The Cherrys are going Green

Alright so I know my postings have been pretty sparse lately but I am sure you can understand why. Little Miss Cherry keeps us very busy and I hardly have enough time to write a full post. Once I wrote a How to make your own yogurt complete post with pictures and everything on my phone, this little one knocked it out of my hand and the entire thing deleted. So I am going to rewrite it next time I make yogurt. Anyways I have so many ideas about things I want to write. Some about the baby, some about marriage, others about food, and crafty things, but for now I settled on the topic of going green (mostly because I have had baby focused post for the last million and we need something different thrown in.) 

Now I have always been the tree hugger of my family. I love the planet and I want to help save  it. Also being green really helps save the green. The hubs and I have taken a few steps recently to really move forward on our mini green movement. 

One of the very first decisions we made baby wise after finding out we were pregnant was to use cloth diapers instead of disposables. So far we are one month in and we love it. They are so easy to use and we don't have to worry about making a midnight trip to the shoppette for diapers. We used disposables for the first month because she was just to tiny to fit in her cloth diapers we had bought and I hated them. I hated making so much trash. I hated that we went through them so fast and I hated having to spend so much money on them. 

Just a few from our stash :)

Alright so after the cloth diapers I was like what else can we do to reduce our foot print on little old Earth. I wanted to use cloth wipes. Mr. Cherry put his foot down with a very firm no. He thinks he will get the gross stuff on him because they are to small. I on the other hand use them every now and then. They are just more convenient when you are using cloth diapers. The wipes led me to thinking about our paper towel use. Paper towels... what a waste. I mean people didn't always have paper towels, they used real kitchen towels and real napkins, so why couldn't I? So I did my research and I found  Unpaper Towels. They are thin like paper towels and absorbent enough to dry your hands, clean the counter, wipe your face, and whatever else you use paper towels for. 

These are the ones I ordered: 

Image from Unpaper Towels shop

To go with our new "unpaper towels" I wanted a chemical free cleaner. So I ventured back into the internet and found that vinegar was used as a cleaner. You could even soak some orange peels in the vinegar to make it smell better. So I decided to try it out. 

Soaking in that citrus smell!

After a few days it was ready to be used!

This didn't work out for us. It cleaned great but the vinegar smell was to strong and the hubs didn't like it. I was a little bummed because I didn't know what else we could use that was not chemical filled. And then over the long weekend for Presidents day, I was laying in bed and another solution came to me. Why not use alcohol. Not the stuff you buy for a couple bucks in the pharmacy section of Wally World. I am talking Vodka, not the expensive stuff thought ( you wanna save that for drinking ;) ) So I mixed a solution that would work for us. 

• 1 cup of vodka
• 2 cups of water
• 25-30 drops of essential oils for smell :) 
• I used 15 drops of Lavender and 15 of Peppermint ( it smells wonderful and cleans great too!) 

This solution can be used for so many things too! Cleaning the counters, windows, sink, jewelry, and you can even sprtiz it on some stinky fabric and it will take care of the smell. 

Alright well those are the things we have changed for now. We are looking into a few other ways to green up our lives and I will let you know when that happens.