Saving the Earth

Today I'm teaching a lesson about answering questions after reading a book and the book I'm using is called "Introducing Planet Earth". It's a simple book but it talks about how proud Earth is to be the only planet in the solar system that can sustain life, and how it rotates so everyone around the Earth gets its fair share of sunshine. It made me refocus on how important the Earth really is. It does say we can trust it to keep rotating for us for billions of years to come...but after movies like Wall-E and AstroBoy I really realize more and more how much we have to pay attention to what we do to our Earth.

I am by no means completely eco-friendly but I am proud of a few things we do around our house...little things that I hope make some kind of a difference. I'd love for you to share simple changes you have made to be nice to our Planet Earth!

1. We recycle like crazy. Seriously, everything that can be recycled, we recycle it. We already up-sized from the small orange box to the giant brown recycling bin and there are many times when it is completely full.

2. We use the Target shopping bags every time we go get groceries...AND now they scan a special coupon barcode that gives us 5 cents off for every bag we use when we check out. It's only 5 cents...but it's something!

3. When I pack my lunch in the morning, I use the reusable buckets instead of plastic baggies or foil so I don't have any waste that way...I've even started packing real silverware with my lunch.

4. I take a water bottle or mug filled with water to work and refill it throughout the day versus buying water bottles. I even took my mug into Starbucks the other day to get hot tea and she only charged me for the tea since I had my own mug...it was less than $1 at STARBUCKS!

5. And, finally, this is the one I am most proud of. I didn't think we were going to be able to do it, but we actually did it and it's not that big of a deal now. On a "green" website I read that one of the things you should never do is buy papertowels. It makes sense, but at first I completely thought there would be no way we could ever possibly live without paper towels. We used them for everything: napkins, drying the table, drying our hands...you name it, we used papertowels. When I thought about it, I told Chad I really wanted to try and not use papertowels as much so we bought a ton of kitchen towels at Target. My sister's boyfriend thought we were crazy and said maybe we could compromise and not use as many papertowels...so I kept that in mind. Less papertowels was at least better. After a few months with the dishtowels though we ran out of papertowels one day and we just never went to buy more. We are papertowel free!!!! Sometimes it freaks out other people when they come over because they instantly look for a papertowel and we don't have any...but I'm proud to say we are papertowel free!

These are just a few things we do! It's amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. Little changes will really add up. What do you do to protect our wonderful Planet Earth?