The best instrument in a Green Diva Mom toolbox is a schedule. Having a set bedtime with a routine the whole family participates in is the best assurance of an uneventful night. But, even the best schedules are interrupted by life.

No matter what ages the children or grown-ups in your household are, everyone has a rough night every now and then. Getting the frightened dreamer back to sleep is goal number one for a happy morning. Here are some tips and tricks for navigating back to dreamland. (continue reading…)

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If you’re the type of person who only uses one paper towel in a restaurant to save paper or keeps the heat down low in winter to save energy, then you might want to reconsider getting married. Why? The wedding industry in North America amounts to over 50 billion dollars a year, and as a result produces a good amount of carbon dioxide gas, the main culprit in the greenhouse effect. Add to that all of the travel, fuss, paper, and gifts, and it’s enough to give an environmentally conscious girl second thoughts.

If you are concerned about minimizing the effects of your wedding on the environment there are many things you can do to ensure that your special day doesn’t take too much of a toll on the world around you. There are many consulting companies and even free web sites that will help you figure out how to tailor your plans to attain a lower carbon-footprint or at least offset the effect of what you intend to do. (continue reading…)

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In October 2000, I took delivery of one of the first Toyota Priuses available in the United States.  Nearly nine years of driving my Prius has seen me answer a lot of questions.

Do you really get better gas mileage? Yes.  My real-world mileage is 40-50 mpg.

Where do you plug it in? Nowhere.  There are currently no plug-in hybrids available in the U.S.  Some Prius owners retrofit their cars to be plug-in hybrids, but that costs several thousand dollars and voids the warranty.

Was it expensive? This is probably the most common question I get. The Prius is more expensive than a comparable non-hybrid car, but I think it was worth every penny, even when gas is $2 a gallon and especially when gas hits $4+. I save on gas and get some satisfaction that I’m doing what I can with the current level of available technology. More valuable than that, though, I’m doing my part to show that there is demand for alternatives to standard internal combustion engine cars.  Hybrids aren’t going to be the ultimate answer to air pollution–after all, they burn gas like any other car, just at a slower rate–but they do prove that people will line up to buy alternative fuel vehicles.  If enough people buy hybrids, we might eventually get widespread distribution of all-electric vehicles with solar charging arrays that we can mount on our garage roofs.
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Each day that passes brings word of another health risk, another environmental pollutant, another toxin we should watch for in our food, water, our home. The list of hazards to watch out for is so long we can’t hope to keep pace and often those stories of potential danger, no matter how remote, cause us stress.

Worry can make us just as sick as any germ or chemical exposure. In many ways it is worse for our health because this attack comes from inside.  It is something we do to ourselves. We may mean well, strive to do the best for our families, and protect our children, but when we allow troubling issues to overwhelm us, we compromise the very health and well being we’re attempting to save. If we get sick, that affects everyone who knows, loves and depends on us. (continue reading…)

Who doesn’t love fresh produce? As I anticipate the arrival of spring, I think about the start of the growing season, and fresh vegetables and fruits. One of my favorite places to buy them is my local farmers’ market. In my home town of Frederick, Maryland, the West Frederick Farmer’s Market is open every Saturday from mid-May until Thanksgiving. I can hardly wait! I go there to find fresh produce grown by local farmers. Depending on which fruits or vegetables are in season, I never know what I might find from one week to the next. Oddball produce is not allowed in grocery stores. Each piece of fruit, each vegetable looks the same as the one next to it. Not so at the farmers’ market, where a funny-looking strawberry, or a misshapen bell pepper is admired for the one-of-a-kind creation that it truly is. Everything is fresh, straight from the farm to you. Shopping at your local farmers’ market strengthens communities by supporting local farms and businesses, and supports a more sustainable standard of living. (continue reading…)

I know that the nine-year-old can be difficult and moody, but when mine wrote “2008—another year to live through” in his journal, it got me to thinking: those teenage years are going to be bad, bad, bad. Sure, there’s no way to guarantee your kid isn’t going to be miserable or get into trouble, but there’s got to be some way to help inoculate them against the troubles of life.

What I really wanted to know was how to tell whether my child is depressed, or just has a really bad attitude. If you’ve got a phlegmatic child who by nature complains a lot and will always comment that the glass is half-empty, what can you do to help that child survive his middle-school and teenage years, never mind the trials of adulthood? How would you even know when this kind of child is actually depressed as opposed to just constantly negative? (continue reading…)

If you are having trouble going green, try going to Grandma’s house first. But, you think, Going Green is a new trend, what could Grandma know when she won’t even venture into that vast series of tubes known as the Internet? As sure as she walked ten miles up hill to school (both ways), she knows more than we do about conserving and repurposing. It took stumbling onto a random website full of World War II propaganda posters for me to realize that not only are our grandparents the Greatest Generation, they are also the original Green Generation, albeit inadvertently.

The parallels between today and the Great Depression Era of the 1930’s are startling. Both eras saw a drawn-out war, high unemployment, failing banks, and a limited supply of resources. And interestingly enough, we saw the same proposed solutions back then as we are seeing today, only in a slightly different guise. For example, a WWII-era propaganda poster created for Douglas Aircraft Company features a Hitler likeness made up of pencils, paper clips, washers and various other scrap metals is emblazoned with the words, “Waste helps the enemy. Conserve material.” Compare that to today’s “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” (continue reading…)