At 9am this morning our Live Green challenge commenced!
Are we ready? No.
Will it ever be convenient? Probably not.
Do we really need to do this?  Yes.

My family and I usually carry on with life thinking we do pretty well in terms of sustainable behaviour - Mr 2 is in cloth nappies most of the time, we recycle, we have a green waste bin collection and haven't had Gladwrap in the house for at least 5 years.  We turn lights and appliances off when we're not using them and use the cold water cycle on the washing machine.  But the truth is we could do better. Much better.  And we owe it to the next generation to make more of an effort.  We need to stop cruising through life doing the "easy" stuff and try a few different approaches to lightening our impact on the planet.  So I'm stoked to be taking part in this challenge - yes, it would be AWESOME to win a heat pump, but even if we don't I hope we will discover a few ways to be more sustainable in our day-to-day lives which makes it all worthwhile.

I thought about spending most of the weekend preparing for this week, but then figured that would leave me nothing to experiment with or write about each day so I've instead decided to integrate a few new "green" practises each day.  Yesterday we started easing ourselves into it.  It was Mothers' Day and my gift was Wendyl Nissen's book - Domestic Goddess on a Budget.  It's a book I'd been meaning to read for a while but hadn't quite got there.  It's full of all sorts of recipes and ideas for home made cleaning products that save you money, and by using less chemicals and packaging they are also a lot greener.  I'm really looking forward to trying them out this week.

We gave my mother in law a lovely cook book for Mothers' Day, and it came with a gorgeous tea towel.  Instead of wrapping the whole lot in paper, I used the tea towel and a pretty bit of ribbon (saved from another gift) to package it up.  It looked fantastic and that is certainly an idea I intend to use again - you could use not only tea towels, but scarves or even scraps of vintage fabric to wrap gifts - the wrapping becomes part of the gift and I guarantee people will comment on your creativity!

We're also going TV free this week.  Now that's not only going to save electricity, but it will be more socially sustainable - we'll be spending more quality time as a family.

That's about enough from me for now, but just to close I want to leave you with a quick note about cloth nappies.  I LOVE cloth nappies!  Ask any of my friends and they'll tell you I have an addiction.  I certainly never dreamt I'd grow to be so passionate about something that contains my baby's bodily fluids, but here I am.  In fact we recently had our first family holiday, during which we had to use disposables and I hated it (not the holiday of course, the nappies)!  Until this week we have used a disposable nappy at night, but this challenge has made me commit to being a 100% cloth mama and so far, so good.  Mr 2 loves his nappies too - they are such pretty colours!

This morning's hints:

Cloth nappies!

Cold cycle on the washing machine

Reusable gift wrap (to wrap really useful gifts)

Try going TV/Internet free (even for a few days per week)