Fighting Culture

I am far from perfect at being green. I'd say I'm only fair at it. We recycle. I use reusable bags at the grocery store (but when we're running out of plastic bags for poopy diapers I will forgo them). I freecycle or otherwise give away our old or unused stuff like baby equipment or our pool pump/supplies for our now nonexistant pool (my husband was not happy to hear I gave it to the oil guy without asking for any cash). I grow a chunk of our produce and virtually all our meat comes from a farm in town. But like I said I am wayyyyyyyyyyyy far from perfect at all of this.

Cleaning the kitchen today I came across one of my son's lunchbags. Yes I said "one of." I realized with a flash of shame in that moment that he has three lunchboxes/bags and he doesn't even need one on a daily basis yet. To be fair one was bought as a supply box but more than one really is excessive for a five-year-old.

Every year we get bombarded with Back To School marketing. Every year our kids grow and to one degree or another their interests change. When you're not thinking or are just tired of saying 'no' all day long it can be very easy to write off the five to ten dollars one of these costs in your mind and just buy it. Now if you also are in a household whose family members are reluctant (to outright adamently against it) to getting rid of old stuff, it can all pile up pretty quickly.

I have to fight against my own impulses. I get tired of seeing the same clutter day in and day out. I've been guilty of replacing it with new clutter. For the last couple of years I've been trying hard to get rid of the clutter. I've been trying hard change my own behaviors, patterns and impulses. I've been trying to model it for our children. Some days I succeed and others don't go as well. I've noticed fatigue plays a big part of it. The amount of time the tv's been on also plays a role. We don't generally allow the kids to watch tv with commercials but even the commercial free stuff is still marketed to them and us in the stores.

So, when our tv died yesterday I had mixed feelings. The first, I freely admit, was panic. Oh God what would we do without being able to watch The Polar Express, Diego or High Five? The next was depression. A new tv is not in our budget. After that was calm. We do have two very old tvs. One has the dials you rotate (and does not get the two stations the kids love best of all) and the other changes volume on it's own and puts a greenish tinge over the picture. But they work, both get PBS and the computer can play dvds.

I'm not sure what we'll do. My husband and I are going to talk about it over the weekend but I'm feeling less pressure to run out and buy a replacement tv than I was 24 hours ago.

That's progress isn't it?