This morning I went to the gym. It was the first time in a month. I run around the block a few times a week but after having our third child the gym just sort of got crossed off the list. But this morning, with two of the three in school, I managed a visit. My daughter was more than a little grumpy about being dropped off , but hey, mama’s got a few winter pounds to shed. 

I grabbed the April issue of Vogue and hopped onto a machine. As a general rule, I am not a Vogue reader. I prefer to think of myself as above this, but who am I kidding?! When I am at the gym I burn my time by flipping through useless magazines and catching up on pop culture. Every now and then you need to know what the celebrities ate for breakfast. I’m starting to sweat and flipping through Vogue when I stumble across a page that has been dedicated to Cameron Diaz and her green life. She’s been an active voice in the celebrity world when it comes to green living so I mean the gal no harm here. And honestly, I like her, as far as celebs go. Charlie’s Angels aside, she’s made me laugh on more than on occasion. She seems sort of real and accessible, like we could even be friends if she wasn’t super famous and gorgeous. She seems the sort of gal who snorts when she laughs and might even split a diet coke with me at the pool. So I like her.

Anyway, there’s a page in the April issue of Vogue that is dedicated to her and green fashion. She’s all dolled up and hip looking and she happens to be sporting an organic cotton outfit from some high end designer named Bamford. The copy on the bottom of the page informs me that she is wearing a $1,195 organic cotton shirt and $495 organic jeans. I am told that this is a good thing and that the fashion industry is not just going green to be trendy but it is forming a green way of life for celebs and designers. 

Of course I trip when I read this. I am sweating. I am already all worked up because I know better than to flip the pages of Vogue. It is depressing. I do not look like those women and on most days I have enough self-confidence to skip the worry here, but I am trying to fend off my 40’s and am already all pissy about supermodels. Now I am really getting cranky. Vanity will only get you so far on the treadmill, so I am already mad about that and am now quite angry with our little friend Cameron.

I like her green efforts, and I am sure that she has considerably more disposable income to toss around at environmental causes than I do, and when she opens her mouth about climate change, people listen (mostly because it is a pretty mouth), so kudos to her for using her fame wisely. But SERIOUSLY PEOPLE! A $1,195 organic cotton top is supposed to make me think that fashion has gone green?!

You see, here is the way I see a green Cameron should be. She’d be wearing a pair of jeans she already has and maybe a shirt that she nabbed from a resale shop. The copy would read like this: “Here we see Cameron Diaz wearing her old jeans because she does not need new ones. The greenest of fashion is about keeping what you already have and not wasting resources to make new stuff, even if it is organic. Now because she is Cameron and this is Vogue, she went down the street to the closest chic consignment shop and found a vintage concert t-shirt from 1985. It is very trendy, albeit a little reminiscent of middle school. And the $1690 that her former organic jeans and shirt would have cost her, she donated to the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund.”

This is how I see green fashion. And I will be honest, I’m a gal with a trendy organic t-shirt or two, I am. And it is probably all relative. The money she spent (or that Bamford spent) on her wardrobe for that shot probably equates to the $20 I spend on all my slogan t-shirts (I’ve been known to make a statement or two on a t-shirt). So I realize that here I am as much part of the problem as I am pointing the finger at celebs. Even ones I actually sort of like. But, I have not jumped into the pages of Vogue and allowed their writers to showcase my $1600 outfit and call me green.

Green living is not about finding organic cotton everything or fashioning a new handbag from hemp. It is not about tossing out everything that we have and replacing it with organic t-shirts and vegan shoes. It is mostly about being happy with what we have (which means ultimately with who we are).  The time to buy green is when we find ourselves ready to replace an old item that needs to tossed or repurposed. 

And yes, more irony here is the fact that as I was fuming over this “green fashion” statement I was not at all satisfied with who I am. I was working off calories and flipping through Vogue, looking in both places for some small shred of self-confidence. It’s more than a little snarky of me to poke fun at Cameron while trying to shape my body to look like hers. But come on girl, $1600 for an organic outfit! Give me that $1600, I’ll buy a few rain barrels for my church and give the rest to local efforts to restore a prairie 5 miles from my house. And I may just work up a sweat doing it.

For those of you who are urbanites like I am, which I know is most of you since statistics say something like 80% of the nation lives on roughly 20% of the land in the US, spending time in the downtown area of your closest big city is often something we take for granted. I live a whopping 20 minutes from the heart of Chicago (which actually becomes 2 hours in Friday traffic). It’s a great city but one that I sort of slough off on most days. You see, I’m a suburban gal. I’m nestled all safe in my little burb with parks and pools and a safe distance from all those inner-city unknowns like traffic jams or homeless folks or even diversity. This is not necessarily a good buffer, there are many reasons we should ditch this suburban/inner-city buffer, but for now, it is the buffer.

So us suburban moms, we want to be trendy and all cutesy and want to talk about great little restaurants and clubs in the city. We want to drink a glass of Merlot at some she she bistro and chat away about how urban we are. We want to take the subway or the Metra or the El when it suits us as city savvy to do so. But really, most of us do not know our way around the city the way we should and we get lost more than we want to admit. We’re really suburbanites that want to be cool like those people that live “downtown,” but we’re really not. We just mostly know how to get to Target.

So this past Monday I was invited to a brunch with a bunch of other suburban ladies. The woman hosting was a marvelous urban friend who lived on the 20th floor of a high rise on Lake Shore Drive. From her window you can see out across Lake Michigan and Navy Pier. We navigated the city streets and landed in her parking garage without much fuss. Moments later I was standing on her deck overlooking the city of Chicago and Lake Michigan. It was breathtaking. I grew up here (in the suburbs “here” that is). I can see the skyline every day from the end of the street that is just three blocks away. But I don’t get to see this every day, the city skyline and the Lake. It was great. I was a tourist in my own town.

For those of you who read this from a place other than the midwest, you may not know that Lake Michigan looks more like the ocean than a lake. That you cannot see across it, and once or twice a year a storm moves in that swells up waves that are big enough to surf. If you weave through it and head East, you can dip into Lake Huron and then Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and finally into the St. Lawrence Seaway, you can drop yourself right out into the Atlantic Ocean. Not too shabby for a “lake.”

So anyway, this is how my mind works. I was basically star struck by my own backyard on Monday. I thought about the city and the lake all day. Thought about those mighty waters and how a simple glimpse of them on Monday morning stirred up my soul for the better part of the past two days. And as I was washing dishes with my hands managing soap and water I kept thinking of someday sailing from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean. And in the middle of my daydream at the sink my son, who was sitting on the couch watching TV, starting yelling to me “mommy, mommy, come quick.” There was a Transformers commercial on. His birthday is coming. He wanted some creepy Transformer thing for his birthday.

In my mind I was thinking “oh, I so wish you wanted organic broccoli or to give all your birthday presents to a charity.” But he’s going to be 6. So I nodded and said “mmmm,” and “hmmmmm” and then walked back to the sink. Now I was thinking about Transformers and this started me thinking about plastic packaging. 

Are you tired yet? Tired of following my train of thought? This is how I get from point A to point B in my mind. Why I have to take you along for the ride I am not sure. But this is what blogging is I suppose. So anyway, from a view of Navy Pier to plastic packaging in a few hours. And this is where something green emerges. My desire to sail to an ocean collided with an upcoming 6 year old birthday party. 

Did you know that in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a mass of floating plastic that weighs an estimated 3.5 million tons? It’s been called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Others call it an oceanic desert. Nothing lives there, the sea life near this area sees all these floating plastic things like bags and bottles and caps and Transformer packaging, and thinks that this stuff is food, so they ingest it and die. The most conservative estimates say that this floating mass is the size of Texas. Many say it is the size of 2-3 Texases. Ugh. And honestly, isn’t one Texas is enough (sorry to my Austin friends)?

This patch moves and swells and grows with the ocean currents. It’s waste that gets dropped off ships and ocean vessels, it’s waste that gets pulled off the beach and into the ocean. It’s waste from our own bottles and bags that misses the landfills. Sometimes on purpose, other times on accident. And the sun beats down on this plastic and some of it disintegrates into our water and makes us sick and other stuff just floats there, where it will stay for hundreds of years. And you don’t need to be in this particular spot to see the damage of plastic in the ocean. In 2006, the UN estimated that for every square mile of ocean there were 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it!

Plastic is killing us. It is floating into our oceans from every corner of the world. Sometimes purposefully and many times innocently. But each time, inexcusably. So what can we do?

We’ve got to ruthlessly monitor our dependence on plastic. We must be hyper-aggressive in riding our lives of simple every day things like plastic garbage bags and water bottles. We’ve got to look for products that are not packaged with a plastic clamshell or wrapper. We need to go to our stores and ask them to consider offering products with less waste. We also don’t need things like plastic cutlery or cups. We can wash the good stuff can’t we? And we also need to do our best to pick up plastic trash we see in places like parking lots. Because it is possible for that smashed up bottle in the parking lot, the one that four cars rolled over, to end up in a creek or a river after the next thunderstorm carries it from the parking lot to the stream. And from there it floats and meanders to Lake Michigan and on it goes into the Atlantic and into the ocean.

Sure, that may seem like a stretch when you are looking out over the lake from 20 stories up, but this is more than pure hyperbole. Plastic seems to live a sort of eternal life. It can make it to the ocean. And if yours does not make it, your kid’s will or your neighbor’s will or the next time you visit the ocean on vacation, the plastic cup from your Pina Colada on the lido deck will end up in the ocean. Someone’s waste will be there, swirling in an oceanic desert the size of Texas+

So Green Mamas (and green dads and students and friends), we can make a difference. As depressing as a growing mass of plastic with no place to go (because where do you put 3.5 million tons of trash – “not in my backyard, this is why I moved to the suburbs”) we can do something! Ditch the bottle, ditch the plastic bag, ditch the plastic spoon. It’s not that hard, it just takes a few tweaks and you are on your way. Give it a try this week. Try one week of freedom from three basic plastic things: 1. plastic bags, 2. plastic water bottles 3. plastic utensils. Just try it for a week and see how it goes. And then try it for another, and another, and another.

One week ago Friday it was one of the first gorgeous days of the spring. Almost 75 degrees, sunshine, and lots of flowers in bloom. So I packed my kids up and headed to the zoo. So did the rest of the city of Chicago. We got a late start, sat on the Eisenhower for 30 minutes and then sat in a line of cars waiting to get into the zoo for another half an hour. Once there we waited in line to see everything, including the bathroom. It was nice but it was way,way, way too crowded. We bailed after two hours. The giraffes can wait.

So this past Friday, Arbor Day, I was not to be outdone by all those organized, early moms. No siree. It was Arbor Day, which meant it was a free day at the Morton Arboretum. http://www.mortonarb.org/ One of the greatest little slices of plant and tree preservation I know. Lots of great stuff for the kids to get dirty and splash around on too. So the minute my children woke up I hollered at them to put their socks and shoes on. By 7:30 AM we were dressed, fed, and watching the clock. We packed cheese sticks and yogurt into the diaper bag, slapped sunscreen on, and headed out the door. The weather guy said it would be 85 degrees and sunny. We had to hurry. Those hyper-organized moms were probably already there. They had probably put sunscreen on their kids last night before bed. Darn them.

We arrived at the Arboretum early. Phew! After racing my double stroller (packed with three kids) across the parking lot and to the main entrance, I finally took a moment to slow down and breathe. We were meeting my niece and brother-in-law that day. She’s the most adorable little thing, 20 months old and feisty as can be too. “You go girl,” I always think when I see her. So we had a few moments to wait for them. I looked around. Trees everywhere. Flowers in bloom. My kids were poking at worms and gingerly touching tulip petals. “ooh, these are so pretty” they were saying.

Then they started asking about bugs and about trees and why this day (Arbor Day) was all about trees. So I took a moment to start telling them all about oxygen and carbon dioxide and they actually listened. And then, as if he was reading a tele-prompter, my oldest said “so mommy, what happens when we cut down all our trees? That is bad right?” And I said “yes honey, it is.” And then he said, “oh, wow, then we’d better save them all right?” “Yes baby, we need to save them.”

And on this went for another 5 minutes. Talking about it all. And it actually turning into the sort of idyllic moment I dream about. And then we snapped a few pictures, for which they smiled, and it was just all perfect! And I know what you are thinking, at least if you are a friend of this blog and know anything about me, you are probably wondering when the dramatic moment is coming when this all falls apart. When someone has a diaper blow-out or falls or says the absolutely inappropriate thing, because this is just now how my life normally works. But I tell you, that it did not fall apart on this day. It was as God himself bent down and whispered in their little ears “shhh, now be good and love the trees today okay buddy.”

So, I got all sappy. I teared up. I looked around at this fabulous little slice of the suburbs that had been set aside to love the little earth God made. I saw all these peppy arboretum staff people in their green t-shirts telling people all about plants. I handed out crackers and cheese to my forever snacky kids and I actually cried. I had my sunglasses on. No one noticed. And THANK GOD my brother-in-law was not there yet. Not that he would have cared, he’s cool like that. But how do you explain why you are crying at 9:00 AM on a gorgeous day at the Arboretum? Especially to a guy.

So I wiped the warm tears that had slipped below my sunglasses and mixed with my sunblock, and I the first truly deep breath I had taken all week (actually, probably all month) and then saw our playmates for the day walking up the path. Time to go and check things out. Sappy moment over. Drink the coffee and let’s move on.

So we did, we played and splashed and giggled and snacked and it was marvelous. And then we stopped on the way out at a little exhibit where the kids could make their own paper. Of course I yelped to them “hey you guys, wanna make some paper?” And they said “yeah mom.” Fabulous right? Only I had not bothered to look at how long the line was and what was involved in making paper. 

You see there were blenders and pulp and people and irons and all sorts of other gadgets. Just to make yourself a little piece the size of a coaster. And as I bemoaned my eagerness and jumped into the line, I noticed that there was no need to fret. The kids were willing to wait (that and my brother-in-law was chasing the two babies, this helped too). So we stood in line and I watched my kids stare wide eyed and this woman who helped them manage the pulp and then mix it and dry it and iron it. And it was all earth friendly and made from recycled materials and it was pure Arbor Day bliss. And then we noticed that the kids could decorate their piece and print their names on it and leave it there and it would become part of an international exhibit that would travel the world. How cool would that be, my little peanut’s handwriting ending up in Spain or something? http://www.treewhispers.com/

Of course my selfish kids wanted to take their paper home. Can’t blame them though, they did wait a long time. So much for that fame. But we learned that day how to make paper and recycle stuff like newsprint and construction paper and even repurpose old window screens to filter the water in the paper making process. And did you know you can do all of that from home with your blender? http://www.pioneerthinking.com/makingpaper.html

When we got home that day my two little ones were pooped, they napped like champs. My oldest sat down and colored his little coaster and with great pride stuck it to our display board with a magnet. “There you go mama” he said.

Indeed, “there you go mama.”

Most of the time our little earth lessons run amuck, kids get cranky, it rains, or they just don’t care. I often underestimate how much they can absorb and they never underestimate how many of my buttons they can push. But once in a great while you end up making paper at the Arboretum on a gorgeous day. You talk about why trees matter and your kids actually listen. Once in a rare while it all lines up just fine on a sunny Friday afternoon. Trees, sunshine, oxygen.

There you go mama. There you go.

Last night my boys were playing with their beloved Geo-Trax. For those of you not in the throes of parenting preschoolers, Geo-Trax are big Fisher-Price plastic trains. Lots of stations and gates and little windmills. Every train set needs a windmill. I was in the kitchen, my husband was playing Geo-Trax with the boys and the baby. As they were motoring along with the trains,our two year old suddenly leapt up all excited about something. But since coordination is not one of the hallmarks of this age group, he tripped and fell, and then smacked his face into one of the Geo-Trax towers. Bloody nose.

All I heard was the crash. Then a few seconds later my husband shows up in the kitchen holding our little guy with blood all over his face. I freak out. I am that cool and collected. You would think after parenting three children, two of whom are boys, and after one ER trip that ended with 9 stitches, that I would not think this to be a big deal. And in general, I like to think I am not this sort of mom, the freak out at blood sort. But when your husband comes into the kitchen with a kid who has blood all over his face, you get a little stressed. I had no clue it was just the nose. Of course my calm husband said very plainly “don’t worry honey, its just his nose, get a towel.” But my mind had already gone to missing teeth, gashes in the face, stitches in the chin. I was flashing ahead to an ambulance ride and a concussion. Moms do this.

But after my hubby more firmly said to me “HONEY, IT IS JUST HIS NOSE,” I chilled out and got with the action plan. Ultimately this plan ended with me holding my little guy in my lap with a towel on his nose. I was flanked on each side by my other two kids. We were sitting on the kitchen floor leaning against the cabinets, chatting about the little mishap. It was a nice moment actually. I was enjoying it, even thought I could see from that level all the goopy piles of lunch and dinner that were stuck to the floor (and they were from several days ago). 

As we sat there on the floor, my son looked up at me and asked me if the blood was gone. “Yes honey,” I told him. Then he said this “Mama, is my nose all gone?” I giggled inside. My husband did too. We shot glances at one another, those “oh that is the cutest thing ever” looks that parents swap in a moment like this. “No baby, you still have your nose” I said.

Funny as it was, can you blame him for asking? It was his first major nose incident. All he knew was that he crashed and there was blood and it hurt. And he knows that his nose sticks out from the rest of his face. So in his little two-year old mind, it seemed an absolutely appropriate question. “Did I lose my nose?” 

If it is your first time having an experience, the obvious sometimes escapes you.

The obvious escaped me this week. I have these idyllic green plans that I set forward in my life. Since we just moved this past November I have been planning for an opportunity to plant a tree at our new place. Our front yard has a gorgeous big, tall tree that I wish I knew the name of. It’s one of those cool 50+ year old trees that you get in old Chicago neighborhoods like ours. Our back yard, however, looks like a prairie. Not a mature tree in sight. Just two scrappy little trees. 

So to celebrate our new home and our new adventure here as a family I thought that this Earth Day (like tomorrow) I would round up my kids and plop a tree into the ground. But like I just said, if this is your first time having this sort of experience, sometimes the obvious escapes us. How was I to know that you don’t plant a tree after two straight days of rain? That the soil gets all clumpy and lumpy and is poor for root development if you plant on a rainy day. Did you know Midwestern soil is very clay-ish? I’m not sure that is even a word, clay-ish, but that is what it is around here. Soil with lots of clay. When I think clay I think adobe and then I think of Santa Fe, not my backyard. No planting after a long rain.

And I surely underestimated the size hole I would be needing to dig in order to drop in the size tree I am planning for. My mom bought my kids little plastic gardening shovels for their Easter baskets. I had visions of us using these, taking pictures, making an Earth Day moment. I had hopes that Daddy would come home from work and see our accomplishment, that maybe we’d even place a few pet rocks near the tree or something. But reality was that my husband said this “honey, you are going to have to get the nursery to come out and dig a hole for the size tree you want.” And then there was this detail “how are you even going to get a tree home? In what car will you drive it?” Dang! I guess you cannot take a 10 foot tall tree and three kids home from a nursery in a station wagon. 

So tomorrow, on Earth Day, we will plant a few flowers instead. And we will be happy to do it. And we have preschool in the morning and then I have to work in the afternoon and then there is t-ball practice at 5:00. So who knows exactly when we will do this earthy thing. But like my son’s nose, once you learn how hard it is to knock something like that off, you begin to know your stuff. Once we learn how to plant you won’t be able to knock us off with rainy days or holes that need to be dug. We will learn together and we are going to grow some things around here. Some big, green, earthy things. Things that bloom and flower, things that give oxygen and life, things that stick, and things that will make me smile 25 years from now, when they are all off at college (or on their own) and I am an older lady sipping coffee, laughing about the funny things they used to say. Like that one time when he bumped his nose on the Geo-Trax.

So this week we have Amnesty Days in our town. Actually, I’m not sure we call it that but that’s what I’ve heard it called. It’s the week when you can haul anything you want out to the curb and the garbage people will haul it all away for free. Normally it’s the one can limit and then you have to start slapping all those $1.50 trash labels on stuff. But not this week, no siree. You can haul anything from old skis to a recliner from 1975 out to the curb and they will haul it all away. Just chuck it on the curb and adios. Last year my kids and I sat in the front window and watched a couch get flipped into the garbage truck. It was excellent.

At first it seems like the perfect opportunity for a pack rat who’s been through therapy and is ready to purge. The chance to clean out your garage and every closet. The chance to let the whole neighborhood see what you’ve had in your basement for the past 20+ years. It is a clean freak’s dream come true. It’s also a landfill’s worst nightmare, but we’ll get to that in a sec.

Amnesty day is phenomenally anxiety producing for me. You see we all know that people put perfectly good stuff out to the curb, stuff they no longer need but someone else does. On these days you will find lots of plastic playground stuff and big wheels and kid toys that have been outgrown. We drive through town and my kids holler at me, asking if I’ve seen all the stuff they are seeing. I have. I want to stop and throw it in the trunk, but I get stressed out. For some reason I struggle to garbage pick. It’s not that I’m above it, I do it for sure. It just makes me all panicky and sweaty for some reason.

My husband does not have a problem with this. He’s dragged everything home from canoes to riding lawn mowers. But last year I was driving home from a friend’s house where the free trash/amnesty day was in full force. It was a Sunday and in this particular neighborhood trash day was Monday. It was also a gorgeous day. So everyone was out dragging stuff to the curb. And hoards of people were driving around in vans and pick up trucks grabbing stuff as quickly as it was being set out. I was simply trying to get home and had no plans to garbage pick until I passed a guy who was dumping a pile of hockey sticks at his curb. We were just getting into hockey and my boys had 1.5 sticks between the two of them. We could use a few. This guy had about 6 kid-sized sticks that he dropped near the street.

My heart started beating faster. I drove past slowly and eyed the treasure. There was an emerald green hockey stick. I did not stop. I drove around the block and came back by again. What if someone saw me? What if the guy wasn’t really throwing them away but was setting up for a hockey game in the street? What if there was mold on the sticks? Now granted, he dragged them out of a ga-gillion dollar pristine house, but still. One man’s trash is another woman’s treasure right? I drove past again. What is wrong with me I lamented. Finally, I circled the block, flipped open the tailgate, and threw in the sticks. Triumph. Now I was unstoppable. I drove up the block a bit and saw a giant blue plastic tugboat. A backyard toy to climb on. I stopped. There was no way this would fit in my car. Now I was defeated.

So I love and hate this Amnesty Day thing. It gets so crazy in our town that people descend upon a particular neighborhood the night before the trash collection and just start rummaging. They pile up cars and vans. A guy comes by every year with a giant jalopy of a pick up truck. He’s a scrap metal collector. His car looks like it could belong to the Joads, or at least the Beverly Hillbillies. These people move fast. If you see something good you’d better get on it quick. I pulled over one year for a big wheel. Then of course I panicked again. What if it was not really trash, what if the kid left it there and will be crying over the big wheel and then they will see us riding it and come get us? It’s gone now.

The cool part of this trash picking frenzy is that the more stuff that gets hauled away in a car means the less stuff that plops into our landfills. I know several people who take stuff from trash heaps, clean it up, and sell it later at their own garage sales. It can be lucrative.

The hard part of this is how much stuff we all have. It amazes me how year after year piles of stuff can show up at the curb. And it amazes me how many people could give a rip whether or not it ends up in a landfill. Some of it is perfectly good stuff. If it wasn’t, people would not be circling the block like vultures trying to get at it all. So, if you have a similar charade in your town, let’s all think about what we trash and if we can put it someplace else.

And if your town is up for a free trash/Amnesty Day soon, think about these little tips to help you figure out how to do it well. First, put your “trash” out early so that people have enough time and daylight to determine that it is indeed their treasure. Second, consider recycling stuff. Not just cans and bottles. But there are organizations that take old bicycles, for example, and they fix them up and give them to homeless folks to get around on. Trash to Treasure. People take old running shoes and send them to Africa. People even take old bras, yes, old bras, like from junior high, and send them to impoverished communities across the world. An old one is better than none. (Sorry to the guys reading along for that one). Third, look for a community recycling event in your area to ditch these items. Don’t toss them if you can help it. Local events often take everything from electronics to blue jeans. So consider finding one in your area. Just google your county name and the words “recycling events” and see what pops up. In our area there are 8 events in our county in April alone. I’d do it for you and drop the link in here, but since I don’t know where we all live, that’s a little rough.

Lastly, if you check out Earth 911 http://earth911.com/ It’s a great resource. Just type in your zip code and what you want to recycle and it will tell you the closest place to your home to do just that.

So throw out the used tissue and the stale milk and recycle the rest of it. And if you have anything good to toss out you will likely see me drive by your house at least three times before I get up the guts to make the grab.