Mom On Green Living: Do It For Yourself

On Earth Day, there’s usually a barrage of media reminders to "live green." But for Kerry Laberge, green living is a million conscious choices each day that she says she does as much for selfish reasons as out of duty.

“I’m first concerned about my family’s safety,” she says from her home in Unionville.

She had an "aha" moment when she was pregnant with her oldest child, now 10.

“I was cleaning the bathtub and hanging my head out the bathroom window" because of the chemical fumes, "and it clicked – this is so wrong and so unsafe.”

Laberge switched from the familiar chemicals found in most stores’ cleaning aisles to natural products that are safe for people and for the environment. And she’s looked at every aspect of what surrounds and goes into her family – food, soaps, cleaning supplies, fertilizer, pesticides, food storage containers, paint and household items.

To replace the toxins under the sink, she keeps Dr. Bronner’s products, which she says many people use for camping. It can be used for cleaning countertops and surfaces at home, she says, but since it’s made of natural ingredients you could wash your hair or brush your teeth with it, too, with no ill effect.

For some things, she makes her own cleaning supplies. Laberge mixes a paste from baking soda and laundry detergent to clean the bathtub and combines borax and lemon juice to clean the toilet.

She’s been doing it so long she’s not sure how much more she spends by buying organic products, but she’s sure it’s worth it.

“You pay for it now or you pay for it later,” says the mom of two. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Laberge says she went through her whole house, throwing out the products that are known to contribute to cancer.

“It really hits home about how it affects you,” she says, noting that the type of cancer her mother had can be attributed to the toxins in consumer products.

One of the most important things for women and for teens is makeup.

“If you do one thing, get a safe lipstick,” which inevitably ends up in your mouth as you talk and eat throughout the day, she says. Laberge buys natural makeup from Nature’s Goods, through the Internet and from the Citrus Salon in Canton. But she checks everything out on the Skin Safe Database, a website that rates and explains products’ health impact.

Laberge says she tries to buy local because products produced in other states or countries require an extensive use of fossil fuels to transport them. She shops at Bristol’s Wild Carrot Farm in Canton for fresh produce and at The Meat House in Canton, for times when her family does eat meat. Natural products she buys at Nature’s Goods in Unionville and groceries at Stop & Shop or Whole Foods. At Garden of Light, she can bring a glass container to be filled with popcorn and get other groceries while cutting down on packaging.

Besides buying local and buying green, she says sometimes buying less is the best thing to do. Her family uses present bags made of cloth, when giving gifts and they are reused year after year.

The presents she has given her kids are different, too, though it’s becoming harder now that they’re getting older.

“It was easy when they were young. They had wooden toys and homemade things. But I can’t go around the corner and ask someone to make him a wooden truck anymore,” she says. Being in school has brought the lure of plastic toys in plastic packaging.

Her kids aren’t suffering, though.

“Sometimes people ask me ‘what, do your kids play with, sticks?’” and she says they do. Constructing a leaf city out of sticks and old bricks has kept her kids and their friends busy for five years.

“This is normal to them; they’ve grown up with it,” Laberge says of the family’s green lifestyle. She tells of one family vacation, when her son was small and the place they were staying had no compost bin.

“He took the wax paper from the butter and dug a hole in the ground and buried it.”

While it’s become natural to her kids, it’s sometimes surprising to their friends. The cloth napkins she sends to school in their lunches were strange, at first.

“Lynn Katz has been really great,” she says of the Union School principal who oversees her son’s school. “She instituted cloth-napkin Fridays and now it’s the thing to do. On Fridays, kids are trying to borrow one on the bus and scrambling to make sure they have one.”

Laberge writes a blog under the name Gruppie Girl – “a self-professed granola yuppie.” It details some of her adventures in green living. Reading it, people have sometimes thought she’s a little odd, too.

“People think I’m going to be an aging hippie with a gray ponytail who smells bad,” she says. It’s far from the truth.

She’s proof that small steps can add up to a powerful impact to improve your own health and safeguard the environment.