Marrow Mountain

Our garden is not as tidy as it ought to be. It became neglected during my first pregnancy, compounded during the following couple of years of having Baby Badger and definitely not improved during pregnancy number two. I'm gradually clawing back during my current maternity leave, but I have at least got control over the edible garden. Or so I thought...

I knew I'd missed a few cucumbers in the greenhouse. They have a tendency to hide behind leaves. I wasn't expecting twenty-two of them. Likewise, I knew there were a few courgettes that should really be classed as marrows, but I was leaving them on the plant until I decided what I was going to do with them. There have grown somewhat, and the four largest of them probably now weigh more than my three year old. There's also a glut of knobbly beef tomatoes and cherry & baby plum tomatoes, but we'll have no problems getting through those, nor the big handful of runner beans.

Tonight's challenge is to track down recipes to use the marrows and cucumbers. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

The Varied Colours and Textures of Life

Before Baby Badger arrived in my life I would never have imagined the level of fascination I have for nappies. This fascination is on many levels.

Firstly, there's the sniff test. Don't deny it, we've all done it. You're at Baby Music group, or chatting to another mum over coffee, and you've a sneaking suspicion that the odour permeating the conversation is coming from your little darling. What do you do? Start the laborious process of removing layers of clothing without invoking the wrath of your child, or simply lift them into the air and sniff the nappy region? The latter, obviously. My core screams "euughhh", but the now-seasoned mummy in me says "perfectly practical".

Secondly there's the type of nappy. I wrote many months ago about my aspirations to stop Baby Badger from winning the battle of Baby vs The World. We started off as evil/convenient as we could be: a popular brand of disposable nappies (partly because they were the only ones that did a size small enough for our tiny daughter) together with one of those magic bins that seals the soiled nappies away in what looks like a string of plastic sausages. Non-degradable nappies double-sealed in plastic. Cringe.

Since then we've moved onto supposedly better disposables, in this case Bambo Nature nappies. They claim to be fully degradable, although I'm not sure whether the tabs will actually break down. A rival of theirs, Moltex, have actually been proven to be fully degradable to the extent that one city council (I think Leicestershire) have agreed to take the nappies in their compost bins. Of course, that did mean we stopped using the magic nappy sausage machine as there's no point wrapping degradable nappies in impervious plastic; we now use degradable bags.

Our final step was to cloth nappies, prefolds (which, confusingly, aren't the nappies that are folded to look like disposables). We are doing it the yuppy way - we found a laundry service. Once a week they pick up the soiled nappies and drop off a bag of nice clean ones. I tell myself that it's far more hygenic and environmentally  friendly for the nappies to be washed and dried in bulk (which may be true) but obviously I'm doing it to avoid the yuck factor! If we go away or out on a long day out we revert to the eco-disposables, but generally we're using the cloths and I feel very virtuous! It's been going well for the last four months and I intend to continue.

Finally, we come to the real fascination... the nappy contents. Poo! Yes, I said it! When Baby Badger was young, the fascination was checking that poo was frequent enough. I was terrified that after her shaky start she might not be feeding enough, so I counted daily nappies, assessed their weight. Yum. Now that she's piling on the pounds I don't worry about that. No poo for five days? No problem... just brace yourself for the poonami when it arrives.

Now that we're on solid food, the fascination is in what's coming out. Is it liquid and yellow, like breastfed poo? If so, she's obviously not been eating much for a few days. Has she been chewing? Definitely not in the case of peas, but strangely yes with sweetcorn kernels (or at least the majority of them). Why does banana poo look like worms - it's very disturbing! Is the black bit olive, mushroom or aubergine? How many days does it take for a piece of chicken to come out the other end? I've not yet attempted beetroot, mainly because we'll probably have to throw away whatever she's wearing, but partly because when it "appears" three days later I'll have forgotten what it is and end up at A&E in a panic!

This post is part of the Poo Carnival over at Notes From Home. Why not head over there now and see who else joined in?

Image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

OCR

OCR. It's a bit like OCD but rubbish, quite literally. My name is Mother Badger and I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Recycling.

Over the last week or so I've been clearing out the kitchen. First it was the pan cupboard (empty, clean, put back minus the grotty one that puts nonstick coating in your food). Next the crockery (do we honestly need 40 mugs?!). Then on to the store cupboards...

I honestly didn't realise our kitchen was host to such a random selection of out of date ingredients. We have almost-full jars of spices that expired three years ago (obviously bought for a recipe and never used again); two untouched bags of bread flour, purchased several years ago in a fit of enthusiasm for wholesome 4am baking sessions ready for pre-commute breakfast (which unsurprisingly never transpired); the packet of strange purple seaweed with indecipherable Chinese writing and no use by date.

The obsessive tree-hugging green in my head refuses to allow me to simply chuck these foodstuffs in the bin, so I have spent the afternoon (and a good part of my evening) systematically opening jars, cans and packets, depositing contents into the food recycling bin, then assessing how much of the packaging can be recycled.

OCR. You saw it first here.

Image: Paul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Baby vs The World

I've always tried to do my bit for the environment. I recycle as much of our household waste as possible. I give away things I no longer need on Freecycle rather than send them to landfill. I do my best to switch off appliances and lights, and I try to buy items with minimal packaging. I'm hardly an eco-warrior, but I probably fit in the "above average" category for environmentally sound gestures.

Baby Badger, on the other hand, is definitely a consumer to challenge my (pale) green principles.

Father Badger and I decided before Baby Badger arrived that we would use disposables at first, while the sleep deprivation and ineptitude was at its worst (and while the daily turnover of nappies was likely to be at its highest), but aim to move to a more eco-friendly alternative as soon as possible. Baby Badger is now three months old, so we're overdue. We've bought a handful of different modern washable nappies (Itti Bitti D'Lish, Bumgenius Flip and v4, Bambooty EasyDry and FuzziBunz OneSize) and tested them with similar results: they absorb wee for a good few hours, but Baby Badger has yet to test the leg holes to capacity, if you get what I mean...

It seems logical that reusable nappies must be more eco-friendly than disposables, but there are so many factors such as the energy used to produce the nappies and the energy and detergent used to clean them. There are lots of sites online where people trade and sell pre-loved nappies, which goes some way towards dealing with this; Cloth Nappy Tree is one such site. You can wash the nappies on half or quarter dose of detergent, and most are fine at 40 degrees, but use of a tumble dryer makes them almost as bad as disposables [although I honestly can't remember where I read this]. Experience of our trial nappies tells me, however, that even with a decent day for the washing line these nappies take a while to dry, so over winter we can expect soggy nappies on indoor airers.

Cue knight in shining armour: the Nappy Laundry Service. The county council website reliably informs me that our area is covered by a Nappy Laundry Service. They deliver a week's worth of nappies and take away the previous week's soiled nappies and wash them to suitably high standards. I'm telling myself that the fuel used to shift the nappies around must be offset by the ability to bulk wash the nappies in an industrial washer because the idea of being green without the ick factor of having to wash them myself is, quite frankly, highly attractive.

We've also trialled some "eco-disposables". These are nappies that are produced in a supposedly more eco-friendly manner (bleach-free, etc.) and also decompose in a more timely manner. Some, I've heard, may even be compostable, but I've yet to find the evidence. I'm hoping that we can end up combining the magic Nappy Laundry Service washables with eco-disposables for emergencies. Watch this space...

Baby wipes, the chief weapon in any mother's armoury, are equally onerous in landfill. There are brands that claim to have a lesser impact, and then there are the reusable, washable variety. I bumped into a mother at a Nappuccino (I kid you not) that uses flannels and a spray bottle containing water, tea tree and lavender oil to clean up. I'm not sure I'm quite at the stage of being able to cope with that when a poo-nami strikes.

There are, of course, many other ways in which to lighten your little one's impact on the environment. Gratefully accept second hand baby clothes; after all, what is the point of brand new clothes that last a month? Pass on clothes that no longer fit to other mothers - NCT nearly new sales are one way to do this. Minimise the number of toys that require batteries. Try public transport rather than drive everywhere with your little one: I managed a trip to London single handed on the bus, train and tube with only a baby carrier and rucksack and it actually wasn't that bad!

So... my plan of attack? Firstly get Baby Badger cloth bummed, then give the flannel a go (once I've worked my way through the baby wipe mountain in the cupboard*). After that? Who knows.

* The baby wipe mountain is courtesy of Father Badger, who became slightly over-enthusiastic when he spotted an offer at the supermarket and ordered packets totalling in excess of 1,400 wipes. Seriously.

Post inspired by imperfectpages: http://imperfectpages.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/it-aint-easy-being-green/

Image: Phiseksit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Slingtastic!

Believe it or not, I've just been to a beer festival! Admittedly, I only had half a pint of mild, but it still feels quite liberating to be able to have a social life when you have an eight week old baby. How is this possible? My Moby sling.

The Moby is a type of wrap: a six metre long piece of material that you tie around yourself to create a baby carrier. It's slightly stretchy, which allows you to tie it first then slot the baby in, and although it looks complicated it's actually very straight forward - I can tie it and get Baby Badger in place inside 90 seconds!

I can't sing its praises enough. Baby Badger was born three weeks early and was underweight, so she couldn't be carried in a conventional carrier (and has only just become big enough to go in my husband's Baby Bjorn), but she was fine in the Moby. Putting her in the Moby is an almost guaranteed way of calming her and putting her to sleep; I guess it's almost like being back in the womb.

To find out more about slings and other types of carriers, look for your local slingmeet - they do demos of the different carriers and for a small deposit lend out slings so you can try before you buy.

Image: www.mobywrap.com