September

As a seasoned mother of a six-year-old and a nearly two-year-old, I thought I was past the point where much could shock me. But then school started.

And suddenly I went from the friendly confines of the Green Mom blogosphere to the public school system, where teachers routinely send home “supply lists” containing environmentally unfriendly items such as (gasp) plastic ziplock bags and Purell hand sanitizer (2 bottles, please!), where students use  thousands of styrofoam lunch trays each day (eventually bound for the Incinerator), and where fossil fuels are burned sending children to school on buses that drive past shuttered schools near the bus stops.

I feel like a creature in a strange land.

How’s it going in your world?

Correction: This post originally stated that the styrofoam trays were thrown away. That is incorrect. They are re-used and then after they break are sent to the incinerator.

In the interest of marital harmony, let me be clear right from the start: My husband Glenn is no girly-man. During the past few years, he has sustained so many injuries, through accidents that defy the imagination and boggle the mind, that he can no longer straighten half of his fingers and a chiropractor took one look at him and suggested he come in for weekly treatments lasting into infinity.

Take the time we were renovating a bathroom. At 3 a.m., a heavy rain began to fall and Glenn decided to make sure our bathroom was safe from leaks. Seconds later, I heard a thunderous noise and a howl reminiscent of a wolf baying at a full moon. Glenn had forgotten the bathroom’s floorboards had been removed, and he somehow crashed through the plaster ceiling of the room below. He hung from a joist, his head in one level of the house and his legs in another, swaying like a piñata only a malicious kid would want at their birthday party.