Cool Laundry Soap Trick

Earlier this week I posted about the benefits and instructions for making your own laundry soap. Today I stumbled upon the most amazing time shaving tip to help speed along the process. I, and I'm sure many others out there, was hand grating my Fels-Naptha (or your favorite laundry sutible bar soap [Dr. Bronners and Ivory work as well]) by hand on my cheese grater. Today I learned that you can microwave 1/2 a bar at a time for 30 seconds and blend it in your blender with a 1/4 cup regular baking soda. It literally cut my time preparing from 15 mins (with frequent breaks to help children) to 2 mins in the blender. Talk about amazing!!

Today's batch I skipped out on our scented Epsom salt so that may be on tomorrow's agenda! 

Hello there!

Some of you may know me from my blog  www.twinchronicles.blogspot.com, which chronicles our day to day life with Irish triplets and our adventure living with special needs twins. I felt it only made sense to make a space to share our triumphs and difficulties living a greener, ecofriendly, more minimalistic life.

Before I had children I would have never been interested in learning about our carbon footprint, looked twice at the label of the prepackaged food I was eating, or the "trusted" commercial cleaners I was using. Once Ethan was born my curiosity was peaked. I thought I was giving him a head start by breastfeeding, baby wearing, and bed sharing. Now it was a start but I never could have imagined it was just the tip of the iceberg. 

It wasn't until our twins were born at 30 weeks old just eleven short months after our oldest made his appearance that I really started making drastic changes. They both developed cerebral palsy as a consequence of oxygen deprivation during our delivery. I promised myself, just like all parents do, that I would give them every possible advantage I could. (We are a family of six (little boys, step son, and dad) living off an annual income of only $15,000 a year so this would be no easy task.) This meant no more prepackaged junk filled with plastic fats and synthetic fillers, removing all chemicals from our personal hygiene products and household cleaners, minimizing and hopefully completely removing screen time in the house, growing our own food supply, car sharing, cloth diapering, line drying, and making from scratch; just to name a few.  

Hopefully this can be a learning experience for us all, allow us to take a step back and really see what truly matters in our own lives.