current thoughts on living

Something about bringing a new human being into the world makes you really want to clean up your act. We've both had an almost reverse nesting instinct. We're trying to cut back on the amount of unnecessary stuff in our lives and household, much to the chagrin of excited future grandparents on both sides. I thought I'd post this to try to explain.

I was really inspired by this simple post "to buy or not to buy" and we had actually been following this philosophy to a large degree in preparing the nursery. We haven't bought a single new piece of furniture for him to date, everything has been Craigslisted or Freecycled. Freecycle also allows us to give away things that we don't need knowing that they are actually needed/wanted by the person who picks them up. We are borrowing a lot of things from friends and family who have recently had babies. With the speed that kids grow out of things like car seats, strollers, and clothes, it makes sense to just pass these around. We've also redone two pieces of furniture that we already had to go in his room, and repurposed others.

I love to shop for baby clothes, and a friend told me she had gotten nearly everything (and she has a really cute collection) from thrift and consignment shops. I make biweekly trips to the area thrift stores and have gotten many many cute things, which I can give right back to the community when he grows out of them. The one exception is handmade goods which we have found on etsy or locally.

Some lifestyle change successes we've had so far: We have only one car, and Biff takes public transportation to and from work in Chapel Hill. We use a clothesline for drying clothes. We save our shower water and use it to flush the toilet. We reuse what we can and recycle the rest. We compost. We (well me really) have been making weekly trips to the library instead of buying books. We have a farm share from Lil Farm, which gives us a box worth of local, organic produce each week.

Next steps in the stuff-reduction plan is to do away with all of the unnecessary cleaning and hygiene products and their plastic packaging. I'm searching for shampoo and detergent refills, with the eventual plan to make homemade laundry detergent. We're using up our current spray bottle cleaners which will be refilled with a simple vinegar, water and baking soda mix from the recipes in the How It All Vegan cookbook. I have several reusable shopping bags and am trying to get Biff to carry the one I got for him. I definitely have to curb my urges to just run to Target, or shop for shoes and clothes online.

Since most likely we will be living with a lower income and increased expenses, we need to scale back anyway. We still have the guilt of being Americans in terms of energy and resource consumption (25% of the world's total energy consumption, 4.56% of the world's population), you've all heard this spiel from me before....but we're trying to shrink our footprint as much as possible.

The Story of Stuff video is one of my favorites and sums up our thoughts pretty well.