Safety First

The Bachelor Update: 
Fun news! Burger a.k.a The Bachelor left a comment for Bella on the last post! HOORAY! Let me tell you, Bella was dancing all over the place when we read it to her. Yes, my dog can read...but it was much more fun to read it to her as we all danced around in excitement. Ok, well the dancing was semi hilarious considering my stomach and throat were in a whole lot of pain after my whole experience at the hospital and Josh came down with the flu...but it was dancing nonetheless. Anyway, the latest is that there were over 100 submissions and Burger is picking the semi-finalists this week. Keep your fingers...or paws..crossed!!

On to regularly scheduled programming:
So not to be a totally crazy stalker or anything, but the rest of this post also has a bit to do with Young House Love. Yes, I love their blog...and yes I do believe they should be an inspiration to you all as well. Well, let me move on to what I was trying to say and then explain what they have to do with it.

Livearth.org

Joshua and I have been striving to be "green" since we got married. Once we have our house we hope to add in a lot of great eco-friendly elements that should help the earth along with our pockets. We would LOVE to do compost since it is a great way to use up all of our scraps and yard clippings and it also means great nutrient rich soil for the vegetable and fruit garden that I have already been planning. Since we do not have our house yet we have been implementing other things in our daily lives. The biggest one is household chemicals and cleaners. We have slowly been making the switch to "green" cleaners and it has definitely been trial and error. Most people know I can be what they call a GERMIPHOBE. Yes, I admit it and I am gosh darn proud of it. However, a lot of the items that disinfect are the most toxic chemicals in our house (i.e. bleach). This has been our biggest struggle as I try to find something that cleans well, but also gets rid of the flu and cold germs that lurk around our house during this time of year. Even so, we had already made it a personal goal to rid ourselves of all toxic chemicals before we started our family. Babies are a big deal to us and once we are ready to have our own we want to make sure our house is as safe as we are able to make it. We realize how many things are out there that we can't shield our baby from, that's what our Father is for, BUT there are things we can do to help. So, we started scratching our heads to try to figure out what to do about this problem. I didn't mind making up my own cleaners, especially since it would save us money, but most of the items that people would list were things I had never heard of. That bothered me.

Enter Young House Love. Today they featured a smart guy who really knew his stuff about going green. He had great recipes for creating your own cleaners...out of stuff I actually knew! Amazing I know. We plan to start trying stuff out (once we have used up the brand new bottle of cleaner we picked up at the store) and we will let you know what we think. Maybe it will work and maybe it won't, but we can't let this one pass us up! Good luck to those of you out there who try it!

XoXo,
J&M

P.S. This is our favorite way to get our dishes clean without being unsafe for our bodies. It is available at Target. Please note that the packaging has now changed and it is now in a resealable bag.