Be sure to enter the GIVEAWAY for the book
The Eco-nomical Baby Guide by Monday (May 31st).
To read part 1 of this Q&A, click HERE.
photo by Gina E. Kelley
Q&A with Rebecca Kelley and Joy Hatch,
Authors of The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide
How did you become interested in frugal and green living (i.e., were your parents hippies?)?
Joy’s parents were the opposite of hippies: Midwesterners. Still they were highly resourceful and saved on the trash bill by recycling, saved on the water bill by taking three minutes showers, and saved on the grocery bill by making almost everything from scratch including bread, yogurt, and ice cream.. Secondhand clothes were very common and touring garage sales was a thrilling family sport.
I [Rebecca] grew up in Nevada, which is not the eco-friendliest place in the world—at least it wasn’t in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I specifically remember watching an Earth Day special on T.V. in 1990 and instantly jumping onto the green bandwagon. I collected glass bottles to take the recycling center and adopted “reduce, reuse, recycle” as my mantra.
How do you gently encourage greener living with spouses, parents, coworkers, friends (besides giving them your book, of course)?
We lead by our wonderful examples! Ha! Joy’s husband, who’s a self-professed lazy environmentalist, was willing to make changes as long as they were incremental. Going green is quite hip out here in the Pacific Northwest so many of our friends have similar lifestyles, but we do come across the occasional person who is shocked that we’re using cloth diapers. When they see how easy cloth diapering has become (no pins!) they’re usually very interested.
What are your best blogging tips for new bloggers? How about for veteran bloggers?
The best thing we learned about blogging is to write short posts! If you look at some of our early posts, you’ll see that they could easily be divided into three or even four separate posts. We’ve been blogging for two and a half years now, and I think we owe this in part to the art of the short-but-sweet post!
I don’t think we have any tips for veteran bloggers. We’re both practically computer illiterate and still don’t know what we’re doing half the time. I just checked out the book Problogger from the library. Maybe it will help us out.
Are you going to keep posting on your blog, Green Baby Guide?
We plan to keep it going as long as it remains fun for us! For Joy, who still has a twelve-month-old sporting cloth diapers, it’s more relevant, but as our kids get older—we may find ourselves growing disconnected from the whole “green baby” world, which is so all-encompassing during pregnancy and those first two years.
We’re not sure yet what our future plans are, but we definitely hope to keep writing about green issues!
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Thank you for answering my questions, Rebecca and Joy (a.k.a. The Green Baby Guide)! Did everyone notice how I immediately implemented their advice to have short posts by splitting this Q&A into 2 posts? I'm still working on keeping my posts short and sweet, since brevity is not one of my strengths (as you may have noticed).
How did you become interested in frugal and/or green living?
Ha! Yes, I did notice that you divided the Q & A in half in order to implement our advice.
ReplyDeleteReading this reminds me that I still haven't read Problogger. . . .
Thanks for interviewing us!
Why is it that men are not taking the Eco-Green trend seriously? HOw do we get more dads to participate?
ReplyDelete