How to make your own balance bike - take the pedals off!

These days training wheels equipped bikes are being cast off for the new balance bike philosophy. So while balance bikes are hard to find online and expensive even if used, the traditional training wheels variety is plentiful.

I'd strongly suggest getting one of the free or cheap training wheel bikes and turning it into a balance bike yourself by removing the pedals. One of the benefits of this is that you actually have a bike that can be used either way. I set out on this path for green reasons ($ and enviro), but it turns out one of my twins only wanted to ride with training wheels and the other only wanted a balance bike set up. I was able to deliver them what they wanted.

I promise that is was VERY easy. I followed the directions here. The only real challenge is if you want to get the chain off you need to find someone with a tool to pop it off. That might mean your local friendly bike store, or in our case a friend who is into cycling (thank Joe!).

Oh and I found this site is a great resource for thinking about teaching your child the bike skills.

Coupons for healthy and organic foods and products

It all started because I've become addicted to Tofurky Italian Sausages. I thought I'd look and see if there were any online coupons for these glorified tofu dogs. My search landed me at this page: the magazine Eating Well's coupon page.

It's actually a well set up site... you select the coupons you want and type in your email. The coupons land in your in box and you print them out.

So I was suddenly on the prowl. And found these totally useful coupon sites next:

• Coupons for Seventh Generation diapers and other Seventh Generation products
• Coupons for Organic Valley dairy products
• And this site Mambo Sprouts, that currently has some good coupons up for products including BioKleen and Method cleaners, and Maranatha Nut Butter and more. You can also sign up there to get coupons in the mail.

I did notice some online grousing that some stores don't accept online coupons because they're printed from a computer. And I guess they look like could be copies? But so far I've had good luck with them. Hope you do too...

Getting 3 kids in car seats in a small car

I'm not trying to jump the gun, but I imagine sometime soon we'll want to take our girls' friends along for a playdate to the zoo, or even carpool with kids coming home from preschool. But with 2 kids already in car seats in a compact car, there isn't much room for a third.

I recently learned about this product that may make it possible to get three 3 or 4 year olds safely and comfortably in the back of our civic. It's called the Ride Safer vest. I'm hoping that in combination with the narrow Radian seats we'll be able to easily transport our daughters' friends. My blog about the Radians is here.

So now I've set up an RSS feed looking for one of the Ride Safer vests on Craigslist. Once I get my hands on one I will post more info.

Good deal on rain and snow boots for twins

There's a "buy two boots, get 20% off" sale right now at endless.com. They have free shipping and return policy. So while used is always best for the pocketbook and environment, from a convenience standpoint I jumped in this puddle. And now I don't have to worry about the rain that's forecast for today -- except what to do with the girls. But more on good indoor budget activities next post...

Great site for internet coupon codes

When I buy online I often check this site:



As always reuse is best, but there are also plenty times when it's only appropriate to go new. Like buying off-registry. Or when you're about to miss a cross country gift deadline. And when you're on a budget this is a great site to hit. I remembering hitting a great coupon code for REI.com on here.

GoodGuide.com: useful new site

Here's a link to story I was assigned this week. It's about a useful new site that just launched. You can look up consumer products and get immediate scores back on health, environment and social performance. If you want to drill down and get more info you can.

It just launched with personal care and household cleaning products. Up next: Food, electronics and toy ratings. And of course, an iPhone app.

Here comes the sunscreen

I have a good friend who works in maternal-child health and environmental toxicities for the state. She read up on sunscreens made with the least possible harmful substances and then went out and bought me this brand... Hawaiian Tropics Baby Faces. Yup, turns out it's not Aveeno or California Baby or anything like that.

In addition to being a good sunscreen, the bottle shape is great. A small bottle just kind of clicks into the large one like a puzzle (my husband the chemical engineer said "I wonder what kind of processing plant it takes to produce this!").

I take the travel size everywhere - of course I also learned last year to refill a bunch of the small bottles we have that used to be full of hotel shampoo with sunscreen and stash them in the car, every stroller we own and the diaper bag. Somehow on the hottest days I was always caught without sunscreen and that can ruin a perfectly good day at the park.

Green product IQ

There is a lot of info out there about making green consumer choices. But a friend is working on a new site that is supposed to help people on the go make quick decisions about one product over another - very mobile device friendly for people who are literally standing in front of two brands of baby shampoo in the store and want the skinny on their green cred. Anyway, he just sent along a link to a quiz that they've set up to pique interest. I scored 5 out of 11. Give it a whirl if you'd like.

Fitting multiple kids (with car seats!) into a small car

We can't be the only ones with a compact car who have wondered how on earth you can keep your small wheels and potentially transport 3 kids around. Car seats just seem so big. So far we've been very fortunate with our setup. Two Britax Roundabouts in a Honda Civic. With twins anything bigger, like the Marathon, just wasn't an option because we couldn't fit them in rear facing. We are still able to use the middle back seat to squeeze in one small adult - and often do - but I've wondered what would happen if we needed to get another car seat back there. Or even to make it comfortable for the adult back there.

I just learned about this Radian Car Seat line which I would have opted for in a SECOND over our Roundabouts if I'd known about them when we were buying. They're each about 1.25 inches narrower than the Roundabouts but add it up and that's 2.5 inches less car seat which in a compact car's back seat is significant. An added bonus of the Radian seats is that the bottom folds up into the back for really easy travel. They're supposed to have a great safety record too. Oh, and the sides aren't as high as the Roundabout's. Initially that seems like a nice comfort feature but it makes it difficult to maneuver the girls into their seats given the car's low headroom and if they squirm I often end up accidentally bonking them while getting them in their seats. Poor girlios!

And I just want to put in a plug for making due with a small car and twins. At first I was worried with the strollers and gear we'd be squeezed too tight. I don't rule out getting a second bigger car when we do more carpooling and traveling around with their friends but for now this is perfect.

Getting a funny odor/smell out of SIGG bottles...

... or probably any metal water bottle for that matter.

I love our SIGG bottles, but occasionally if I leave my water bottle half full in a warm car it gets a funny moldy smell or taste. I've found using hot water and soap fades that. But then I went and left milk for the girls in a bottle and forgot about it. The sour milk smell just would not leave.

I tried the trusty water and vinegar approach. Filled the bottle up 1/8th of the way with white vinegar and then the rest of the way with water (same basic solution I use for cleaning off toys that need it). Closed the cap, shook it and let it stand almost a day. The terrible odor was gone when I rinsed the vinegar solution out. I'm sure it would work wonders on the plain old moldy issue.

In a way I wish it hadn't worked because I wanted to test out this other cure I'd heard about: denture cleaning tablets. It's supposed to be a cure all for SIGG bottle smell. My one reservation is that it's basically bleach in a fizzy matrix. Wasn't sure about how I felt about putting bleach into the girlio's water bottle. That caveat aside, you can sanitize the bottles for far less cost by just using a teaspoon of bleach in a liter of water (can add 1 tsp. baking soda too). The whole denture cleaning tablet trick is what some people use to clean out those Camelbak water hydration systems.

Oh, and apparently the risks of bacterial and fungal growth are higher if you use the bottle with a drink that contains sugars. So make sure the wash out the bottles immediately and well after putting juice or other sugary drinks in them.

Hope that's helpful... (though I'm running the risk of turning this into a blog of all things smelly).

SIGG water bottle discount code / coupon

I recently got one of these SIGG water bottles. They're great for storing water without it getting any odor or weird taste. Plus they're recyclable when they get to the end of their useful life, but I mostly just like them because they don't give the water an off taste (at least if you clean them daily. For the times when you forget to empty them and they get a little funny here's there best solution I've found to the problem).

If you order some online from the company, you can get 10% off by typing in this code:

loyal123107

They have them in sizes for kids, though my girls haven't quite gotten the hang of the spouts they use.

Do you Zwaggle?

Admittedly there are a lot of ways to share kids stuff you've outgrown: friends who are expecting, freecycle, craigslist, eBay, the marketplace on Berkeley Parents Network (if you're in the Bay Area). But just in case...

Here's another option. Though there's a twist. It's called Zwaggle and the idea is sort of a virtual mom swap meet. You post what you have and assign a point value to it. Other parents claim your stuff and then you can shop for other peoples' stuff with your accumulated points. For the big stuff you obviously have to be in the same geographic locale for it to be reasonable. But the site does partner with FedEx to make shipping things like clothes and such possible.

The usefulness of this site probably depends on the resources that already exist in your geographic area... but do check it out!

Beware Pottery Barn (and PB Kids) rugs - they can smell like burnt rubber

UPDATE: sign a petition directed at Pottery Barn here

It all started when we were give some credit and coupons for Pottery Barn. We thought we would get two rugs to cushion the wood floor in the girls' room. This was before the girls were born. Within a few months there was the most noxious burning rubber smell in their room. I traced it to the back of the rug and it totally correlated with heat. As we got into summer it got so unbearable we took it out and I went back to the store and demanded a refund. From what I've now found here, here and here, I was lucky. Apparently it's a common problem. A lot of people didn't get their money back or got way reduced values. We put the smaller rug that didn't seem to be a problem in our office, but just last week I noticed that started with the smell. Argh.

The most credible answer I could find for the smell was posted at RedBook Magazine by someone calling himself Rug Guy:

This odor is commonly found in rugs that are hand-tufted in India. These rugs are quite substantial for their low cost, but we've found that about one in ten either has this odor from new or will develop the odor in a year or two. The problem is with impurities in the latex rubber that holds the tufts of fiber in place. Remove the latex and you remove the smell, but remove the latex and the rug may fall apart. There is no economical way to fix this as the time and effort involved in removing the rug backing, scraping off as much smelly adhesive as possible, and recoating with a quality latex will cost near the replacement value of the rug and may not remove the smell completely. The only sure cure is to return the rug to the retailer. Again, we see this in one in ten, so if you really like the rug you may be able to trade it for one that doesn't smell.

If you do buy a Pottery Barn rug for your kid make sure you smell the back and make sure there's no trace of a rubber smell. At least that's what I'd do. Our solution: once we got rid of the PB rug, we found a pile wool rug on Craigslist. It was all wool and knotted so no synthetic backing material!

UPDATES [July 15, 2010]:

1. Thanks for all the signatures and posts about your own experiences. I wanted to add that it appears not just to be Pottery Barn rugs… I’ve been in friends’ houses where I could smell that telltale odor and it was not a Pottery Barn rug, though it was a wool rug with a canvas backing.

2. In my non-parenting blog life I am a journalist, and my experience with this post has piqued my interest in the issue of indoor air quality. If any of you have a rug that you’re planning to get rid of, I would be happy to take it off your hands for possible air quality testing – hopefully it is a smaller size or else you’re located in the SF Bay Area where I could do a pick up. If you’re interested in reaching me about this you can email me, Rae, at potterybarnrugpetition [at] yahoo [dot] com. Thank you!

Best price I can find on Seventh Generation diapers

We go through a lot of diapers, as I suspect any family who is using disposable diapers does with non-potty trained twins. My favorite kind is definitely Seventh Generation. and diapers.com is my favorite place to get them. They ship them incredibly fast which is key when you realize you need to order more with only a handful of old ones remaining.

Now diapers.com has some promotion where you can buy a Seventh Generation discount card. It gives you 15% off Seventh Generation purchases over the course of a year. I'm generally skeptical of such things, but I did the calculations. They're now selling this card for an introductory price of $29.99. It gets you approximately $6 off each case you buy. So after 5 cases you break even. Every case after that comes at a $6 discount. If like us you go through 1+ cases per month, then it can add up to a case or two of "free" diapers by the end of the year.

The only annoying thing about diapers.com is that free shipping is for purchases over $50. So that means getting wipes with your diapers, or else ordering two cases at a time.

An Umbrella Built For Two

With all the rain we've been having lately, couldn't resist posting this twin umbrella.

Boycott IKEA

I know this isn't a popular sentiment, but IKEA just pushed me over the edge yesterday. Bottom line is that for a store that tries to get all sorts of environmental cred, they are the worst abusers of the disposable culture ethos. I'd much rather pay double or even triple for something that will be in usable condition for 20 times as long.

See, I bought this butter dish there a little over a year ago...
And the other day I was making mashed sweet potatoes for the girls. I heard this crunching sound when I went to cut off the butter and when I looked closely I realized part of the glass edge of the dish had chipped off on the butter pat. It had stuck to the butter and I was now mixing it in with their food. I looked even more closely and saw that there were a bunch of small to large chips missing from the inside edge of the butter dish. I tried to take a pic and it didn't really show the chipping but for what it's worth...Who knows how many of those shards we've ingested over the past year?

Now we are not hard on things, and use dull butter knives. So I emailed IKEA corporate saying this was a dangerous item and got this reply that basically said (and I'm paraphrasing to adhere to their privacy clauses):

thanks for writing. we forwarded your message to someone else. i hope this email has been helpful.

So I decided to pack us all in the car and go return the butter dish. Get some sort of credit. And try to be helpful to them because it really shouldn't disintegrate in your food that way.

Well they basically laughed at me at the return counter, focusing on the fact that it was A YEAR OLD and the unspoken message was: what here is supposed to last that long? They weren't even interested in taking a report about it being possibly dangerous.

I vowed to never go back there unless there's some really compelling reason. With craigslist you can find much sturdier, REAL furnishings at competitive prices anyway, unless you're way into it being brand new. So I got everyone back in the car and we headed off to Goodwill (the one on San Pablo near Ashby - love that store). Unfortunately no butter dish there, but we got a bunch of good stuff for them to use for playing pretend kitchen.

As far as Boycotting IKEA, I googled that and it turns out I have some very diverse company:

• a pro-Israel group that was mad at Sweden;
• white extremists - they're going nuts (no wait they're already nuts) over ads that show couples from different ethnic backgrounds - not gonna deign their hate speech with a link;
• Catholic politicians in Italy who are upset IKEA doesn't sell nativity scenes;
• and even our mild-mannered neighbors to the north, Canadians who say IKEA was offering unfair pricing schemes up north and blocking access to the US website for comparison shopping.
  

On-line book publishing deal

One of my creative endeavors this month was to make a photo book of the grrl-ios' first year. With everything digital these days I hardly have any prints and so I thought making the book would be an easy way to make albums for posterity for each of them, for us and for grandparents, too.

I just stumbled on this GREAT deal for printing photo books, in case it's useful for anyone:
http://www.winkflash.com/

It's $19.95 flat rate for a 10" X 8" book with up to 100 pages of photos.

Say "cheese!" (that just happens to be one of the grrls new words, too)

Be double prepared

Living in earthquake country I try to have an emergency kit together. The nights I've been home alone with the girls I always keep a carrier in my room next to the bed, too, in case I suddenly had to scoop them both up in my arms and get out of the house (I know... there's a line between prepared and paranoid).

It's challenging trying to keep an emergency kit up to date for little ones who are changing so much all the time, but fortunately now they're out of the hard core baby food stage. As long as I have canned goods we're set. Though making sure diapers and clothes are current for them is another thing.

We do have one new item in our emergency kit that's very cool and could even make a great gift for someone in the coming year. It's called a BOGO light and it is a high efficiency LED light that stays recharged via a solar panel on its side. You just leave it in the window and whenever you need it it's good to go for hours. There's a great story behind it, too. The guy who invented them actually created them for families in Africa who had no power. BOGO stands for Buy One, Give One. You get an emergency light, and one is donated to someone who needs one for light every evening.

A great gift... without leaving the house!

You know those Target ads on TV (at least I think it's Target) where gifts keep giving way to other gifts in a creative, continuous chain? This program is kind of like that, but crunchy. A San Francisco based organization named Kiva allows individuals to give microloans to individuals who are seeking them around the world. So in $25 increments you can give support in someone's name to a dairy farmer in Peru, a food bodega in Lebannon, a clothes seller in Kenya, a bike repairman in Ghana... lots of people and businesses and places to choose from. And then your loan is repaid. At which point you (or in the case of a gift, the gifted) can loan the money to someone else or just withdraw the funds.

My husband's family has a system set up where you only buy one gift for everyone in the extended family and the recipient rotates every year. This year I drew the impossible to buy for relative... you know, the wealthy minimalist. He doesn't want anything, and what he does want he can buy a much nicer version of than we ever could anyway. So we got him two loans on Kiva to individuals whose businesses are in his lines of interest.

And you get updates on the recipient's business and the progress their making (or not making) with their loan, too.

For the duration of the holidays, I'm going to post a banner about their work on this blog.

Dreaming of a Green Christmas

I just got to do a story about a fun and green holiday topic. There's an organization in San Francisco that will rent families a living tree for the holidays. For $90, Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) will deliver a living tree to your house and then pick it up after the holidays. You just have to water it and decorate it for about a month. Once it's back in the hands of FUF, they'll grow it a little bigger in their nursery and then plant it somewhere on the streets of an under served neighborhood in San Francisco.

There's more info here:
http://www2.sfenvironment.org/greenchristmas/

The folks at FUF says it's a program that's unique to SF right now, but there's lots of room for other cities to tackle a program like this. And some could probably offer the more traditional looking Christmas trees in their program.