FAQ

What kind of camera do you have? and, what kind of camera do you recommend?

A Canon Rebel – I usually use my 50 mm lens or 85 mm lens.  It’s a great starter DSLR, but I hope to get a 5D eventually! If you want to take great pictures, you don’t have to have a nice camera. A point and shoot will work great if you don’t use flash! I used Canons for years and loved them.

How tall are you?

I am a teeny tiny five-foot-one. Just don’t call me a shrimp. I still hate that nickname.

If you could give people just one eco-friendly tip, above all others that people should do, what would it be?

Think about how much waste you’re creating with what you eat, buy, wear, and drive. And then try to reduce that. Just be conscious.

It sounds simple, but if you do it right, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to use and waste less.

Your most favorite food as a vegetarian?

Oh, man. Just one? I love to eat. Perhaps baked sweet potato fries are my favorite. Right now, anyway. {They’re super simple – just cut, toss with olive oil and salt/spices. Then bake at 350, or broil on high if you’re impatient like me. Turn them over when they start to brown. Dip in ketchup. Mmm.}

What’s the one green thing you do that’s hardest to remember and/or do consistently?

For a long, long time – I always left my reusable grocery bags at home. Always. Without fail. I eventually got better, and it’s a habit now. Yay!

Currently, I’ve been prone to forgetting the produce bags that I reuse. {Although, if you want to talk about what “green” thing I am most lazy about, or something like that – I would be hard pressed to choose just one. Sadly. Like, I know that I shouldn’t be insanely lazy and just TAKE my paper downstairs to recycle instead of throwing it out in the trashcan upstairs but sometimes I AM LAZY. There. I said it.}

When and why did you go vegetarian?

Can you also ask where? Because that’s equally awesome. (Hawaii! The land of Spam lovin’, ironically.)

The quick story: I never really enjoyed meat, but my dad wouldn’t let me be a vegetarian. So I just ate as little as possible. I didn’t want to say I was a vegetarian, because hello! high maintenance.

Then I learned a whole lot about the land usage for meat – like how 80% of all agricultural land in the US is used to raise animals for food, and about all the chemicals and antibiotics that get injected into animals to make them cheaper to feed. (ie. Cows. They are supposed to eat grass, right? Well, we inject them so they can eat grain and scraps of other animals. Not good for the cows, people! Also, ew.)

Vegetarians have lower rates of colon and other cancers, which sounded awesome to me. And I didn’t have to worry about animals laying in their own waste or beaks getting chopped off or all that stuff you hear about in factory farms.

So, I decided to be high maintenece and proclaimed myself a vegetarian in January 2005, my sophomore year of college, in Honolulu, Hawaii. And I’m never, ever going back. I love my meat-free life way too much.

How did you meet your husband? And how did he propose? (I’m a sucker for cute stories).

I was a sophomore in college (at the University of Dayton- woohoo!), he was starting a graduate program. He was a campus minister who lived in a freshman dorm and I heard about him before I met him. My friends gushed about the “cute, new campus minister!!” who played guitar.

Then I met him. And we were “just friends” because it was against the rules for him to date an undergraduate. We ate dinner together in the dining hall all the time, and he came to my aunt’s wedding – the whole family got to meet him only two months after I first met him. They adored him. Then I left for a semester in Hawaii, and we talked ALL the time on the phone. And exchanged tons of postcards, emails, and letters. We still insisted we were “JUST FRIENDS.”

(He sent me flowers and a package on Valentine’s Day with a CD of songs he wrote and recorded for me. Yep, we were just friends.)

Then I came back to Ohio and we decided we wanted to get married eventually. Buuuut, I was only a junior in college. My senior year, he was done with his program so he jetted off to Denver for a year to volunteer. This time, the distance was awful. It was so hard to be apart and I hate almost every minute of it. (Except the fact that I got to spend much more time with my friends and roommates with my boyfriend gone. Woohoo, senior year!)

I spent Christmas with his family that year, and on Christmas morning, he and I opened a stocking that was on our doorknob. A letter was in it from him, telling me that I was going on a scavenger hunt. With riddles. That were associated with our relationship. (One was on the coffeemaker, because he hated coffee before me; one was on the thermostat because I’m constantly cold, things like that.) After 16 different riddles and hunts around his parents house, we ended up by the piano. He sat on the piano bench and instructed me to sit in a chair next to the piano. He gave me a lyric sheet.

He played a song he wrote for me, a song that he had written in the beginning of our relationship without lyrics, a song that had been on my Valentine’s Day CD. And now he wrote lyrics about how he wanted to spend his life with me.

At the end of the song, he knelt down and proposed.

The first thing I said?

“How did you afford to buy this? Did you STEAL it?”

Yes, I am so romantic.

What were the first changes you made to your life(style) when you decided that living green was a priority for you?

The very first, most important change for me was reducing waste. This has taken different forms as I’ve grown and learned more in this lifestyle. At first, it was simply getting a water bottle to avoid all the plastic water bottles I was going through. I started to refuse bags at the store if I could just throw what I’d bought in my own big purse-slash-bag. It slowly, naturally spread to other things. One day my senior year of college, we ran out of paper towels in our house. We just started using normal towels instead. And never bought more paper towels. I didn’t think twice about it. And we saved tons of money. I am convinced that no one has an excuse to not be doing these things. It’s insanely easy to get a water bottle. Or wash your towels instead of getting disposable ones. It saves money and resources. Win-win.

Now, I avoid most all disposable plastic containers (particularly if they’re non-recyclable). I make a ton of my own stuff, including cleaning exclusively with baking soda and vinegar. It’s all come so easily and has made so much sense.

I still have some areas where I know I can improve – less driving, not getting coffee if I’ve forgotten my reusable mug at home, keeping the house colder, and so on. I think the more you become aware, the more you are inclined to want to do. And that makes me happy. Nothing seems to take an unusual amount of effort or thought – it’s just the way things are done.

Pregnancy FAQ

When did you find out?

December 23, 2009.  My period was several days late (I am usually like clockwork. TMI), and I couldn’t stand not knowing immediately if it was what I thought. So during a last minute Christmas shopping trip with my sisters, I bought my first three-pack of pregnancy tests. It was hard to hide them, as I didn’t want to raise suspicions – but I told my youngest sister, “It’s always good to have these on hand when you’re a married woman.” I thought she fell for it, but apparently she was highly suspicious after that. Ah, well.

How did you tell Mike you were pregnant the first time?

We had talked about it – since I had a really strong sense I was pregnant – but he urged me to wait a few days to take a pregnancy test. I obviously couldn’t resist, so I when I found out, I ran out to the garage where he was spray painting his bicycle and squealed, “I’m pregnant!” We hugged in the cold doorway, then he shooed me back inside, saying “Well, you probably shouldn’t be out here since I’m spray painting!”

How did you tell your parents you were pregnant with Gabe?

Since we found out over Christmas, we were with my family for a week, then with Mike’s family for a week – right after finding out this life-changing news. Although you’d expect this to be excruciatingly difficult, it was actually perfect, since we needed some time to absorb this huge surprise.

I was very, very worried about having a miscarriage, so I didn’t want to tell anyone at all until I was at least ten weeks pregnant. Including my parents. When we finally did tell them, at the end of January – check out the story here.

Why did you see a midwife? Is it because you’re a hippie? Do you want to give birth at home?

For a number of reasons, mostly because midwives tend to treat pregnancy like a normal occurrence, not like a disease to be treated. There are lower c-section rates among midwives and women who see midwives report more satisfying birth experiences. Most of all, it’s because of this film, which I seriously recommend to any woman who thinks she might someday want to get pregnant.

Most European women see midwives, but it’s just not as common here in the States, so I get lots of questions about the validity of having a midwife attend my birth. Midwives deliver in hospitals as well, which is where I plan to give birth. (A very awesome hospital birthing center that claims to be more ‘high touch’ than ‘high tech’ and has things like birthing balls and aromatherapy.)

Did you get morning sickness with Gabe?

I was really queasy for a few weeks, but like most bad things – I tend to forget how bad it really was. (This bodes well for childbirth and having future children, I hope.) I was nauseous in the evening for a few weeks, then for a few weeks I’d throw up if I didn’t eat ASAP OMG OR ELSE! I really only got sick a few times, including once in our kitchen trash can while Mike’s parents were visiting and using the bathroom (and we hadn’t told them yet…)

I do remember spending a Saturday afternoon in January curled in a ball on the floor, absolutely miserable. Mike was watching something on Hulu and I saw a commercial with a guy eating chips and salsa. Instantly, I knew that was the one thing in the world that would make me feel better. It had to be chunky, mild salsa and really thin white tortilla chips. Mike ran out to the store and made a very happy girl. I felt great for the rest of the day.

What’s it like to feel a baby move inside of you?