You see, I have made a promise, a pledge, a commitment.

But there’s a catch.

No I’ve not sold my soul to a malingering monkey disguised as Elizabeth Taylor.

And I haven’t agreed to shave my head in aid of homeless alcoholic shrews

And I definitely won’t be dunking my biscuits in a bucket of squid

But, if I fail, if I fall in the face of adversity, then I will allow Miss M, that is Miss M my 4 year old daughter, to do my make up, and will then post a picture of it on my blog.

Bear in mind this is the child who thinks more is more.  When she crayons a picture she tends to go for the multi-coloured look, and erm, realism isn’t her thing, so I could be in trouble here people.

So what have I pledged to do?

Well, having been tagged by the fabulous Almost Mrs Average over at the Rubbish DIet, I have joined a merry band of parent bloggers in supporting Recycle week 22nd-27th June.

You can see my pledge by clicking here… 

It may sound an easy task, except at my new house I don’t have a composter, and I’m not sure I’ll be getting one anytime soon or where I’ll put one, so, I’ll be composting by storing my fresh fruit and veg waste, tea bags, lolly sticks, gerbil bedding etc in a lovely box, then ferrying them over to my parents house to feed their garden beast.

Nice right?

The lovely Almost Mrs Average says:

“to spread the word about Recycle Week amongst the British Mummy Blogger network whose talented members are always up for supporting a good cause. Who knows, maybe I can turn them into Mummy Garbloggers too.

So today I am launching a new meme tag, with the challenge to see how many of the 300-or-so BMB members can sign up to a Recycle Week pledge over the next two weeks as well as blog about it!

And the rules are easy:

1. Visit www.recyclenow.com and sign up to one of the pledges to waste less.

2. Share details of your pledge on your own blog.

3. Chose five other bloggers, who will also be up for a bit of recycling fun.

4. Come back to this post at The Rubbish Diet and share your pledge with others, by placing a link to your pledge in the comments field.

5. Optional – as a thank you to all involved The Rubbish Diet will be publishing a British Mummy Bloggers’ Recycle Week carnival on Monday 29th June. To be included, simply submit your favourite post revealing the progress of your pledge by Saturday 27th June – email to karen[at]therubbishdiet[dot]co[dot]uk.”

Seems pretty simple right? 

SO, I am tagging:

1.  Mr Dan the man over at All That Comes With It who is looking for volunteers for his next big walk in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust.

2. The lovely Emily at Maternal Tales from the South Coast

3. The fabulous Laura from Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy

4.  The gorgeous Tasha (Coding Mummy) at Wahm-Bam 

and

5.  The blumming marvellous Tara at Sticky FIngers

And even if you’re not tagged, if you can, take the time to make a pledge, you probably won’t regret it…

Hee hee. 
 

P.S  Don’t forget to enter my competition to win cycling safety gear by leaving a comment here.

and, if you’ve been following the brilliant writing of xbox4nappyrash but haven’t popped in for a while, go here for an even bigger smile than usual.

Blog Carnival

Welcome to the November 13, 2008 edition of Carnival of Trash.  We have a ton of rubbish posts for your enjoyment and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your submissions, and to thank the fabulous and not-at-all-rubbish Almost Mrs Average for her organization and inspiration.  

Now let’s get trashy… 

Recycling

Cindy presents Recycled Net Market Bag posted at My Recycled Bags.com, saying, “Here is my latest trash to treasure crafting project. It’s a plarn (plastic yarn created from recycled plastic bags) into this reusable market bag. It’s makes a handy and strong grocery tote or beach bag.”

Reducing Waste

Wenchypoo presents When the Clutter Isn’t Your Own posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket, saying, “Update to story: we ended up taking in the in-laws cat ourselves. It also took 6 dumpster loads to finally reach bottom in that house.”

Wenchypoo presents Lost: Simple Basic Yard Sale posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Wenchypoo presents Fun With Reverse Shopping posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Beth Terry presents Less Impact Cats eat homemade food posted at Fake Plastic Fish, saying, “In which Beth eliminates 21 cans, a cardboard box, and a plastic overwrap every week by making homemade cat food. Not entirely zero-waste, but a significant improvement. I guess letting them outside to catch mice and birds would really be zero-waste, but not so eco-friendly actually.”

Jo Beaufoix (that’s me, your host) presents I have something to show you.  A post that will hopefully inspire some of you to begin your own Rubbish Diet, though it looks like you’re al pretty much on your way.

Rethinking

Wenchypoo presents Turning White Elephants into Work Horses posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Wenchypoo presents The Best of Everything posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Heather Levin presents Why Live In A Micro Home? posted at The Greenest Dollar.

Raymond presents Drinking Bottled Water – Is the Extra Convenience Worth The Cost? posted at Money Blue Book.

Mrs Green presents Back from the bowels of my fridge posted at MY ZERO WASTE, saying, “On Monday I arrived safely back from the dark, deep, rather smelly bowels of my fridge. I had a spot of Divine Inspiration while I was scrubbing hard cream off the shelves. Find out what my epiphany entailed”

Jen presents Day 127: Birthday Bounty Without the Wrapping posted at The Clean Bin Project, saying, “Even when we live green lifestyles, we sometimes make “exceptions” during special events like birthdays. We recently had two birthdays here at the Clean Bin, and we tried as much as possible to make them consumer and waste free.”

Almost Mrs Average presents Am I Insane? You decide posted at The Rubbish Diet, saying, “It never used to be like this.”

Reusing

Wenchypoo presents Treasure From Trash–A “Retirement” Occupation posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Wenchypoo presents Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket: Holiday Dinner from the Dumpster posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Wenchypoo presents Cheap Diesel From Trash posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Annette Berlin presents 20 Crafty Ways To Use Up Fabric Scraps posted at Craft Stew, saying, “My grandmother always had a mountain of fabric scraps. Leftovers from sewing projects, hems cut off pants, recycled out-of-style skirts, old pillowcases; everything was added to the pile. If you have your own fabric scraps, here are 20 crafty uses for your excessive of riches.”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of trash using our carnival submission form where the theme of all posts should be related to CHRISTMAS. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Everything I have asked her to do she has ignored and I have found myself falling into that annoying place where, like Baby Annabelle, I am stuck repeating a small cluster of phrases over which I have no control.  I am at the mercy of a small child pressing a button, and she just keeps on pressing.

“Put that down please M.”

“No, put it down.”

“Stay near Mummy.”

“Don’t touch.”

“No.”

“Do not climb on the display.”
 
“If you do that one more time it will be a warning.”

“Ok.  First warning.”

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, second warning.”

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, third warning, that’s it, no TV.”

“Arghhhhhhhhhhhh.”

We approach the counter and I fumble for my purse while Miss M dances lightly around the barrier, then ducks underneath it taking with her a rack full of Barbie Mittens and Roary the Racing Car belts.

Me:  ”M, come here and help me pick these up please.”

I turn to the assistant, apologising while she attempts to hide a smile as my ‘adorable’ little girl crouches down and loads her skirt with her fallen spoils.  Between slotting my card into the machine and typing in my pin I manage to restock the shelves and pull Miss M close with a few words of warning.

And what does Miss M do?
 
She lifts her head.  Her eyes are wide and shine with the possibility of tears.  Her lips are slightly parted and dip down at the edges, echoing the lines of her shoulders, slumped and rounded.  She looks like a tiny bird cornered by a hungry cat, and her eyes flit between me and the cashier as she says;

Miss M:  ”Mummy, can my still have some dinner?”

Really?  Hee hee.

And calling all recyclers and environmentally friendly people, and by that I mean you lot.  I’m hosting a Carnival Of Trash for inspiring  Almost Mrs Average and would love you all to submit one of your ‘Green’ posts.

As Mrs A says; “Submissions should be examples and inspirational stories about how you or anyone you know is helping to eliminate landfill waste. Items can be anecdotal accounts or examples of good practice of how frustrations are dealt with. Please feel free to share news about fabulous products, people and organisations that promote recycling. Examples of poetry, photos of trash or trash as an artform are also welcome.”

The Carnival of Trash can be hosted by anyone interested in the subject of rubbish and the great thing is your blog doesn’t need to be entirely focused on trash in order to host it. The only requirement is that you have already contributed a post about the subject.

The carnival will be published on November 13th, so I need any submissions in by November 10th.  If you are interested in featuring an article\post from your blog or website, please go to here.

Having checked out my Carbon Footprint I knew there were things we could improve on so I vowed to make some changes including getting cavity wall insulation, car sharing and turning appliances off instead of keeping them on stand by.

And our results??

Our old footprint is the red and our new the dark green so I think we’re doing pretty well. There are still things we can change, for example using the car less, buying a diesel and improving on our ’stand by’ efforts which we haven’t quite reached yet.

As a family we also decided to change all our light bulbs to Energy Efficient ones, even though it meant buying new fittings in some rooms.

So, did we do it? Well what do you think?

So not only have we been slimming our bin the Almost-Mrs-Average way (including buying energy saving lightbulbs which means less waste for landfill), we’ve also shrunk our collective Beaufoix feet and will now all undoubtedly go to the Ball as they’re probably tinier than Cinderella’s comparitively enormous great loafers.

Sighhhh, it’s not a bad start right?

This post was written as part of Rubbish Diet’s Carnival of Trash. Go and visit if you get chance and be inspired to change your lives and change the world. And anyone else who took up the light bulb challenge please let me know how you got on. Can you believe it’s been a year??

We’re having an amazing time.  The weather has been boiling hot AND it has poured with rain but it’s what we’re used to so we’re ok.

Today we stalked the great white shrimp down amongst the craggy sea filled hollows and caught a few, but the hammer head shark evaded us, sorry dad.

And I was yet again a bad mummy, because, erm, I let Miss M pee in a rock pool.

(Shielding myself from the gasps of horror and disgust.)

(This wasn’t the pool.)

I promise we were too far away to get to the toilet in time and nobody was nearby. 

I promise I chose a tiny pool that looked empty and had just a few pebbles in it and already looked a bit green and stagnant.

I promise I wouldn’t have let her do erm, anything else… 

..but I did feel kind of guilty.  She’s only 3 though, so she only does tiny little wees,   seriously, a small haddock probably adds more to the ocean than Miss M, she eats and drinks like a mouse.

One think that did worry me a little though, was the oily rainbow we added to the water each time our hands dipped into the crystal clear pools. 

EvenMiss E noticed;

Miss E:  “Will our suntan cream hurt the fish?”

Me:  “I don’t know babe.  I hope not, but I don’t know.”

And part of me was thinking, ‘it’s so sad that the stuff we use to protect ourselves from an environmental danger we unwittingly created, could now be further harming the environment.’

Then I thought, ‘Chill out Jo, time for ice cream.’

It’s a little bit special.

I’ve never shown it to anybody before. No, that’s not true, I have shown it to one other person, but otherwise you’ll be the first to see it.

Ready?

Da daaaaaa

Sighhh, lovely isn’t it?

So why am I showing you my overstuffed and unsightly wheelie bin?

Well, my wheelie bin is unhappy. Really really unhappy. For the last few years he has been fed until fit to burst, then purged of his undigested lunch on a two weekly basis by ‘the lorry’.

The thing is, Simon (well I’ve got to call him something), stinky Simon has a crush on the the lorry. He believes she is a thing of beauty, an angel in the guise of, erm, a large heavy goods vehicle with mechanical extras, but she cannot see past his bulging lid, the flies, and the extra bags that hang around waiting to climb in when she has relieved him of his innards.

Are you with me?

Do I need to recap?

• Bin is too full
• Bin fancies lorry
• Lorry thinks bin is a disgusting greedy porker
• Bin is sad

Simon told me his story one night over a glass of Heineken and a muller light yogurt and I realized of course that it was all our fault. We overfed our bin. We left him bulging at the seams, swollen, aching, not even able to close his lid properly and no sooner was he emptied we filled him again with the left over bags we couldn’t fit in before.

Alas, what were we to do?

But fate was at hand. My lovely blog friend 21st Century Mummy aka Almost Mrs Average was already making headway into the realms of lowering your landfill waste by creating The Rubbish Diet in her own efforts to produce Zero Waste. She asked me if I would like her to design a personal programme to help me slim my bin and after sending photos, filling out a questionnaire about our waste habits and the area in which we live, she did just that.

We began our rubbish diet about a month ago.

We bought one of these…

..a happy side effect of which is that the slugs seem to love it so I’ve not had any in my kitchen for a while.

We’re using loads more of these, so we no longer have a ton of carrier bags littering our cellar stairs like a shiny plastic carpet covered in Schmesco logos.

And, almost Mrs Average found out that we could recycle cardboard drinks cartons in our area, and that our blue bin which is also emptied every two weeks can now receive yogurt pots and other recyclable plastics, so all of that, along with our glass waste now goes to the great God of recycling instead of into a big mucky hole on the ground.

So we’re doing ok.

And how is Simon?

I can feel the anticipation.

Well one month on, and our bin went out like this.

And apparently that saucy minx of a lorry winked at him and gave him her number.

Result.

We were aiming to cut our landfill waste by 50%, and we’re really on the way. I know it won’t be like this every week, but we’re doing much better and are now being so much more careful about what we buy, i.e. what it’s packaged in. I could give you a long list of the little changes we’ve been making, but that would be long and this post is already long enough, so I’m going to give you a little bit at a time over the next few weeks.

One thing though, it hasn’t been all that hard.

And it feels good.

(And my wheelie bin didn’t have a name before this post I promise. We don’t generally name household objects. Except the kids.)

This morning, as she sat in the hairdressers minding her own business, her eyes flicked absently to the window then back to the magazine on her lap, then back to the window.

You see, in that momentary glance, when her thoughts were elsewhere and her eyes were scanning her surroundings without actually looking at anything properly, she thought she saw…

..wait for it, she thought she saw a naked man on a bike.

So like any normal person would, the moment her otherwise engaged mind received the message from her eyes, and registered “man, bike, penis,” she awoke immediately from her thoughts and looked back through the steamy glass, expecting of course to see a man in a flesh coloured cycling outfit, or with an awkwardly placed bicycle pump.

But instead she saw, man bike penis, man bike penis, man bike penis, again and again and again.

All shapes, sizes, ages and colours were peddling happily past the salon’s large frontage. (And that was just the bikes.) Some were hairy, some were shaved, some were tanned, some were pasty or red, others were painted brightly, but all were naked.

Frankly it was a bit of a shock. She glanced at her stylist in the mirror. They laughed. Swapped a couple of, “Blimey, you don’t see that every day do you?” type comments and as Claire later told me, she didn’t know if her “cheeks were red from the drier or from all the naked flesh.”

So why the naked blokes on bikes? I asked her, giggling down the phone.

And she explained that it was something to do with cyclists riding to be noticed, the idea being that if you notice them nude then you should be able to see them at other times, kind of a call for motorists to be more aware of cyclists on the road. And I thought to myself, ‘That is so cool but it would only happen in Brighton.’

But, I was wrong, apparently this is happening across the UK, AND, the rest of the world.

This is so cool, yet worries me just a little. I mean, I have in my head dangly bits and bicycle chains…Ouch.

It doesn’t seem to be worrying this man though.

I can just hear him, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

Lovely AOJ over at the Lurchers wants us to describe in words and/or pictures our favourite walk.

So we had a lovely day planned today. We would visit Mr B’s mum, aka Grandma, and go on the lovely walk over the field to the park, then back home by the river.

But then the rain and the hail and the thunder thwarted our plans, so I decided to tell you about our fab day at Willowtree farm on Saturday which was a beautiful sunny day, but then I though, nahhhh, I’ll use words…

So,

The Walk…

Across the road from Grandma’s house,
About four houses down,
There lies a secret passageway
that leads into the brown
and grass bare field where football’s played
and big kids scrape their knees
And children ride their bikes and boards
and hang from friendly trees.
And when we’ve scaled the climbing frame
And shimmied down the pole
And dizzied round the round about
and clambered through the hole,
We head down to the river side
where vole and duckling mingle
and gather sticks and special stones
and tramp upon the shingle
And feel adrift from harder times
Apart from all our worries
Enamoured of the willow tree
and how the water flurries
at play between it’s trailing bows
as fish glide through the shallows,
then home again to Grandma’s house
to feast upon marshmallows.

Thanks for the inspiration AOJ, hope you managed to get an idea of our favourite walk from that. Now go and check out all the other Fun Monday participants. And have a wonderful day.

Today it is Earth day.

As in , the earth.

So we plan to take the bus home instead of adding our petrol fumes to the ether, (This has nothing to do with my mum not being able to pick us up and Mr B needing the car, honest) and we have seeds to plant.

Of course this all depends on how long it takes Mr lovely electrician to mend Miss M’s light fitting which crumbled away when we tried to change it for a nice new Ikea one.

So for now I’ll leave you with something interesting I learned from Miss M today.

All about us…

Miss M: “Mum, we got very sharp teeth, very sharp nails and very heby, what’s dese called?”

Me: “Elbows.”

Miss M: “Very heby elbows.”

Me: “Oh right???”

Then she strolls away purposefully.

Hmmm, very heavy elbows, pointy teeth, sharp nails…

Could my child be part Vampire Orangutan?

Is there anyone I should inform about this?

It’s 7pm.

I’m back.

I had to cancel the electrician as we are brassic till Friday. Bugger.

But we still walked into town, came home on the bus and planted stuff.

Look…

Place compost in trays.

Get big sister to help when it starts getting a bit dull.

Push seeds into pots.

Water.

Water some more.

Bounce on trampoline till Daddy gets home.

Perfect.

And tomorrow I will tell you all about Hootin’ Anni’s pay it forward, and how you can get ’stuff’ from me for fun.

Hooray.