Book List

I would like to write reviews for some of these eventually, but in the meantime, here are some of my favorite books about smart growth and walkability, simple living, creativity, and parenting.

Smart Growth and Walkability

How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage out of Life by Chris Balish

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon

The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment by Eric O. Jacobsen

Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World by Ross Chapin

Everyday Bicycling: How to Ride a Bike for Transportation (Whatever Your Lifestyle) by Elly Blue

Crafts, Cooking, and Creativity

Knitting for Baby by Melanie Falick and Kristin Nicholas

The Expectant Knitter: 30 Designs for Baby and Your Growing Family  by Marie Connolly

More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson and Anna Williams

Simply in Season by Cathleen Hockman-Wert and Mary Beth Lind

The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections by Amanda Blake Soule

Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures by Amanda Blake Soule

Family, Parenting, Simplicity, and General Life

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore

The Rhythm of Family: Discovering a Sense of Wonder through the Seasons by Amanda Blake Soule and Stephen Soule

Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids by Kim John Payne

The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two by William Sears, Martha Sears, Robert Sears, and James Sears

Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets by Barbara Brock

Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children by Sharifa Oppenheimer

Making hand-me-downs work for children of different genders

I've been writing a lot about walkability/biking/transit/smart growth and how they relate to simpler parenthood, but I'd like to continue in the simple living thread by discussing how we can reuse kids' items, especially when we have kids of different genders. Conventional wisdom says that kids are expensive, but parents can usually choose to spend significantly less than the standard "cost per child" figures commonly tossed around. One logical way to do that is to reuse items from one child to the next as much as possible, but parents might wonder what to do when they have children of different genders.  Here are some of my ideas after having a boy and a girl in immediate succession.

1. Plan for hand-me-downs starting with your first child

First of all, if you suspect you might eventually have more than one child, start planning for it by getting (buying, registering for, inheriting, finding on Craigslist, or making) baby supplies accordingly when you are expecting your first child. 

This might mean getting higher-quality items that cost a bit more so they will last through a second or third child, which will cost less in the long run. This is especially true for the big-ticket items like strollers. 

It might meaning using cloth diapers, which can typically be reused through at least two children, unlike disposable diapers (that would be gross).

If you are on a tight baby budget, it might be tempting to skip the infant car seat and go straight to a convertible car seat.  However, if you plan on having children within a few years of each other, keep in mind that your oldest might still be using the convertible car seat when the second baby comes along, necessitating a second car seat anyway. We decided on an infant car seat (which is also infinitely easier to transport on foot if you are car-free with a baby, the subject of another post altogether) and got a convertible car seat when our oldest was almost 12 months old.

2. Get gender-neutral basics

This is more difficult than it sounds, which you will undoubtedly know if you have walked into a Gymboree lately. Children's clothing manufacturers don't want you to buy gender-neutral clothes that can be reused for second and subsequent babies. They want your girls in princess dresses and your boys in baseball uniforms so you will have to buy a brand-new wardrobe when that opposite-sex sibling comes along. Besides being not a little ridiculous (Do strangers really need to know whether your child is a boy or a girl at one month old? Are you planning on marrying them off anytime soon?), buying a completely gender-specific wardrobe is hardly cost-effective for clothes that will be outgrown after a few weeks anyway.

Basics like onesies, socks, cloth diaper covers, and sometimes sleepers and pants can usually be found in gender-neutral colors or good old-fashioned white. If you're having trouble finding neutral clothes, check the boys' section. Blame it on sexism, but boys' clothes tend to be or at least seem more neutral than girls' clothes. Boys's clothes often include green, gray, yellow, and red, while most girls' clothes go for the pink and purple. It is generally more acceptable for a girl to wear blue than for a boy to wear pink, so between real neutrals and some neutral-ish boys' clothes, you will be set with a wardrobe of basics than can be worn by a son or daughter. 

3. Get gender-neutral gear and toys

Your car seat, stroller, swing, bouncer, etc. do not need to be in gender-specific colors, and there are many gender-neutral options for these items. Paying hundreds of dollars for a new crib just so little Reagan can have a pink one is unnecessary. In my opinion, baby carriers and diaper bags belong to the parent's wardrobe, not the baby's, so you can go crazy with the design that matches your own personal style. That being said, if you expect Daddy to carry the baby or the bag, just say "no" to the purple Moby and opt for something more neutral. 

Toys, like baby gear, have become surprisingly more gender-specific over the years, as marketers have discovered that parents will pay for a brand-new toy collection if toys are marketed in terms of "his" and hers." For a fascinating look at gender in toy marketing, check out this article on the Center for a New American Dream blog. In the meantime, there are many wonderful toys that are for everyone. Classic toys like blocks, puzzles, wagons, books, and balls, and creative toys like crayons and other art supplies, transcend gender. For big purchases like bicycles and scooters, try to find (again, often marketed as "boys'") red or green items rather than ones with very gender-specific designs or characters. You can even find toy kitchens, dolls, or workbenches that are gender-neutral enough to suggest that either girls or boys can cook, have children, build things, and otherwise engage in human life. By following these toy suggestions, you will also likely avoid the Disneyfied, mass-marketed, and mass-produced toys in favor of handmade or small company's toys (search Etsy for wooden toys, dolls, Waldorf toys and Montessori toys, for a start).

4. Buy or make a few special items

There's no shame in sometimes wanting to dress your baby in gender-specific clothes, and the easiest and most cost-effective way to do this is to get (request, register for, find on Craigslist, or make) a few special items for your baby: a cute dress or two per season for a girl, or an Easter vest or button-down shirt for a boy. These can be paired with neutral items for a feminine or masculine effect, without doing the whole outfit, every day. Trust me, if you put a sweet A-line tunic on your daughter, no one will notice that airplane sleeper underneath (and since when do only boys ride in airplanes, anyway?). Extra points if you stitch or sew your special items for your cherubs - these will be special not only for your little boys and girls, but also for a niece, nephew, a friend's child, or even a grandchild! Now that is what I call an efficient hand-me-down.      

  

52 Projects (or 36 and counting...)

In addition to the benefits of a car-free lifestyle, I recently stumbled upon another way to motivate myself to devote time to creative pursuits this year: the 52 projects. The idea is nothing revolutionary, just making a list of 52 creative projects (large or small) to accomplish in 2013. There is a book entitled 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity  if you need some inspiration.

So far I only have 36 on my list but I'm sure I'll add more as the year goes on. The list has already inspired me to start or finish some projects, such as (ahem) this blog. Others on the list include some long-unfinished objects of the knitted variety, simple finishing touches that will make objects usable (finally putting names on our Christmas stockings, for example), a baby scrapbook for my second-born, homemade birthday cakes for the family birthdays this year, and projects to harness my interest in creative writing.

I love having plenty of endeavors on tap for those lovely, stolen moments of creativity.

Creativity and the Car-Free Life

In the midst of daily life with little ones, how easy it is to forget our own personal and creative pursuits! One more meal, one more load of laundry, one more diaper, and soon the day is over and we don't know exactly what we did all day. A certain amount of "accomplishment amnesia" is inevitable when one's primary responsibility is to keep small humans alive for one more day.

But whether we work from home, work away from home, or primarily take care of home and children, we all need personal pursuits. They maintain our balance and sanity and remind us that we are still individuals. We have passions, abilities, interests, and Selves that will ideally live on well after our kids are grown, and we still need to cultivate those now.

This is one reason why I love not having a car, even in our current not-ideal-for-walking situation. But wait a minute, you might think, doesn't a car leave you more free time for creative pursuits? You get your errands done sooner and voilà, look at all the time that is left over. That is supposed to be the idea, but it doesn't always work out that way, does it? How much time is wasted sitting in traffic, finding parking spaces, loading children in and out of car seats, or waiting for car repairs? And with the possible exception of waiting on car repairs, none of that time is relaxing or free time for personal endeavors.  Having a personal automobile also leads to a habit of going places in the car just because it's there, circling retail establishments and thinking about the things we might "need." Hardly a recipe for creativity or frugality or simplicity, for that matter. Instead of investing time on what we really and truly want to accomplish, we fall into the trap of going and going "just because".  I know because I find myself doing the same thing whenever I am driving a car.

By contrast, when I go anywhere walking or biking, I am getting exercise, getting rid of stress, and spending valuable brainstorming time on my various creative projects. When I take public transit, I don't need to focus on the road, so I can read, write, or even knit. Being car-free usually means combining trips to the store or other errands, so the time spent on those necessary activities is combined, leaving more free time at home and more fulfilling and fruitful travel time as well.

Adventures en Bus

Last week, I summoned up my courage to take both kids with me on the bus. We are lucky to have a bus line very close by (exceedingly lucky, if you look at how little of this area is covered by bus), and for my own sanity, I needed to get out of the house and give the bus-with-two-young-children thing a test run. With the baby in her wrap and the toddler pushing his own stroller, we set off.

The ride itself was relatively pleasant, as the driver and other passengers were indulgent and even doting to my little brood (two kids are nothing to write home about here). By the time I disembarked, I was feeling rather proud of myself for being so clever and resourceful... no sitting at home watching Sesame Street for us! It was at this point, as we were getting off the bus, that I realized there was a) no sidewalk, only a muddy, grassy curb between the road and a railroad track, and b) no crosswalk to get to our destination, in spite of its being directly across the street. The closest crosswalks were a good half mile in either direction. Hmm.

Why, one might well wonder, did the transit authority see fit to place a bus stop directly across the road from  a shopping area, but with no crosswalk to get there? Is this particular stop actually intended for hobos getting on and off the freight trains that occasionally pass by? Or, more likely, did no one give a moment's thought to who might be getting off at this stop, and why? Struggling to push my stroller through grass and mud to the nearest intersection, where I would study the traffic light timing until I could jaywalk least dangerously, I imagined it was probably the latter. The goal of this particular shopping area is clearly to get cars, not people, into the stores as quickly and efficiently as possible.

A Dream Deferred

True confession: I do not own a bike. Yes, I know. There is really no excuse for not having a working bike, especially when one is living car-free. To be fair, in the DC metro area where we lived for over five years with no car, we never had a need for bikes. We always lived within a 10- to 15-minute walk of a metro station, and we could get anyplace we needed to go on foot, by bus, by metro, or some combination thereof. As struggling grad students and then struggling "aw geez, we graduated in the middle of a recession" underemployed people, we never seemed to have the money to make such a purchase. Add to those factors small apartment living, with no storage space indoors for a bike, and here we are.

However, since moving back to the Pacific time zone late last year and eyeing the brand new, adorably optimistic bike lane painted on the local main road, I have been dreaming about how easily I could get from place to place, wind in my hair, on my very own grown-up two-wheeler. It has been a while, perhaps 15 years, since I sat on a bike, but I'm hoping it will come back to me like... well, you know.

Of course, the image in my mind of riding around town happily running errands has often included my two munchkins in tow, my two-year-old in a rear bike seat and my almost-two-month-old in a trailer in her car seat. Unfortunately, after a bit of Real Actual Research, I discovered that there doesn't seem to be a way to transport a baby under 9 or 12 months safely via bicycle in this country. To begin with, they don't make helmets sized for little babies, and besides, wearing a helmet in a car seat pushes the baby's neck into an awkward position and may restrict airflow. There is always the option of skipping the helmet, but ugh, that doesn't seem right either and may be illegal. This is not the Netherlands, or even Portland or San Francisco, where I would trust motorists not to injure us.  These are the real, honest-to-goodness exurbs here, after all. The shock value of seeing humans on a human-powered machine might offer some protection from the automobiles, but I'm not going to count on it.

So, my dream of transporting both babes via bike will have to wait. In the meantime, I'll work on getting myself onto my very own bike and building up the leg muscles and confidence to carry them with me soon enough.  Spokane Bike Swap, anyone?

Meet Walking Mama

Welcome to A Walking Mama.  I'm Heather, wife to a Really Smart Guy and mama to two little ones under the age of 4. We live a rich and fulfilling life without owning a car, and here I will focus in part on our carfree adventures and ideas for living more joyously without always depending on a personal automobile.

Walking is as central an activity to the human species as eating, sleeping, or breathing.  Sadly, though, in much of postwar America, the walking human has been relegated to outsider status to make way for the automobile. I will use this space to explore ideas about smart growth and strategies for recreating our cities on a human scale, with a particular eye to how growth policies affect families with children. If you care about anything - children, culture, beauty, recreation, health, social justice, prosperity - you should care about smart growth.

The other "walking" I do is more metaphorical: living on a human scale with my children and myself, trying to move slowly, simply, and deliberately through my days.  This means avoiding consumerism and the focus on more, better, and faster stuff. It means appreciating simple pleasures, enjoying public goods, respecting the natural rhythms of childhood and the seasons, and pursuing creativity in our home. Walking together, engaging our minds and bodies in our everyday pursuits,  is what we are trying to do in life and as a family.