Green living is something of a passion of mine. I don’t live in a yurt or engage in subsistence farming or anything like that, but I really appreciate this little planet we all share— and that we’re passing on to our kids-- and I recognize that the choices I make have some bearing on its overall well-being. Now that I have a baby, convenience is key; finding fun, easy or cheap ways to treat the earth right in living everyday life gets me kind of excited. I’ve made some good discoveries on that score this year. Here are the best of them (then tell me yours!):

There’s been value, too, in realizing that life will go on if I don’t take a shower every morning, if I don’t get to my ‘plans’ exactly when I planned to. Letting go in this way hasn’t always been fun, per se, but it’s been an important part of growing up in earnest; there is a little person in my life who matters to me more than my plans do.

That being said, I firmly believe that taking care of others begins with taking care of oneself. Letting go (of planning, of control) is helpful to a certain extent, but letting myself go sometimes feels like a looming threat in the face of life’s current intensity... ‘Letting oneself go’ is a distasteful turn of phrase, I know, but I’m not talking about sweat pants and waistlines here.

Hearing this, I became mildly concerned (okay… I spun into kind of a tizzy), for our baby friend and for Kaspar, who’d likely been exposed to the Pertussis germs while they were incubating in his little pal. I knew that whooping cough can kill newborns (a number of babies in California have died from a recent outbreak—so scary and sad). Kaspar was definitely feeling better, but I didn’t want to mess around; a Google search (when will I learn?) indicated that whooping cough’s early symptoms are identical to a common cold's, which-- when it's whooping cough-- appears to clear up and then comes back in the form of coughing fits that disrupt breathing, damage lungs and otherwise make life miserable for little ones. Early treatment with antibiotics is the most effective, and it’d been over a week since Kaspar had potentially been exposed to the illness. We haven’t yet chosen a pediatrician in Austin (Kaspar’s next well-visit is still a month away), so I spent an afternoon calling all manner of pharmacy, doctor’s office and community resource listing trying to figure out how we could get a test done, quickly. The clock was ticking.

I called our pediatrician back in Brooklyn. I secretly hoped I could talk her into calling in a prescription for antibiotics to a local pharmacy so we could skip the wait time and just play it safe, but she had a different plan.