During my second pregnancy and shortly after my son’s birth, my quest for the best diet and the best everything started to accelerate. I quit buying white bread, white pasta and white rice. I decided to have an epidural-free birth and took a hypnobirthing class. I stopped buying red meat and stopped drinking milk. I had been a faithful 3 glass a day milk drinker my whole life.
We bought a Blendtec blender with a Costco gift card Spencer won at work and started making green smoothies. We started doing P90X together late at night before our son’s midnight feeding and decided to try the P90X diet suggestions. We were feeling great.
Spencer was working 12-16 hour days and would frequently go a couple days without seeing our children. It was awful. We rarely saw each other and even when he was home, he often had to keep working. Welcome to every young start-up entrepreneur’s dream life. It wasn’t shaking out the way we envisioned.
I spent my nights voraciously researching and reading all I could about healthy diets. I remember feeling so conflicted reading The China Study and Weston A. Price philosophies. They completely contradicted one another. I was desperate to find the best way. Why was it so hard. Why didn’t scientific evidence clearly point to one diet?
Making the best food choices started to consume my thoughts and affect how I felt about eating foods I considered “undesirable.” Planning menus and cooking healthy food started to stress to me out. It wasn’t fun any more unless it was “perfect.” Food was all I thought about, and that level of unhealthy focus coupled with postpartum hormones was a scary combination.
I was terrified one of my children or Spencer or I would get a completely preventable-by-diet disease. I couldn’t stand the thought of that happening. Spencer had already been sick early in our marriage for 6 months and that was scary enough. I took the responsibility on myself to make sure that didn’t happen again. I couldn’t quit trying to figure it out. Thank goodness for Spencer’s low-key personality with my obsession during this time. I felt like I was going crazy, and he probably wondered the same thing 😉
At the same time, I started looking through my home to find other ways I could make it better. I began searching online for non-toxic cleaners so I didn’t have to worry about my kids getting into poisonous chemicals. Each recipe I found called for essential oils. I didn’t really know what those were, but I had an entire closet full of them. My husband had been getting them from as part of a business trade and putting them in the closet. For 6 months, we never opened one bottle. Not one.
I threw away all of our cleaners. Goodbye, toxins! I bought baking soda, vinegar, and Castile soap and opened a few essential oils – lemon, melaleuca and white fir. I mixed up a few spray bottles of new cleaners and was thrilled that I could clean the house without toxins. They wouldn’t be on my skin or in the air we breathed, and I could let my 2 year old help without worrying.
You can find a few of my favorite non-toxic cleaning recipes here.
