PYO

 

The other week I met up with a friend and her little one to go strawberry picking. It was at a lovely little farm just 10 minutes away. They only have strawberries, but as it was Stan's first PYO (and mine for such a long time) it was easy to do. Their crop was already running low I think due to the amazing 3 weeks of glorious sunshine, but what they did have left was gloriously plump and red. They ask you not to eat before you pay, which is just about easy enough for me to manage, but for the toddlers it was too much temptation!

sneaking in a strawberry

We managed a pretty good haul and celebrated with a picnic in the field nearby. A really nice morning. Most of the strawberries we ate with meringues and cream, but I blended the rest up with a mango to make the most intense ice lolly mixture. So good. Makes a real difference when you pick your own and don't buy shop ones. Even the best supermarket strawberries are never red all the way through!

CHEEKY WIPES

So those of you following my blog for a while know I'm a big fan of re-useable nappies as well as most things eco. I already purchased a mini set of Cheeky Wipes way back when I first decided to cloth nappy to go alongside them. Heck, if you are going to be washing nappies, you might as well save money, time and the environment and wash wipes too? Anyway I loved them straight away - they are a great size, have the texture of a flannel and remove all sorts of delights much better than a disposable wipe, which as I'm sure you know has sometimes the tendency to smear.... (Sorry to those of you eating lunch.) Anyway, as I loved them so much I decided to make my own wipes for clearing up faces (sometimes my own) and the high chair at mealtimes. I didn't want to use the same ones we used alongside the nappies and mix them all up. I'm sure it is totally fine, but you know, I just felt weird doing it! So my make shift muslin cloths did the job ok but weren't great like the Cheeky Wipes. So when the lovely people at Cheeky Wipes asked if I'd like a second complete set I jumped at the chance!

The set up is oh so simple, and I must have saved myself an absolute fortune as well by not using disposable wipes. It doesn't matter if you are not using cloth nappies, you can use these wipes and wash them alongside your/their clothes.

So you have yourself two boxes, a clean one and a mucky one and two essential oil blends. 25 lovely soft baby wipes. Two waterproof bags for out and about and a mesh bag for the 'mucky' box. All you do is put about 2-3cm of water in the Fresh Wipes container with a few drops of the essential oil blend then pop your wipes in to soak up the water.

Put some water in the Mucky Wipes container and some drops of the other essential oil. Hook the clever little mesh bag over the green hooks and Voila! Away you go!

They can be washed anywhere from 30-70 degrees and then you just chuck them back in the box and carry on. I mainly wash mine with Stanley's clothes on a 30-40 wash and they seem fine to me! Every now and then I might throw them in with my towels or bed linen on a higher heat just to keep them hygenic.

Seriously though they are that easy. It's the sort of thing I'm surprised I don't see more people doing. I don't know about you but as a Mum there isn't a lot of spare cash floating around and I'd much rather be buying myself a nice coffee when some little thing ::ahem, that's you Stanley:: has woken me up at 5 am than waste my money on another pack of disposable wipes! So please check out their website and put it on yours or your child's Christmas list! Hohoho!

see, this is us enjoying cake instead of wasting money of disposable wipes....

hmmmm, messy business this cake eating

phew! all clean and back to playing thanks to cheeky wipes 

This IS a sponsored post, but I hope you know me well enough to know I only review products I have, or like, and that fit in with the ethos of my blog. All opinions are my own. I'm real clever like that :)

GREEN PEOPLE

Which is us really most of the time, but also them. I hope you have all heard of the lovely Green People. If not I'm about to sing their praises! We have been using Green People for years. My husband first introduced me to them (being the secret eco warrior that he is!) and we have been fans of their body wash, shampoo and suncream for a while now. So of course it made sense that when little Stanley came along we only wanted to use organic, non chemical products on him too. Ben ordered me a selection of trial products for Stanley when he was first born - similar to this one. We still use them as his travel kit for when we stay over at people's houses. Recently I've been needing to wash Stanley's hair more. Not only is it quite long but it gets messier with his activities, being outside etc and I wanted to use a specific hair shampoo not just his body wash. Green people were kind enough to send me their Lavender Shampoo as well their Sticky Hand Sanitiser. Well the shampoo smells GREAT, and not at all old lady lavender. It always nice to have some relaxing lavender action before bedtime, even if washing hair isn't a relaxing experience for everyone....please turn away now if you don't want to see Stanley cry.

no idea what is about to come

distracting him with the mirror worked wonders last time

this time, not so much

all clean! what a cruel mother i am...

So Stanley may hate his hair being washed but I can tell you it has nothing to do with the product and I'm sure he'd be crying a lot more if he had chemicals seeping into his eyes. Funnily when I tried to explain this he just shot me a 'whatever' look. How can they already do this at such an early age? A sign of things to come I'm sure.... Anyway I'm very happy with it and I didn't need conditioner (thank goodness, can you imagine trying to that next!). Stanley's hair is fine and the product is so good it rinses out easily and combs through well. A little goes a looooooooong way too people. I used smaller than a pea size and got a great lather up. Oh my it is great - so yes maybe it is more money than other brands but I can tell you now you won't need to buy another for ages. Good for us, maybe not so much for Green People!

The Hand Sanitiser is lovely too. I was so pleased to be able to try this. It has a great scent and comes out in a very satisfying action from the pump! Stanley likes it, he of course wants to do it himself, which is fine, but not to be left alone with or else they'd be none left, even with a mighty 200 squirts per bottle! He's a pretty clean child really and does love to wash his hands. He is not a messy with food, but other children are so it is nice to have this on hand to wipe down high chairs etc when we are out. I'm all for a bit of germ action, but perhaps the only place where it makes me nervous is the tube, and seeing as we visit London a fair old bit it is good to have this on us. It is also good to squirt on to cloth wipes when nappy changing as occasionally I find they dry out in my bag. I use it on my hands too as Stanley is scared of the hand dryers, so washing my hands can often leave us traumatised! (In a similar way to hair washing...) An all round great product, safe enough to use on bottoms but attacks those nasty germs. At the moment too it is a special price so snap some up while you can!

footnote: yes we still bath Stanley in a baby bath. We have a large normal bath and are on a water meter so filling it would be expensive and wasteful. We like to save money and water where we can, and in the Summer it meant Ben could re-use the water over our garden plants as we have used safe organic products, another good reason for bathing Stanley in Green People stuff. He doesn't seem to mind and can't slip over as easily.

"BEING ECO"

Firstly, yes, we have a well organised garage. One of the plus sides of buying a 1930s house (unlike the Victorian one I would have really liked) is that it came with more space, and more importantly if you are my husband...a garage. Not for storing a car mind you, oh no, oh no... This garage is for storing food, wood, his many vintage bicycles and all our Ecover refills. In fact probably enough things that someone would be very happy living there for a month or so as long as you are into cleaning and eating dried and tinned foodstuffs. Make no mistake this is a sponsored post but I wanted to show you why I'd made this my first one. We are no stranger to the Ecover products as you can see from the photos. We've used them for many years for the very simple reason that they work and they are good for the home, us and the environment. I have never had a problem with them not doing the job. There are so many clever natural ingredients that it is a no brainer that they do as good a job if not better than the chemical alternitives....and they smell good! So when Ecover wanted to send me their newest line called Ecover Zero I was more than happy to test them out. As we still cloth nappy (Stanley is now 20 months) and have done since he was about 8 weeks old it follows with our ethos of having a house that doesn't impact too much on the environment. When I fell pregnant and read about the shocking statistics of how many nappies a baby uses in it's life time I was horrified. It didn't take much to switch to cloth, it was really just a matter of realising that cloth worked better than disposables and were the better option for all. The same can be said for using Ecover, just getting my head round the fact that of course natural ingredients were better in so many ways than chemical and voila - happy household! I think sometimes it feels like I am in the minority with using cloth nappies and using environmentally friendly cleaning products - like I'm some sort of saint for doing it. But really it just makes more sense! Right?!

The Ecover Zero products are great for me to wash Stanley's clothes and nappies with as they can help reduce allergic symptoms and I'm particularly aware of this with Ben suffering with eczema and my brother and Dad suffering so badly with psoriasis their whole life, that I feel very strongly about how chemical washing agents affect the skin. The other thing I like about Ecover is that it's not just the products that are environmentally friendly, their factories are as well, and the products that came to us were packaged fully in stuff we could afterwards recycle. I think that is really important which is why we have always bought the huge refills, to save again on packaging. 

All ok, only recyclable packaging. No plastic in site. Well, except the bottles of course!

Lovely products in a handy canvas bag

Checking the ingredients carefully to see all is ok...

Happy customer!