The 40 Days of Green

This year I gave up paper plates and paper cups for Lent. I know some people might not consider that much of a sacrifice, but to me it is. Every morning I used to sweep through the dining room, grab three dirty paper plates and three used paper cups, deposit them in the trash can and move on to my next chore. Now I must stack up three plastic plates and three plastic cups, rinse them out and put them in the dishwasher. I realize that this is not a huge addition of work, but three times a day every day, the extra minutes start to add up. But something had to change - I think I had a sort of addiction to paper products.

It started slowly, with those animal paper plates that they make for kids, with the face on the plate part and two little bowls in for ears (or feet, depending on the animal). They were perfect for pancakes and syrup, which at least one kid was eating every morning, and they provided a neat way to measure out and contain the vegetables (especially frozen peas) at dinnertime. I moved on to paper cups because they were the easiest way to hand out a bunch of m&ms or sweet tarts at treat time without hearing the inevitable sound of candy hitting the hardwood and scattering under the furniture. I thought I had my habit under control, but as with all addictions, the addict can’t really appreciate her dependence. Eventually I was going through a package of paper plates and paper cups every week. I moved on to the big packages of plain old paper plates, and we began to burn through those every week.

I don’t know if I would have hit rock bottom – if my friends and family would have had to stage an intervention to wean me off the paper, hold my hand as I moved on to plastic and support and encourage me as I worked my way back to regular dishware. Fortunately, Lent arrived and I was looking for something to give up that would make a difference to anyone or anything besides myself. I understand the sermon I heard at church that no one should judge another person’s Lenten sacrifice, but I just can’t help it. Any adult that gives up dessert or chocolate or any other food or beverage clearly has an ulterior weight loss motive. I appreciate that they don’t admit to it, but to me it seems rather obvious. So remembering my previous life as an environmental consultant, I decided I would try to find an environmentally friendly sacrifice - hence, the move away from paper products.

When I was young and in charge of no one but myself, I was a poster child for recycling and reducing waste. At the campus pub in college, I would always try to get the bartenders to refill my original plastic cup so that I wouldn’t have to use a new cup for every beer. After a year of student teaching in graduate school I had piles and piles of paper that I could not find a place to recycle, so I carried it with me from apartment to apartment until I finally had a job at a place that recycled white paper, and one evening I snuck in all of my previous students’ 5-year-old lab reports. I would conscientiously pile up cans and bottles at my desk at work and eventually take them home to put out with the recycling since the office didn’t recycle. But once I had kids, ironically all that careful caretaking of the planet and its resources began to change.

I still recycle, but I can’t let it pile up, especially the paper since each kid of mine brings home approximately 132 pieces of paper every day. Every product designed for children comes with a staggering amount of packaging. A friend and I recently lamented all of the packaging that is involved with products that make packing lunch so much easier. We feel guilty about the waste, but we love the time it saves. She told me her son attended a camp last summer where no disposable packaging was allowed in the lunches, so she had to buy reusable containers and forks and spoons for him. Although she could appreciate the waste reduction, it made making lunch that much more irritating and tiresome. Our moms always had to buy the big package of cookies and repack them for lunches, which is probably why I remember lunch packing as the one chore my mother complained about on a regular basis.

The lunch box item that makes me feel most guilty is the juice box, with its plastic straw and wrapper and its complex little package that doesn’t fit into any recycling category. I once saw something on PBS about a little girl who had found a way to recycle juice boxes. It involved taking apart the cardboard box, peeling out the foil layer and then finding a place that would accept those things plus the plastic straw and wrapper for recycling. That is not really a task I plan to take on for every four ounces of juice that the kids drink. Today at the store I bought some half pint water bottles, and when the water is done, I’m going to try to reuse the bottles as juice containers. That way I can buy big bottles of juice and then recycle the big bottles. I suppose it would be even better if I bought frozen concentrate juice and reconstituted it in a reusable pitcher, and recycled that little can. Then again, I suppose it would be perfect if I bought myself a juicer and squeezed all the juice myself. However, I have no pressing need to be perfect, so I am going to start slowly with the little water bottles (yes I know water bottles are a big problem too, but I’m reusing these).

My next step toward a better environmental profile may be grocery bags. I have a mental block about this however, since I have always thought of people with reusable grocery bags as irredeemably crunchy or hopelessly crazy. I can reuse a certain number of grocery bags, but at times I think every item I choose from the store is being individually double bagged by the super conscientious baggers at our store. I have a pile of grocery bags in the kitchen that is almost big enough to be a little seat for people who’d like to visit with me while I’m cooking. Sometimes I remember to put them out in the recycling, but most of the time I just shove them with the rest of the stash out of habit.

Where do I go from there? I’m not sure. I read a Bill Bryson essay about how much energy Americans waste which said that 5% of our country’s energy is used by computers that are left on over night. Can that be true? I suppose it could be, so now I have begun turning the computer off every night, no matter how tired and desperate for bed I am. I was trained as a kid to reflexively turn off light switches and to keep the heat just above freezing, but additional energy conservation in my current living situation is hard, since the government owns the building and chose all the appliances. I have already made a promise to myself that when the washer and dryer go, we will upgrade to the frontloading, lower-energy, less-water model, but for now I don’t think getting rid of working appliances will do anything for anybody. One huge sacrifice I made in my life is agreeing to drive a minivan rather than upgrading our Explorer to an even bigger SUV when the third kiddie arrived. We had sworn to ourselves that we would never be minivan people, and yet here we are with one in the driveway. I realize the gas mileage for a minivan is not ideal, but it is better than a Yukon.

Years ago I gave up swearing for Lent. I was never as much of a gutter mouth as my two sisters, but after 40 days of trying not to, I fell out of the habit of swearing. I have to be blindingly angry to start dropping four-letter words, and since I am always surrounded by short people, even when the f-bomb is most appropriate, I usually don’t drop it. Now, aside from when I stub my toe and a reflex @#%!&! bursts out, I sound ridiculous when I curse. Maybe after 40 days, using paper plates and cups will seem ridiculous. I did go to Target and get some fun plastic plates and cups and bowls for the kids, and maybe that will be enough until they can be trusted with real plates. The only problem is that the plastic plates are not microwave safe. When I need to warm up the pancakes in the morning, I have to use a real plate. Maybe after Easter I will keep a stash of animal plates in the kitchen, just for those morning pancakes...

Project Parenthood

I can appreciate that children of all ages need to do special projects in conjunction with their school work. Special projects reinforce lessons by taking the abstract concepts out of the books and putting them to use in the real world. In addition, these sort of assignments can make school seem more interesting and more fun. Most every kid would like to spend time with his mom or dad, doing something unusual and creative. I can appreciate all of these things. However, I finished 18 years of school, so I would like to think that teachers should no longer be assigning special projects to me. I’m not objecting to helping my kids, I just don’t think I should be receiving homework at my advanced age. Apparently, I am wrong. Tonight we completed of my 6-year-old’s latest school project – construct your own clock.

So what would you do? Get a paper plate, some straws and a marker and help your child make a clock in under 10 minutes? So would I. However, this clock project came with rules: “1) No paper products may be used including paper plates, construction paper, and cardstock; 2) No crayons or markers may be used.” And the clock is not the first project that the First Grade Team has sent home. Earlier this year we had to construct a piggy bank under similar restrictions. When a teacher sets up rules that ban all materials that a first grader normally utilizes, I have to think that the project is no longer the responsibility of the student – it’s all mommy’s (or daddy’s I suppose). I don’t want my daughter to end up like Lisa Simpson, on the famous episode when she receives an award for her crappy project because she was the student who obviously got no help from her parents. But I also don’t want to do class projects anymore – I’ve graduated four times already.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, instead of projects it was costumes. She needed costumes not just for Halloween but for the Thanksgiving play, the 100th day of school, and, most challenging, a costume to dress as her favorite Dr. Seuss character for Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Clearly no five-year-old is constructing little costumes for herself in the hours before bedtime. The costumes were homework for the parents, and given that the kids had to wear the costumes, the pressure was really on the parents to come up with something that was not only clever, but unlikely to fall apart. When the Dr. Seuss costume request came home, I had an epiphany. All of these projects and costumes are a kind of release for the teachers. They unleash these chores on parents as payback for the years of dealing with obnoxious children in exchange for miniscule paychecks.

The most challenging part of the special school projects is trying to come up with a plan that, in theory, a six-year-old could execute herself. We are told to let the kids “use their imagination” to come up with an idea for the projects. Fine. But how long should we let them struggle as they try to piece together a clock from broken toy parts found at the bottom of the toy box? When it came time to make the piggy bank, my daughter got to choose what shape it would be (she decided it should look like a goldfish) and got to help with the construction, but the plan, the gathering of materials, and most of the execution was up to me. We ended up gluing two gladware bowls together and covering them with orange tissue paper. We added two fins, a tail and some eyes and we had the cutest fish bank I’ve ever seen. However, the entire project required hot glue, so my daughter got to crumple the tissue paper and hand it to me to stick onto the bowls. Not particularly exciting for her I’m sure.

I had no idea where to begin with the clock. Thinking back on it now, I suppose the simplest plan would have been to let her paint numbers on a plastic plate. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that at the time. Confronted with the rules, I could only picture an elaborate clock made of clay, or one made out wood with numbers burned into it, or one constructed from sheet metal. None of these options were within my abilities, so in desperation I turned to the one medium that we are both well-versed in – cookies. For once, my pathological need to buy from every fundraising kid paid off for me, because by chance one night I had bought a set of cookie dough from a neighborhood kid. It included four tubs – red, green, yellow, and blue – of dough that was ready to be thawed out, shaped and baked. I found some number cookie cutters and had my daughter cut out the numbers for the clock. She and her sister made the gingerbread dough for the face of the clock which I then baked as a huge circle. Today I wielded the frosting, but the girls did all of the decorating, adding the numbers and candy to the clock face. It really was a collaborative effort up until the time I had to figure out how to attach hands to the stupid thing, at which point I had to dismiss my little helpers because the engineering of that part needed grown up attention. The clock looks great, but I cannot fathom what other way we could have constructed a clock that would have allowed my daughter to complete so much of it herself. I am so curious to hear what all of the other moms and dads came up with. A small part of me worries - will my daughter get an award for having the lamest clock because clearly her parents didn’t help her enough?

I have always been driven, ambitious, and an overachiever. I can completely understand the women who throw themselves into their children’s birthday parties, or afterschool activities, or school projects. When you step out of the workforce as I have and have small children that keep you close to home, the outlets for creativity seem harder and harder to find. How many times can you redecorate your house or reorganize your kitchen? When someone asks you to make a costume or a piggy bank or a clock, the urge to seize the project with both hands and wrestle with it until you have attained perfection can be overwhelming. After all, the teacher and other kids will be evaluating your work, more than likely saying how much they like it, and how often does that sort of opportunity for validation arise for the average mom up to her elbows in laundry and runny noses? To me the hardest part of these school projects is keeping my imprint on them to a minimum, but so far I think I have done a pretty good job. However, this is only first grade, and the projects are for fun. Every kid will get a check for completing them, but no grades will be awarded and no GPAs will be affected. What happens three years from now?

The Washington Post Magazine this week was “The Education Review” about college. I borrowed it from my sister this weekend, but when I sat down to read it, I really wished I hadn’t. The worst part to me was the description of professional “educational consultants” who charge thousands of dollars to “guide [families] through the application process.” Has the world really changed that much? When I applied to college I met briefly with my guidance counselor (and concluded she was a wacko), agreed on a list of schools with my parents, got recommendations from my teachers, wrote an essay about being a soccer referee, and sent out the applications. I was an honors student and had good grades, but I had never chosen my classes based upon what I thought my future college might want to see on my transcript. Something tells me that as I look back to my high school days, I might as well be looking back to Little House on the Prairie.

And so though my children are 6, 4, and 2, the anxiety is already beginning to build. If I leave my kids to their own devices in the future, when their class projects do carry a grade, am I ruining their future? Should I put the full force of my chemistry degrees behind their science fair projects so that they might win a ribbon and have something else to add to their list of accomplishments? If I say nothing when they, as I did, write a quirky college application essay on something they enjoy, am I being hands-off or irresponsible? Should I take the essay into my own hands so that the organization and style make it stand out from the crowd? Every instinct I have says no – the special projects and science fairs and essays are competitions for kids, I should encourage their independence and individuality. But everything I read tells me yes - the competition these days is between the parents, and pretending it’s not will only bring disappointment and heartache to my sweet unsuspecting kiddies.

The Perfect Car - An Appreciation

The first car I ever bought in my life was the perfect car. My life moved on, and I outgrew the car, but I still think of it fondly and I sincerely doubt that I will ever have such a wonderful car again. Whenever I see an ocean blue 1991 Mazda Protégé on the road (which admittedly is not too often), I always stop to check if it is mine, even though I know that mine is back in Kentucky somewhere.

I bought the Protégé right before I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. I knew that lots of people bought cars right after college, but since I still thought of myself as a kid, I was really surprised to find myself behind the wheel of a car I owned (or after 60 easy payments of $200 would one day own). For those of you who don’t know, a Protégé is a small, four-door, decidedly unsporty car. I thought it was cute, but basically, it was just a car, the kind of car that would be depicted in a dictionary to demonstrate the meaning of the word “car.” It was the lower end model – with cloth seats and manual locks and windows, but to me it was a luxury automobile because it was mine all mine. Unlike my parents’ cars, the Protégé had a tape player and functioning air conditioning (for years I felt guilty about turning the air conditioning on, since my parents always traveled with the windows open and the vent on). It had automatic seat belts, rear seats that folded down to enlarge the trunk, and a lever inside to open up the gas cap. My favorite part was the “hold” button on the gear shift which would let you accelerate up steep hills without changing gear.

I suppose the care and attention I gave to my first car was not unusual. I washed it every month, got the oil changed on a regular schedule, and bored everyone with stories and praise for my car, much as normal people would bore people with stories of their children. I always kept it locked, as if a ring of car thieves would be gunning for a $12,000 little car. I was in automotive heaven, but sadly, no one else on the road seemed to appreciate my car.

About five days after I moved to Charlottesville, I found a half-inch long ding on the driver’s side door. I was devastated, unable to understand how anyone could cause such injury to such a beautifully engineered vehicle and drive away without a note or offer to repair the damage. Little did I know that that was just the beginning of the abuse my poor little car would suffer at the hands of other motorists. One night in Philadelphia, someone sideswiped the entire driver’s side, denting and scratching both doors. A few months later someone changed lanes without waiting for me to get out of their way, and slammed my car into the jersey wall along the Schuylkill Expressway, leaving a dent and a scrape on the passenger side. I would later find out, this fender bender caused other unseen damage. It started a leak in the trunk that over time caused the entire trunk to become a huge rust basin and bent the rim on the rear wheel which caused the hubcap to fall off every time it was replaced. I bought the car as a student and kept it through a succession of low paying jobs, so the Protégé’s wounds piled up, because I had no money to fix them.

I must admit, the Protégé had a few other problems that it brought with it from the factory. The little clip that was supposed to pop open the door over gas tank was too tight, and would pop right out of the little door onto the ground at the gas station. The brakes it started with must have been as low grade as the manufacturer could get away with, because they had to be replaced after 18 months. The worst flaw was the defrosting system, which did not work in the front. Hot or cold, air conditioner or not, the front window would never defog, and one day the windshield even had ice on the inside that I was trying to scrape off while driving through rush hour traffic. But these were minor inconveniences. Eventually I just removed the clip from the gas tank door and I would open it by pulling the lever with my foot while stretching back to push on the door with my hand. Once I got a lifetime guarantee on brakes at Midas, they lasted for years. And really, how hard is it to stick your head out the driver’s side window and squint when the windshield is too foggy to see through?

Five years into our relationship, the Protégé was no longer pretty, but it was still a great car. I could go hundreds and hundreds of miles on every tank of gas and it handled better in snow than any SUV. It was small enough to parallel park all over the city, but big enough that I wasn’t afraid to drive on the highway. Yet, when I got married, my husband used to infuriate me by referring to my car as a “hoopdee,” mocking the dents and the unconventional method I used to open the gas tank. I still wonder where he got the nerve. I had been together with my car for five years, it was a definite part of my identity, and everyone who knew me knew my car. My husband should have been the one treading carefully – by the time we tied the knot my car was paid for, and he didn’t have one. He was lucky to find a bride that could come into a marriage with such an impressive dowry.

Clearly as a young couple with two careers, we were going to need a second car, so shortly after my husband returned from Korea, we went to a Ford dealer and bought a 1997 Explorer. The Explorer was blue, but in every other way it the opposite of the Protégé. The Explorer was the top of the line model, with leather seats and automatic everything. We had plenty of money and no kids, so we didn’t even think twice about the gas it would guzzle. I admit I thought I was good looking for a truck, and fun to drive, but I left it to my husband. I loved my Protégé, and with my new short commute to work, I only had to put gas in it once a month. When it was time for us to move, we left our daughter with my parents, tuned up the Protégé and drove it to Kentucky together where we could safely leave it while we dealt with the movers.

And so we moved. We had another daughter, and we drove the Protégé and the Explorer well past the happy day when both were paid off. Even my husband came to appreciate the Protégé as the little car that could - it required so little attention, and yet was always up for whatever drive we needed. I viewed the Protégé’s advancing age as an accomplishment, and took pride in the fact that I had been driving the same car for 12 years. Ironically, I never understood why other people liked their old cars - I found it kind of pathetic that people would hold on to a junky car out of sentiment - but I never thought of my car as junky.

And then came baby number 3. We knew that we were going to have to get a new car when we got the new baby, because 3 car seats wouldn’t fit in the Protégé and were hard to manage in the Explorer. My husband thought we should sell the Explorer since it was worth more, but one of our neighbors observed that if we got rid of the Explorer, we would only have one family car. If our new car needed work or an oil change, we’d have to rent a car to go anywhere as a family. And so I faced the big decision. After 12 years together, I knew it was time for my car and I to part company. The Protégé had been the perfect car for me for more than a decade, but it wasn’t perfect for me anymore, not with all these stinking kids, so it was time to let go.

My husband put a “for sale” sign on the car, parked it in the designated area on post, and two days later, someone called with an offer to buy it. As it turned out, we sold it to the family of a woman who worked at our daughter’s preschool. Much as a person who adopted a puppy might inform the prior owner of the dog’s progress, she kept me informed of my car’s performance. Her son removed my college sticker from the back window, got some of the dents fixed, and put in a new stereo. He drove it into a ditch and cracked the frame, but they got it repaired and back on the road. She told me that her son loved his new car, and described how he kept it spotless inside and out. Sometimes I miss my car and my life that went with it, but I’m happy knowing that it has found a good home. I’m not surprised that it has charmed its way into someone else’s heart.