Thinking Thursdays: Blog Action Day!

Hello!  Its Blog Action Day, and the topic of interest is climate change... I won't go into recommendations and lists on what we can do to save the earth, but I think Scientific American has a pretty good list of solutions of what we can do to reduce our negative impact on our planet.  I think all in all, though I won't preach a doomsday message with regards to global warming (especially after reading Michael Crichton's "State of Fear", which presents a slightly alternative view), each individual does has the responsibility to use our resources wisely.  For ourselves, we've been trying to practice the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle... For example, we use energy-saving light bulbs, we recycle all our paper (by selling it to one of the old karang guni men who ply our area on Saturdays), we try to reduce our waste by opting for foodstuff with less packaging.

One more R that I think I would like to mention, would be to "Repurpose" things.  We've been trying to think of alternative toys for baby J that would firstly cost less, and also reduce the amount of waste generated.  (I mean, when you buy a toy, it comes with a carbon footprint thanks to manufacturing, transport, as well as all that packaging...)  So here's one idea:  Using leftover household containers as baby musical instruments!

A churchmate recently brought mooncakes over to our place during bible study and the cakes came in this gorgeous box, which looked too good to throw, but didn't seem to be very useful for storage since it was round in shape.  Also, we had a few plastic drink bottles lying around as well.

What I did was to take buttons from my sewing box and placed them in one bottle, and we got samples of a few different kinds of beans (the uncle at the market kindly gave them to us for free!) for the other bottle.  Since the bottles are transparent, baby J can see the buttons and beans, and he's been having a good time shaking them, but under close supervision of course, since he might eventually learn how to take the screwcaps off!

The mooncake box ended up becoming a drum for baby J, who had been having fun before this with my cooking pot and rice scoop.   I basically glued wrapping paper to the top (it was this super cute monster print from Paperchase, which is glossy, thereby protecting it from baby J's drool), and covered the sides with origami paper, folding the excess into the box and gluing them down.   And the best part of it is the new "rattles" and the rice scoop fit nicely inside the drum for storage!