Going Crunchy

Crunchy. A new term to me. I heard it recently from a fellow mom who never thought she would "be the crunchy type". When she said it, I had no clue as to what she was referring, but I smiled and nodded and continued on with our conversation. I honestly thought I misheard her at the time, until recently when I stumbled upon this web site.

At first, I thought man this lady is really out there and then I started to realize that I do, or would like to do a lot of what this Crunchy lady is doing--I am an aspiring crunchy homemaker folks!

What makes one crunchy? To be honest, I have no idea what the term really means, but I do know that to go crunchy one needs to care about trying to be as natural as possible for your little ones, taking care of our beautiful planet (I'm no tree hugger, but I am grateful for God's beauty and provision), and re-using as many recourses as we can. From the get-go when we had children we knew we wanted to give them the best possible start, for us that meant breastfeeding (I know it doesn't always work for some women, but for us I am grateful that it has), making our own baby food, cloth diapers -- sort of, and homeschooling.

However, as our children get older we find ourselves wondering what other possible ways we can cut down on some of our consumerism dependance, be it for budget reasons or just to conserve recourses. We recently made the decision to start with cloth "paper towels" and I am going to try my hand at making our own laundry detergent as well. Mostly these are budget friendly moves as I am so sick of spending so much of our budget on paper and soap. It's really a HUGE chunk and it drives me nuts.

In my dream we would have land and a beautiful garden, a cow for fresh milk and chickens for fresh eggs. It's really getting tiring buying so many things and not knowing where they come from. I'm a traditionalist in so many ways and I want traditional food. It's a far off dream, one that I'm not sure I'll ever have fulfilled, seeing as we live in the city and zoning isn't too friendly to farm animals, heck we don't even have dirt at our disposal for the time being.

As my children become more curious about how things work, where things come from, and how God's hand is orchestrating it all I feel myself pulled more and more to a traditional lifestyle of dirt and farm animals. Maybe it's a phase. Whatever it is I hope to come to some happy medium, between hillbilly and city slicker where we can all enjoy the labors of the Industrial Revolution without loosing the ability to see God's handiwork in it all.

So for now I continue my crunchy journey with this recipe for homemade laundry detergent. I am hopeful that I will be happy with the outcome and will be ecstatic to cut down my soap budget by at least $80 this year!

In what ways are you going crunchy?

**Update.**

Since drafting this post I have made and begun using recipe #4 from the link above. I have ran about four loads so far and am pleased with the results. I am a happy homemaker!