My younger sister is rubbing off on me. Not her craftiness because crafty and Erin don’t work together. I try, it looks, well, like Widget made it. At the age of 30, I still cannot cut in a straight line with a guide tool. It is hopeless. Really. I gave up on it a long, long time ago.
But she does have me thinking a lot about the food we eat, the toys Widget plays with, and eventually what baby products to have at the ready whenever we do adopt again. MK hasn’t gone completely crunchy because she does like her Starbucks lattes and Target, but I’d call her a ”half-crunchy mama” because she does like babywearing, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, minimal television for her kids (mostly Kipper, Signing Time and Thomas videos) natural fabric, fibers, wood toys and products, organic foods- she practically lives for the farmer’s market in the spring and summer. She hasn’t done cloth diapers yet, only because she hasn’t had the money for all the stuff you need but she wants to.
Right now I’m focusing on trying to buy healthier foods for us. I have started buying food without high fructose corn syrup and food dyes when it comes to Widget, meaning it takes me longer at the store because I’m reading labels and trying to decipher the ingredient lists. There aren’t a lot of choices when it comes to organic food and products around here, so it is still much more expensive to buy organic except at the farmer’s market for produce in the summer. We have a couple smaller “health food stores” and the regular grocery stores are carrying small quantities of organic goods but we could stand to have a store like Whole Foods nearby with more variety. It would still be more expensive to buy all organic than not but I’m beginning to think it is worth the expense to know that there are less chemicals going into our bodies.
And when we move this next time, I am going to go through and try to get rid many of the plastic and noisy toys Widget has- side note: hopefully into the house we went through on Friday- yes we got our deposit back from the property management place with a little bit of a hassle. I have been buying her more wooden and natural toys in the last few months but she still has a lot of junk. If only I could get certain family members to either not buy her so much crap or when they buy her stuff, to not buy noisy and plastic.
And I’m thinking about when we adopt again, what kind of bottles to use. I know I don’t want ones with bisphenol-A in the plastic and I’ve heard some things about the plastic drop-in liners, which we used with Widget, possibly leaching chemicals if they get heated too hot. I’m worried about glass bottles with how “helpful” Widget is likely to be. I would like to use organic formula if I can find it reasonably priced somewhere. I also know I want either a pouch or ring sling and I’m thinking about cloth diapering. T was rather alarmed at the mention of cloth diapers because he was afraid of pins and poking the baby but then I told him that many types do not use pins but snaps or velcro. So I have some research to do to get things figured out 
What is rather funny about all of this is that when my two youngest siblings were babies and preschoolers, my mother went through an organic/natural phase. And since I was a teenager, I felt it was my duty in life to say that everything organic was disgusting and weird.
Now, here I am contemplating the same thing.
