Am I crunchy yet?

Last night, I went with my family to the library, which is always a blast! The main library in our city has been newly renovated with some awesome features for us! There is a really cool kids area, with all these adorable little reading nooks that you can climb into to look for a good book! My 19 month old is ALL about climbing, it is super fun! Then they recently put in this giant light bright board! There are 3 panels on the walls that are maybe 5-6 foot square that are black with holes, and they have these acrylic tubes that you can pop into the holes that light up! Eliana loves these, and she can't get enough of putting the tubes into the holes and watching them light up! She says (in her cute little toddler voice) "WUAIGHT!! WUAIGHT!!" (this is my best attempt at phonetically spelling how Eliana says "Light", but its still not quite right!) Every time, there is this moment of awe, we sometimes get a "woah!" and then hundreds of high pitched, so excited she can barely squeak the word out, "WUAIGHT!" over and over again until she thinks we get how absolutely amazing she thinks this light is! Ah, if pregnancy wasn't so hard, and our issues with bad genetics weren't so hard, I would probably pop out new kids every day! ;) So fun!

Anyways...back on subject... I got a few books on living green while saving money. I started reading one called Shift Your Habit, by Elizabeth Rogers. She also has a website with some more information here. It has been really good so far, some of the things we were either already doing, or have taken a step further. But, it still has a lot of great suggestions. Some I don't see myself doing, but others are really simple, like how much money you save per light bulb per hour if you just turn them off. Or, if you have a multi-bulb lamp, just remove a bulb or two. That saves a certain amount of money per year, and if you do it around your house, there is a much bigger savings. Anyways, things like that, some common sense, some just things I may not have thought of. Plus, I like how she tells you a realistic number on how much making these shifts in your habit can save. She goes into details, like how an average bath tub holds 42 gallons of water, so if you take a 5 minute shower, it is better than taking a bath, but then she has a chart for how many minutes in the shower compares with the number of gallons used. good food for thought! 

Ok, so on the subject of showers, I lived in Peru for a couple summers in college, and well, it is part of the reason why I don't think I would regularly be able to take cold showers! But one hint that they do in Peru is that they turn the shower on and get wet, turn the shower off and use all your soap, shave, whatever, turn the shower on to rinse. This saves a lot of water, and makes taking a cold shower more bearable. In Peru, if you did have a water heater, it was only usually for a very small amount of water, so by the time you got wet, you had to wait for the water to warm up again. The idea, though, holds here too, warm or cold shower, get wet, shower off, lather up, shower on, rinse (and turn it off again if you need conditioner). Something I am considering. Right now just the thought makes me shiver... :)

So today, I took a shorter shower, and went shampoo free for the very first time! I tried the baking soda and apple cider vinegar mix... and I think it might need to be tweaked a bit, but overall it's ok. It doesn't look oily though, what do you think?

I know people usually rant and rave on this method after using it for about a year, and I don't think I feel the same after my first trial. My hair feels soft, but having naturally oily hair and hard water might mean I need 2 tbsp of baking soda per cup of water, and maybe more vinegar? Even still though, I didn't think my hair would do as well as it did. It seems to be soft, and its really just on my scalp that it feels a little oily. I may not have rubbed it into my scalp enough either. But since I am planning on slowly weaning myself off shampoo, I won't be washing with baking soda for another few washes. I think I will fix the mix tonight while it's fresh on my mind! 

The Oil Cleansing Method continues to be the absolute best thing I have ever used! Its hard to tell because of the lighting and bad photography... besides the places I picked at, I am clearing up, my face has no new spots, which is definitely not normal for my face! And did I mention how smooth my face is? From all of my knowledge of face stuff, I would imagine I should be breaking out by the sheer amount of how much I am touching my face because it feels so wonderful! I keep wondering when the honeymoon will end! Haha!