Green Your New Year #GIFtATree

If you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know that we consider ourselves “Semi-Crunchy”. What that means is that we lean towards the natural, eco-friendly, environmentally conscious side of life; however, we know we still have a lot of ways to improve. Since having Skibbles, every year in January, we set goals of what we can do to be more “crunchy” than we were the previous year. We’re switching out appliances as needed to more environmentally friendly ones, shopping local when we can, buying more American made products, and being conscious about what products we are using on and in our bodies, especially when it comes to the girls.

I wanted to share with you the three things we already have planned to tackle for 2016 and then I’d love to hear your comments below about what you plan to do in 2016 too!

Make a true attempt at cloth diapering Baby.
- I cloth diapered Skibbles until she was almost two. With Baby, I have made two failed attempts. The first day lasted less than a day, and the second time lasted a week. With my schedule and the ease of disposables, it’s just made my life simpler, but for both monetary, health, and environmental reasons, I really want to commit to doing doing cloth at least every time we are at home.
Plant a garden
- I can’t tell you how excited I am about having a garden again. Andrew and I had a plot in a community garden when we lived in an apartment and then the first summer in our home, we did cucumbers, strawberries, and tomatoes. Last summer we didn’t do anything, except strawberries, because I was due in June and didn’t want to take on the stress. This year we are planning raised beds with a minimum of 10 different fruits and vegetables and I couldn’t be more excited about it.
Plant trees
1. I have these huge lofty goals very often in life where I think I can tackle the world (I know I could if I really tried…or had 30 more hours in every day where I wasn’t constantly being screamed at by children). When we moved into our house we cut down trees to have a cohesive flowing yard and I felt so guilty over it. I made this huge elaborate plan to plant this huge green outdoor space once we put up a fence. Over the past year, we finally saved enough to put the fence up and then decided that we would actually start Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, so that money is now going towards our debt. So when I was asked to work with the Arbor Day Foundation in exchange for trees, I jumped at the opportunity. Normally, it would seem silly, but it will give us the opportunity to start our green outdoor space and have a little privacy for now. Add in the whole planting trees for environmental purposes and my heart starts singing.

I’m also helping plant trees in other places across the US by something extremely simple and I’d love your help doing it too. Right now NBC Universal and the Arbor Day Foundation are committing to planting up to 25,000 trees in our national or state forests or parks, but you have to help! There’s 2 ways!

Head over to http://www.greenisuniversal.com/ and create your own GIF to share on social media.
Share any tweet using #GIFtATree

By doing either of these things, you will be able to help plant a tree! You can do it as many times as you’d like, there’s no limit per person. The goal is to reach 25,000 trees!