I have no idea how I’m just now discovering Vitacost, but I’m pretty darn excited about it.  Keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it – including how you can get $10 to spend there on your own groceries!  I’ve been focusing on our grocery bill this year, working to reduce the amount we spend on food, while not compromising on quality.  I’ve stocked up on some bulk items (there’s a gallon of coconut oil in our pantry right now, and a gallon of green Tabasco sauce on its way – no more little jars of either of those for a while!) and eliminated some of the more expensive items from the shopping list all together (bye bye gogi berries).  But mostly I’m focusing our grocery dollars on sale items and forcing myself to shop at more than one store.  With very few exceptions, everything we buy is organic and I’m not changing that.  But I’m finding that even within the parameters of only buying high-quality, organic food, I can still spend less than I used to on groceries.

I sat down at the computer a couple days ago to see if I could find canned coconut milk online.  My local store sells organic canned coconut milk for between $2.30 and $2.80 a can, depending on whether it’s on sale.  I thought if I could find a place selling it by the case online, it might be less expensive.  We go through a lot of it, and it seemed like a candidate for stocking up.  My internet searching led me to Vitacost, and I ended up buying almost all of the non-perishables that were on my grocery list for today’s scheduled shopping trip.  Their organic section has 2230 items in it – it’s a very well-stocked store.  I got organic coconut milk for $1.69 a can!  I got our boys’ toothpaste for about 40% less than it costs me at the store where I normally shop.  I got soap (including Dr. Woods liquid soap, which I’m very excited about.  Tons of great reviews comparing it favorably to Dr. Bronners – which we love – but for a lot less money), dishwashing soap, tea, mustard, hemp oil, evening primrose oil, red raspberry leaf in bulk, several bulk spices, and even a bag of mocha Teeccino as a treat for myself.  I still have to go shopping today for fresh produce and cold items, but my trip should be much faster and easier.  The stuff I bought from Vitacost has already shipped – for free!  They don’t charge shipping if you spend at least $49 (as long as you’re within the 48 contiguous United States).  And it was all much less expensive than what I normally pay.

Anyway, to say that I’m excited about this is an understatement.  It will definitely change the way I shop.  I’ll still “go” shopping for perishables, but I can do the rest of my shopping from my living room at 11pm after my boys are asleep.  So much easier, and a lot less expensive.  Unlike a standard grocery store, my “shopping cart” on Vitacost updated my total each time I put an item in it, so I was able to see exactly how much I was spending as I went along.  Before checking out, I removed a few items in order to bring my total down to my target amount.  I liked the running total – definitely helps to prevent impulse buys if you’re trying to shop within a budget.

So now for the exciting part!  Vitacost has an affiliate program, which I thought about doing.  But they also have a referral program where I can refer new customers and we each get $10 to spend on our groceries at their store.  I like that idea better.  Affiliate programs only financially reward the referrer – I love that this program rewards you and me equally, with ten dollars apiece.  You have to sign up for their referral rewards program though this link in order to get the ten dollars.  Once you sign up, as long as you make a purchase within 60 days, you will be able to spend the $10 towards your purchase.  You also have to be a new Vitacost shopper in order to get the rewards bonus.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

The scrubbie I use at the kitchen sink has been dead for quite a while.  Today it fell apart and I could no longer ignore the fact that I probably should have replaced it about a month ago. 

My next shopping trip is scheduled for March 12th.  That’s a long time from now.  And I have to wash a lot of dishes between now and then.

Then I remembered how my mother used to make her own scrubbies out of mesh produce bags.  Most of my produce comes loose, but if there’s a sale that makes the bagged stuff a better deal, that’s what I buy.  And I just happened to have come across such a sale the last time I shopped.  I had a big bag of grapefruit on the counter, in a nice red mesh bag.  So I dumped them into a bowl and made the bag into a scrubbie.

Nothing fancy, obviously.  I just folded the bag over on itself until it was the size and shape that I wanted.  Then I sewed around the edges using heavy duty thread (it’s almost like dental floss, which would also work great for this project).  I did it in about ten minutes, standing in my kitchen with little boys playing under my feet.  Definitely a “beginner” level sewing project – aren’t those the best kind?

I just used it to wash a sink full of pots and pans, and it worked great.  Admittedly, this isn’t going to save a lot of money.  Scrubbies are a few dollars at most, and usually a lot less.  But what I like about this was that I was able to avoid going to the store (sticking to my scheduled grocery shopping trips is a big part of my strategy for reducing our grocery bill), and I also kept a little chunk of plastic out of the garbage.  Reusing is the best form of recycling, and every little bit counts.

Do any of you do this?  Or do you have other things that you do with mesh produce bags?  Seems like a waste to throw them out, so share whatever ideas you have!

There are no boxes of cereal in our house.  No frozen waffles or toaster pastries either.  Sometimes there are homemade muffins in the freezer, but we usually eat those as dessert or a snack.  Breakfast around here is an oat/quinoa mixture that my husband makes for us every morning while I’m cleaning the house sleeping.

As far as economical breakfast food goes, bulk oats and quinoa – even the organic stuff – is pretty high on the list.  We buy our oats in 50 lb bags that we special order at the health food store (they give us a 10% discount for ordering in bulk).  Our quinoa comes from the bulk section, 5 lbs at a time – although we should probably look into ordering a bigger bag of that too.

Anyway, here’s what he does.  I asked him for details this morning, since he works his kitchen magic while the boys and I are still asleep – when we wake up, breakfast is ready for us, so I rarely see the preparation phase.  This is what I wake up to:

He never measures anything, because oats and guinoa are pretty forgiving – if you have too much water, just let it cook a little longer.  Or if you didn’t put in enough water to start with, you can just add more.  And after you’ve done it a few times, you can eyeball it in the pan and know that it’s right.  But he uses roughly one cup dry quinoa and two cups dry rolled oats.  He rinses the quinoa and then adds everything to a saucepan with roughly six cups of water (as long as you have about twice as much water as oats/quinoa, it will work).  Then he adds about 1/2 cup raisins and about a tablespoon or two of blackstrap molasses.  He brings it to a boil (watching closely, or else it will boil over), stirs it around, and then turns the heat off, letting the pan sit on the warm burner (we have an electric stove – with a gas range you might have to keep it on low for a while before turning it off).  It takes about 20 minutes then for the breakfast to be ready, but since the stove is off it doesn’t require any babysitting.  He can go about the rest of his morning, since breakfast is on autopilot.

Once the water is absorbed, breakfast is ready.  We spoon it into bowls and then add toppings.  This is where we can mix it up and make our breakfast different from one day to the next.  We always add hempseeds and chia seeds.  These are powerhouse foods – lots of protein and essential fatty acids.  We also usually drizzle some flax oil or Udo’s oil over the bowl.  Then we add fruit (blueberries today – just depends on what we have in the freezer or on the counter) and sometimes almond milk or coconut butter.  I often add a scoop of protein powder and some shredded coconut too.  The sky’s the limit – add whatever sounds good and will add a nutritional boost to your day.  We stay away from sugar and syrup – those don’t add any nutritional value to the meal and we can get all the sweetness we need from fruit.

We used to have just oats in the morning, but we started adding quinoa several months ago in order to maximize the nutritional content of our breakfast.  The chia seeds, hemp seeds, molasses and flax oil also give the meal a nutritional boost.

Since it’s so easy to change the flavor of the breakfast depending on what toppings we use, we never get tired of this meal.  It’s simple, easy to make, far less expensive than boxed cereals, and gives us a great start to our day. 

Many thanks to Mr. Frugal Babe for making our breakfast every day! 

What do you eat for breakfast?  How do you make sure you’re getting a solid meal before heading out the door, without blowing the grocery budget?

A couple weeks ago, I decided to make my own body scrub out of salt and oil.  I’ve been using it ever since, and I love it.  My “recipe” is very simple:

I spent $3 on a big container of coarse sea salt, $8 on a large bottle of almond oil, and used olive oil that I already had in the cupboard.  I decided that a recycled glass jar + oily hands in the shower might not be the best idea, so I used an empty plastic jar from some Justin’s chocolate almond butter (usually I try to buy things in glass instead of plastic.  But the chocolate almond butter was on sale – and only comes in plastic – and it was delicious.  And it gave me a perfect container for my body scrub.  So it was meant to be).

I dumped a bunch of salt into the container, added a few Tbsp of almond oil and a few Tbsp of olive oil, put the lid on, and shook it up.  It took about 30 seconds to make.  And the jar I made has lasted me more than two weeks now, and still has at least another week or two before it will be empty.  I only used a tiny fraction of the ingredients I bought, so my $11 investment (plus the olive oil, which I always have on hand anyway) should last a good long time.

I’m loving this body scrub.  So simple, no weird ingredients, and my skin feels great after I get out of the shower.  The salt is a good exfoliator, and the oil means that I don’t need lotion at all.  I’ve been using coconut oil for a long time as a lotion after I get out of the shower.  But I haven’t needed to do anything at all lately as far as lotion goes.  Between my homemade body scrub and a bottle of Dr. Bronners, all my shower needs are covered.

I’ve also gotten back into the routine of “no-poo” for my hair.  I had done this in the past, but got out of the habit when we moved to our new house a few years ago.  The water here is much harder, and my hair hadn’t been reacting as well to the baking soda/vinegar routine.  So I stopped and began buying expensive shampoos and conditioners that didn’t have any nasty ingredients.  We installed a shower filter a couple years ago, and it removes chlorine as well as a lot of other stuff from our water.  I thought about going back to the no-poo routine after that, but never got around to it.  A few weeks ago, I was reading Nature Mom’s blog post about using baking soda and apple cider vinegar in place of shampoo and conditioner, and it inspired me to give that another go.  In the past, I used regular white vinegar instead of apple cider vinegar.  This time I’m using apple cider vinegar and it’s working great.  I’m also taking care to really massage the baking soda paste into my scalp and to only use the vinegar/water mixture on the ends of my hair.  I’m definitely happy with how it’s working, and I would say my hair feels better now than it did when I was using shampoo and conditioner that cost $10 for an 8-ounce bottle.  If you’ve never tried it, you might be pleasantly surprised by how well it works.  My hair is tangle-free and easy to comb right out of the shower, and it dries nice and soft.  As Tiffany (aka Nature Mom) explains, you may have to do it for a few weeks and let your hair and scalp get used to it – don’t give up if you don’t like the results after one wash!

If you’re a fan of making your own body scrubs/lotions, etc. or if you have any experience with the baking soda/apple cider vinegar hair routine, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Several years ago, I got rid of nearly all of my plastic food storage containers.  I have several pyrex dishes with lids and lidded casserole dishes that I use to store large quantities of leftovers.  But most of the time, I use empty glass jars. 

My freezer is full of repurposed glass jars holding things like flax seeds, chia seeds, and hemp protein.  I order stuff like that online in bulk and it comes in big plastic bags that can be a bit unwieldy.  So when it arrives, I dump the bags into several jars and stash them in the freezer.  Much easier to dump chia seeds out of a one-quart jar than a five pound bag. 

My fridge is also full of glass jars.  I buy nuts and seeds from the bulk section of our grocery store, and store them in the fridge in glass jars.  When I make salad dressings and smoothies and soups, they get stored in glass jars (if they make it as far as the leftover stage!).

I use empty glass jars to store stuff in my pantry too. 

Remove the labels, wash out the jars, and glue on new labels.  Easy and free and much better for keeping track of everything than it would be if I kept them in the bulk bags from the store. 

Jars are also a great way to shake up protein supplements or any other powdered drinks.  I mix things like powdered greens, probiotics, spirulina, protein, etc. with water every day.  I use my blender for smoothies, but when the ingredients are powdered, shaking everything together in a jar is a quick and easy solution.  Much faster and more effective than stirring them in a glass with a fork (always ends up chunky.  Spirulina chunks?  Yuck.) and less expensive than one of those purpose-made “shaker jars” that some of the protein powder companies sell.

Another way I love to use empty glass jars is for giving edible gifts.  I enjoy cooking and baking, and food is always a welcome gift.  I don’t ever want to give people food in containers that they feel they need to return.  And I don’t like the idea of buying disposable food storage containers just for the purpose of giving food to someone – seems like a waste of money and resources.  So instead, I save the nicest of my empty glass jars for this purpose.  Large, wide mouth jars make great containers for soup.  Smaller jars – especially if they have interesting shapes – look great filled with bite size cookies (or dough balls!) or spiced nuts.  Fill jars with layered ingredients for “soup in a jar” or “cookies in a jar”.  Use your imagination!  spruce them up with some pretty fabric glued to the lid.  Tie a ribbon around the top with the recipe attached.

One caveat.  Please don’t use this as an excuse to have 100 empty jars cluttering up your shelves!  I have a lot of jars in use in my pantry, freezer and fridge.  But that means I don’t really need any more.  I save the nicest ones these days to use for food gifts, but I make liberal use of the recycling bin for most jars we get these days.  Save the jars you can use right now or in the immediate future.  Recycle the rest.  And enjoy your recycled, frugal, plastic-free food storage!

I know you guys have plenty of other ideas for repurposing glass jars around the house.  Please share!

When I asked recently for reader feedback in terms of what you wanted me to write about, one reader asked for a post about drying laundry in the winter without a dryer.  We’ve been in our current house (sans dryer) for more than two years now, and the last year we lived in our old house we didn’t use the dryer at all.  So we’re heading into our fourth dryer-free winter.  I agree with Penny that dryers are a want rather than a need, although for me personally, I don’t want one.  I honestly prefer to live without one.

The one and only downside that I’ve found to not having a dryer is that our bath towels aren’t all nice and fluffy when I put them on the towel rail.  But after one or two uses, they feel about the same as they did back in the days when we dried them in the dryer, so I can live with that.  There are several upsides to not having a dryer:

• Our clothes last longer
• We get to take advantage of the free stain-bleaching provided by the sun (I love this!  It’s especially amazing for diapers).
• No need for dryer sheets (that nice “spring breeze” scent?  It’s a bunch of nasty chemicals).
• No need to spend money on a dryer, anti-static sheets, or electricity to run the dryer.
• It’s a chance for us to “walk the walk” in terms of teaching our boys about living lightly on the earth and conserving natural resources whenever possible.
• Stains don’t get accidentally baked into our clothing by the heat of the dryer.  Nothing ever shrinks (we always wash in cold water).

Continuing on the grapeseed oil moisturizer theme, let’s talk about sunscreen.  I have mostly Irish ancestry, with blue eyes and fair skin that freckles (and burns) easily.  The up-side of being a burner instead of a tanner is that I learned very early in life that baking myself in the sun wasn’t a good idea.  I’ve never been to a tanning bed, and while my friends in high school were covering themselves in baby oil and lying on sheets of aluminum foil, I was sitting in the shade or wearing sunscreen.  For several years, I was diligent about wearing sunscreen all the time (late teens, early twenties).

Just before my husband and I got married, we bought wide-brimmed Columbia hats, which have turned into one of our best purchases ever.  It’s been more than eight years and the hats are still going strong – and we wear them nearly every day.  Pretty much every time we leave the house we have our hats.  The brims are wide enough that they cover our faces, ears and necks.  I’ve noticed that my freckles are a lot lighter than they were in my pre-hat days.  For several years now, we’ve been focused on making sure we’re getting enough Vitamin D from the sun (we supplement in the winter when UVB rays are in short supply, but get it naturally in the summer), but we make sure we’re getting sun exposure on our legs rather than our faces, since facial skin is so much more delicate and prone to sun damage.

For about the past four or five years, I’ve taken the hat concept one step further.  Most of the time, I try to wear a cover-up when I’m in the sun.  I bought a light weight linen zip-up jacket at a thrift store years ago, and I keep it by the back door all summer.  In the house, I’m usually wearing a tank top, but I grab the jacket before I head out if we’re going to be outside for more than a minute or two.  My shoulders and chest have always been prone to reddening easily in the sun, but that hasn’t happened at all since I’ve been using my cover-up jacket.  I do the same thing with our sons:  lightweight long sleeve shirts are great.  Yes, it’s been a hot summer, but I’ve actually found that my arms feel cooler in the jacket than without, if the sun is beating down on us (it’s an off-white jacket – don’t do this with dark clothes in 100 degree weather!)  As an added bonus, long sleeves also work well to keep mosquitoes at bay.

With my hat/jacket combo, I rarely wear sunscreen anymore.  But sometimes it’s a must.  Last weekend, we met up with a bunch of my husband’s family to take all the kids to a nearby water park.  Our three-year-old wore a long-sleeved rash guard, but a hat wasn’t very practical, so he had sunscreen on his face.  I thought about just wearing regular clothes, but I wanted to get in the water with our son (my husband and I took turns staying on land with our baby), so I wore my bikini and slathered on the sunscreen.

Back when I ditched all of our personal care products with questionable ingredients, none of our sunscreens made the cut.  They were all loaded with toxic crud and there was no way I was going to use them on myself or my family anymore.  I switched to mostly being in the shade or covering up, but I knew we needed some sunscreen for times when neither of those options was practical.  By the way, I have never liked the idea of spray-on sunscreen (even back when I was using drug store sunscreen), simply because they stink so much and it was obvious to me that putting them on would likely involve inhaling toxins.  I have since settled on two sunscreens that our family uses:  Dr. Mercola’s Natural Sunscreen, and California Baby.  Both work well and I don’t have concerns about the safety of their ingredients.  My fair, sensitive skin approves of both of them too.  They’re more expensive than regular sunscreen, but since we don’t use them every day, we don’t have to purchase them nearly as often as I did back before I stared covering up instead.

In addition to covering up or using a non-toxic sunscreen, we also eat tons of vegetables – antioxidants help protect our skin from the inside out, so load up on the veggies!

What are your favorite sunscreens and/or natural ways of avoiding sunburns?

Several years ago, I went through all of my personal care products and tossed nearly everything.  Anything with parabens, phthalates, artificial fragrances, dyes, sodium laureth sulfate, etc.  I kept just a few items, and it’s made my daily routine much simpler too.  Not to mention the fact that the air quality in our bathroom is much better without all of the fragrances from the products I no longer use.  After I got rid of my conventional body lotion, I switched to using coconut oil instead.  We live in a very dry area, and humidity here is usually non-existent… some sort of lotion is a must, even for those of us who are very careful to get lots of Omega 3 fatty acids in our diet.

I liked using coconut oil because of how simple it was – only one ingredient, and it’s edible (I prefer to avoid inedible body care products, since our skin absorbs whatever we put on it… why would I want to put something on my body if I wouldn’t be willing to eat it?)  But it was a bit greasy.  After putting it on, I would have to be careful to not let my skin rub against stuff for half an hour or so while it soaked in.  I figured it was a good trade off though, for not having any nasty gunk in my lotion and for not having to pay an arm and a leg for fancy organic lotion at the health food store.

When we were getting ready for the birth of our second son earlier this year, our midwife brought over a little supply bag of stuff that she likes to have on hand for new babies.  It included a tiny little bottle of grapeseed oil, labeled as a moisturizer.  She told us to rub it onto our baby’s bottom at each diaper change in order to keep the initial tar-like newborn poop from sticking to his skin.  She also mentioned that it would be a great all-over moisturizer for him.  We used it on our son, and it worked great.  I noticed that whenever I would rub it onto his skin, my hands would absorb it very quickly and didn’t feel greasy afterwards.  So I decided to try it on myself, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I have been buying grapeseed oil at Costco for quite a while now – I love it for cooking as it has such a high smoke point.  And now it’s my daily moisturizer too.  A little goes a long way, and it doesn’t leave my skin feeling greasy or sticky at all; it soaks in within just a few minutes.  It has a very neutral fragrance that pretty much disappears once it soaks in, and best of all, it works!  No more dry skin.

Instead of buying a tiny little bottle labeled as a moisturizer, I just refill the one I have from my giant jug in the kitchen.  Definitely my current favorite personal care product: inexpensive, easy to use, no greasy legs, and no questionable ingredients.

On a completely different note, I love this post about saving bugs instead of killing them.  I have always been a rescuer of creatures (so are all of my siblings – it’s just how we were raised).  I can remember my little brother being afraid of the spiders (harmless, but big) that were in our farmhouse, and my mother sat on the floor with him and let a spider crawl all over her to let him see that there was nothing to fear.  We grew up in an area that had lots of copperhead snakes, but also lots of other non-poisonous snakes.  Rather than teaching us to fear snakes, my parents taught us how to tell the difference between the copperheads and all the other snakes.  (They also taught us to be careful – to never put our hands or feet somewhere we couldn’t see, for example.)  Same thing with spiders – there are very few spiders in the US that can actually cause serious harm to humans, and they’re pretty easy to recognize… the rest are only a concern if you’re a fly.  So my siblings and I all have a healthy respect for creatures that can harm us, but no irrational fear of bugs, snakes, mice, etc.  And we have all been known to go out of our way to rescue bugs from drowning, squashing, or being encased in concrete.  Anyway, I loved Gena’s post about catching bugs and taking them outside, so I had to share it.

Confession time:  We’ve lived in our current house for nearly 20 months, and until today, I had never cleaned the oven.  I use the oven maybe 3 or 4 times a month, and the bottom of it was looking pretty grubby.  Cleaning the oven is not particularly high on my list of things to do, but with the possibility of both my mother and my mother-in-law using our oven to cook for us after our baby arrives (for which we are very grateful!), I decided that it probably needed to be cleaned.

Ten years ago, I would have headed to the grocery store to buy a can of oven cleaner and a pair of rubber gloves.  But since I no longer use any sort of toxic cleaners (or any cleaner that requires rubber gloves), I decided to see if my trusty baking soda and vinegar solution would do the trick.  I sprinkled baking soda all over the bottom of the oven, and on the open door.  Then I sprayed vinegar all over the inside of the oven and let it sit for half an hour or so while I worked on other tasks.  I used a razor blade knife (designed for cleaning ceramic stove tops) to gently scrape the stuck-on gunk out of the oven, and it came off with very little effort.  Then I rinsed everything a few times with water and clean rags.  It took me about 10 minutes of actual scrubbing/cleaning time to get it done.

So we have a clean oven.  Our son was able to hang out right next to me while I worked on it, and neither of us inhaled any nasty fumes.  For a while during the oven cleaning process, the kitchen smelled like vinegar.  Now it smells like nothing at all, which is what clean really smells like.  I didn’t have to go buy oven cleaner or rubber gloves (I buy baking soda and vinegar in bulk at Costco, and always have plenty on hand).  I’m convinced that there’s nothing in our house that can’t be cleaned with baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide and water.  For laundry, all I need is soap nuts and hydrogen peroxide.  A simplified arsenal of cleaning products is not only less expensive and easier to keep stocked, but it’s also a lot better for our bodies and the environment than a bunch of bottles of toxic cleaners.

Anybody have any other tricks for cleaning an oven without using commercial oven cleaners?

When our son was born, we bought an organic crib mattress for him.  He slept in our bed for a few months, and still comes in from time to time to sleep with us during the night, but most of the time he sleeps on his crib mattress.  Last year, we got a wooden toddler bed and moved the mattress into that, which had been working perfectly.  But with another baby on the way, we knew we needed either another crib mattress for the baby, or a twin mattress for our son so that we could take his little mattress and put it back in the crib for the baby.

My first thought was to just get another crib mattress.  The organic ones are available for a couple hundred dollars, and we’ve been very happy with the one we have.  But I knew that would be a relatively short-term solution.  Our son is going to outgrow the toddler bed and the extreme firmness of a crib mattress before we know it.  So although they are a lot more expensive, I started looking at organic twin mattresses. 

Given that a standard twin mattress can be bought for a couple hundred dollars, the price tags on the organic mattresses were a bit hard to swallow.  But I reminded myself that we’re frugal for a reason.  It’s not so that we can hoard money and just save it aimlessly.  Instead, we want to make sure that we use our money mindfully, on things that really matter to us.  There’s a lot of controversy about mattresses and the chemicals that are in them.  I don’t claim to know everything about the issue, but my gut instinct is to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposure to synthetic chemicals.  That’s why the only cleaning products that make their way into our home are baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, soap nuts, and Dr. Bronner’s soap.  It’s why we don’t use any synthetic chemicals on our lawn or garden.  It’s why we buy organic food. 

In general, I try to balance my desire for a toxin-free home with both our budget and with our efforts to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.  That means that we’re not going to replace stuff we have that is still in good shape (like our living room furniture, for example), just to get toxin-free versions.  But when we need to replace something or get something new, we try to choose the most environmentally-friendly and toxin-free version we can afford.

And that brings us back to searching for a mattress.  We wanted to get something that would last our son for a long time.  We looked at mattresses at a local organic bedding store, and of course the solid latex ones were divine.  They were also $1500 for a twin size.  We decided to go with an innerspring instead, and add a latex topper to it in a few years when our son is heavier and needs a softer bed.  The Green Baby Guide has addressed the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of choices available for reasonably-priced twin mattresses, and I agree.  I looked at both of the ones they mentioned, but didn’t buy either one.  The $600 Naturepedic is waterproof and from what I read, it’s just about as firm as the hard-as-a-rock crib mattress our son already has.  I know that’s perfect for babies and small children, but not as likely to be a good long-term solution.  While I liked the price tag on the $400 Natura Kidz mattress, it looks like soy-based polyfoam isn’t really that much of an improvement over regular polyurethane foam, and to get a truly “organic” mattress from natura Kidz bumps the price tag up to $1100.

I liked what I read about Naturepedic mattresses and their non-toxic fire protection system (another alternative to toxic fire retardants is wool, which is naturally fire resistant, but adds a lot more to the cost of the mattress).  Eventually I settled on their quilted organic cotton deluxe mattress for $700.  I felt that would give us a mattress that could be used long-term (with the addition of a latex topper as our son gets older) and was a good compromise in terms of price.  I ordered it from The Clean Bedroom because they offer a ten percent discount if you become a fan on Facebook.  That allowed me to get an organic waterproof mattress pad ($79) essentially for free.  There was also no tax and no shipping charge.

Since we were spending so much money on the mattress, I wanted to find a good deal on a bed frame.  We wanted a bed with a solid support under the mattress (so that we wouldn’t need a box spring) and we were looking for something with drawers so that we could move our son’s dresser into the baby’s room.  I also wanted something made of solid wood instead of particle board and veneer.  Happily, Craigslist rarely lets me down.  After a few weeks of searching the listings, I came across a bed that was exactly what we wanted.  Solid wood, drawers underneath, a solid platform for the mattress, and in excellent condition.  We got it for $160.  It looks a little odd right now, because we have the crib mattress on it while we wait for the new mattress to be delivered:

We moved our son’s dresser into the baby’s room, and all of his clothes are now under his bed.  In addition, the big middle drawer holds all of his stuffed animals, so they aren’t crowded all over the bed anymore.

All in all, I’d say we did pretty well.  We ended up with a solid wood bed/dresser, an organic mattress that should last a long time, and an organic waterproof mattress pad, for a total of $860.  The mattress should be arriving any day now, and our son is very excited about his big boy bed.  The price was more than we usually spend on stuff like this, but in the nearly three years since our son was born, we’ve spent very little money on supplies for him.  And I feel good knowing that he’ll continue to sleep on a toxin-free mattress. 

The only thing that bothers me about this whole process is how unaffordable non-toxic mattresses are for a lot of people.  We’re thrifty and careful with our money, which helps us budget for larger purchases.  But we’re also fortunate to earn a good income and be able to afford something like this if we want.  For many families, a $700 mattress for a child is out of the question, no matter how carefully they budget.  It shouldn’t be that difficult to get non-toxic products.  I do feel like the tide is turning a bit in terms of people understanding that “better living through chemistry” might not be better after all.  Hopefully as time goes by, non-toxic products will start to be the norm rather than the expensive exception to the rule.