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Follow Joe’s cartoonery at JoeMohrToons.com and on Twitter at @GreenCartoons.

For this week’s Two-fer, I’ve got a couple of posts you might want to not only read, but to bookmark for future reference and to pass on to your friends.

The first one is about cosleeping (and why babies should not sleep alone), and the second is a great one for homeschoolers and DIY folks who want to make their own music.

From Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone:

“Where a baby sleeps is not as simple as current medical discourse and recommendations against cosleeping in some western societies want it to be. And there is good reason why. I write here to explain why the pediatric recommendations on forms of cosleeping such as bedsharing will and should remain mixed. I will also address why the majority of new parents practice intermittent bedsharing despite governmental and medical warnings against it.”

Agree? Disagree? Leave the author a comment!

And from my friends at Planet Green, Handmade Music: Make Your Own Instruments From Scratch:

“Creating your own music is like growing your own food. Those who play music, play for sustenance. Musicians are driven by an inner desire to create. Often, it is this innate craftiness that leads music makers to improve upon their instruments and evolve their craft.”

There’s 5 DIY musical instruments from upcycled and recycled materials in that post, and they look like great homeschool projects – or maybe just for dad and mom to jam out with!

Image: Randy Son of Robert at Flickr

I usually bring my first cup of coffee into the office to check my email for anything that needs immediate attention. Usually it isn’t much, and I was half asleep this morning. Imagine my surprise to see this email waiting for me from Treehugger:

“Congratulations on being nominated for a TreeHugger.com Best of Green award! You’ve been nominated for an award in our Food & Health category.

The Best of Green Awards are our annual awards given to the people, companies and ideas doing the best in walking the sustainability walk within their respective fields.  This is the second year of the Best of Green Awards and we’re excited to announce some changes to the voting process.”

Last year, Adam Shake and I were nominated for Best of Green: Celebrity and Culture as Best Tweeting Duo. We didn’t win (we were up against some stiff competition!), but we had a lot of fun schmoozing with all the celebrities and fighting off the paparazzi…

OK, so we didn’t really meet any celebs or paparazzi, but we did have a lot of fun.

This year, both Natural Papa and my Twitter feed (@derekmarkham) were nominated.

Natural Papa was nominated for Best Health and Wellness Website, along with Crazy Sexy Life, Environmental Working Group, and The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

My first thought was “Huh? I’m up against EWG? Sheesh.” I’m flattered, but don’t see how I can compete with them. However, if you like what I do here, consider voting for Natural Papa!

My Twitter account was nominated for Best Twitter Feed for Environmental Culture, along with my friends @jerryjamesstone, @AdamShake, and @ecosalon.

So if you like what I’m sharing on Twitter, consider giving me your vote!

Here’s the details:

“Reader’s Choice Voting Process: Starting today and running until Friday, April 2, 2010 is the reader’s choice voting period. During this time our readers and your friends, family and fans will be able to vote for who they think deserves to be called the Best of Green! Readers can vote once a day until voting ends. Winners will be announced the week of April 12, 2010.”

Vote early, vote often! Yes, you can vote once a day…

Feeding your kids natural snacks that are fast and easy to prepare can be a challenge for fathers who aren’t so natural in the kitchen.

Depending on how often you prepare food for your kids, the chorus of “I’m hungryyy… what can I have to eat?” may make you grab for your keys and wallet, or head straight for the pantry with a puzzled look on your face. Maybe you need some quick and easy natural snack ideas?

I know some dads are a whiz in the kitchen, so if that’s you, just skip to the comments and leave one telling me what your preferred ‘papa snacks’ are.

In my house, I’ve found that mama may not always approve of the timing or choice of food, but she’s always grateful that I fed them, so don’t let that hold you back. Get some grub in those little bellies!

12 quick and easy natural snack ideas from the Natural Papa kitchen:

1. Keep a bowl full of fresh organic fruit within reach of your children, washed and ready to eat. Fruit is a great hit with most kids, and a blood sugar boost may be just what they need for a natural attitude adjustment. We like to buy seasonally, and by the case when we can, and then we always have it on hand.
2. Raisins and sunflower seeds are cheap, available just about anywhere, and taste great together. Buy in bulk and keep some in a container for easy access. Try some other combinations: raisins/peanuts, dried cranberries/walnuts, goji berries/sunnies. Mix it up in a bowl and give it an official name, and it sounds way more exciting.
3. Is plain old fruit not exciting enough for them? Try blending a banana with water. Now you’ve got Banana Milk. Goes great with anything. Add raisins after blending, and it’s “Chunky-style Banana Milk”. Add a teaspoon of cocoa powder and it becomes “The Amazing Chunky-style Chocolate Banana Milk”. Get creative and think of a silly name, and you can get them to eat just about anything.
4. Sheets of nori spread with tahini or peanut butter or whatever you’ve got. Roll them up and watch them disappear.
5. When making banana milk or smoothies or other liquid treats, put some in popsicle trays or tupperware for the next “I’m hungry.” If they are offered ‘ice cream’ or ‘popsicles’, they’ll go for it.
6. Popcorn sprinkled with nutritional yeast and salt is super easy if you’ve got an air-popper (I see them at the thrift stores all the time – cheap). You can do it in a pan or a wok on the stove just as easy, but you can’t just walk away until you’re done. Spirulina makes an extra-tasty super green snack and gives plenty of material for funny pictures as well. For a sweet treat, mix some sugar and cinnamon, drizzle the popcorn with alternative butter of choice, and mix in the cinnamon mix. I wouldn’t recommend using honey or maple syrup with this unless you can hose them down afterward. Trust me.
7. Two words: peanut butter. On anything. Carrots, apples, celery, bananas, straight from a spoon. We buy ours in bulk straight from the peanut grinder at our co-op – no sugar, no added salt, just peanuts.
8. If you’re into sprouting, chop a little onion, grate a carrot, or a zucchini, or an apple over a bowl of sprouts, maybe add a shot of soy sauce or ketchup (or peanut butter), and serve with crackers. Or serve it as finger food if you don’t mind the mess.
9. Romaine lettuce leaves make excellent wraps, and can be filled with leftovers or sprouted seed spreads, or your favorite real or pseudo-cheese product. Ours is jalapeno jack almond cheese. Fill one with a banana and raisins and yes, peanut butter. They’ll probably go for it.
10. Oatmeal only takes 10 minutes to cook, and you can add any dried fruit or nuts (coconut flakes are tasty) and they’ll be fueled up until mealtime. Why do we only eat oatmeal for breakfast? Some sort of food stereotyping conspiracy, I’m sure. If you make a big batch, keep the rest in the fridge and make fried oatmeal with it. Make cookie sized patties and fry in a hot skillet until slightly browned.
11. Make some of the best banana bread ever, or bake it as muffins, if you’ve got some speckled bananas and a little time.
12. Is dessert a snack? Try this quick and easy cookie pie, but only if you have time to run all of the kids to exhaustion.

When you hear that oh so common question echoing in your house, make one of these snacks for them, and if they don’t like it, you can blame it on me. (“Natural Papa made me make these snacks for you…”)

What are your favorite natural snack ideas for kids?

Image: Gilgongo on Flickr

After my accident, I was awash in self-pity and quite depressed about the whole thing. I felt as if nothing was going my way, and I stopped doing a bunch of things that I had just recently started to do.

The underlying feeling I had was that I was off my game. Even simple tasks took three times as long, and the quality of the work I did complete was less than my usual standards.

But then I watched this video (several times), and it’s been a big factor in helping me to get my mojo back.

[Note: some adult language]

“The lovely and amazing performance poet Gabrielle Bouliane performs for the audience at the Austin Poetry Slam.

This would be her last public performance.

Gabrielle was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer shortly before this video was filmed. Our dear sister fought hard, but she ended her fight January 29, 2010.”

If you know someone who could benefit from watching this, please forward it on to them.

Image: notsogoodphotography at Flickr

More:
How to Earn a Gold Medal in Water Conservation
We Use How Much Water? Scary Water Footprints, Country by Country
How much water do you use at home?

Follow Joe’s cartoonery at JoeMohrToons.com and on Twitter at @GreenCartoons.

[This is a revised version of a post originally published on Jan. 11, 2009, one that I felt was worth revisiting.]

This weekend, I buried my grandfather. He was a giant among men, and will be sorely missed.

He lost his wife of 65 years to cancer over two years ago, and he still lived at home (he was 90), but was unable to fully care for himself anymore. We knew that he wouldn’t last much longer, but it was still a shock to hear the news of his passing. He was my last grandparent still living, so perhaps that’s why his death was hard for me to take. I didn’t realize how much I missed my grandparents until they were all gone.

I heard so many good things about him at the funeral – how many people he had touched with his life, what a strong presence he had, and how much he valued his family and community. His funeral service was standing room only.

As I looked at my mother and her siblings on the stand, I saw them as they were now, getting old and now assuming the positions of matriarchs and patriarchs of their families. I no longer saw the uncles and aunts who always seemed so young to me, and who always looked up to their parents for guidance.

It brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings about family and relations for me. I realized that I was now only a single generation away from being the head of my family, and that felt strange. Could I live up to those standards? What will they say about me when I’m gone?

Every person at his funeral service expressed such respect for him that I found myself with a new admiration for his life. Perhaps the most common thing that people said about my grandpa was that he lived a good life and was passionate and committed to his principles. He left a legacy of service to others.

And I didn’t see that as I was growing up. All I saw was a grandpa. Not a person, not a man. But he was, all of his life – raising a family during the depression and then WWII, and living to see the era of laptop computers and digital cameras and cellphones. What a contrast to his childhood!

It started me thinking about the difference between men of his era and those of my generation. It seems that we’re losing something. I know that I did – both of my grandfathers passed away before I was wise enough to consider the wealth of experience in their lives.  A whole generation of giants of men are leaving us, and with them, we’re also losing their ideals and virtues and principles.

When we lose these giants of men, these principles become endangered:

“He’s a good man.” The endorsement of a friend or community member was as simple as that. And it meant a lot. It said that person had honor and integrity and could be counted on to do what he said. My generation has lost this. We still endorse and recommend our friends, but it doesn’t carry the same weight anymore. We’ve become cynical and skeptical about others, and could use a return to trust and integrity in our world.

Cash is king. If you didn’t have the money back in the day, you didn’t buy it. You made it, or you scavenged it, or you did without. If something got broken, you repaired it (again and again). Today, everybody wants to extend credit to us, and we’re all purchasing things that we don’t really need, simply because we can buy them. Having that debt puts us under the gun to make more money every day, and having all that stuff doesn’t make us any happier.

Saving your money is honorable. Those growing up through the depression eras had different ideas about money, and saving it was higher in priority than spending it on consumer goods. Putting our cash aside for a rainy day or for the future is not super-relevant to my generation. We’ve been told that 401K plans and Social Security will be our safety net, not our savings. And we spend huge portions of our lives just paying for a house that we’re told is a good investment, with little to no cash savings.

A handshake deal is written in stone. If you shook on it, a verbal agreement was as good as a contract. Better, even. A man’s personal integrity was what bound him to do the right thing. Now we need multi-page contracts and background checks and credit checks to make a deal. We don’t trust anybody without a signature.

Marriage and children are sacred obligations. Marriage used to be a bigger commitment, not something to take lightly. A man took responsibility for his decisions and his actions, especially when it concerned his family. That’s not to say husbands or marriages or families were perfect then, but simply that it was a bigger deal to get married back then. Today our divorce rate is out of control, and fatherless children are the norm, not the exception. Men go through several wives these days, sometimes within a short time. Why get married if we aren’t really making a commitment?

Mind your own business. Gossip has been a part of the human experience for such a long time, but it used to be considered more of a bad thing. People were labeled as gossips because they were the exception, not the rule. Modern media has now made voyeurs of us – we want to see everyone’s dirty laundry and then judge them on it. Or we want to see someone else’s mistakes and screw-ups so we can laugh at it. If we put that same energy into changing our own lives, we’d be so much farther ahead and much better people because of it.

Do the right thing. Acting on principle is a rare thing these days. Most of us act out of our own best interest, not the good of the whole. Doing the right thing everywhere you go is hard, but it’s what separates the men from the boys.

Row your own boat. Men did what it took to get ahead and to support their families. They worked hard at honest jobs, taking pride in their work. We’ve now got generations that think the world owes them a living, and we expect to get ahead even if we don’t do anything. It’s become more about who you know than what you do, and honest labor, skilled or otherwise, isn’t given the respect it deserves.

***

This may seem overly simplified, but I really do think that we’re losing something in our culture, and urge everyone to connect with and learn from our elders before they’re gone.

I can only hope that the legacy I leave behind will be something celebrated by my children and theirs. But somehow I don’t think it will be the same.

What do you think?

Growing spinach for your family at home is a simple way to get more greens in your diet, lower your foodprint, and teach your kids about gardening at the same time. Early spring is the perfect time to start thinking about planting yours.

I have to admit, it wasn’t until I was grown up that I started enjoying spinach. As a kid, I remember looking at the bowl of cooked spinach (from a frozen package) with despair, just dreading having to eat some of it. I don’t remember ever being served fresh spinach while growing up, but to be fair to my parents, there’s a lot of hazy spots in my childhood memories, so it may have happened.

Working at a local food co-op exposed me to a great variety of fresh food, especially locally grown produce, and I found that a big bowl of baby spinach was a tasty and nutritious lunch. Later, while volunteering at a local CSA farm, I got hooked on eating the fresh baby leaves straight off the plant. And now, whenever there’s fresh baby spinach, it always reminds me of spring and the smell of rich soil under the sun.

When we began gardening for food for our family, one of the first things we tried to grow was salad greens, starting with a baby greens mix (mesclun mix) and then head lettuce and spinach. And while head lettuce is satisfying to grow, it takes a lot longer than growing microgreens (baby salad greens), so over the last few years we’ve been focusing on our greens bed and doing succession plantings all summer long. Growing spinach is not tough in most regions, and it’s the perfect vegetable to start in early spring!

Growing Spinach at Home:

Planting spinach:

Spinach loves cool weather, so you can start preparing the soil for it in early spring/late winter. Loosen the soil in your beds with a garden fork down to about 10″ deep, working in some finished compost at the same time. As early as six weeks before your average last frost date, start your seeds inside or directly in the soil under a cold frame. You’ll need to check the plant hardiness zone map to find out what’s best for your area.

When sowing your seeds, space them in full sun, a couple of inches apart in the row, and plant about half an inch deep. Spinach grown for baby greens can be planted closer together, but for full sized plants, make each row no closer than six inches apart. Keep the surface moist until the seeds have germinated and have grown their first true leaves. (These are generic planting instructions, so follow the ones on your seed packet for that variety of spinach.)

Sow the next succession of seeds between a week and two weeks after the first ones germinate, and continue to plant more at intervals through the spring for fresh spinach all season long. Once each planting is established, mulch between rows to help keep the soil cool and moist. Don’t put the mulch directly up against the baby plants – they’ll have a better chance of surviving both slugs and rot that way.

Thin the rows once the seeds are up and have a few leaves, making sure the plants are at least six inches apart for full sized spinach, or three inches for baby spinach. Eat all the ones you have to pull out while thinning – they’re spinach sprouts!

Harvesting spinach:

For baby spinach, harvest a few leaves from each plant, starting as early as a month after sowing. Pinch off the bigger leaves right at the base of the plant, leaving the smallest leaves. They taste great right off the plant, so eat them immediately or fill a bowl for a salad.

Once the leaves start getting large, you can either harvest the outer leaves regularly, or wait until the whole head is big and cut the entire plant. I recommend doing both – harvest half or more as leaves, and leave some alone to grow into full sized bunches. But watch out, as you might be surprised by how much spinach you get if you let all the bunches mature.

Rinse the leaves or the bunches in cool water and store in the fridge if you aren’t going to eat them right away. For the most nutrition and best flavor, don’t store spinach for more than a couple of days before eating it.

During the hottest part of summer, spinach will bolt, which means that it sends up a tall flower stalk and wants to produce seed. The leaves tend to be tougher and smaller when that happens, so you can pull up all of those plants for your compost pile, unless you have open pollinated varieties and wish to save the seeds. In that case, let some of them flower and go to seed, harvesting the seeds once they are mature.

Harvest the bunches after the first frost for the sweetest taste, and use row covers to extend the harvest through the early winter. With a heavy mulch, you can still harvest fresh spinach well into the season.

And more spinach planting:

About a month before the first fall frost date in your area, plant a couple of rows of winter spinach in an area protected from harsh winds and extreme temperatures. Before the first frost, cover them with a thick blanket of mulch and some row covering or a cold frame (try using fall leaves and covering the whole thing with some chicken wire to hold the mulch in place). Those plants will supply you with your first greens of the year, as they will continue their growth very early in the spring, before anything else is growing.

As with most vegetables, don’t plant spinach in the same areas every year – rotate the beds so that nothing in the chard family (like beets) gets planted in the same bed that spinach was last growing (and vice versa). This keeps any diseases or insect infestations from getting out of control.

Growing spinach with kids is fun, because it can be sown early in the spring, when the little people are dying to get outside, and it grows very fast. This makes it a perfect candidate for a child’s own garden, and once they learn that they can pull off the young leaves and eat them, you might have a hard time stopping them from devouring the whole row!

Image: woodleywonderworks at Flickr

Follow Joe’s cartoonery at JoeMohrToons.com and on Twitter at @GreenCartoons.

This week’s Two-fer Tuesday links cover two topics near and dear to me: gardening and self-improvement. Both posts come from dads, and I think they’re deserving of a read, a share, and some comments.

Plus, a newly widowed father and his daughter needs your help, so please open your hearts and wallets to them.

The first piece is from Dear Mr. Man (“Male by birth… Man by choice.”), who gives us 25 Things We Can Do To Become Better Citizens and Parents:

“We have lofty expectations for our leaders. It is easy for us to criticize from afar, but take no action on our own. It is simpler to live our lives in a vacuum rather than actually doing something. I am proposing that we indeed, do something to become better citizens (and better parents in the process).”

From FrugalDad we’ve got Square Foot Gardening: How To Grow Vegetables In Your Own Backyard:

“Gardens appeal to self-sufficient, frugal types like me. While I won’t be able to fully feed my family of four with our mini-harvest, we will surely enjoy some fresh-picked vegetables to supplement our spring and summer meals. With any excess, we may even do a little canning. Gardening is also therapeutic in that provides something to look forward to, and is a great stress-reducing hobby.”

I just heard about this fundraiser today, so if you’re feeling generous and would like to help improve the life of a dad and child, please consider donating to the Sonic Boom fund or auction:

“On the 5th of January 2010 Tee Morris found himself facing raising his daughter (with the alias of Sonic Boom) alone, after the sudden, shocking death of his wife Natalie.

The podcasting, writing, and social media community gathered around and within days had raised over $10,000 to cover funeral expenses and other pressing bills Tee was facing. This response was incredible, and showed just how much Tee has touched the lives of others.

However now, as a community we are turning our attention to Sonic Boom’s future. She is only five now, and relying on Tee to provide everything for her. We have the aim of providing a trust buffer for her, so that she can go to college if she wants.”

Image: Randy Son of Robert at Flickr