I'm headed to the green, green jungle!

Not the real jungle but a place called, the "Jungle" with fake green everywhere and nothing organic or healthy to eat. This is where my four year old begged to have his birthday party. I resisted and wanted to do a charitable birthday party and be the greenest mom I could be. I lost. There’s something about a cute face that came from your womb begging you to have saturated fat, high fructose corn syrup soda, cupcakes and play putt putt golf while running around like a wild baboon, playing video games. I really did resist. So then I needed to figure out how to sprinkle some of my green mom qualities onto this, not to so green birthday party. We used recycled, make your own invitations and soy crayons from the best place ever, Stubby Pencil Studio. I’ll tell you more about this eco-friendly company later and how you’ll get to win some earth friendly art supplies! The birthday boy will wear his organic shirt from MamaOm, so everyone knows that we’re an earth lovin’ family. I wanted to get the kids the organic playdough from Wild Dill , but it's made fresh and it takes two weeks to ship, bad mom I didn't plan ahead. I'm not wrapping my sons gifts, he has to go on a dinosaur hunt to find them (guess his gift) and they're dinos (he has a little obsession)! I think my good intentions and green sprinkle here and there, should really count for something! Oh, and to end the day I’ll have a green margarita with some family members (that counts, right). I’ll need it after all the screaming, yelling and begging for more tokens. And did I mention the annoying parrot that squawks and won’t shut up? Yeah, that will drive me to have two green margaritas!

I wasn’t going to write all of this and flaunt how oh, so very ungreen I am going to be this weekend but then I thought, nah, readers need to see that I’m normal. I’ve written this a dozen times over but folks, being green isn’t a contest and we shouldn’t pass judgment. We all just have to do our very best and be some shade of green each day. Hopefully I won’t turn green from the not so organic margaritas either! I’d love for my kids to want earth friendly birthday parties and will continue to encourage it and when possible impress upon them the importance of having a charity party or doing something o’so green but I cannot force them. You might want to check out a post I wrote this winter about having a charitable birthday party for my daughter. I gathered some great ideas that I hoped to utilize this spring as well, no such luck. Nature Mom & Enviromom write good posts about having a green birthday party for your wee one but this Green & Clean Mom just didn't cut this year for this child. Oh, well if I’m going to go to the jungle with fake green grass and painted elephants and giraffes all over the walls it might as well be for the good of my sweet little boy turning four.

Crayon Recycling

Last night I stayed up way too late trying to get to all of my readers blogs. I read every post, email and try to get to each blog, but it is getting harder. I did delete an email by a reader asking a question about what to get someone? I can’t find it for the life of me so if sent me something and I did not reply….try again (woops and sorry).

Lots of going green blogs out there! Go moms! My Greening: Going Green, wrote about recycling crayons to make candles. How clever. As a long time preschool teacher the recycling of crayons and markers has become common practice for me. Here is what I do:

~Grab an old muffin tin and preheat my oven to 150 degrees.
~I have my little guy peel all the old broken crayons and I cut them up.
~We randomly put them into the muffin tins because we like the rainbow colors.

~Bake for 15 or so minutes (you’ll see that they all melt together).
~Let the crayons and muffin tin cool and then pop out your new crayons. You can keep doing this over and over! No need to throw crayons in the garbage, ever! Great for chubby hands and fingers!

When the markers all dry up we use them for painting. The kids stick the markers in water cups and they’re suddenly water color paint brushes. It’s fun and a great way to make the most of those markers.

So thanks, My Greening: Going Green, for this crayon recycling reminder. A great Earth Day project to do with the kids!

Imagination + Box = Eco-Friendly Toy

When I think back to my childhood, I don’t have memories of toys or possessions. I remember playing outside until it was dark and making the bath water black because I was so dirty. A rock could be play money for playing store or twelve of them were a dozen eggs. A leaf suddenly became the dollar bill I needed to buy my dozen eggs! The ideas were endless and my imagination ran wild. That’s the natural thing about childhood, the imagination. It’s so fresh and vivid…and then we buy every plastic toy out there, videos, and video games and the vivid imagination fades. It’s sad really and I see it happening with my own four year old.

I’m an early childhood educator, I know that play is how children learn best. Not by watching a video, pushing buttons on a video game or having a thousand expensive toys at their fingertips. Children should be able to play with blocks and have them be more than just blocks. Blocks can turn into race cars, space ships, a house, a hamburger, and the list goes on. Too much has been created for our children and that takes away from their natural ability to imagine! Today I had a rebirth, I went to Fridge Blog. I had become desensitized as a parent and had lost touch with the basics of childhood and being a green mom!

April, with Fridge Blog, has an online store called, FridgeBoxWorld.com and it’s exactly what it sounds like, a place to buy a fridge box. As a preschool teacher, I’ve done dozens of cool things with a fridge box (bear caves, tree houses, haunted tunnels, play kitchens, castles, etc.) over the years. They were hard to come by and were usually broken down and damaged. With FridgeBoxWorld.com you get a heavy duty fridge box, you can use both sides, it’s eco friendly, non-toxic, made from recycled materials, and can be recycled. It keeps getting better…April donates a percent of her revenues to http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org! Plus, Fridge Boxes to school teachers for sustainable storytelling workshops. Made in the U.S.A., no recalls to worry about and the children get to use their imagination to power this toy, not batteries.

I have one coming, thanks to April, and plan to build a hot air balloon out of it with my son’s preschool class! This was my favorite project when I was a preschool teacher! I’ll post the pictures here for you to see. In the meantime, visit the Fridge Blog and reconnect with what is natural about childhood…playing and the imagination.