A Favor

Without a doubt, kids parties are becoming increasingly more expensive. If we, as parents, take our cues from the media, we should be throwing our tots lavish affairs with glamorous cakes and favor bags.

As we all know, I'm cheap and in this economy I'm not spending any extra money I don't have to on favor bags that won't last much past the party anyway. I would much rather spend more money on gifts for the kids than on cheap party favors that don't do much for the environment when they're made and create a lot of waste when they break. It really speaks of our character and judgment when even the moments of levity are disposable.

Having said all of that, I'm not against making a great favor bag with really cool contents. A friend of mine is throwing an Alice in Wonderland birthday party. Unfortunately there aren't kits for Alice in Wonderland that you can just order and not think about. This might cause panic in the less brave but it is a fortunate problem because it causes one to exercise our creative muscles in our brain.

The theme for the party is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. She has a friend coming to entertain the kids as the Mad Hatter himself. The cake can go in so many directions from here. One of my favorite ideas is a cake in the image of a pocket watch!

I donated my creative brain to make the favor bags. For the bags I took regular craft bags and made Alice's dress out of felt to cover up the bag. Inside of the favor bag will be crayons, age appropriate candy and hopefully toothbrushes. The contents of the bags are up to the party giver but I made Alice in Wonderland coloring books using my binding press, card stock and free downloadable coloring pages off the internet.

Decorations for a party don't have to be prohibitive or wasteful either! For a tea party theme, go around to your friends and borrow tea pots and tea cups. Present cup cakes in the tea cups instead of a traditional cake. If you don't have tea cups, buy them from a thrift store and then donate them back when you're done. You will probably spend no more than $.25 per cup and it won't go into the garbage can at the end of the afternoon like a paper plate might.

For games you can use a box decorated with stickers and your child's art, cut a hole in it and make bean bags with beans for a bean bag toss. Because the Mad Hatter's Tea Party was such a crazy party, it's a great party for musical chairs or a game of "freeze". Another active game might be to have all of the kids bring their bike and have a bike parade in front of your house.

Unless your kid's party is going to be on MTV, there is no need to go overboard with a birthday party. Chances are, your kids probably won't remember what party favors they gave out at any of their birthdays or what games they played. My thinking is we do this party dance for the other parents. I for one am much more impressed with how creative a party can be than how many disposable party favors my child comes home with. At the end of the day, if all of the kids have a fantastic time at the party, that's the only thing that matters.

Create less waste and spend less money by looking around and using the resources at your fingertips. If you don't have things around the house to do something, ask a friend. These are the days for asking a favor.

Sesame Street Birthday Party

I started planning our two year old's birthday months in advance.  I knew I wanted a Sesame Street birthday party for him because he *loves* Elmo.  I figured, two months should be plenty of time to get my stuff together and have the bakery bake the perfect cake etc.  So this might not be the best example of Why It Makes a Difference but I am so tired of the character cakes with little thought and imagination at the bakery that I went forth with a vision in mind.  I was looking for a Sesame Street cake that was truly unique.

And then it turns out, I was going to have to just keep looking.  Not only were there no interesting Sesame Street cakes, there were no Sesame Street cakes (or even Elmo cakes for that matter).  So, 18 eggs, 6 boxes of cake, 5 containers of frosting, 30 straws, 2 cardboard cake tiers, 1 container of marzipan, 3 packages of gel pen frosting and a lot of red dye later this is what I created for my son.  It's a three tiered Elmo cake with marzipan eyes, mouth and nose.  (As a side note, I'm allergic to almonds and yes, after an hour of perfecting the perfect marzipan face my hands broke out into angry hives.)  

Hey, it make not be the most beautiful Elmo cake ever attempted but my son immediately recognized him as Elmo and absolutely loved it.  My only concern was that he and his friend who shares a birthday with him, would look at the cake and run away crying.  They identified it as Elmo, giggled at it and ate it.  Mission accomplished.

One word of caution though, the cake ended up to be about 30 pounds and hefting it through the park wasn't exactly what I would call "fun".  Some nutter thought it would be funny to ask for a quarter while I waddled through the park with Elmo parading precariously on the cutting board turned cake plate.  

I also made banners for our two birthday kids and a banner for a table with cookies, we called that cookie monster's table.  I then put up a plastic swimming pool and filled it with plastic balls and small duckies for the kids to toss around.  This was called Big Bird's Nest.

While this may not make a whole lot of difference in anybody elses' life.  Watching my baby have such a good time made my week a whole lot better.  This is the only reason to do it.

Cheers to all of those moms out there who are celebrating Mother's Day!

The Crime of Battery in the 1st Degree

As I write this, I'm preparing myself mentally for turning my husband in for the crime of battery.  That's right, he committed a battery crime.  He took the batteries out of the silent toy and THREW THEM IN THE GARBAGE.  I just about choked I couldn't believe what was happening.

I dug them out of the trash and I pointed to the bag in the utility closet RIGHT NEXT to the new batteries with the label  "USED BATTERIES TO BE RECYCLED" written on it.  His excuse was, "well that's where I have always thrown them."  Yeah, we'll let the jury decide your fate on that flimsy excuse.

The problem is that alkaline batteries contain toxic chemicals, including mercury.  They have a sturdy casing for rough and tumble usage, but they are no match for the crushers and heavy equipment used at landfills.  The result is the casings are damaged and mercury leaks into the environment.  Remember the last couple of years those families who have been evacuated from their homes because of mercury contamination?  It's a serious threat and batteries should be handled as a hazardous material.

If you live in the city of Boise, collect your batteries and then take them to one of the eight mobile drop off sites for hazardous materials.  Above is my current collection of batteries that needs to be dropped off with hazardous materials.  My last collection was truly a sight to behold and I managed to get my neighbor to take it on a trip out to HazMat with her stuff.

To circumvent a trip to the hazardous waste people, consider using rechargeable batteries, particularly those that can charge on a solar current.  Properly disposing of hazardous materials such as batteries, spent nuclear materials, really smelly diapers etc. makes a difference in our environment by cutting down on the number of toxic substances we dump into the landfill and henceforth ALLOW into our air and water.  

Go Speed Racer

Seriously, Go Speed Racer...go away.

We moved into our house 6 years ago.  We had been eyeing this street for a few years before that and had not had the chance to buy on the street because the prices were out of our range.  Finally, the original farmhouse for the platt came up for sale at a reasonable price.  For good reason too, it was a renovation nightmare.  But, I noticed the house across the street was for sale and we checked it out.  It was listed as a rental with two units but was listed with 1 bathroom.  I figured it was a mistake and sure enough, there was another bathroom in the second rental.  The price was fantastic because it hadn't sold as a 1 bathroom house and just like stars lining up correctly, our other house got an offer the same day we put an offer on our house.  (Actually, it was weird, while driving to the real estate agent's offer to put an offer on our house she called and told us there was an offer on ours.)  The result was perfect and we purchased our new house on a quiet street with well manicured lawns.

The only problem with the street was that it did not have sidewalks but the speed limit was 20 mph and we looked at the house at several different times of the day, witnessing no major traffic concerns.  We moved in just in time for Halloween and were converged upon by a group of 10 or 12, mostly parents, who came by to check US out.  What they really wanted to know was whether or not we were going to rent out the basement.  They skipped away jubilantly when we told them we weren't.  Apparently, they took this as a sign that the neighborhood was going back to perfect harmony.

And then came the housing boom.  We're all familiar with this boom and our neighborhood sold houses with amazing speed.  Once the existing houses started to disappear like warm cookies, then developers started to add houses with infill projects.  This added more people to the neighborhood, usually younger people with no families because the infill houses were smaller and more attractive to DINKS (dual income, no kids).  This is where my blog topic steps in.

Over the last 6 years we have seen an increase of traffic on our street.  It wouldn't be so bad if everybody just heeded the speed limit.  Unfortunately, we now have about a dozen people who regularly speed down our 20 mph street at speeds well over 25 mph.  The number of more aggressive drivers that get to our house at speeds over 35 mph is alarming.  We asked the county for a traffic study.  They recognized we had a couple of bad apples but nothing that warranted speed bumps.  They did add a speed limit sign to the end of the street that didn't have one and had the home owner with the brush covering the original speed sign on the street, make the sign actually visible.

This might have changed a few driver's behaviors but there were still the bad apples.  The ironic part of the new speed limit sign was that a speeding driver lost control of their car and took out some bushes AND the NEW speed limit sign not even ONE WEEK after the new sign appeared.  The new speed limit sign was quickly fixed but it just highlighted the problem.

So, we still have the regular speeders down our street.  When our oldest child goes to the neighbor's house across the street, both moms have to stand by the street and make sure all sets of children get across okay.  We are on the ready to jump into the street at the mere sign of somebody not paying attention.

There is little we can do, except this one handy tool: our police department has an online reporting form we can use to report speeding drivers.  Believe me, we're not even bothering with the 25-30 mph drivers and instead only reporting the ones that are WELL above in the 35-40 mph zone.  You would think that there wouldn't be that many to report but I reported two last week and expect to report at least two this week.  The police cannot be everywhere at once so it is our job as neighbors to protect the livability of our streets by taking reasonable actions on our own.  We're not talking vigilante justice, just taking down the license plate number and filling out a form.

There is a real cost to speeding aside from just annoying and panicking moms and dads in residential areas.  A speeding ticket includes a fine, double if you're in a school zone.  Your insurance company then may start charging you a surcharge for having a damaged record.  In some areas one ticket equals an extra $150 per year.  Now, you're $50 fine is costing you $500.

There is another cost though.  In 2005 the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Association) reported 13,113 deaths from speeding related accidents.  The drivers were not impaired, just driving too fast.  See www.nhtsa.dot.gov for more information including a statistical analysis of 2008 driving fatalities.

The number of fatalities increases (obviously) when considering drivers who drive under the influence of any drug.  The NHTSA has a good pdf on children and cars.  Speeding with kids in the car or driving with kids while intoxicated amounts to child abuse and law enforcement is connecting many of those incidents with separate incidents of neglect.  The correlation is unnerving but it really just comes down to: if you don't care about anybody on the road except yourself then you probably don't have much esteem for your own children as well.

Here we get to my big piece of aggravation.  There is this kid on our street, we'll call him Timmy, and Timmy has some sort of mental delay.  We think it's related to fetal alcohol syndrome and his adoptive parents try to do a good job keeping him under control.  The truth is, Timmy bugs the crap out of me.  From April through October this kid regularly jumps in front of my car with his hand held up like a traffic cops.  When he's not jumping out in front of my car, he's riding his bike down the middle of the street without a care in the world and doesn't bother moving to the side of the street when a car approaches.  I call this my "Timmy Aggravation" and have yelled at him on more than one occasion.  This kid is going to get hit by a car one of these days and no matter how irritating this is, I just don't want to see a kid get killed on our street while I did nothing about the speeders.  It says something about a person who is willing to watch illegal activity right under their noses and can calmly go on as if nothing was happening.  If we want change, we have to recognize that change begins with us in all areas of our lives.

It makes a difference how you drive in residential areas.  There are Timmy-types all over the country.  Running over a kid is not like running over a squirrel.  There are very real repercussions for hitting a kid and they don't stop with legal ramifications.  The scars of killing or maiming a child while speeding carelessly on a residential street would haunt a person forever.  It is time we all make a difference in our neighborhoods by being more careful about how we drive and taking the stand that speeding is not acceptable for any reason.  If you have a true medical emergency that makes speeding required, you should call for an ambulance.  Speeding is just not acceptable.

Timmy still bugs the crap out of me but I'm willing to do this even for him.

Spring Training

Maybe you're not in the same league as Ty Cobb or Lou Gehrig but you still need to manage your home field grass.  The beginning of Spring is the perfect time to practice incremental environmentalism and change one polluting habit, how you mow your lawn.

You already know that you spend a decent amount of money on watering your lawn and finding creative ways to keep it green.  Most people are not aware that their lawn mower is a heavy polluter, worse than your car.  In fact, a small gas lawn mower spews a whopping 4 times the pollution than your car in ONE HOUR of operation.  It's the equivalent of 11 cars on the road for a big mulching mower and 34 cars for a riding mower all driving 55 mph for an hour.  These emissions include carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and un-burnt hydrocarbons.  Did you ever notice you wreak after mowing the lawn?

So, why is the lawn mower a bigger polluter than your car and why do you end up smelling like Pigpen when you're  done mowing your lawn?  Your lawn mower doesn't have a catalytic converter.  The device, a standard on cars since the 1970's, lowers emissions.  It would make the lawn mower cost prohibitive and too big for the average consumer to add one, so figuring that they only get used once per week during the grass growing season, lawn mowers were never given a catalytic converter.

If that's not enough to make you want to second guess your lawn mower, then another shocking item is that each year Americans manage to spill 17 million gallons of gas when filling up our lawn mowers.  Don't believe me?  Watch any 13 year old fill up a lawn mower's gas tank.  Even I get drips down the side of the tank sometimes.  This wastes a precious fossil fuel and contaminates the ground water and soil.

The end result is a heavy polluter that most people don't think anything about because you can pick one up at the hardware store for as cheap as $150.

So, what's the solution?  

1.  Re-think your landscape without grass.  Grow edible plants!  Throw down rock; plant a flower garden or you can even invest in ornamental grasses that never require cutting and require less water than traditional lawn grass.  The downside is that grass helps cool down the planet unlike black asphalt or dark rock that can heat things up.  The other downside is that kids, swing sets and rock do not mix.  (Although, you don't need grass for a good playground.  San Francisco has a fantastic urban playground on the roof of the Moscone Convention Center.  The play surface is recycled from old tires, shoes and other discarded rubber items and it's thrilling to walk and run on.  The colors come in an enticing array of colors others than black.)
2. Buy an electric lawn mower.  The cost is in the same range as a traditional gas mower.  The downside is the power.  While it only costs about $5 a year to operate, you have to run an extension cord and you're bound to the grid for your power.  If the lights go out or you run over your extension cord, there is no mowing for you.
3. A push mower.  Yes, the kind your grandparents had.  No emissions, no fossil fuels and little maintenance (just sharpen the blades once per year and spray the works with a little WD-40 every once in a while). The downside?  If you have a really big lawn, you might have to start mowing again as soon as you finish.
4. Battery and solar powered mowers.  It's not too far off when battery powered mowers will be a mainstream item.  However, they cost a few hundred dollars more than an electric or gas mower so you probably won't find a battery operated mower at Home Depot.  The downside here is cost and they aren't as readily available.

While none of the solutions are without downsides I think we can all make a difference by employing several of the strategies to get us closer to shutting off the gas mower.

Here is what we did: we replaced our mower with a push mower.  It does require more work to operate but we found that we could mow our lawn and it only really added 15 minutes to mow our 1/4 of an acre of grass.  The best part is there are no fumes and little noise.  You can listen to your iPod at a safe volume while you mow.  The kids can be outside while you mow because it doesn't send debris flying off at eye gouging speeds.  It is great exercise, although I was easily able to mow the lawn when I was 8 months pregnant.  

Next we started chipping away at the amount of grass we have.  Wherever possible, we have or are in the process of replacing grass with gardens.  Some of the garden space contains drought resistant (low water) flowering plants while the rest of the garden is edible.  However strange it may seem, there will be tomatoes growing in our front yard this year.  The winter months might be a bit of a visual challenge but the grass doesn't look so great in the winter either.  We will probably have a lot of kale, garlic and onions planted.

The end result is the kids still have grass to play on, we have vegetables growing to save us grocery money and we are not spewing angry fumes when we mow.

Gas powered mowers are a real part of our pollution and energy consumption problems.  By changing our lawn mowing habits we are decreasing pollutants.  Reducing this particular pollution makes a huge difference, especially for vulnerable people like kids with asthma.

Whine? No! Part II

The 20% discount sale at Albertsons ends tomorrow at midnight (4/07/09); be there before midnight strikes.

Given this information, I went back for a THIRD wine adventure.  This time I went with all Columbia Crest Wines.  The rebate is for the Grand Estate or Two Vines collections.  I came to know the Grand Estates wine through a wine enthusiast who was head over heels in love with one of the 2003 reds.  Given his recommendation and my limited knowledge (aside from, "ugh, good, Nikki Like"), I have kept my eye on this brand.

To make life simpler for my blog, Albertsons not only priced the Two Vines merlot, cab and chardonnay all at $7.49 but also discounted them the same so all 6 were $6.58.  Okay, math time.  The 6 bottles at the $6.58 reduced price came to $39.48.  20% off takes $7.89 off the total price.  Cost after the 20% = $31.59.  Now take off the $18 rebate (remember the tag around the neck of the wine bottle?); my total cost was $13.59 for 6 bottles of wine.

New tip: if you want to do more than one rebate program with one trip to the store, ask the cashier for a duplicate receipt.  The rebate requests an original receipt but the head of the wine department at the Albertsons on 16th and State in Boise said they will accept a duplicate receipt from the register.  Remember to read the rebate instructions very carefully.  They're tricky.

Have fun.

Whine? No!

The other night I bought 6 bottles of wine for $7.92.  I am now and have been for quite some time, a coupon/deal freak.  I love going to the store and not paying full price for anything that I bought.  On this particular night, the only item I paid full price for were the popsicles that sent me to the store in the first place.

You're probably more interested in the wine though.  Most places will give you a discount if you buy enough bottles of wine.  Albertsons normally gives you a 10% discount if you buy 6 bottles, plus you get the free wine bottle tote bag.  However, on this particular occasion, the 6 bottle discount was raised to 20%.  A discount of 10% is good, a discount of 20% is phenomenal.  It has the power to turn a $20 bottle of wine into a $16 bottle of wine (or if you're rather like me, it turns a $10 bottle into an $8 bottle).

20% was too great to pass up so I set about looking for 6 bottles I would like to go home with.  My standards aren't THAT low but I confess it's easy to entertain my inner wino for less than $10 per bottle. My default bottle of "cheap and good" wine is Robert Mondavi's merlot.  It tastes smooth and nothing like rotting cabbage or vinegar.  It's a very drinkable wine with nothing that curls your toes, eyebrows etc.  You should be aware that this is the extent of my wine review abilities.  (ex. Does it taste like something that has sat in a horses stall for a month?  Is it sour, too sweet?  Does it make your face contort?)  Robert Mondavi's wine is mellow and tastes good.  One friend told us over a bottle of Mondavi's merlot, "I'm enjoying the shit out of this wine."  There you have it.  Don't give me reviews about the fruity overtones, I have no idea what that's REALLY supposed to mean.  I taste wine when wine is what is in a glass.

My bottle of Mondavi had one of those super irritating tags on the neck of the bottle.  I regard those like I do advertisements on windshields, assinine and not worth the effort to remove it intentionally.  If you look closely at those silly attachments sometimes they are an advertisement touting the benefits of a particular wine (fruity overtones etc).  In the last year, with the coming out of many fellow cheapwads, these around the neck pieces of paper have evolved into rebate coupons.  Robert Mondavi's merlot had a tag around the neck telling me that if I bought 1 bottle of their wine or any other pictures on the tag, then sent in my original receipt and the UPC code from the wine, they would send me $3.  If I bought 2 bottles of wine, they would send me $6.  This whole offer taps out at, coincidentally, 6 bottles of wine.  If you buy 6 bottles of Mondavi and associates wine, fill out this tag from around the neck of the wine bottle and send that in with the original receipt, these people will send you $18!

Okay, so now we have wine discounted 20% with a rebate coupon for $18.  I used this opportunity to try other wines in the Mondavi family that were approved for the rebate.  Low and behold most of the wines were on sale with a Preferred Discount card.

This is about how it went (the receipt is long gone on its way to claim my rebate already), I bought 6 bottles with an average price of $5.40.  Yes, ordinarily that would be unrealistic to buy any wine for $5.40 that doesn't make you cringe when swallowing but once again, most were on sale.  6 bottles for $5.40 comes out to $32.40.  Take off the 20% discount and you have a price tag of $25.92.  Turn in your rebate for $18 and your final price is $7.92 for 6 bottles of wine for a SAVINGS of $24.48.

A better example might be if your average bottle cost $7.  That's $42.00 for all 6 bottles.  With 20% off it comes to $33.60.  With the $18 rebate it comes in at a grand total of $15.60 for six bottles of wine, a SAVINGS of $26.40.

It's not just the Mondavi family of wines with this $18 rebate offer.  I found several different wineries with the same rebate offer of $3 per bottle.  There are some higher end wines with $4 per bottle rebates.  Albertsons will also special order a brand if they don't have it.  One of my favorite bottles right now when I'm feeling flush with money or horribly depressed, is Girasole from Mendocino, California.  It's an organic winery and it's difficult to find but at $12 per bottle it leaves me without family friendly words to describe how much I enjoy it.

Now for the best part?  Albertsons has extended their 20% off sale until 4/12/09.  Now go out and stock up your wine rack!

Cheers,

Nik