Hi – Thanks for stopping by the Kid Friendly Organic Life blog! As you may have noticed, I don’t post very often on this blog anymore. There are lots of reasons for this, but it is NOT because I don’t care passionately about living a kid-friendly organic life anymore—I do! I do!

I’m leaving this blog live, sort of like leaving the light on, because it has an important message and I’m not completely convinced I’ve said all I want to say on the topic. Meanwhile, if you are looking to live a kid-friendly organic life, you can find much of the information on this blog, plus plenty of information not on this blog in my book –

Live Intentionally: 65 Challenges for a Healthier, HappierLife

Live Intentionally is full of stories, recipes, ideas, inspiration, and yes, challenges to help you live the most intentionally organic life you can. If you’d like me to mail you a signed copy, just shoot me an email and we can arrange payment through paypal.

And if you need a few recipe ideas, check the recipes tabs above—there are links to all the recipes on the blog.

While I haven’t been blogging on Kid Friendly Organic Life, I have been blogging on two other sites you might want to check out:

Another Good Dog is a blog that chronicles our family’s adventures as a foster dog family.

My Life in Paragraphs is a blog about my writing life.

I've also been busy writing novels! Seriously? Why, yes! Here are a few of them:

Links to my blogs, books, and other published writing in journals and magazines, plus news, schedule of appearances, random photos of my foster dogs, and even video clips from TV appearances can be found at CaraWrites.com.

Thanks for reading! I am always grateful and humbled by your interest in what I have to say!

Many blessings to all of you.

Explanation for random post spams....

Hey Subscribers to Kid Friendly Organic Life!

First off, sorry for the random old posts that Blogger keeps sending out. I have NO earthly idea what that is about, but rest assured I am attempting to get to the bottom of it with little or no help from blogger (or google who own blogger!). If I can't resolve the issue, I may remove this blog, which would break my heart, of course. Still, I don't want you to get this odd form of spam from me because I am the anti-spam.

Many apologies! I'm working on it - promise!

(and just in case you were wondering - I do plan to post to this blog again, I'm just WAY over the top too busy at present with the release of my second novel, Girls' Weekend - check it out if you're so inclined and if you're jonesing for one of my real posts, you can subscribe to my other blog, Another Good Dog, which chronicles the tales/tails of our foster dog adventures)

Happy May!

Blessings to you,

Cara

10 Simple Things You Can Do to Lower Your Grocery Bill

How'd you like to cut your grocery bill, improve your health, help the planet, and eat food that tastes great? It's within your reach. Here are a few ideas for making it happen. 

1. Don’t Buy Rinse Aid, Windex, or odor-repellents.

Use good ole white vinegar in place of all of these products. You may have to refill the rinse aid dispenser more often, but since vinegar costs about a tenth of those fancy, expensive, toxic, earth-polluting commercial rinse aid solutions, you’ll actually be saving money (and not contributing to the poisoning of our earth, sorry for the guilt-trip, couldn’t help myself.) Vinegar diluted with water, is more effective, creates on build-up, is non-toxic, and works great on windows, mirrors, and nearly all surfaces. Got a stinky trash can? Spray some vinegar in there and let it evaporate – it will remove the offending smell. Before you ask – yes - in all these uses, the vinegary scent disappears in minutes. There are lots of other ways to use vinegar to replace expensive cleaners.

Yes! You CAN Raise a Daughter Who Loves Her Body!

[Note: This is a guest post from an amazing woman I met via twitter. I'm super excited to share her writing and her message! I think it is a CRITICAL message for everyone who has a daughter. Give Hilary a shout out via twitter or in the blog comments if you agree!]

If I had read the title of this post a few years ago, I would have had two reactions: ‘that’s not possible’, and ‘tell me more.’ I would have been split down the middle between believing that we exist in a world where loving our bodies as women is nearing impossibility, and wanting desperately to know that it didn’t have to be that way.

But all of that doubt changed a few years ago. When trying to pick a topic for my master’s thesis, I kept coming back to the fear that I would one day have a daughter who struggled with her body in the same way I have. So, my supervisor and I set out to find young women who loved their bodies, and learn from them and their mothers what went right.

Over hours and hours of conversation with these women, and their mothers, we learned two very important things.

First, it is possible for young women to love their bodies, and their mothers absolutely had a role to play in that.

You're Responsibility Vs. Deep-fried Twinkies....

After what seems like a very long hiatus, I’m back at it. I haven’t abandoned you my Kid Friendly Organic Life people! In fact, one of my New Year’s resolution is to get back to blogging regularly here.

Honest confession – it’s not just that I’ve missed you (I have! I have!), but also my jeans are getting a little tight and there’s just a bit too much white sugar creeping back into my world. My excuses are long and layered, but they amount to nothing more than distraction and laziness

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I have discovered that I write about what I most care about, and lately that has been rescue dogs, fiction writing, and my own navel. Not that those are bad things, but it’s time to turn back to my health. I’m turning 50 this year which is a shock to me. Instead of running from that fact, I’m embracing it and that means getting serious about staying healthy.

We should all be serious about our health. There’s much too much taking-it-for-granted-until-it’s-too-late happening. In honor of that, I thought I’d tackle the NEW nutrition guidelines that have been behind a flurry of redundant filler articles turning up in every news outlet in town

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Dietary Guidelines for Americans is published every 5 years for health professionals in light of the latest and greatest nutrition science. This momentous occurrence just occurred as the 2015-2020 dietary guidelines were published this past fall. If you want to read it in full (it’s long and has many, many tables and appendixes, but it’s very clearly laid out and not too governmenty) click here.

For the rest of us normal people, here’s the shortened version of the guidelines:

How I Grew the Biggest Lemons in Pennsylvania!

About seven years ago, I ordered a lemon tree through the mail. 

At the time, I was seriously over the edge in terms of doing EVERYTHING organic and decided that growing my own organic lemons was a good idea.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I live in Pennsylvania. Not Florida.

But the optimistic website assured me that I could grow lemons ANYWHERE. So, I said, “Awesome! Send me a tree!” (I’m sure that’s technically historical fiction, as the facts are fuzzy these many years later.)

The tree arrived and I carefully followed the directions and planted it in a humongous pot filled with wood chips mixed with soil (per the instructions that came with my tiny little tree).

For seven long years, I tended my plant. It grew and grew, eventually sprouting long sharp spikes that poked us when we passed too closely. One year, my angry husband cut all the spikes off the tree, but even that didn’t deter it. It just grew new spikes.

We moved it inside each winter where it proceeded to be forgotten for weeks at a time, only to be rescued from death by heavy watering, removal of all its dead leaves, and being doused with a seaweed fertilizer concoction.

Anyway – all that is to say – it’s not been an easy life for our little lemon tree. And for six long years it produced not one lemon.

But this year everything changed. This year we grew lemons! Really, really, really BIG lemons. Grapefruit sized lemons!

Early in the summer they were tiny little green balls, more like limes.

Somewhere about August they began to swell to epic proportions. So much so, that I took to Facebook to see if anyone knew what I was growing.

After much serious and some not-at-all-serious-but-very-entertaining discussion/speculation, it was decided that what I was growing were indeed lemons, but they wouldn’t be fully ripened until Thanksgiving, maybe even Christmas.

And what do you know? This is the lemon I picked from my tree last night.