A new, "green"er outlook

This past week I was blessed with the opportunity to not only visit with some good friends who treat us like family, but with my mom as well.

On our drive out of town we saw some sunflowers growing wild on the side of the road. This year they are all over up here. So J indulged me and stopped so I could take a few pictures. There were so many bees around these flowers it was amazing, we discovered when we left there were was a bee farm about 300 feet away, go figure :P

We first went up to see our friends near Chico. It was such a delight to see them, and a truly positive and encouraging experience. My friend has been diagnosed with diabetes and has to loose quite a bit of weight in the hopes that her condition will be healed. She and her husband are on a strict diet, one I am not sure I'd be able to stick to. She has lost a good amount already and continues to show good progress. She is in our prayers. We had a great time visiting, and as always it seemed too short a visit.

This  year even though they had a late spring and there was still a lot of snow on Lassen, we were able to make it clear up to the Emerald lake, which is completely frozen over:

Caution Thin Ice!

I was also able to get a few good pictures of the kiddos while we were in the park :

My little explorer N

N watching people through snow balls behind me, this seriously intrigued
him to the point that at the next rest stop he threw one at me... OH Boy!

My little cutie M

This is right before she noticed there were pebbles around
her and tried to eat them.. Gotta love it.

And a picture with sweet dear Alyssa:

Alyssa and I on the snow bank obscuring the view to the Emerald Lake

After leaving their house we stopped in Chico to visit some more friends. Unfortunately my good friend had gone to a BBQ and wasn't there to see us. I was pretty bummed out. and again the visit was much too short. Chico was ridiculously hot and humid. I absolutely was overwhelmed when we got back into the car. My oh so nice Honda decided that its not going to blow cold AC air anymore. In fact even on the coldest setting the air feels like its shooting directly off the engine at ridiculous heats.

We got to my moms pretty late, which is OK because she is up late every night. We got settled and the next day we went into Stockton, which was an adventure. We went to Jo-Ann fabrics and got 2 more fabrics for carriers, I actually got several made up while I was at my moms house. She has an older Pfaff Tipmatic sewing machine, it sews like a dream and now I am home sewing on my Singer and so sad. I want a Pfaff now.

My mom has been suggesting to me that I switch to cloth diapers for a few months now. Its what she did with my sisters and it saved her a lot of money so she thought I should give it a try.. I have been resisting this for the obvious reasons, but I went online and researched how much I could save in only 6 months of using cloth and I had to re-evaluate. 6 months of cloth diapering will save me over $500.00 and that's not including wipes.

So while at Jo-Ann's we got PUL fabric and flannel to make some diaper covers and bought some diapers to use. I decided to use Velcro to secure them and we got elastic for the legs. It worked out pretty well. I got several fabrics, green and pink PUL, and enough elastic to do many many covers. I got home and whipped out a couple for M to start using immediately. The Velcro wasn't the best idea, M likes to rip her diapers off. The first one I put on her she pulled the cloth diaper out of her cover and was chewing on it.. Don't worry it was still clean and dry. She then periodically ditched her diaper entirely by ripping off the Velcro straps. It was a nightmare.

One of the diaper covers before snaps.

After discovering that snaps were really necessary I got online to check out prices. At Jo-Ann's they wanted $10.00 per diaper's worth of snaps.. I had to find a better deal. I looked online and found a company called KamSnaps, http://www.kamsnaps.com, who sells plastic snaps for diaper covers and such. I got snap pliers and 200 snaps for under the cost to do 4 diaper covers through Jo-Ann's, a huge savings to me! I ordered the package and got a discount on the snaps for doing so, about a 25% discount. They also did free shipping so my overall cost per diaper cover was super low~YAY~

We left my mom's with 3 carriers made up completely, 1 half done (I ran out of thread) and 2 more cut out and ready to sew. I need to get more fabric for the bags and hats for the others. I felt really accomplished and good about not having to buy diapers any more. It was freeing to not have to worry about where that $70.00 a month was going to come from.

We got home late at night and got settled in. The next morning we went out to check out our pumpkins to see how they survived the ridiculous heat wave we escaped for the 4th. They have gotten so big that they started attacking our other plants!

Today I made up some baby wipes out of old flannel receiving blankets and a concoction that I found on http://moneysavingmom.com consisting of 1/4 cup baby wash, 1/4 cup baby oil, and 2 cup hot water. I folded the wipes into an older disposables container then I poured the concoction over the prepared wipes and let them soak it up. I used them and they were excellent! They were soft yet strong and cleaned up diaper mess quickly without irritating my sweet little M's skin.

Also today I decided to make some insert type cloth diapers to use . I used the Gerber cloth diapers I had and some cream colored flannel:

We also did a lot of planting today, I repurposed an old plastic tote which had no lid into a salad planter box for the back deck, in a few weeks I should have some lettuce for salads and we are super excited about that!

I guess that's enough for now, hope you enjoyed my massive update :)

~C