Homemade all natural bug reppellant

 Bugs are in season around Happy Chaos Casa, so I'm trying not to load the kids up with tons of bug spray full of crazy chemicals, I found a few recipe's online so I can make my own with Essential Oils. --



Daniella seems to attract the bugs really bad, so she has bites all summer long, this year I'm hoping to use this mix with better results!! Check out the link to Soap Deli News with the recipe I used. I'll update in a few weeks to report the results !
http://www.soapdelinews.com/2011/06/natural-mosquito-repellent-recipes-and.html

New Projects

So now that summer is about to begin, I've begun the organization of the house in preperation of having all 3 kids home 3 months straight!! And since we live in the oven of Texas (San Antonio) with 100+ temps pretty much all summer, we dont get out much, hardly even the back yard as its just too much for the little ones! Of course we do have SeaWorld San Antonio 15 min away so we certainly take advantage of their water park as often as possible.

So with that in mind I started thinking of ways to declutter and make summer easier to have all 3 kids fully entertained at the same time. Last summer was easier since Isabella was an infant and basically ate slept and pooped, as infants do.

My first project was to purge the plastic toys which I kinda did, about 50% anyway, then I organized them all and gave Chance all the bigger toys in his room. Then I decided to use all the left over diaper boxes I had to build a toy bookshelf out of them!

Cut tops off and laid them out

Poked holes with a screwdriver and attached the boxes to each other with zip ties

Lots of tape to support it up, could use duct tape

final product except I will be adding contact paper on the insides and cover in fabric on the outside

Trying to parent naturally

So I've always been interested in being eco-friendly and especially with the kids. It is so hard and sometimes I feel completely failed at this attempt as I clean with all purpose cleaner, and laundry detergent. But I keep trying and I usually remember to make my own all natural cleaners half the time... better than none of the time (right??). So in the past year I've come to realize the kids toys that are full of plastic and electronics may not be the best for them, learning wise or toxicity wise. Now this seems to be my biggest challenge because all natural toys are soo hard to come by! ToysRus has very little selection ... and dont even bother with Walmart, Target has introduced some more lately and I'm pretty excited about that. But I already LOVE Target!!! so I'm not surprised :) Well I managed to get rid of a ton of small plastic toys that have accumulated Since Chance was a baby, so that is progress. But I've recently discovered a ton of fun shops on Etsy that sell beautiful handmade toys! Now I just need to money to get them all! So I've started my collection with some handmade playsilks that I won in a contest with BeneathTheRowanTree!!!

 And I've found several others doing giveaways like this blog http://naturalsuburbia.blogspot.com. I hope I win some more of these fabulous toys for my babies!! As of right now I'll continue to purge the plastic and look for the more natural toys, but I am sure its all in balance since we still got Daniella a cute pink/purple keyboard for her birthday because she has gotten in to performing songs for us! We love this passion in her and will hopefully continue to find more things she will love! I'm going to continue to look for more natural ways of parenting and living too, and hopefully at some point the natural stuff will take over the chemical stuff but until then I will just keep trying!