If you found me by choice, thanks! And if you accidentally stumbled here and are about to click away because you think I’m going to wax philosophical about the joys of dressing your kids in hemp, stick around.

I’m not here to preach.

I might use biodegradable toilet cleaner, but I’m not about to deny my kids the occasional restaurant hamburger and fries—though I can’t help reminding them what factory farming is doing to the planet. I live by example, but I’m not a sustainabully. (Yes, I made that word up.)

My children run the gamut from preschool to tween. We eat organic and grow a lot of our vegetables.

While blogging as Mommy Greenest, I’ve written about talking with third graders about global warming, feeding my kids organic food, battling a lice infestation without chemicals (they won), trying out veganism (less for the planet than for the purely selfish goal of losing five pounds), saving money by DIYing my own cleaners and face masks, and disposing of off-gassing toys while my two-year-old was sleeping. (“Doll? What doll?”)

And I drive a relatively large SUV. (It was supposed to convert to hydrogen. Long story.)

So maybe I’m not the greenest mommy on the block, but I try to make daily choices that can help shrink my family’s carbon footprint. And those choices—old and new, bad and good, right and oh-so-wrong (like the gas-guzzling Volvo)—I’ll share here with you.

Mommy Greenest’s tag line—“We guard the nest of the world”—was inspired by a speech I once heard given by pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene. He described the rates of children’s illnesses—including cancer, asthma and autism—as escalating at a pace so rapid they would soon be considered epidemic.

Scientists—Dr. Greene among them—believe that many of these illnesses are caused by chemicals in our environments, which children absorb at a rate much higher than adults. And even the EPA admits the chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis have never been tested for safety in children.

Research to support the negative impact of chemicals on our families can be found at Healthy Child, Healthy World, a national non-profit dedicated to children’s environmental health, which inspired me to learn more about greener parenting.

The analogy that Dr. Greene made was to the old “canary in a coal mine” adage, in which the coal mine is the world and our children the canaries, whose spiking rates of illnesses should be telling us that something is very, very wrong. In envisioning Mommy Greenest, I kept coming back to the idea of those birds, and the safe nest that is their right.

In taking small steps to keep chemicals out of our homes and our children’s lives, we act collectively to protect our nest—for all the world’s children.

I hope that we can inspire each other to keep taking those steps. Thanks for reading!

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