Hidden Dangers in Baby's Nursery Infographic by HCHW

Last month I wrote about Healthy Child Healthy World's free eBook Easy Steps for a Healthy & Safe Nursery last month. Now they've released this informative infographic called Hidden Dangers in Your Baby's Nursery.

Via Column Five for Healthy Child

Share, tweet, and pin! Spread the word to help parents protect children from harmful chemicals during this vulnerable stage of development.

Related posts

• Eco-novice's Top Five Tips for a Healthy Nursery
• Easy Steps for a Healthy & Safe Nursery: a Fantastic Free Resource from HCHW
• Avoiding Toxins in Baby Products
• What Does a Baby Need?
• Non-toxic Crib Mattresses
• In Search of the Affordable Natural Bed
• The Best Time to Try Cloth Diapers

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It's so hard to say goodbye to BPA

I use a can of tomato sauce every Friday night to make pizza.

I've already taken many steps to avoid BPA:

• We use stainless steel sippy cups and water bottles instead of plastic ones.
• We avoid any plastic marked 7, particularly food packaging/ containers and toys.
• I avoid handling receipts and try to wash my hands afterwards if I do handle one.
• I have stopped using most canned foods. For example, I bought a pressure cooker and started making beans from scratch.
• We don't drink canned beverages. 
• I am suspicious of any clear hard plastic.

But there has long been one hold out in the canned food department: tomatoes. This is somewhat tragic because tomatoes are acidic and thus more likely to involve leaching from the epoxy lining of metal cans. I did can diced tomatoes purchased in bulk at the farmer's market with my lovely friend Heidi a couple summers ago, which effectively replaced my canned diced tomatoes. But I have never stopped using canned tomato sauce (Trader Joe's organic tomato sauce, if you really want to know). And now that I am making pizza every single Friday night, I am using a lot of canned tomato sauce. One can per week to be exact.

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Eco-novice's Top Five Tips for a Healthy Nursery

Here are some simple suggestions for keeping your baby's nursery healthy and toxin-free.

Use less. I have three children. My youngest is one year old. The more babies I've had, the less baby stuff I've wanted. Even without switching to greener products, you can expose your baby to fewer toxins just by buying and using less. Buy less furniture and decor, use less baby gear, slather the baby with fewer bath and body products.

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Which Soft-structured Baby Carrier is Better: Ergo or Beco?

I have an Ergo and a Beco Butterfly II, both of which I love and use regularly. I often get asked by friends and family which carrier is better. More specifically, I often get asked, if I only could have one baby carrier, which one would I choose: the Ergo or the Beco?

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The Friday Question: Much Ado About Junk Food?

Kindergarten snack is my nemesis.

Can I gripe here for a moment?

Each day my son gets a snack, provided by a parent, at the end of afternoon Kindergarten (noon to 3:30 pm). Parents take turns bringing snacks. Originally, snack happened during class, but then the teacher decided that snack was taking up too much class time, and moved the snack to the end of the day. I think this is kind of odd all by itself. Why hand out a snack after class when each parent can just bring their own snack or take their kid home for a snack? The long and short of it is, I get to see the snack my son receives every day. He usually eats it in the car on the way home.

Yesterday he came out with a fruit roll-up as well as a bag of pink lemonade to drink. I glanced at the packaging and ingredients of the fruit roll-up:

Fruit Roll-ups: Strawberry Naturally Flavored (Fruit Flavored Snack)
Ingredients: Pears from Concentrate, Corn Syrup, Dried Corn Syrup, Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil, Contains 2% or less of: Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Acetylated Monoglycerides, Fruit Pectin, Dextrose, Malic Acid, Vitamin C, Natural Flavor, Color (red 40, yellows 5 & 6, blue 1)

Continue reading at The Green Phone Booth 

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Easy Steps for a Healthy & Safe Nursery: a Fantastic Free Resource from HCHW

Healthy Child Healthy World, one of my favorite and most trusted sources, has just released an invaluable resource to help parents and other adults keep children safe from toxins: Easy Steps for a Healthy & Safe Nursery. This interactive eBook is 40+ pages and packed with user-friendly information and tips.

I love that the Easy Steps eBook begins with a section entitled "How to Use This Guide" which directly addresses the toxic information overload that so many parents encounter when they first discover the number of toxins in our everyday environment. Next, the eBook briefly discusses why we need to pay attention to chemicals in the environment, including a discussion of childhood diseases that are on the rise -- a great section to share with partners and other caregivers who might need a little convincing that baby products can be unsafe.

The bulk of this eBook, though, is all about solutions. Here are some features you'll find within Easy Steps for a Healthy & Safe Nursery:

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Favorite Sources for Play Food and Dishes

One of my favorite classic toys is a wooden play kitchen, along with the accompanying play dishes and play food. I wrote about our wood play kitchen earlier. We still love it. My only regret is not buying it sooner. I bought it just last year, when I should have purchased it when my first child was a year old. My one-year-old plays with the kitchen the most of all my kids. She is endlessly fascinated by opening and closing the doors, by putting things inside and taking them back out, by dropping things through the sink hole and then opening the door to find them inside.

Here are some of our favorite sources for play food and play dishes.

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Hummus from Dried Beans in 5 Minutes

I used to make hummus from canned beans.
Then I made hummus from garbanzo flour, but I didn't quite like the consistency.
Now I make hummus from dried beans in 5 minutes.

Here's how.

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Holiday Reflections

We did it! We made gingerbread cookies!

The holidays have come and gone again. Our decorations are still up, but the parties and gift-opening and cookie-making are over. Now that I have children old enough to remember their Christmases, I am trying to make them more memorable, more filled with meaningful traditions. Here are some traditions we enjoyed doing this year, as well as some traditions I aspire to doing in the years to come:

Continue reading at The Green Phone Booth

For more great ideas on being green and saving green during the holidays, 

visit my Green Holidays page (continually updated).

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Eco-novice's 10 Most Viewed Posts of 2012

Yesterday I posted the 10 most popular posts that were published during 2012. Here are the posts (published at any time) that were viewed the most often during 2012.

In reverse order for dramatic effect:

10. Stainless Steel Drinking Straws by The Mulled Mind (Giveaway and Review)
  9. The Perfect Child's Cup
  8. Avoiding Toxins in Baby Products
  7. Natural Nursing Pillows
  6. Green Cleaning - DIY Cleaning Recipes
  5. Surprise! Why It's Better to Not Know Your Baby's Gender Until Birth
  4. Goodbye, Teflon. Hello, Le Creuset.
  3. Non-toxic Crib Mattresses
  2. Homemade 100% Whole Wheat Honey Bread (without a bread machine)

And the most popular post of 2012 was:

  1. In Search of the Affordable Natural Bed

Happy New Year!

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