Cool Cardboard

It’s not a big shocker that we’re big fans of cardboard – it’s our business, ya know! So when we come across other innovative cardboard ideas we love it and can’t keep to ourselves. Not only is cardboard an eco-friendly and recyclable material to use, there are about 8 gazillion ways to use it to create fun playthings for kids.

photo by yusuke suzuki @ fotostalgie

We ran across these photos on a photographer’s website. Admittedly, we’re not sure the entire airplane is made out of cardboard and since the entire website is in Japanese (we think), we can’t give you too many details about the photographer or the subject. But how fun would this be to do for a party?!

photo by yusuke suzuki @ fotostalgie

This car is way cool too. Break out the big ol’ appliance boxes and make this fun car for your kids. You could let the kids decorate it any way they like – race car, sedan, police car. Oh the possibilities!

cardboard kitchen on etsy by forty-two roads

And look at this sweet little kitchen. You can purchase the instructions to build this kitchen on etsy from forty-two roads. The beauty of this is that once your little chefs get tired of it you can just toss it in the recycling bin – no guilt over selling, donating or tossing a plastic or wood play kitchen.

cardboard play table from Megnificent Made

How about building a cute little cardboard table to put inside your Color Me House playhouse? Oooh, we like it! On Megnificent Made you can find all the instructions on how to make one for yourself.

photo by Barb Uil

And we would be remiss not to mention our Color Me House playhouses and rockets. They are affordable, easy to put together and lots of fun for kids. Turn them into castles, army bases, hospitals, restaurants, you name it!

What cool stuff have you made out of cardboard?

That’s a reusable wrap!

We try to be a touch on the “green” side.  We use cloth cleaning rags instead of paper towels.  We wash clothes in cold water instead of hot.  We buy many local, organic foods.  We make a lot of our arts and crafts out of items from our recycling bin instead of always buying new supplies.  We use environmentally-friendly household cleaners.  We use cloth napkins.  One of us has even taken the leap of using cloth diapers on our little wee ones.  (This last one is actually quite fun and addicting.  Such cute little fluffy-covered bums!)

But one thing it seems we use a LOT of is plastic wrap and plastic zipper bags.  For a long time there have been great options out there to replace these plastic goodies in our life, yet we somehow keep using the icky stuff.  In fact, one of us has a fond memory of an elementary school friend (we won’t say how many years ago OVER 20 this was…)  who used to bring a sandwich for lunch wrapped in waxed paper and tied with a little piece of twine.  (The bread was homemade, too.  Come on!)

Anyway, now the options for replacing disposable food packaging, especially in our lunches and snacks when we are on the go, have become SO abundantly available AND ridiculously cute that we can’t avoid making the switch any longer.  Yep, we’re going to be greener, and that feels awfully good.  But we are also going to have cuter snack and lunch bags AND we’re going to save a wad of money!  Yay!

We are COUNTING on winter going away for a few months and seeing more sunshine soon (is it nice yet where you are?) and we think these Green Lizard and Pink Flower snack and sandwich bags will look great in our days-spent-constantly-outdoors-because-we’re-oh-so-tired-of-being-cooped-up-all-winter picnic bags.  Don’t you agree?

Planetwise is a company that we’ve been familiar with for providing some of the accessories we use to make cloth-diapering easier.  And their new line of food-safe bags come in a variety of styles, from sandwich wraps to “window” bags that let us see what is inside.  And the number of fabric designs is almost dizzying.  We find ourselves drawn to the Spring Stripe print, because, well, in case we haven’t mentioned it, we are EAGER for Spring!

We need something to contain our various little pouches, too, don’t we?  We’ve re-used a lot of things over the years as lunch bags.  Gift bags, grocery sacks, an old purse…  But this simple recycled cotton canvas lunch bag from ECOBAGS is incredibly appealing in its honest simplicity.  We know our kidlets will want to decorate it up with some fabric paints, and we have our thoughts turned toward a little bit of funky applique to jazz ours up.

One of our kids is starting pre-school in September at a school with a zero-waste policy at lunch.  We LOVE this and have been getting all nerdly about the cute basket he’ll take his lunch in and the cute cloth napkins we’re going to make out of boy-themed fabrics he likes and the cute little containers we’ll store his munchies in.  And then we found this company, Kids Konserve, and realized that we probably aren’t going to ever get around to doing ANY of the things we think we will, so we should just pick up one of these pre-asssembled waste-free lunch kits now.

We think we’re on our way.  Both to a glorious spring (it is still rainy and windy here in Oregon and we heard from a friend this morning it was snowing in Boston) and to reducing or eliminating our use of plastic bags and wraps.  We’re pretty sure a few of our kids are going to be grabbing their sustainably-bagged snacks and heading right out to their Color Me House as soon as the weather is nice!

Take Photos WITH Your Kids, Not OF Your Kids

As winter settles into most of the country – be it a rainy season or a very snowy season – sometimes it’s hard to come up with ways to get your kids out of the house to enjoy the great outdoors. Yes, there’s always sledding and snowball fights if you live in the snowy tundra (which many of us are in this year), but isn’t there anything else to do?

Of course, there is. Why not go out with the kids and take some photos. We love how accessible photography is these days. You don’t even really need a camera – everyone has a cell phone, right?!

We remember the days when when our parents gave us a camera, and we had nothing better to shoot than our stuffed animals on our bed, but our parents generously took the rolls of film to the drugstore and paid to have them developed. Photos of stuffed animals. I can’t imagine paying for that today, but we sure are glad our parents did it back then. We still have some of the photos and get a big kick out of looking at them. But we digress…

 

photo courtesy of kfjmiller at stock.xchng

Taking photos during the winter gives your kids a new perspective of nature. There aren’t pretty flowers to shoot so you have to get creative in what makes an interesting shot. Maybe dog tracks in the snow look cool or bright orange finches at the bird feeder really stand out against a grey sky.

 

screech owl at Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge

A couple weeks ago, it was very foggy in our neighborhood, so we got inspired to take one of the boys out to the wildlife refuge near our house to take photos. We had a blast looking for animals that might not come out on a bright sunny day. We saw a screech owl up in a tree that was camouflaged to the point that someone had to point it out to us – we took lots of photos!

It was so much fun getting outside together and taking photos. When we got home, we downloaded the photos right away to see if we got any good ones. There were a few keepers – and, boy, are we glad we didn’t have to pay to have 90 pictures developed at the drugstore!

If you want to have a goal, there are lots of photo contests that you can enter. Some of them have specific categories for kids entries. Check out this site for lots of links to contests for kids.

What kinds of activities do you do with your kids outside during the winter? We’d love to hear!

Playhouses Are The Best

We are, of course, major fans of playhouses. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Being that we are always on the look out for new ideas for Color Me House, we run across some pretty neat stuff – and we like to share with you the cool stuff we find.

It’s our opinion, based on lots of research, that children need a place to be creative and explore their imagination. Playhouses and structures offer such a place. Whether it’s a playhouse or rocket like Color Me House offers or a more permanent outdoor structure, children thrive when they can pretend and play.

Dreaming Spires Playhouse by Judith Needham Willow Design

We discovered these wonderful playhouses designed and made by British willow weaver Judith Needham. She makes these beautiful structures out of willow, which is inherently very eco-friendly. It gradually degrades in around 5 years – about the length of time a child will be interested in a playhouse. The floor is made of untreated pine that can be reused after the playhouse is gone.

Onion Shaped Hideaway by Judith Needham Willow Design

Unfortunately, these play structures are only available “made to order” and in the U.K., but perhaps if you’re handy and imaginative, you could create something equally wonderful for your kiddos!

Back-to-School Crafty Projects

Our kids are getting ready to go back to school. It’s a exciting time – though a little bittersweet. The kids are looking forward to seeing all their friends again, and we’re happy to get a little down time. On the other hand, summer fun is over. No more lazy mornings in bed and staying up late to watch movies on Wednesday nights.

But with school comes fun projects too! During the school year, we like to disguise useful tasks with a little fun. If your kids are like ours, they’ll never realize that these projects actually accomplish something!

Lunch Chart by Martha Stewart

Creating a Lunch Chart not only gives the kids the responsibility of choosing what they want each day, it helps us create our weekly grocery shopping list.

Carryall Tins by Disney FamilyFun

Our kids aren’t the best at holding onto their lunch money each day. We can never figure out where the $2.40 disappears to between leaving the house and getting to school. So alas, we are making Lunch Money Tins this year. They are bulky enough to find in the bottom of a backpack and will stay closed so lunch money won’t fall out. Yay!

Binder Pouch by Sew, Mama, Sew!

Our older kids like to keep their pencils and such in one of those plastic zipper pouches that clip into their binders. We’re not sure if it’s our kids or just shotty construction, but those pouches never seem to last for more than a semester before tearing apart. So we found this Binder Pouch that will surely last – at least half the year, we hope!

If your kids haven’t returned to school yet, enjoy the rest of summer! If your kids are already back in school, we wish you all well for the school year!

Green Your Kid’s Toy Box: Part 2

Last week, we shared with you that we’ve decided it’s time to take care of the ridiculous amount of plastic toys our children own. This realization, that our kids’ toys just weren’t very eco-friendly, isn’t a new one. It’s part of the reason why we decided to create Color Me House‘s line of cardboard playhouses and rockets. We know that children’s imaginations extend far beyond the confines of conventional, multi-colored toys. But we digress. :^)

This week, we’re ready to share a few more ideas on how we’re begun to “green the toy box.”

Our "new" reused play structure

A Previously Loved Play Structure

A few weeks ago, our neighbor who has two older boys asked us if we’d like to have the wooden play structure that he built years ago for his boys. Since they have outgrown it and our little ones love slides and ladders and climbing, we thought it was a great offer!

Here’s how it stacks up in the eco-friendly sense: It’s a perfect example of reusing. All that wood and the plastic slide did not go into a landfill. Not to mention it was great exercise for us taking it down and reassembling it!

Get outside and play!

Go Outside!

Another “green idea” for summertime is simply turning off the TV, video games and computer and going outside to play. Electronics take a lot of electricity so when the weather is nice, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go outside to play. Running through sprinklers, going for a bike ride, or playing in one of our Color Me House playhouses makes for an eco-friendly and healthy day.

Lion exhibit at the Oregon Zoo

Activity Gifts

We know it’s still warm outside, but in the back of our minds we know that the holidays will be here in the blink of an eye. Our mother-in-law already asked what the kids might like for Christmas. She’s a planner, she is.

This got us to thinking, wouldn’t it be a great idea to ask the kids what kinds of activities they’d like to do and have the grandparents give them a gift of swim lessons, ballet or art classes, or something really special like a private tour of the zoo. $50 for a week of art classes will surely last in a child’s memory a lot longer than a tube full of plastic animals.

So there you go. Three more way we are “greening the toy box.” What are your green ideas?

Green Your Kids’ Toy Box

Looking around our kids’ playrooms and seeing all the plastic, multi-colored playthings has started driving us nuts. Imagine all the plastic that goes into the landfill each year – all the discarded toys and packaging. There’s only so much we feel like we can pass on to Goodwill or hand down to friends with little ones. Who really wants the junk we get from Chuck E. Cheese or from the county fair?

Messy Playroom via Real Simple

So in the spirit of our eco-friendly Color Me House playhouses and rockets, we’ve decided to take action and green up our children’s toy boxes. It would be counterintuitive to throw out all the plastic toys they already have since we’d just be adding to the landfill so eco-friendly begins with their acquisitions from here forward.

First off, we’d like to propose that the greenest act of all would be to reduce the number of toys our children have. Let’s consider repurposing what we have. For example, one of our boys has eight million Lego pieces from about 1,000 kits – OK, that’s bit of an exaggeration, but it sure feels like there are that many when they’re spread all over his bedroom floor.

One of our boy's Lego creations

How about this idea: Take one of the Lego instruction booklets that we saved, dig through the bin of Lego pieces and rebuild that project. We suspect it would take our boy a couple hours just to find all the pieces!

Another area we have green issues with are batteries. We don’t know about your household, but we go through a lot of batteries every year. And even though we’ve become upstanding battery recyclers and haven’t thrown a battery in the garbage in a couple years, it still seems a little ridiculous that our kids’ toys use so many of these little things. Do the toy manufacturers purposely make their products suck the life out of batteries ten times faster than other household objects? Or perhaps it’s that our kids are lax about turning off the toys. Maybe a little of both.

So to green the toy box, we propose to teach our kids to switch the button to off when they are done playing. Toys that can be enjoyed sans batteries will be enjoyed sans batteries. Our kids make funny enough noises by themselves – who needs electronics to make the caterpillar talk? We don’t really need Dora to sing while playing with the play kitchen. Adios, batteries!

So there are the first two steps we’re taking to green up our toy boxes. We certainly don’t have all the answers so we’d love to hear from you! What are some of your green toy box ideas?

April Showers Bring…Bored Kids

Spring brings rain. Rain brings, “Mom, I’m bored.”

The cure: A Color Me House Playhouse or Rocket. Set it up, let the kids go nuts decorating it and then playing in it. We’re talking hours of entertainment! Really!

The Today Show suggests cardboard rockets as a great cure for rainy day boredom – and we couldn’t agree more!

Until April 15, if you buy online, enter code “rainy day” and receive $10 off your order!

Check out our list of retailers, or go online to buy yours today.

Color Me House Playhouses and Rockets are perfect companions for rainy days and Spring Break too!

Magazine Overload? Reuse ‘Em

We don’t know about you, but the number of magazines we get each month gets a bit overwhelming. We love reading mags for the great ideas, recipes, projects, style, etc., but after about six months, the pile on our coffee tables rivals the Eiffel Tower!

Sure we recycle, but we knew we could find some cool ways to reuse our magazines. Alas, the blogosphere is a wonderful place. Check these out:

Gift Bows at How About Orange – All it takes is one page, a stapler and some glue or tape. Easy peasy.

Coasters at How About Orange – Six pages, scissors and Voila! no more water rings on your tables!

Gift card envelopes: Templates by Mirkwood Designs – One page and some glue, and you’ve got a fun envelope for a gift card, letter to grandma or thank you note for teacher.

Dreaming of a Green Christmas

“Go green” is used all the time these days, but it sure sounds best when you’re talking about the holidays. (You know green and red…OK, corny, we know.) But really, it only makes sense to us to try to make some subtle changes to our holiday traditions to help out the environment a little.

We just love the Planet Green website. We find it to be a wonderful resource for all things “green.” Their How to Go Green series is full of good and easy tips. We think the How to Go Green: Holidays is especially good.

From trimming the tree with LED lights to sending greeting cards that can be turned into ornaments (or better yet, send email cards) or giving gifts of experience (like concert tickets or spa treatments), we think we can make some valuable changes to our traditions – without sacrificing the joy of the season.

Hope you join us!