Making a small change

I’ve been following Hip Mountain Mama’s campaign “One Small Change”. The changes that people are making are inspiring that I find myself thinking about changes we could make. As a family, we have made so many changes over the years to live a greener life that there are not too many obvious options left or that do not entail a huge financial outlay.

Another option is to revisit some of those good changes that we followed for a while and for one reason or another, we dropped. I made a list to see which we could take up again.

Top of my list is making my own baby wipes and solution again. I have done it before and it has so many advantages: the coldness of the wet wipes is not popular, less rubbish, recycle some of the old clothes and baby sheets I have been storing, no dubious chemicals on young skin and so on.

So I’ve gone through my bag of old clothes and cut up two little T-shirts and an old fleece. Coupled with my existing cloth baby wipes this should be an incentive to start again. I have put a solution of olive oil, tea tree and lavender in a pretty jar. I much prefer the scent of these rather than the commercial ones. When I need a baby wipe, all I need to do is add this solution to warm water and soak the wipes.

The little chap is not far off being potty trained, but the wipes will still be handy to clean hands and faces, especially before they pile out the door.

It did occur to me that this is one step away from creating family cloths. We have a septic tank and old drains, so reducing paper would be good all round. I did discuss it with the girls, but I’m not sure they understood. So I have decided to make a few extra bigger baby wipes as a test run. Let’s hope they don’t flush them.