A New Focus for our Lives

Two weeks ago, I abandoned my corporate career in favour of being a stay-at-home mom. Actually, I prefer the term "Domestic Goddess" but I'm not sure that my capabilities at this point warrant it. I'm working on it though.

But more than full-fledged domestic goddesshood, I'm working on being eco-good. In every aspect of our lives. So far, I've taken the following steps:

1) Quit job. This saves many, many tons of carbon emissions in the form of me NOT driving my cute but far from fuel-efficient little truck to work each day, and removes me from active participation in an industry fraught with waste and dedicated to making its products redundant as quickly as possible.
2) Buy local food as much as possible. I'd say we're at about 80% local in our diets right now. All our meat and veg is local, as much fruit as possible (except bananas of course), all our dairy and eggs, and all the honey we use in place of sugar as much as we can. What's not local are our grains (rice and wheat flour primarily), and things like maple syrup, sugar, baking soda, salt, etc.
3) Switched child to cloth diapers. This was done for two reasons - primarily the environmental reason, but also in hopes that she'd be a little less comfy in cloth diapers than disposables and would be thus inclined to start peeing and pooping like a grownup a little sooner. So far, not so much.
4) Switched me to reusable and cloth feminine products. More details on this later.

Staying home has enabled me to have at least 2-3 or more days each week in which I don't drive at all, which is great. Stirling's job is within walking distance, so he doesn't have to drive either.

The challenge is making changes that help the planet without bankrupting us. Some things, like the cloth diapers, may or may not end up being cost-effective, depending on when Rowan potty-learns and when and if we have another child. Other things, like the drastically reduced amount of driving, obviously save us a lot of money. The food is a bit hard to track, since I was buying pretty local before so it's not really a change... it really depends on the food, and frankly this is less about the environment than it is about our health - I like knowing where our food comes from, I like it fresh, and organic - buying local just makes sense for all of those things. But, for the record, our weekly food expenditures are between $150-$175 for our family of 3. Take from that what you will. We eat very little packaged food though - the occasional bag of potato chips makes its way home with us, and Stirling will pick up the odd treat from Chinatown, but that's pretty much it.

In future posts I'll go into more detail about how we made some changes and tips and tricks we've discovered. If you have any tips you want to share, please do!