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.

Lead in kids snacks

I'm back! Been focusing on my podcast for young 'uns - Podaroo - in my spare time. You can dowload it from iTunes here. But I'm back to blog. My twins are about to start preschool this fall, so I have a feeling there will be a bunch more kid, budget, and ecoLiving revelations on the school front to come.

So I've been hearing about lead in kids drinks and wanted to look up the brands for myself. The PDF with the list is linked to in this Seventh Generation post. I'm assuming they're talking about big bottles of juice, not juice boxes but I couldn't figure that out for sure. Interesting question in all this about WHERE the lead is coming from... manufacturing? the apple growers?

I also happened to get into a discussion last night with our scientist neighbor about BPA in canned tomatoes. So I gave subject another google this AM and here is the result. If you are looking to avoid canned tomatoes since the acidic food seems more prone than others to leach the BPA out of the resin liner, Berkeley Bowl currently has organic diced tomatoes in 25.5 oz. GLASS JARS on special for $2.99. No bargain but given they're organic and packed in glass I may stock up - in the winter we do LOADS of cooking with canned tomatoes.

Great cookie gift bag

Happy New Year! If your resolutions formal or informal for 2010 involve more reuse or all the stuff around us... here's a great idea from a friend. If you buy whole bean coffee, wipe out the insides of the bags and then they make great gift sacs for cookies or other baked goods.

And if you tie a ribbon around it the look is complete.

Reduce your carbon contest

Dorky, snide remarks about "carbon-free" sugar aside, I'm all for greening the kitchen. Here's a great opportunity to offer up nuggets of wisdom about eco-friendly cooking. And to earn prizes in the process (Kindle anyone?)!

It's thanks to the folks at the Brighter Planet Blog. Happy Blog Action Day 2009!

Making foaming hand soap refills for toddlers

I'm a big fan of using foamy soap for teaching my girls to wash on their own. Because the product is basically diluted soap, it wastes less if they go overboard and also it washes off more easily. With H1N1 season coming I imagine we'll be doing lots of handwashing.

On that note, I've been researching the best way to make a refill. Just adding regular liquid soap to the pump clogs the mechanism. One website I found said to dilute liquid soap with boiling water (I could see how this would dissolve the soap without creating bubbles as happens with shaking). Others suggested a variety of ratios of liquid soap to water. One place suggested 1 oz. Dr. Bronner's to 5 oz. water -- Dr. Bronner's is already so liquidy it's easy to work with.

I ended up going 1 tablespoon standard liquid soap to 3/4 cup water. I combined them in the soap dispenser and shook them up. So far so good. That's a 10:1 water-soap ratio which I read was best for not clogging the soap bottle.

Besides being a cheaper way to go than buying the pre-made foaming soap refills, making your own foaming soap can ensure eliminating an ingredient commonly used to make the soap foamier: SLS. (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate). While I am not super hard core about trying to avoid SLS, it's not something you really want to have in EXTRA doses. There are some pre-made foamy soap refills that don't have it like this Kiss My Face version.

Part of me was also excited about making my own foaming soap because I thought I could make an unscented version. I know scent free is supposed to be best for sensitive skin. But when it comes to my toddlers who are adamant about independence when hand washing I like something with a strong fragrance so I can tell easily if they've washed or not. I ended up used the last of this lemongrass soap I had on hand.

Great idea for an eco friendly bridal shower (even baby shower?)

I recently checked with an organization I did a story about a few years ago. It's called Village Harvest and it does backyard gleaning. They organize volunteers to pick ripe fruit from backyard trees. And then they donate the fruit to food banks. The group also picks in old orchards that dot the San Francisco Bay Area and donates those crops as well.

The founder told me that next weekend they're doing a bridal shower... someone contacted them saying that they wanted to have a bridal shower that involved giving back. Picking fruit to donate to food banks fit the bill. So a group of women are going to come to an old pear orchard and have a picnic/picking party. They decided on a "pear" orchard for the shower (get the pun?). Photo credit for above:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/suttonhoo22/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Thought I'd pass on what seemed like a nice green shower idea. Now for a visual pun. This photo is titled:

Pear: Shaped

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Another reuse for old clothes

We've been doing a lot of painting lately. I took a bunch of my dads worn and stained dress shirts off his hands. In reverse, they make great smocks! They'll work as full body bibs too... Just need to cut the sleeves off rather drastically.

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...

Where to donate or recycle stained clothes

I've got three kinds of laundry detergent next to the washing machine and four different stain removers. Bleach stick, Ecover stain remover, Oxy Clean stain spray, even the old hair spray stand-by (for ink). But sometimes stains get set in and while I don't mind my kiddos wearing them, once they outgrow them, I often feel bad passing them on.

A woman on my twin parent listserve just posed the question of what to do with stained clothes. It seems to be an urban legend that Goodwill has ways of recycling them. Thought I'd post the useful link she received as a response:
http://parents.berkeley.edu/recommend/charity/clothes_poorcond.html

How to Go Green in Hard Times

The Wall Street Journal has a special section today on the subject. Their suggestions are generally higher cost than the stuff I cover here, but then the pay-offs are probably bigger too. Their ideas also only seem relevant if you're a homeowner. My audio-curious side is wondering about the affiliated podcast but haven't had a chance to check it out.

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.

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.

Word of the day: Upcycle

The word upcycle has apparently been around since 2002 - it was coined by the authors of this book. But I've only recently been coming across it and kinda like it so thought I'd pass it on. A basic definition is to use waste products to make useful things. Of course I always thought that using waste products anew was the whole REUSE part of the R-R-R scenario. But I think the subtext of the word upcycle is up(scale)(re)use. I guess "haute reuse" didn't really have that earthy ring.

Here's a Canadian upcycle site with ideas for crafts for kids.

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!

A bathtub built for two

Using one of these inflatable tubs is a good way to save water, especially if you give nightly baths. Plus it saves time, since less water also means less filling needed!

How to tell if something is genetically modified...

An orange is an orange is an orange, right? Well, maybe not if it's genetically modified (GM). My sister-in-law shared this info about how to easily tell if produce is GM next time you're in the supermarket. All you have to do is look at the little sticker on its side:

• A four-digit number means it's conventionally grown.
• A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it's organic.
• A five-digit number beginning with 8 means it's GM.

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.