The Shoeless House and Eating Chemical Free

How different is our house and life? Well, I try to be green, keep my family safe from toxins and environmental hazards. One "easy" way to do this is the shoeless house...except...Sam cannot go shoeless because he needs his foot braces, which require some sort of shoes. I suppose I could try, every time we go in and out to not only remove my shoes, but struggle his sneakers off of his AFO'S and struggle on a slipper over them. We try to let him feel walking barefoot now and then and going without AFOS (braces) to roll on the carpet, kept clean by our shoeless ways...except...his mobility equipment (wheelchair, bronco, walker) have all rolled through whatever is on the street, park grass, sidewalk and is rolling all over our carpet. Well, you do what you can. Fortunately I have been a do your best, middle ground sort of woman for a while now.

BPA's, plastics, I try to avoid. Healthful food practices and eating is important to me--I store Sam's liquid food in glass (even though part of it comes in those forever storage boxes like rice milk does) but he has to eat out of plastic, because his hands are not strong enough to lift ceramic cups or most metal cups (we have one that works, bless e-bay). Most parents, when they feed their kids, cook, sit the kids down (or have the kids set the table) and then they all eat together as a family. We feed Sam the way one feeds a baby who cannot eat by himself. It is messy as he is still learning and whoever is doing the feeding must wait to eat until later ( it frequently takes Sam an hour to eat). Also, for a variety of reasons, Sam cant eat much of what Jason and I eat. He is at least interested in sampling it now, which is very exciting. More on Sam's diet later.

Most of our time is spent eating (feeding Sam). But when we are finished, he is not likely to pursue his own interests as he can only do a few things independently. He does go through glorious phases of playing independently for 10-15 minutes. If I sound defensive around our time, it is probably because I feel pressure from the educator front for not doing more literacy and communication tasks and programming his talker all the time and from the occupational therapy front for not practicing more mouth and hand stimulation activities and from the physical therapy front for not stretching him more and practicing with the walker and crawling. Meanwhile. Sam would like to play with the fan, thanks. Yes, it is breezy at our house. we have lots of fans.