Sometimes I like to think back to simpler days. Back before I had kids, before I thought about getting pregnant, before I bought a house, before I got engaged. I was so uninformed back then. It was so freaking AWESOME!!
Because now? Well, now I am so very much informed about everything that at times I'm sure I am sentencing my family, my dogs, society to certain and cruel death.
I am informed about everything. I know bunches of stuff about GMO's and the non-GMO project. I know about organics, about the dirty dozen and the clean sixteen. I know that maybe, just maybe, sunscreen and vitamin D deficiency cause skin cancer and not the sun. I know that Deet is bad. I know that toothpaste and deodorant are poisonous. I know that plastic is quite possibly the most evil invention ever.
My brain is overloaded with the information on how to stay healthy. I know how we should eat, I know what we should use to groom and clean ourselves, I know where we should shop. I know all this stuff. There is just one teensy, little problem with all this information. I absolutely, positively, do not have the time to execute it all.
I get it. The world has become one of convenience. It has to be for me. My world begins at 5 am and doesn't stop until 11 pm. The two grown ups in my world, work and commute 9ish hours a day. The three little people are shuttled around to different locations depending on the week. Back before anyone knew what GMOs were, when my grandmother grew her own garden and canned her own veggies, when barely anything was plastic, when West Nile Virus was something that obviously only happened on the west bank of the Nile...life was a little slower. Not saying it was easier, just slower and simpler.
I am aware that when it comes to food and household products, the more you can do on your own, the better it is for you. The fact is...there aren't enough hours. I can barely find the time to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...let alone bake the bread, jar the jam, and mash the peanuts. It's pretty tough to cram the farmer's market into a Saturday morning when you also have soccer games and birthday parties and all other errands to run.
Last year I made a small commitment...no more granola bars. I would not buy another granola bar. All that sugar, all those additives parading around as a healthy snack. I would just make my own. I have tons of recipes with zero sugar. And really, it's not a huge undertaking. However, when it's Sunday evening and I haven't started because we've been running around fitting all of our errands and house cleaning and fun family time into 2 days because fat chance any of that is happening during the week, it is a huge pain in my ass. Those nights I'm staying up past 11 to get it done. I've stuck to my commitment, but I've definitely lost a few hours of sleep over it.
My newest obsession is sun block and vitamin D deficiency. I have a recipe for making my own sun block. I've had it for over a month, still haven't made it. So instead I lay out the big bucks for the organic, chemical free stuff. And I've started letting my kids get a bit of un-sunscreened outside time. But seriously? My kids are blond, blue eyed, fair skinned babies. I can't, in good conscience, let them get sun burned...and they will burn. They will. I don't care what you tell me about tanning diets or essential oils or anything. They will burn and it will hurt and I can not believe that a burn is good for them.
I yearn for the carefree stupid days. The days when I didn't google how to naturally remove ants from my smoke detector, when I just bought a can of Raid and sprayed those little effers until they curled up and died. I long for the days when I just bought milk, the cheapest milk I could find, and didn't worry about added hormones and if my 6 year old's nose pimple was because of the rBGH in some string cheese I bought because I can not afford organic dairy. I miss the time when I thought the most awesome invention ever was the aerosol sunscreen. Spray that on and no lotion hands and it worked. No burning. Who cares about what you're breathing or if it contains hormone disrupting chemicals like Oxybenzone?
But you can't unlearn it. You can't become re-blind to it. So I will just try and manage my panic attacks over genetically modified corn and BPA in plastics. I will just do my best and try to remember that there's always something. Even when Grandma was making jam on the back porch, I'm sure there was something out there that had her worried for her children, worried for the world. Probably the bugs eating her cabbage leaves, but I'm sure she had some nice pesticides to take care of that ;)
