Homemade Gifts

Now that Halloween has passed, Christmas is fast approaching. What a tricky time for a frugalista and a...greenie (haven't found myself a good nickname there)? How to wade through the commercialization and over-consumption that is the Christmas beast? Better yet, how to do it as the parent of two young children?

I'll start with the second first: we give our children very little for Christmas. Sacrilege! What we do give is second hand where possible and generally consists of books or music or a toy. The grandparents (they've got 6) will shower them with more than enough gifts and so we keep it very simple at home. The boys are 1 year (K) and 3.5 years (F) and so far this is working well for us.

What about my husband and I? We are very good at not buying indulgences throughout the year for ourselves and try to save these wants for special occasions. In the past we have stuck to a strict budget when buying for each other and buy a few small gifts that we're sure the other really wants: again things like books, music, DVDs, games, etc. Lately my husband is getting harder to buy for because he has less time for reading and playing. Back when we were both working we would also buy a gift for the two of us ("the house"). This year we may even forgo gifts for each other and just get something for "the house": most likely a digital SLR camera as it's something we would use constantly.

What do others get us? Our family likes us to create wishlists for every member of the family. This is a great idea, but the more we simplify, the shorter these lists get. Making them for the boys is even harder since they "need" very little. As F gets older, he's better able to vocalize his wants, but we try very hard to teach him that wants are not needs and that we don't get everything we want, which is okay. Luckily he still enjoys simple pleasures and even favourite fruits get him very excited. Our youngest, K, needs next to nothing and wants less. Most of what he has is handed down and he couldn't care less. It's a wonderful age! Above all, we encourage gift-givers to give the kids preloved (used) items and not to overindulge.

What do we get the rest of the world? Now there's the tricky part. For nieces and nephews I've made things like hats and mittens when they were young:

We ask for wishlists when available or find something thoughtful and useful (perhaps even educational or creative) and keep the budget low. For adult family members, over the past several years, we've been making baskets. Here are some previous examples (I can't believe I didn't get pics of last years when I made biscotti, cookies, sauces, and other yummies!):


These include items to be consumed (food and drink) and, increasingly, homemade items. I love to cook and bake (obviously) and so I tend to give many baked goods and things that can be frozen and consumed later. This year we have a pressure-canner which I'm hoping to use for soups and chilis and the like. (I'm very excited about this and will definitely blog about it.) And I'm working on a way to present these baskets next year without cellophane (which was always on its second life when I used it).

Aside from comestibles, I've found it difficult to think of useful items that can be homemade. I don't want to give silly useless, or tacky things that must be displayed. That is not green and it is not frugal. I was thrilled today to find (at my new favourite blog Domestic Cents) a listing of 50+ Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas. Nicki gives lost of unique ideas and links to wonderful sites. (I said to myself, not for the first time, as I was discovering yet another fascinating blog, "how am I supposed to do anything else with my time?") I'm loving Skip To My Lou, Bella Dia, Geekware, Stardust Shoes, I could go on and on. Go, have a look around, and if tell me if you've gone down the homemade route before.

CSA Week 2

I can't believe it's already Saturday and I'm just posting about the CSA I picked up this past Tuesday! (The two kids and I have been sick and that's thrown a wrench in our plans, but more on that later.)

First, what happened with the rest of last week's veggies? I'm ashamed to admit that the spinach bit the dust. I hadn't expected it to go so soon, but alas it wilted and withered and in the green bin it went without so much as a taste taken. Half of the salad greens went too. The beets and mushrooms are still awaiting consumption. The remaining apples went into soup or were eaten by my son. 2 of the pears are still hanging on. Most of the enormous butternut squash went into a Curried Butternut Squash Peanut Butter Soup but only this Thursday. The rest of it has been frozen for either another soup or a squash lasagna.

Here's what I found in my goodie box this week:

FrugalMaman's Fall CSA Box Week #2
Onions (2) 353 g
Italian Parsley 157 g
Spinach 252 g
Avocado (1) 166 g
Butternut Squash (1 small) 811 g
Yams or Sweet Potato** (2) 897 g
White Carrots (7) 424 g
Mystery Root Vegetable* (5) 310 g
Beets (7) 345 g
Mushrooms 116 g
Apples (7) 787 g
Bananas (5) 918 g
Celery 787 g
Red Kale 284 g
Hydroponic Romaine Lettuce 283 g
Total Weight - 6.89 kg

* Thanks to the help of my father, these have been identified as small turnips. I'd considered posting a pic on Facebook and asking my friends to 'name that root vegetable'!
** I honestly can't tell the difference despite many efforts to educate myself.

I'm planning to make a veggie soup tomorrow with some of the veggies (not sure which yet) with a turkey stock I made on Thursday (also used up some veggies), the fate of the rest is as yet undecided, We're making good progress on the romaine lettuce, but in all this has been tougher week. I've fallen behind in my eating and cooking because I've been sick since last Sunday and have been enjoying a general lack of appetite and bouts of nausea - yippee! So I haven't zipped through the veggies as I'd hoped. Fingers crossed that this week is better.

CSA - Yay!

I picked up my first ever CSA box today - what an thrilling experience! It's like Christmas, opening up that box and not knowing what you're going to find inside. (I kept saying "this is so exciting!") I was pleasantly surprised with the bounty I found. (More on that later.) I've been eagerly anticipating our first box for several weeks, so it's a wonder how I managed to forget to pick it up yesterday. Thankfully, we had 24 hours to pick it up before it's given away. So on the way home from preschool, with my 3.5-year-old and 11.5-month-old in tow, we picked up our lonely box. (Technically it had 2 other boxes to keep it company - clearly I wasn't the only one who'd forgotten - but there was a tall stack of empties sitting next to them.)

How did I get here? Well, I've been kicking around the idea of joining a CSA for some time now and after reading "The Dinner Diaries", I was inspired to finally take the plunge. A few weeks ago. I signed up with Plan B Organic Farm in Flamborough. According to their website: "Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) is a system of growing and distributing organic produce that restores the link between the farmers and city dwellers." Basically, you pay ahead of time and then every week you pick up a box full of produce from a local depot. Plan B is a multi-farm CSA, so the summer produce comes from 12 organic farms in southern Ontario. In fall and winter, it comes from "local and imported origin" although you can choose just local (that would mean slim pickin's in the dead of winter). Go to their website to see all the yummy goodies you can get in a box.

I only signed up in September, so I did a single share for Fall 2009, which spans Oct.13-Dec.31. It amounts to $25/week for 12 weeks. It's a real bargain for organic produce and saves so much effort trying to locate a good variety of local food every week. A single share is: "One week's worth of fruit and vegetables - approximately 8-10 items/week, enough for a household with 1-2 adults." To be clear, 8-10 items does not mean 1 apple, 1 pear, 2 potatoes, 1 head of lettuce, etc. Take a look at what came in my first box!

FrugalMaman's Fall CSA Box Week #1
3 red cubanelle peppers - 431 g
2 onions - 521 g
4 small potatoes - 435 g
6 beets - 558 g
5 carrots - 408 g
2 heads of broccoli - 740 g
1 bunch of spinach - 421 g
1 small bag of salad greens - 159 g
1 extra large butternut squash - 3.5 kg
1 small bag of mushrooms - 136 g
7 apples - 869 g
5 pears - 435 g
5 bananas - 728 g
Total Weight - 9.771 kg

It looks like I'm going to be kept on my toes planning meals around all this fresh produce! I know what to do with these fruits and vegetables, and luckily my family eats everything we received. (My 3.5-year-old son is very excited about all the fruit and was begging to dig in as soon as we arrived home.) I am looking forward to some delicious salads and soups over the next week. I must admit I'm a little nervous, though, about one day finding a lot of strange looking root vegetables in my box. At least this is the easy part of the season!

I intend to track how we fare with our fare. Should it work out well, I'll be signing up for a winter share.

More from the Plan B website:

Why buy produce from Plan B in the fall instead of the supermarket?
- The best selection & value of local and imported certified organic produce
- Plan B "puts local first" in the shares, with stored root crops, local greenhouse greens, and local apples all season long.
- The imported foods in your share are as fresh as you can get. They don't sit out on a store shelf losing valuable nutrients, they go straight from the cooler to you.
-Support Plan B in their ongoing work of developing a local organic farm business by buying from us year round!

My whole family is in Detox

As one of the characters in my son's latest DVD obsession ("Thomas & Friends: Hero of the Rails") says, "slowly, slowly, gently, gently." That's my motto right now as I attempt to remove as many toxic products as I can from our personal care regime. I've been reading "Slow Death by Rubber Duck" and "Ecoholic" and am learning all kinds of nasty things about what's in our medicine cabinets. My motives are twofold: to remove unwanted chemicals from our lives (and bodies) and to save money in the process.

So I embarked on a journey, filled with perhaps 'too much information', to find better choices for everyday products like shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, hand soap, hand cream, moisturizer, baby body wash, etc. I began by visiting www.cosmeticsdatabase.com to look up the ratings of the items we're currently using. The result was pretty scary: just about everything turned up high on the hazard scale. From what I can tell, the more heavily marketed brands and the ones always offering free samples and coupons are pretty toxic. Even the stuff for babies is bad! An easy rule of thumb is if it's heavily scented or brightly coloured, it's bad news. After that, you're dealing with specifics and the issue becomes more challenging.

Here's a sampling of our bathroom cabinet contents and their ratings on the Cosmetics Database.

Product Name - Hazard Level (out of 10, 0-2 low, 3-6 moderate, 7-10 high)

Neutrogena T/Gel Shampoo Original Formula - 8

GilletteSatin Care Shave Gel Dry Skin - 8 (in 2007 was 10)

istyle "i'm flexible" molding wax - 8

Pampers Kandoo Foaming Handsoap Pump, Magic Melon - 7

Pampers Kandoo Flushable Wipes, Magic Melon - 7

Glysomed Hand Cream - 7

Gillette Series Shave Gel for Sensitive Skin (men's) - 6

Garnier Fructis Style Curl Shaping Gel Spray - Curls & Shine - 6

Sesame Street Finger Paint Bubble Bath - 6

Huggies Naturally Refreshing Wash for Hair & Body, Cucumber & Green Tea - 6*

Gillette Satin Care Shave Gel Alluring Avocado - 5 to 8*

Banana Boat Kids Dri Blok SPF 30 - 5

Banana Boat Kids Dri Sport SPF 30 - 5

Garnier Fructis Fortifying Shampoo Color Resist - 5

Garnier Fructis Fortifying Conditioner Color Resist - 5

Avon Bubble Bath, French Lilac - 4 to 6*

Gillette Antiperspirant and Deodorant ClearGel, Wild Rain - 4

John Frieda Collection Frizz-Ease Hair Serum - 4

Avon Feelin' Fresh Original Roll-on Antiperspirant - 3 to 6*

Avon Tranquil Moments Roll-on Antiperspirant - 3 to 6*

Dove Beauty Bar Unscented - 3

Thentix Skin Conditioner- not found

* Approximation since specific brand not listed

Observations:

• The kid stuff is all between moderate and high on the hazard scale! I mean, come on, children are the most sensitive and there aren't regulations to protect them from scary chemicals being slathered all over their growing little bodies?
• We've got nothing in the low range.
  
• The colour green does not mean "green"!

So having discovered we've got a cupboard full of baddies, I've got two options: turf any unused product right away, or use up what is left and find a nicer replacement. I'm opting for the first one since none of us is showing any adverse effects and I don't want to be wasteful.

Next choice: do we really need to replace it? For the most part, we've trimmed a lot of unnecessary products already, but it's always worth reexamining something. For example, do I really need a hairspray for curly hair? Or an anti-aging serum? Or does my 3.5 year-old need a special body wash and shampoo? The answer to all these questions is no, but those are the easy ones. What about: coal tar dandruff shampoo (for a particular scalp condition), or antiperspirant, or shaving gel?

What do we replace it with? That is a toughie. I've searched through the cosmetics database for products on the low end of the scale in different categories. That part is easy enough. The hard part is finding a place in Canada (the database primarily lists American products) that sells what I want.Comparison shopping for price adds another level of difficulty. Good times! To help me in my quest, I used Well.ca and printed out my shopping cart to bring with me to my local stores. Well.ca has free shipping, but their prices tend to be a little higher. If I can't find something near me, I'll order from them. I have yet to buy a single item, but I'm going shopping today. Wish me luck!

I could go on and on about how it seems utterly insane to me that finding products for my family that aren't possible carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, bioaccumulative, etc. should be this hard. Some would argue that there isn't hard proof in the form of human trials for some of these claims. Perhaps, but do we need it? I don't want my family to be lab rats. If there's a better way, I'm looking for it. I'm trying to find a balance (on of my favourite words) between simplicity and convenience, ecological and economical. I'll post my findings as I continue my quest.

My new favourite term: Self Sufficient-ish

I borrowed an excellent book from the Hamilton Library called The Self Sufficient-ish Bible: An Eco-Living Guide for the 21st Century  by Andy and Dave Hamilton (great last name). (Let me digress here to rant about the fact that new pulp-fiction novels and pop culture DVDs can be very hard to borrow from the library due to the long waiting lists. However the books I've just checked out regarding energy conservation and self-sufficiency have no waiting lists! That's really sad. Good for me, but sad.)

I've read a little already and absolutely love it. At first I was worried that it wouldn't be very useful for me since it's written in the UK and I was seeing a lot of products we don't have here and there were lots of words we don't use and references to climate that is different than ours. Well, happily I found with more reading that there's only a tiny bit that doesn't apply. What is wonderful about it being written in the UK is that there are so many new and fresh ideas. The different perspective is refreshing. Here are some fun things I've read about so far:

• hand-crank MP3 players
• putting foil behind a radiator to reflect more heat back into a room
• hay-box cooker (you put your hot pot of soup or stew into a box, surround it with hay, newspaper, or rags, then cover tightly)
• a solar cooker you make yourself
  
• pot-in-pot cooler (a way to keep food or beverages cool for up to two days, which consists of two nested terra cotta pots separated by damp sand and covered with a damp cloth)
• Bokashi composting (a Japanese method of composting indoors that uses Bokashi bran)

I'm only about 50 pages in, so I'll post more nifty things as I continue. Oh, and the term "self sufficient-ish" refers to ways in which anyone can live a more self sufficient life without having to go all the way. In other words, you can have a balcony edible garden and a worm composter and reduce your energy consumption and reduce your chemical use, etc. while still living in the city. Every little bit helps. Great reading and full of photos and diagrams.

Who am I and how did I get here?

It all began when I became pregnant with my first child. No, wait, it began when my DH decided to quit engineering and go back to school to become a teacher. No, I suppose it started when we were saving for the down payment for our first house. Or maybe when we were saving for our wedding. I guess it's hard to pinpoint when I began making conscious choices about reducing spending and doing more with less. It was a gradual process, and has resulted in our family living comfortably and happily on one income.

Never have I been ashamed to spend less or buy less, but as I became more adept at stretching our dollars, I started to walk proud and tall, wearing my super-frugalness as a cape of sorts. (Of course it wasn't a real cape, that would be pretty silly looking, although my 3-year-old son would love it.) A close friend and former co-worker was an excellent mentor and cheerleader. I don't know if I would be as inspired or successful, were it not for her.

After joining a local mom's group in Hamilton, I found that I wanted to share with others ways to save money, spend less, and simplify. A lot of moms are on maternity leave or living on one income for the first time. The forum threads I started were very popular and I was thrilled with the wonderful and useful ideas that were flowing back and forth. It's great to share information about thriftiness with other moms in the area because I've learned of so many local businesses and parks that were new to me. I've come to rely on the support that we give to each other in any endeavor. Never before have I been a part of such a positive and loving community.

One day, Monica, our Social Mamas founder, declared that she was pitching a tv show based on our group. In no time at all filming for the pilot began. I was scared and thrilled when she asked me to do a regular "Frugalista" segment on every show. I've never liked the spotlight, but when I realised that this was a way to get a very important message out to so many moms, I jumped at the chance. My mind began to buzz (and honestly hasn't stopped since) with ideas for segments and tie-in blogs for the Social Mamas website. I've been researching my heart out and stumbled upon some fantastic blogs. I then realised that all my fervor might be too much for just one audience (the other Mamas might begin to resent me if every day I'm suggesting yet another way to pare down and save up).

All of this led me to this blog. I relish the opportunity to share ideas and learn from others. I feel like a sponge ready to soak up the wisdom of other simplifiers and do-more-with-lessers, kitchen-gardeners and cook-from-scratchers. I can't wait to get that first comment on a blog...