In 1931 Scott Paper Company introduced the first paper towel roll>

Image source: Istockphoto

Growing up my mom did not use paper towels to the extent I do now. The ease of ripping a piece from the roll, wiping up a spill and disposing the paper into the trash can was something not to be ignored. The thought of whether or not a roll of paper towels was made from recycled materials or virgin wood pulp was not a concern. In the year 2008, the green movement is gaining momentum, and I am finally giving serious thought to my paper towel. Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

Summary: Lack of preventive health care, lack of access to health care, lifestyle, poverty and pollution combine into a perfect storm that has women’s life expectancy dropping.

Elizabeth Edwards, in her recent NY Times article, coined the term “strobe-light journalism.” She defines this as media attention, “…in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.”

“Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score.” Edwards asked in her article.

It’s true.

And yet, health care plans are and should be, one of the most important topics.

Recently, I began paying more attention to health and health care. I’m not alone; others have been as well. If you connect the dots between various and plentiful news stories, you can create something meaningful. In this case, you can see a major health care crisis pattern emerge, and not just the “lack of access to care” one you might immediately think of.

Do you want to know about this health crisis? Keep reading…

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Here in my town, a “Clean-up Week” has been organized. When I was a kid, clean-up week happened once or twice a year, and it meant that residents could put whatever kind of trash they wanted out on the curb and the city would pick it up. People would use this opportunity to put old appliances, furniture, clothing, you name it, out on the curb. One year my step-brothers brought home someone’s old recliner for my Dad. He was a good sport about it, but I’m sure purple wasn’t his colour!

Image Source: Kenn Kiser, Morguefile.

Junk-pickers would drive around all night, salvaging what they could for recycling, but mostly for fixing up and reselling. Read the rest of this entry »

The MOTHERS Act (also referred to as Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act) is up before the Senate. The bill has been passed by the House. The basic premise of the Act is provide for research on, and services for individuals with, postpartum depression and psychosis. You can read the bill here.

There are two sides talking about this bill. There are those who believe this is good thing because more research and care needs to be provided for women suffering from postpartum depression and psychosis. There are those that strongly oppose this bill because, in essence, it will be a green light for pharmaceutical companies to force doctors to hand out more antidepressants.

As a new mother to my second child, I can appreciate both sides. First, yes more research should be done on postpartum depression and psychosis. So much has been printed on what happens during the pregnancy, but sometimes a new mom gets nothing more than a 6-week hurried check up at her OB. Is that enough? Does that count as a screening for postpartum depression? What about months later?

Second, this speaks to those who oppose the bill, an antidepressant may not be the best answer for everyone and a patient should not be bullied or guilted into taking medicine. What are the alternatives? The goal of this bill is to not only provide services, but research. Research in postpartum depression and psychosis is needed.

The language of the bill does not specify that prescriptions drugs will be the first line of defense. If you want to make your voice heard in support of the bill please visit the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.

For further reading and up to date postings please visit the Postpartum Progress Blog.

If I had known at the age of sixteen that I’d be blogging about grocery stores and cloth diapers I think I would have become very, very depressed at my future prospects…but here I am. I accept my life. I am thirty-three, married with two kids and a stressful job.

Nevertheless, one thing I refuse to accept is defeat in the face of my search for the perfect grocery store. Square as it may be to discuss grocery stores seriously, I can’t help it. I am in grocery store hell. I can’t think of a more disorganized, intense, sweaty, frustrating, exasperating, mind-numbing, pocketbook-draining, horrible task than going to the store. And I have to go to the store constantly. I think I go to the store every day, if not multiple times a day. I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t have to. One reason that I’m constantly going to the store is that I can’t remember a damn thing. After a lengthy trip to the store, after unpacking and storing all of the goods I’ve just purchased, while at the same time trying to appease the tiny tyrants at my feet demanding things from me, I’ll find my grocery list and scan it only to discover that the one thing I really needed on my list I forgot to get. It’s always some crucial item too: toilet paper, tampons, bread, water. At that point I take out my imaginary twelve gauge and blow out my imaginary brains right there in the kitchen. My brains are so imaginary. I don’t know in what realm my brain exists, but it isn’t this one.

I digress. While it is true that I am your typical scatterbrained mommy/professor type, I have to lay some of the blame on the grocery stores that I frequent, which are Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Albertson’s, Ralph’s, Stater Brothers, Target and Fresh & Easy. When faced with a death-sentence style grocery list, I try to go where it’s most convenient, but see “convenient” can be a sticky word. Do I go to the nearest grocery store? How about the store with the best prices? Do I go to the grocery store that is most easily accessible? Should I go for the most family-friendly store? What about the grocery store that has my bank branch in it? Or, do I go to the store with all the items on my list? And there’s the rub…there isn’t one grocery store in my area that carries all the items on my list. Not a one.

I’d drive to the other side of town for a store that had all the items on my list. I love completing a task and I’ll go to great ends to do it. I’ll be honest though, my list isn’t easy. I try to buy organic food products and environmentally friendly paper and cleaning products. I sometimes like an “exotic” food or two. I’m shopping for a family of four and I need to satisfy their widely varying needs and wants. I’m trying to get the lowest price on top of all of that. Trader Joe’s very nearly meets all my requirements. I love the range of items and the prices are competitive with other stores. I can get a good wine for under $10 and soy yogurt for less than $.90. There seems to be an emphasis on healthy, organic and/or vegetarian items at Trader Joe’s…which is wonderful for us because both of my sons have milk allergies. What isn’t wonderful is that Trader Joe’s doesn’t carry baby items at all. If I want to purchase diaper cream, baby food, baby wipes, sippy cups or diapers I have to visit another store. This means lugging my three-year old and my fifteen month old in and out of their car seats and then into another store. If I forget to visit the other store first, then my Trader Joe’s goods sit in my hot car while I race (as fast as one can go with two children of that age) in to grab some diapers. Needless to say, I’ve locked an unusual combination of things inside my car on Shopping Day: baby/keys only, toddler/purse, toddler/baby, frozen grocery goods/toddler/purse. Multiple grocery store shopping days can be a tad confusing.

If on Shopping Day I go to Trader Joe’s, that means the closest store for diapers is the dreaded (and ironically, loved) Target. Lucky for this mother, the diapers at Target are competitively priced. Unlucky for the Mother Earth, Target does not offer cloth diapers…oh, pardon me, they do offer cloth diapers…the kind that no one uses anymore! You know, those white prefolds that you used to cover with steamy plastic pants, but then leaked all the time anyway? Well, today we have a wide selection of cute, easy to use, washable cloth diapers. I love cloth diapers. I tried to sell everyone in my family on their value, both environmentally and economically. Plus, they are so much cuter than disposables!!! Squeal! We went for it for the first few months of my second son’s life after watching our first son’s diapers pile up and up and up, imagining our baby’s nightmarish contribution to the local landfill. It was a change, but once I got the hang of it, I saw that cloth diapers were easily much cheaper than disposables and much better for the environment (as long as they are washed with detergent that is planet-friendly). But after a while I became worn down. The drag about cloth diapers is that your children eventually grow out of them and then you have to move up a size…which wouldn’t be so much of a drag if cloth diapers were offered in grocery stores. Maybe my head is in the sand, but I couldn’t find one local store that sold contemporary cloth diapers! Not even the high end granola-stomper stores like Whole Foods were willing to charge me exorbitant prices for cloth diapers! Instead, you have to buy cloth diapers online and wait for weeks and weeks to get them. I broke down after the manufacturer that sold our brand withheld shipments from their online stores, making them unavailable and back ordered until our son is scheduled to enter his freshman year of college.

But “Wait!” you say, “don’t they sell ‘green’ diapers at Target and other local grocery stores?” Why, yes, in fact, they do. G-diapers, Seventh Generation, Tushies and other environmentally friendly diaper brands are, in fact, available at your local Whole Foods…but not at Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s, Von’s, Albertson’s, Fresh & Easy or Stater Brothers. In fact, Target sells its own brand of eco-friendly diapers, but they come in such small packs and they are considerably more expensive than the nationwide diaper brands. It’s not just Target that opts out of the eco-friendly and cheap diaper products. Cruise the aisles at your local nationwide chain…Pampers, Huggies, generic brands…would it kill them to throw in one brand of eco-friendly diapers?

In defense of the nationwide grocery store chains, they are starting to figure out that there are alot of women like me shopping their stores. Recently our local Albertson’s remodeled to compete with the new Fresh & Easy that opened across the street. I was very excited about Fresh & Easy despite the fact that I didn’t know much about it. All the brand-associated logos and fliers looked very “green” and there was a buzz around the neighborhood, however upon my first trip into the British-owned store I found that the look was very “green” but the product offering didn’t even rival our local Albertson’s. After their remodel, Albertson’s had an entire section dedicated to healthy foods, including soy products (don’t ask how much their soy yogurt cost though)! Neither store carries eco-friendly diapers, but Fresh & Easy did have special parking for “adults with young children,” and that’s more than I can say for Stater Brothers or Ralph’s!

My ideal grocery store, the perfect grocery store, my Xanadu of grocery stores, would be located right around the corner from my house so that I could walk there, would contain products that are eco-friendly for low prices including “green” diapers and perhaps (am I dreaming too big?) a branch office for my bank or even fresh brewed coffee. I wrote Trader Joe’s a very creative, funny and light-hearted letter and they responded back with a drab and grumpy little email telling me basically that Hades would freeze over before they carried baby products.  But I’m not making the decisions here…I’m just the customer.

Happy Earth Day!

Last summer I was disappointed to find that our next-door neighbour had hired a non-organic company to take care of their lawn. Graham and I would sit out back, drinking our coffee in the morning, and then suddenly the powerful, sickening smell of the pesticide/herbicide cocktail would waft into our yard. Annoyed, disgusted, we’d head back indoors to finish our coffee.

I put a little sign in our garden in the hopes it would start a dialogue between us and our neighbour, but it didn’t seem to phase them at all, which I just can’t understand because he grows FOOD in their yard.

I was pleased this morning to discover an article in the paper (Pesticide ban set to grow, The Toronto Star, April 22, 2008) detailing our provincial government’s plan to ban the cosmetic use of pesticides and herbicides, to be enforced beginning in the spring of 2009. The City of Toronto’s ban took effect on September 1, 2007, but in the smaller cities and town around Ontario, it’s been legal to spray lawns and yards with toxic chemicals. It’s hard to believe that with all of the information available about the health effects of these kinds of sprays, people continue to use them in the very space their children play.

The new ban will mean that my next-door neighbour won’t legally be allowed to spray their yard with pesticides and herbicides. The ban won’t affect farmers, golf courses or managed forests, and the legislation will also force the manufacturers of pesticides and herbicides to reduce the level of toxins they produce.

I’ll be pushing this information on my neighbour this year…they might as well get started with organic methods this year, since next year they’ll be out of luck!

(Cross-posted at BlogHers ACT Canada and Playing in the Dirt.)

If there are green products you can’t buy locally, want to research, price compare, or are ready to buy and need to off the Internet, consider checking out Amazon Green at Amazon.com. They’re having an Earth Day sale on Green Products from April 21-23.

This includes all sorts of products, from Green Media (Books, Movies, TV, Magazines & Downloads), Electronics & Computers, Home & Garden, Home Improvement, Grocery & Household (Certified Organic Grocery, Green Health & Personal Care, Green Beauty), Green Toys, Green Baby and more.

Make sure to do some checking—just because something is called green doesn’t mean it’s Green—and keep in mind these things have to be shipped. Also, Amazon might simply be the connector between you and a vendor.

Still, it might be good to know.

I have bought through Amazon and been happy with the results. They have put me in touch with some good vendors who offer some hard-to-find supplements I like.

* Not an endorsement, paid ad, or otherwise compensated post.

Julie Pippert is also talking about true things and the natural consequence of negativity.

A private member’s bill supporting mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food in Canada was selected randomly for debate in our House of Commons this month.

Bill C-517 went to second reading on April 3, and a second hour of parliamentary debate could take place in as early as two weeks, as per the House of Commons calendar. After a second debate, the House will be called upon to vote on the bill. If you are concerned about feeding your children genetically engineered foods, it’s important to make sure that a majority of Members of Parliament vote in favour of Bill C-517. If the Bill passes second reading, it will be returned for a third and final reading, followed by a vote by all of Canada’s 301 Members of Parliament.
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Since my kids have been born, I have not thrown them a big birthday party, yet.  Granted my oldest is not 3 years old yet.  So far their birthdays have been nothing more than immediate family, 1 cake, and a few presents.  The total cost was well below $50.  But, in time I have a feeling the cost could go up greatly once I start inviting classmates.  It does not help the matter when mothers are spending up near 10 grand on a birthday party.  Check out this article on CNN.com ($10,000 for a childs birthday party?)  $10,000!! That is more than my wedding cost.  This is all in the name of buying more stuff and thinking money buys memories.  There are businesses out there making a serious profit from moms who feel the need to spend a lot to make a day special.  There is a small group in Minnesota that is questioning the need to spend so much on birthdays and they have a website at Birthdays Without Pressure.  Check out the Birthday Pressure Quiz. 

Mothers Acting Up co-founder and communications director Juliana Forbes is on Central Ohio Public Radio THIS MORNING,

Friday April 18, 11AM-noon EST/ 9-10 AM MT, with host Fred Andrle on Open Line.

Tune in online as above or below!!

You can even call in to make a comment or ask a question!

Call Open Line at 614-292-8513 or write to Open Line at openline@wosu.org

The topic to be discussed: We’ll hear how mothers can advocate for the future of children worldwide, with Mothers Acting Up Communications Director Juliana Forbes.

Open Line is a live, public affairs talk show, with listener phone calls, on WOSU public radio.  

Open Line is streamed live and archived for two weeks at www.wosu.org/radio/radio-open-line