The Green Mamas Blog is opening its doors to all you awesome Green Mamas out there, coast to coast! Whether you're pure green, striped, or spotted in your green ways, if you love to blog and are a green mama at heart, that's all it takes. Oh, and green papas are welcome to guest blog post too ;)
Guest Blogging Guidelines:
must be your own original work in whatever medium you choose - written, image, video.
if your post has been previously published, please include a note stating such with a link to the piece's original publication.
your post should be timely, relevant, and eco-conscious in focus and in the interest of green families.
at least 300-400 words. It can be much longer if you like.
video no longer than five minutes.
a back link to our site (your guest post) from your website/blog.
For your bio, please include:
your name with link to your website/blog
a thumbnail photo
a 1-2 sentence blurb about yourself, including what makes you a green mama/papa.
We do not wish to own any rights to your publication. What you write is your own. The Green Mamas blog is a means to help disseminate information and entertainment to the green mama community.
All contributions will be considered, however not all submissions will make it to post. Green Mama Lia will make every effort to help aspiring green mama writers fix any grammatical errors to make their posts stronger, but she (I) don't have the time to fix everything. If it's not written well, well...polish and shine your posts as best you can.
You can find them anywhere these days, and that's a good thing! Reusable snack bags. Forget tossing out once-used plastic baggies. These little bags (and big bags) are washable and more durable.
It's Friday!!! Yeah!!! And I have the flu....yeah...ah, not so much.
My eyeballs hurt.
Actually, that's pretty funny seeing it written like that.
So, it's that time of year again. When we get to see if our wonderful immune systems can fend off the 100+ kinds of flu flying around. I would have gotten the flu vax if I thought it'd work. It only protects you against 3 of those 100+ strands.
Three.
To me, that doesn't seem worth the risk. And honestly, it's just the flu.
But it does bring up an item for discussion that I had thought I was going to timely bring up in October - what do you do for cold/flu season? Little did I know I was about a month too late for that conversation! ha
So, tell one, tell all - what do you do to help beat the odds during cold/flu season?
I typically chow down on chicken soup at the slightest provocation of illness and wash hands like it's nobody's business. That, and vit C, Kefir, Kombucha, and staying away from sick people!
But I forgot one. Moms know this scenario well: make sure the kids are all stocked up and clean and healthy, but forget about themselves. Yep, guilty and sick as charged...
It's just the start of the season. Just like having to pull out the winter clothes, it's time to start pulling out our defenses!
Join in with all your wise woman ideas, tips, and suggestions ;)
Leave your hints, tips, recipes, avoidance measures - everything you do to keep you and your family healthy during the upcoming seasons - in the comments below.
PLEASE NOTE - this is not a blog/forum/comment box location for debates about vaccines. I understand not everyone agrees with my take on the flu vax as stated above. I get that. If you want to debate, please do so elsewhere. Thanks!!
The following guest blog post is by Cassidy Randall, Program and Outreach Coordinator for Women’s Voices for the Earth
Moms know that the ads we see are often the front lines for whether a product gets bought or ignored. A large and increasing number of greener moms may read up on blogs, read reports and articles and try to look up chemical names of material safety data sheets, but not everyone does this. Many moms are still influenced by ads that say “this will get your laundry smelling like a spring breeze!” and buy the bottle—along with the messages and ads that are sold to them.
That’s why I find it so unnerving that Procter & Gamble has issued a complaint to green company Seventh Generation, asking them to take down one of their online advertisements for the inexcusable crime of talking about safety.
The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus’ ruling upholding Procter & Gamble’s claims against Seventh Generation’s commercial implies that companies can’t make claims based on the safety of their products, even though more and more research shows that consumers are increasingly making purchasing decisions based on product safety due to health concerns.
Case in point: a recent report by EcoFocus Worldwide found that the category they term “EcoAware Moms” (more than 51 million women) have $1.45 billion in buying power, and that of the top five products that these women are buying more often, two of them are safer cleaning products: chemical-free cleaners (47%) and plant-based cleaning products (40%). You’d think companies would want to advertise the relative safety of their products to this powerful consumer group.
More disturbingly, the ruling upheld Procter & Gamble’s claim that chemicals in conventional cleaning product chemicals have no connection to a rapid increase in illnesses such as autism, ADHD, asthma, allergies, immune system deficiencies and birth defects. But scientific research continues to mount, linking chemicals in cleaning products to chronic health problems. Women’s Voices for the Earth has released three reports compiling the science on certain chemicals in cleaners and impacts to human health, finding:
A class of chemicals called APEs are linked to reproductive harm and fertility problems.
Phthalates are linked to genital malformations in baby boys, reduced sperm count, and increased asthma and allergic reactions in children.
Triclosan is hormone disruption and is linked to increased risk of breast cancer.
Synthetic musks are bioaccumulative, showing up in blood, breast milk, and infants, and may break down our bodies’ defenses against other toxic exposures.
These are just a few of the chemicals of covered in WVE reports—for more, visit the WVE website at www.womenandenvironment.org. For the past several years, WVE has reached out to all the major cleaning product companies, pressuring them to remove these chemicals of concern. Procter & Gamble has not removed ANY chemicals of concern identified in WVE reports (SC Johnson has removed 4, Clorox has removed 5, and Seventh Generation products contain none, for comparison), and has ignored WVE’s inquiries on whether the company uses synthetic musks or phthalates in their fragrances.
Procter & Gamble is the maker of Mr. Clean®, Tide®, Dawn®, Febreze®, Cascade®, Gain®, Swiffer®, and more. It seems like a company with such high-profile brands would want to advertise their safety. And if companies aren’t allowed to advertise how safe their products are, then consumers should be able to look on a product label to decide for themselves—too bad Procter & Gamble is only disclosing a few ingredients on their website, and no ingredients on product labels (as U.S. law doesn’t require ingredient disclosure for cleaners, few do). At least consumers can look on Seventh Generation product labels to see all ingredients and make a choice based on safety at the point of purchase. The bottom line is that harmful chemicals shouldn’t be in cleaning products to begin with. Join Women’s Voices for the Earth to eliminate toxic chemicals that impact women’s health from products we use every day!
Sign our Twitter petition to the American Cleaning Institute http://act.ly/2dc
Did you know...cleaning product companies can keep toxic chemicals that could impact your health a secret from you?
APEs are linked to reproductive harm and fertility problems
Phthalates are linked to genital malformations in baby boys, reduced sperm count, and increased asthma and allergic reactions in children
Triclosan is hormone disruption and increased risk of breast cancer
Synthetic musks are bioaccumulative, showing up in blood, breast milk, and infants, and may break down our bodies’ defenses against other toxic exposures.
Join Women's Voices for the Earth for this Twitter Party Wednesday, 9/15 at 6:00PST/9:00EST Party hashtag: #toxiccleaners Go to www.tweetgrid.com to join the party!
Join WVE for this Twitter party, which coincides with the American Cleaning Institute’s Annual Meeting! Help send the message that you don’t want disinfectants linked to hormone disruption or laundry detergents contaminating breast milk, and that cleaning product companies can no longer keep toxic chemicals that could impact your health a secret from you.
Follow @women4earth to get the dirt on cleaners, ways to reduce your exposure, and a fun and easy call to action on Twitter and Facebook to make real changes!
Women’s Voices for the Earth is a national organization that works to eliminate toxic chemicals that impact women’s health by changing consumer behaviors, corporate practices and government policies. http://www.womenandenvironment.org
How do you feel about letting your children be Free Range Kids? I don't want to keep my kids shunned away from the great outdoors, but I don't feel it's the same 'world' out there from when I was a kid.
AKA: there's no one around.
With soccer practice, daycare centers, moms and dads at work all hours of the night, people shut up in their homes watching TV, on the computer, playing video games, whose outside watching the kids? Or, more realistically, what kids are left? There is basically no one out there to play with...the place is a ghost-town!
I remember getting to play outside a lot, and without my mother watching over me like a hawk. And I grew up right outside Detroit (12 Mile Road). I was free to roam the block by myself, ride my bike, play in friend's yards.
But the difference between that neighborhood and the one I live in today is that, while my mother may not have been outside to watch me, there was always a handful of neighbors outside in their yards, sitting on their porch, hanging out in their garages. No matter how many houses down the road I went, someone was there who knew me, who knew my parents, and knew when to head me back home.
Where we live now?
There is no one outside. Zero adults. And kids? I know there are some around, but you'd never know it by looking outside. I tell you - it's a ghost town!
But my kids are outdoor animals. They love to run around crazy, dig in the dirt, climb trees. Bikes, hikes, swimming pools. You name it, they're game. And our neighborhood is okay. There's space enough to roam, some street traffic but not much. However, unless I'm out there with them, I can't just leave them out there by themselves. How? There isn't a living soul out there besides them. No one is watching them. There's no one outside ever. No adults. No kids. No one. It sucks.
So enters my problem with free range kids. I think our world has changed. At least in ghost-town suburbia. Of course I can shell out hundreds of dollars a month to involve my kids in sports and classes so they can 'play' and 'make friends'. It seems that's what every other parent out here on the East Coast does. But I want my kids to have time to be kids. I don't want them bombarded with more rules and restrictions and uniforms. So, instead, they have each other and a sea of empty lawns they're not supposed to walk on.
God forbid someone step on grass made of gold...
Yes, I am cranky. I thought this was going to be easy, as in easy to give my kids what I had - freedom. I don't want to say that letting your child have free range is a bad thing. I love it! I want that for MY kids too!
But with vacant neighborhoods and children being abducted right out of their own front yards, I don't know what to do. I don't know what is the safest bet anymore: let them play outdoors with the mosquitoes (benign) and occasional stray wandering adult or teenager cutting through the neighborhood (not so benign); or keep them safely indoors to tear up the place, play Wii all day, never getting time to become acquainted with Mother Earth, bugs, trees, sunshine, fresh air...
What about you? How do you feel about this? Do you allow your children free range of the neighborhood, sans supervision? Or are you like me, possibly letting your imagination get carried away, possibly not.
