire a kitchen-y smell, rosemary is also a natural antiseptic about which I've heard nary a bad word. So's lemon juice but you'd have to refrigerate that mix...which means, of course, that it's too high maintenance for me to use. Worth keeping in mind as one's trying to disinfect a cutting board tho. And speaking of lovely smells, don't fret, the vinegar scent while you're cleaning dissipates rapidly. Vinegar itself can be used in open bowls to remove bad smells (smoke, vomit) from the air.

For dishwasher detergent, I tried making my own (boric acid, baking soda, etc.) but was beyond dissatisfied with the results. I now use Trader Joe's liquid with vinegar as my rinse agent (which does interesting things to aluminum, I realized belatedly) to get rid of any chemical taste (I had to stop using commercial dishwasher detergent while pregnant with Kid 2 as the residue was making me gag).

Since the things I do clean with are pretty simple, a lot of cleaning green for me has meant stopping the use of more toxic products. One of the biggest offenders for the environment is bleach, and I was reminded recently why via a Grist Q&A-- producing bleach creates dioxins, and using bleach may produce carcinogens that harm you and marine life. So although my whites may be a little dingy (no tomato stains, though -- leave them out in the sun! no kidding, a little vinegar and sunshine and they disappear) we are pretty confident that our kids and dog aren't being harmed while we clean. Read more!

Bodacious, Bad-Ass Brownies

I've been loving browsing through my favorite blogs via my steady supply of RSS feeds while expressing CBoy's milk for a couple weeks now and this link is all-time proof of the worthiness of that particular time investment. It's to The Perfect Recipe brownies by Pamela Anderson (the Cooks Illustrated one, not the giant boob mama). GoodyBlog talks chocolate specifics so I will admit that I deviated from their recommendations to cater to our particular brand of sweet toothiness. I used 2 oz unsweetened Ghirardelli's and 4 oz good ol' Nestle semisweet chocolate chips. With a couple more handfuls of chocolate chips thrown in just to be on the safe side.

These are seriously the best brownies I have ever had, chewy, moist, and delightful and you all know I am pretty disdainful of the cacao bean products. More importantly, the CandyMan himself loves them. This recipe is a total keeper.

Fudgy, Chewy, Cakey Brownies

2/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
Vegetable cooking spray
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
4 oz. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate
10 Tbsp. (1 stick plus 2 Tbsp.) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 large eggs
3/4 cup toasted walnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts or peanuts (optional)

1. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and preheat oven to 325°F

2. Whisk flour, salt and baking powder in a small bowl; set aside. Spray an 8-inch baking pan with vegetable cooking spray. Fit a 16-by-8-inch sheet of foil in pan and up two sides, so you can use foil overhang as a handle to pull cooked brownies from pan. Spray sheet of foil with vegetable cooking spray.

3. Melt chocolates and butter in a medium bowl over a pan of simmering water. Remove from heat; whisk in sugar and vanilla. Whisk in eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each one before adding the next. Continue to whisk mixture until completely smooth. Add dry ingredients; whisk until just incorporated. Stir in nuts, if desired.

4. Pour batter into prepared pan; bake until a toothpick or cake tester inserted into center comes out with wet crumbs, 35 to 45 minutes. (Do not wait until the toothpick comes out clean!)

5. Cool brownies in pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Use foil handles to pull brownies from pan. Completely cool brownies on rack, at least 3 hours. Cut into squares and serve. If not serving immediately, do not cut brownies. (Whole brownie cake can be wrapped in plastic wrap, then foil, and refrigerated for up to 5 days.)

I'd like to credit GoodyBlog, one of my new parent-fluff reads, for many of my favorite tidbits lately (gumdrop trees, towel animals, mama spine curvage, baby Samaritans). Don't really know the netiquette for citing pass-through sources, hmmm, but I guess this is it? And next time I will just say "link via GoodyBlog" as I belatedly realized some other bloggers do. Thinking this over inspired me to update my links (so check them out for other good reads).

Read more!

Kissing Kermit?

Wow, I never thought I'd say this, but maybe we should let the states handle matters once and for all. While the FDA's basically letting beauty product companies do what they will (forget the bunnies; let's not test for safety at all), Minnesota's going to ban mercury in cosmetics (thanks Grist for the link) and California, via its Safe Cosmetics Act, requires companies to disclose carcinogens in beauty products.

You'd think that banning mercury in cosmetics and forcing companies to reveal their cancer-causing ingredients might be, um, unnecessary, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

EWG's Skin Deep cosmetics database is a great resource for figuring out what's in your current stash (you can search by brand or just enter ingredients). But I haven't spent time scoping out much more than my baby's bubble bath and soap so far, so this topic is timely for me. We already avoid parabens in shampoo/conditioner/lotions, don't use air freshener (ick) and avoid perfume/fragrances (pthalates). But it seems I need to delve further. For a quick list of ingredients to avoid, check out this Q & A - Are Your Beauty Products Safe? from Care2. I plan to check out the product recommendations in this National Geographic Green Guide lowdown on organic makeup, and to print out/carry their Dirty Dozen guide to unsafe personal care ingredients and Smart Shopper's Non-Food Labels Guide.

Fake Plastic Fish's musings about makeup include a link to this article from Common Ground about the dangers of synthetic chemicals:

"It’s your story and mine because all of us alive on the planet today share something in common that was unshared by countless generations of humans who lived before us: we carry man-made pollutants inside our blood, urine and breast milk."

This makes me want to get serious about figuring out safer makeup for that holiday event: lead in lipstick?? (Echoes of Sandra Steingraber, who initially inspired me to start paying attention to persistent organic pollutants in breastmilk.) Fake Plastic Fish's blog comments are interesting; her readers have recs for specific brands of eco/safe cosmetics and one woman even recommends beet juice! My SIL makes her own lip balm; this seems attainable.

Word of mouth may be in order, though. I've been meaning to ask and see what green makeup other folks wear (and not the Halloween kind). I don't go the Tammi Bakker route but it would be nice not to have to worry about kissing my kids when I do toss on a little lipstick. I would love practical advice from anyone who's thought this through. Read more!

Not for Nibbling

Deck the halls with boughs of holly mistletoe Boston ferns...

So, after our 1 year old wolfed down a leaf off our lipstick plant this morning, I called poison control (love them! love my operator's calm, calm voice and subsequent willingness to talk about every single plant in our house) for some plant 911 411. Turns out the plant in question was safe, mainly because I did some serious houseplant purging five years ago in preparation for kid one. Gotta love the pre-kid frenzy. Anyhoo, I thought I would share what I (re)learned with y'all.

Safe plants: spider plants, Christmas cacti, aloe (may cause stomach upset), poinsettias (despite causing stomach upset, these actually get an undeserved bad rap for being toxic), Boston ferns, African violets, and hibiscus, among others.

Lethal plants: holly, mistletoe, rhododendrons, philodendrons (including pothos and calla lilies), peace lilies, delphinium, foxglove, lantana, and lupines, among others.

Check out these guides to poisonous houseplants and make sure you have those blecch face stickers on your phones with the poison control phone #s on them.

Lucky for us I gave away and/or hung up our dangerous plants years ago. I probably even could have told you yesterday that lily of the valley, nightshade and belladonna were bad news. But I am newly reminded of the need to be aware of all our plants (in our tiny front yard, we have yew bushes, azaleas, a cherry tree, and vinca vines -- all fatal if ingested! -- and hydrangeas, which can cause serious illness and vomiting. We're hoping for the cessation of constant mouthing by spring).

Before I leave the flora front, houseplants can also do remarkable double duty as air purifiers -- some of the best are also poisonous (pothos) but some aren't (spider plants, Gerber daisies). Check out this guide to plants that can clean up your indoor air.

And for goodness' sake, lose the mistletoe. Read more!